108 years

I'll admit this right upfront: I am not and never have been a Cubs fan.

I followed the Phillies in the 1980s and the early 1990s and then gradually transferred by allegiance to the Portland PCL club but my interest in baseball gradually faded after the AAA Portland Beavers blew town.

But...

...the soundtrack of my childhood includes Harry Caray calling Cubs games from the little coral-colored plastic Motorola radio that sat beside my mother's chair out on the small side porch in our house in Glen Ellyn to the continuo of her voice making small sounds of satisfaction when Fergie Jenkins would notch another strikeout and Ernie Banks would take one out to Waveland Avenue, or her "tck!" of irritation if Glen Beckert would hit into a 5-3 groundout.

So that explains how, all morning, I've been hearing my mother's voice saying; "The Cubs will shine in '69!"

Wherever he is today, I hope Ernie "Mister Cub" Banks is grinning from ear-to-ear.

"It's a beautiful day for a ballgame ... Let's play two!"

Mal y pense

My bride was intrigued by the spectacle of Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey, so that is what we watched tonight.

And it was, indeed, intriguing, but not for the reasons it was advertised.

Most of it was a simple repetition of things we know, or should have known already.

The doping, well, I've said this before; I had no doubt that Armstrong, like most of his great competitors, used the methods they did - EPO, CERA, HGH, testosterone, stimulants, corticosteriods - because they had to, to win. The officials that should have been ahead of the cheaters were helpless, and so it was cheat, or lose.

It was obvious to me that Armstrong fully absorbed the ethic of the peleton of his day; that to win meant to cheat, and that anyone who couldn't or wouldn't cheat was not a hero but a fool.

From tonight's interview it's fairly obvious to me that Armstrong still feels that way. And he is still the carefully unsentimental predator he has always been.

He is remorseful, yes, but only because he was caught and in so doing has harmed people he actually cares about; his children, his mother, perhaps his wife and his ex-wife.

The rest of us, well, we're not really people who matter. We're there to be extras in The Lance Armstrong Story.

Most of us think this way, of course, but it takes a pretty enormous ego to be willing to parade that attitude in full view on national television.

And for the record, Oprah really was an awful inquisitor. She wasted an immense amount of time on things that were self-evident and let slide the real hard questions that might have forced the man she was supposed to be interviewing to reveal himself. He slid around any real acceptance of the wrong he did to those who had spoken the truth about him, notably Betsy Andreu and David Walsh.

Armstrong seems clearly using this as a ploy to win sympathy and as an attempt to gain some sort of toehold back into professional sport. He openly stated that he thought his punishment was excessive and that he was driven by a need to compete.

And that was a point that Oprah, as was her habit during the entire interview, failed to seize upon.

Because if Armstrong really needed to compete he needn't return to the Chicago Marathon or any other sanctioned event. He could train and run or ride in secret and alone, where only he would know how strong and fast he had become.

But for this man what he knows about himself is not important. His life is lived by what others know about him. It is not important to be the fastest, or the strongest. It is important to him that others see him as the fastest and strongest.

That has always been the only real question to me worth asking here: "Why now?"

"We've heard you say you're sorry. We've heard you claim that you feel that you have to tell the truth now for your children's sakes. But if that were the case, why didn't you tell the truth when you, of all men, could have told the truth and changed the very sport you claim you loved? Why should we believe any of your apologies now, when you had the chance to be a truly great man and you didn't; worse, instead of merely lying and cheating you savaged those who DID speak the truth about you?"

Sadly, this interview just made clear what we've known; that this man will never do anything for itself. He is simply not made to value such things.

Lois Bujold - I always seem to come back to her when I'm talking about Armstrong, for some reason - writes that the difference between honor and reputation is that reputation is what others know about you, while honor is what you know about yourself. That "(t)here is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying."

Which it may well be for a man or woman who prizes honor above reputation, the inner truth over the outward show.

But, if otherwise irritating, obscure, and incomplete, this interview did show me one thing clearly; Lance Armstrong was not that man.

And he still is not.

Patrocles with a Chainring

I meant to talk about this year's Tour de France earlier, but it's been an insane week around here, what with the grandparents coming (and then going) and my work pulled me out of the house at 4am and not returning me until after sundown.

But I'm here at work late, watching a direct shear sample consolidate, and wanted to share some thoughts about the 2011 edition of the grandest of the grand tours.

But - this is probably the fortyzillionth time someone has made this observation but it's my first, so bear with me - this year epitomized what makes bicycle stage racing such a terrific sport.Because, and we've talked about this before, if sport means anything other than mere diversion and physical exercise it is a sort of bodily morality play, a struggle between ideas; ideas of training, ideas of what the human body and mind are capable of, ideas of right, and good, and wrong, and evil, all carried out in the gross physical acts of a small group of very fit people.

Every contest, whether it's a soccer match, a chess game, a debate, a bicycle race, is in effect an argument between different ideas of what is the right sort of match, game, debate, or race. How best to prepare for it, perform it, succeed at it.This is what makes international soccer so entertaining, or matches between clubs with very differing styles of play; because the two gaffers, the two teams, are wordlessly insisting that theirs is the better notion, and the contest is a way of determining who is right, or closer to right.

Which is what makes the effect of cheating - like the doping in cycling - so pernicious. Because if you don't know whether, and you suspect the likelihood of, the cyclist who ride so heroically today was powered not by will, or stamina, or great training, or brilliant technique, or aided by a ferociously organized team, but instead was fueled by some faceless chemist or physician concocting a blood transfusion or chemical cocktail...well, it makes the entire business less than pointless. Even if you consider sport a worthless entertainment if the contest is honest at least there is the simple truth of the winning and losing, the striving and the gain.

But if the business is a sham, and the achievements and disasters painted over with a taint of cheating, well...

At any rate, this year is supposed to have been a very clean Tour, and I am pleased with that.So the other thing that makes stage racing so satisfying is that the other business of sport is to tell a story, and the great stage races can tell stories with a delicious zest that is matched by no other sport I can think of.

Imagine a soccer match - no, a string of matches - played out every day over three weeks. Only instead of just two teams there are dozens on the pitch, all playing each other, and all for different aims; some to score goals, some to win matches, some to keep a clean sheet, some for individual brilliance, some for team perfection. And those matches would be played on a different pitch every day - some perfect lawns, some muddy fields, some with huge ravines and immense hillocks within them.

That's why a grand tour is so incredible.

Because both the cast, the setting, and the process of a grand tour are perfect for a wonderful tale. Here you have a large group of actors, these cyclists, some 200 of them. But they are organized into smaller groups; the teams, the specialities - climbers, sprinters, the great heroes of the peleton - the GC contenders - and the workaday domestiques...together they present a literally colorful patchwork congeries for our enjoyment.

Different, and yet the same everyday, lining up for the start whether for 200 kilometers of flat roads in Brittany or a short, brutal afternoon's climb into the Alps; the same names, the same faces, that we come to know over three weeks.And yet, changing every day, every hour, as the roads beneath them change. Today might be a day for the speedsters, the sprinters, rocketing across the finish in a rainbow of bone and muscle. Tomorrow may be a day for the climbers, dancing on the pedals as the poor sprinters sag back, hoping merely to finish in time.

Every day is a new match, under differing skies, over changing terrain, and all moving through time towards the final day in Paris. And there they are, the Hectors and Achilles and Ajaxes of our Illiad - the GC riders. Every day they rise or fall, every moment cycling on against the clock, ticking the kilometers off as they eye each other and the pack, needing to husband their strength yet knowing that that strength may need to be sacrificed to reel in a challenger or hold onto a championship.

The Armstrong Years, as great as that champion was, were a different sort of story. It was always about the Great Hero, always about which of the Trojans would fall to Achilles' fierce attack, and when. We always knew that the horse was full of destruction, just not where and when, and on whom, it would fall. Those years were incredible in many ways, but this year was just and incredible because its story was so much unlike the earlier one.This year instead of the one colossus, we had four pit fighters;
Alberto Contador - defending champion, but worn from the Giro and bloodied from the ugly doping cotroversy still hanging over him.
The Schlecks - fierce youngsters full of promise...but how much was still promise and how much ready to hand? And
Cadel Evans - the perennial also-ran, the lonely battler over many a lost campaign, only this year with a new team that looked ready to fight for him.Well, if you followed this Tour you know what happened, and if you didn't you've already stopped reading this post. Cadel finally donned his maillot jaune, a worthy champion at the head of a tough, well-led team. I will never forget Andy Schleck, though, riding away from the peleton on the day of the Galabier, riding like a hero, riding like a man possessed, throwing down the challenge to the other GC contenders. Or Thomas Voekler, who proved yet again that that famed yellow shirt can, indeed, make a man ride like he had the strength of two. Or the old god of thunder Thor Hushovd, at 33 and ten years veteran of the Tour, roaring to stage wins and a week in yellow.And, perhaps, the most dramatic three days in recent Tour history; starting with Scheck's incredible 60 kilometer attack that culminated in victory on the slopes of the Galabier, to Evans' ferocious ride up the Alpe d'Huez - even as Schleck rode Voekler out of yellow - that preserved his chance for overall victory, and finally his destruction of the Schlecks in the penultimate time trial stage that brought him home in the golden fleece to Paris.The glory......and the pain, the drama......and the grinding days in the saddle. We watched it all and it was a great story, a great Tour, another year we were carried away in the hollow ships.Vive' le Tour!