My Favorite College Football Games: Game 8 redux

November 3, 1990: Georgia Tech - 41 Virginia - 38

The best moment in the best game of the best college football season does not occur in the game, per se, but still takes place on the field of play, or at least, right next to it. Five minutes remain. The top-ranked and undefeated Virginia Cavaliers trail the 16th-ranked, undefeated, once-tied Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets 38-35. Virginia has the ball on Georgia Tech’s one-yard line. The Atlantic Coast Conference championship and quite possibly the national championship are at stake. The CBS broadcast cuts to a handheld sideline shot eavesdropping on Cavalier head coach George Welsh and the camera’s invasiveness causes Welsh to break the fourth wall. “Can you move the camera, please?” he says. He sounds annoyed, even exasperated, but as the “please” denotes, he’s polite about it. And it’s that politeness juxtaposed with the appreciable tension in his voice that gets me, befitting a coach, a school, a conference unfamiliar with being on the sport’s grandest stage. College football’s biggest games can be great, even extraordinary, yet in another sense, they are often the same ol’, same ol’, the same teams playing in the same places. That is what infused the tremendous 1990 tilt between Virginia and Georgia Tech with such unique energy, two teams fretting their hour upon the stage, in a manner of speaking. In chatting with Furman Bisher of Charlottesville’s Daily Progress newspaper ahead of the game, Welsh likened it to Virginia’s “15 minutes of fame,” noting that he “never went in for that game-of-the-century stuff,” referencing the moniker traditionally applied to the sport’s most ballyhooed showdowns. And yet, him asking the cameraman to move revealed a man who unexpectedly found himself smack-dab in the middle of one anyway.  

It might seem strange here in the brave new world of 2024, when the Atlantic, underline, Coast Conference improbably stretches from its Charlotte, NC headquarters to upstate New York, to the Ohio River Basin, to the Great Plains, and all the way to the San Francisco Bay, but for the first 50 years or so of its existence, it was a homogenous conglomeration of south Atlantic schools only 300 or 400 miles apart. That is why growing up, I barely ever saw ACC teams on television, as they were generally relegated to games on the Charlotte-based syndicated sports network Jefferson-Pilot. I am almost positive that the first time I ever saw Georgia Tech play a football game was the 1990 one against Virginia. No, the ACC became known first and foremost as a basketball conference, defined by its Tobacco Road rivalries, while its football identity mostly languished. By 1990, Georgia Tech’s sizable football history had languished over the previous couple decades too, while Virginia had no real history post-WWI at all, save for losing 28 games in a row from 1958 to the beginning of 1961. Welsh brought some stability and success upon arriving in 1982, even winning the conference title in 1989, and Georgia Tech had a solid 1989 season under third-year head coach Bobby Ross as well, but this was not a game to normally move the national needle. In the three years leading up to 1990, the Virginia / Georgia Tech game was, indeed, broadcast on Jefferson-Pilot. And when 1990 dawned, JP probably figured they would be broadcasting the game again.

1990 was my favorite version of my favorite kind of college football season, topsy-turvy, not just entertaining but ridiculous, and inconclusive, all of it foreshadowed in the 31-31 tie between eventual co-national champion Colorado and Tennessee that kicked it off. The top ranking changed hands three times in the first six weeks of the season, and many of the expected contenders suffered losses or ties too, save for the Cavaliers, remaining unscathed and dominant in playing generally pedestrian competition, meaning that in week seven, with no other bluebloods for pollsters to anoint, for the first time in history, Virginia ascended to #1. Georgia Tech was not even ranked when the season began, but gradually found their way into the polls and to #11 before a tough 13-13 tie with North Carolina dropped them to 16th. That was how things stood in Charlottesville on the afternoon of November 3rd as a Jefferson-Pilot game in theory became the CBS national game of the week in reality. 

If in retrospect it proved perhaps the season’s most crucial contest given that Georgia Tech would emerge as the other co-national champion, the Yellow Jackets’ more modest ranking in the moment, each team’s meager recent history, and the broad suspicion of the CFB commentariat that neither team was, really, all that good prevented it from being labeled as a proper Game of the Century. But then, the first fight between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was billed as the Fight of the Century and that’s not the one anybody remembers. No, they remember Ali/Frazier III, or the Thrilla in Manilla, and as it happens, in the game’s run-up, The Daily Progress deemed Virginia/Georgia Tech as the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla. Occasionally, it turns out, a Game of the Century just isn’t big enough for what transpires. 

As it happened, the Thrilla in Charlottesvilla was almost called off. Maybe endeavoring to make some sort of ill-conceived point about big-time college athletics, or possibly just acting like a dumb kid away at school, someone broke into Scott Stadium overnight and set fire to the AstroTurf, incinerating a chunk around the fifty-yard-line. In an unsightly but effective enough solution, postponement was avoided by removing a chunk of AstroTurf from the Virginia baseball field and sewing it into the football field, rendering a playable-enough surface. The weird-looking two-tone field contrasted with the brilliant fall foliage encircling the quaint stadium was captured in aerial views by the Shamu Blimp that flew in from SeaWorld, all these disparate elements giving the game an almost surreal when the circus comes to town sort of sensation. But if the field did not keep its end of the bargain, the game did, scintillating start to finish.

In a showdown of such evenly matched teams, the similarities between them were appropriate. Both were quarterbacked by a Shawn - Moore for Virginia and Jones for Georgia Tech - and both were my preferred kind of college football quarterback, dual threats more cut out for the CFL than the NFL. Both teams had a wide receiver doubling as a track and field athlete - high jumper Herman Moore for the Cavaliers and sprinter Jerry Gilchrist for the Yellow Jackets - who wreaked havoc on the opposing secondary. Both defenses were lamentable, though Virginia’s resisted enough at first to help twice provide a two-touchdown cushion, first 21-7, then 28-14 at intermission. In the second stanza, though, bright sunshine gave way to long shadows, casting a spell on Virginia as their offense began inhibiting itself with a bizarre rash of turnovers, including a pass ricocheting off running back Nikki Fisher’s hands and into the arms of a Georgia Tech defender and Moore fumbling when his own offensive lineman kicked up his right leg in falling to the ground and with his foot, inadvertently dislodged the ball from the signal caller’s hand. Georgia Tech then twice tied the score, at 28-all and then 35-all, before forging that 38-35 lead, which brings us back to Virginia at the one-yard line with five minutes left.

Boy, I miss the days when during the biggest college football game of the year they would still take a minute to spotlight the Ivy League scores.

By then, night had fallen in full, echoing a palpable sense of festering time, of quickening desperation. Indeed, the Cavaliers would make one more mistake, a procedure penalty at the goal-line negating a touchdown. Rather than go for broke and try for another touchdown, however, on fourth down, Welsh opted to play it safe by settling for three points to merely tie the game, hoping his defense could hold, get the ball back, and give his team one last chance to win. If it was sound rationale, students of the cosmos knew straight away what would come to pass - that is, Georgia Tech coolly driving to the winning field goal, 41-38. Suddenly Virginia’s fight song, The Good Old Song, set to the music of Auld Lang Syne, felt eerily apt. Midnight had struck on their dream season and their dream, in turn, became Georgia Tech’s in so much as this game would be their springboard to the split national title. 

Two years later gridiron powerhouse Florida State would join the ACC, changing the league’s perception but in coming to dominate it for a decade, also committing a kind of hostile takeover. Eventually, as the league continually grew larger, Clemson would become an FSU-like powerhouse in the twenty-tens, and though both Virginia and Georgia Tech have achieved successes here and there since, it’s never been anything like it was during those happy days of 1990. Now both Clemson and FSU are seeking to abandon the ACC, and Welsh, who died in 2019, has been proven right about the fickle, fleeting nature of college football in ways he probably never intended. The reconfiguring of CFB conferences that happens every offseason is typically deemed expansion, but what’s emerging instead is more like consolidation, the game’s biggest brands entrenching behind the castle walls. Though the sport was never a democracy, in its original raggedy confederation, almost any school could have its fifteen minutes of fame, and as a central college football hierarchy establishes itself little by little, soon a whole lot of schools will not even get that.

Roll Call Regret

By the time My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife and I tuned into Night 2 of the Democratic National Convention from the safe harbor of our Chicago couch, they were already a few states into the roll call, meaning we had just missed DJ Cassidy playing “Edge of Seventeen” by Phoenician icon Stevie Nicks to herald the Arizona delegation but just in time to hear him soundtrack the Arkansas delegation with “Don’t Stop” by Nicks’s Fleetwood Mac, a nod to the first Bill Clinton campaign of yore. And that was generally how the roll call proceeded, with music to properly match each American state and territory. The District of Columbia, My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife’s hometown, was scored to nation’s capital-native DJ Kool, and Florida got Gainseville’s own Tom Petty. Even states not scored to a native’s music, were scored to something appropriate, like Illinois being introduced via “Sirius” by The Alan Parsons Project, as if the Illinois delegates were the ’96 Bulls, or The B-52’s “Private Idaho” to accompany, well, obviously. I was getting excited about what they might choose for my native state of Iowa. And then DNC Secretary Jason Rae asked, “Iowa, how do you cast your votes?” and DJ Cassidy cued up “Celebration?” 

Kool & the Gang hail from Jersey City, of course, a good 938 miles or so from Davenport. True, Iowa does not have as many native recording artists to choose from as some other states, like Minnesota, which went with Prince, obviously, but could have gone with The Replacements, or Hüsker Dü, or Babes in Toyland, or what’s his face, Robert Zimmerman, but the Hawkeye State has enough. There’s Slipknot, the heavy metal band that formed in Des Moines, and released an album literally called Iowa. They’re no little thing, they’re big, so big that I once saw a kid wearing a Slipknot backpack in the Jardin of San Miguel de Allende in the central highlands of Mexico. There was also Glenn Miller, born in Clarinda, and “In the Mood” still slaps, as the kidz say. The folkier tendencies of beloved Iowa singer/songwriter Greg Brown might not have felt right for such a raucous affair, but hey, how about some of the stuff he produced with another Iowa boy, Burlington’s celebrated sideman Bo Ramsey, like the bluesy, groovy “Poor Backslider?” That would have fit right into the theme of the night of going forward, not backward.

 

If those native choices don’t move the needle enough, fine, the artists could have been appropriate without being Iowan. Why not an ode to Clear Lake and the Surf Ballroom with Buddy Holly’s “Rave On,” speaking of songs that still slap. As My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife suggested, why not go with “Our State Fair” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical? Aren’t we always telling people our state fair is the best state fair? And if that doesn’t rock hard enough, then go with “Urgent” by Foreigner, or “Roll with the Changes” by REO Speedwagon, as a nod to music you hear at the Iowa State Fair. Maybe they could have played “Flying High Again” by Ozzy Osbourne to commemorate the time he bit the head off a bat at Veterans Memorial Auditorium?

I got really upset with DJ Cassidy, and My (Poor) Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife can confirm, railing about how he didn’t do the research. Except it turns out this was not entirely DJ Cassidy’s fault. No, the New York Times reported that DJ Cassidy “worked with each state’s delegation to find a song that captured a spirit of ‘unity and celebration’ and had meaning to the state.” And that made me even more depressed. This is how the DNC Iowa delegates saw themselves and the state they were representing? As the most basic party anthem of all time? That in choosing to evince a sense of celebration they just picked the song literally called “Celebration?” As My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife remarked, “What, was it down to this and ‘(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’ by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes?” The only way this could have worked is if the Iowa delegation had enlisted the Farmer Tan Funk Band to record a “Celebration” cover and then played that. (The real Des Moineseans know what I’m talking about.)

Playing “Celebration” at a celebration is like playing Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” when it’s the last dance; it’s like the scene in “Bob’s Burgers” when presented with myriad ice cream choices, Regular Sized Rudy marvels, “Ooooooh, vanilla!”; “Celebration” is what AI would play if you asked it to choose a song. I would expect this from so many culturally uninterested Republicans but my God, you’re the DEMOCRATS. You’re supposed to be the ones who like art and culture! My native state is one where the right-wingers in charge are working hard to make art and culture bland and vacuous, and this is your chance to say our appreciation and understanding of art and culture runs as deep as anyone and what do you do? You serve up something as bland and vacuous as possible. Is this why Democrats never win elections in Iowa anymore?

(Did New Jersey choose “Born in the U.S.A.?” Yes. Yes, it did. I give up. “Land of Hopes and Dreams” was just sitting there.)

Presence

“(Alain) Delon is not so much a good actor,” David Thomson wrote of his performance in Jean-Pierre Melville’s immortal French noir “Le Samouraï” (1967) for Criterion in 2005, “as an astonishing presence.” That’s not to downplay the ability of Delon, but to emphasize his gift, of knowing how to exist before the camera in order to harness its power rather than over-exerting himself to try and seize it. That gift was not entirely innate, though. As he recounted to British GQ in 2018, the director of his first credited role in “Send a Woman When the Devil Fails” (1957), Yves Allégret, gave him the lesson that would crack the code: “Listen to me, Alain. Speak as you are speaking to me. Stare as you are staring at me. Listen as you are listening to me. Don’t act. Live.” Delon lived in “Le Samouraï” just as he lived five years earlier in “L’Eclisse.” I’d seen that movie before I watched it in a Roman COVID hotel in 2021, but lemme tell ya, that movie comes across like absolutely nothing else when you have been stuck in the same tiny room for two weeks in the Eternal City. His presence there is altogether more powerful when at the end…director Michelangelo Antonioni takes it away.

I was thinking about all this on Sunday afternoon, the day Delon died in Douchy, France aged 88. I had gone to the Albany Park neighborhood with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife for tortas and the place was showing some middling action thriller, the kind that is somehow nondescript despite so many gaudy colors and flashy edits, playing on Spanish language TV. I wasn’t paying attention until, suddenly, Bruce Willis appeared. It must have been one of those movies, though which one, who knows, Willis may or may not have made under some measure of duress as his memory started to go given how, as far as I saw, he was barely in it, hardly spoke, and seemed to just be in one location. (His character appeared to be kidnapped, possibly, and tied up.) But even in this, whatever it was, never mind the plot, when Willis showed up, you could detect a change in the air. Just in existing, he imbued the camera with a presence beyond all these other yammering youngins around him who were trying so hard to act.

Delon is gone, and Willis is gone in his own way, and I’m left wondering when actors of the next generation will decide to live again. 

Hazards in Headline Writing

Not an image of Gena Rowlands in The Notebook.

Gena Rowlands died last week at the age of 94. She was perhaps best known for blazing trails in a series of films like “Faces” (1968) and “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), an unmatched performer and a patron saint of American independent film. Or perhaps not. When news of her death first emerged, the headlines of numerous news outlets, like CBS and NBC and USA Today, deemed Rowlands as the star of “The Notebook (2004).” That was a nice film, a sweet film, a film to watch on your phone while you’re relaxing on the beach, but I mean, c’mon, this would be like deeming Parker Posey, who thankfully will never die, as the star of “You’ve Got Mail.” Many, including the actor Carrie Coon, took to the social media platform Still Referred to as Twitter to voice incredulity: “We lost Gena Rowlands,” wrote Coon, “but also our dignity, as headlines trumpet: actress from ‘The Notebook.’” This caused others to voice incredulity that Coon would knock a movie so many loved, and that was, in fact, directed by Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes. Coon riposted further incredulity that people could not hold two truths at once. Indeed, the news outlets that mentioned both “The Notebook” and “A Woman Under the Influence” probably got it right; each one has a place. Maybe we just need copy editors to have a fuller grasp of film history.

The hullabaloo made me think of Sarah Vowell’s piece for This American Life in the 90s, eventually collected in her book “Take the Cannoli,” in which in advance of Frank Sinatra’s death she implored television networks to refrain from peppering their future Ol’ Blue Eyes obits with snippets of “My Way,” “the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly-dictatorial chestnut in the old man’s vast and dazzling backlog,” an unworthy testament to the monumental singer’s career. (I know that when Bruce Springsteen dies, which he won’t, the television news networks will play “Born to Run,” of course, and that’s fine, even if I have always fantasized about them playing the first verse of “The Price You Pay” instead.) They did not heed her call. The dead might well be happier dead, as the esteemed philosopher Harry Lime once noted, but it’s only natural to want to properly honor the legacy of a mountain-mover like Rowlands. Or like Faye Dunaway, whenever her time comes, which I hope is not any time soon. 

Indeed, what this minor hubbub really did was reinforce my now semi-long-standing apprehensiveness in regard to Dunaway. The obituaries themselves will be fine, no doubt, as they were with Rowlands, but even if her own mountain-moving work was, I dare say, more universally known than that of Rowlands, it was so long ago that even if “Dunston Checks In” wasn’t enough of a box office hit to get cited, I can still imagine oblivious copy editors summarizing Faye Dunaway as “Hollywood star who read the wrong Best Picture winner at the 2017 Oscars.” If I see that in the headline - if I see that in the first paragraph of the eulogy - then there’s gonna be trouble.

From the Couch: the 2024 Summer Olympics in Review

After succeeding in her first attempt of the women’s high jump competition, Australian Nicola Olyslangers sat down, opened a journal, and started writing. This, the television announcers explained, was what she did after every jump in every competition, giving herself a grade of 1-10 and more importantly, writing down what she felt in the moment so she could reflect on it later. Every Olympics is a jam-packed sensory experience, yet even on that inherent level, Paris 2024 was filled to overflowing with feats of strength, a sensation enhanced in the States by NBC’s Peacock streaming app finally living up to the nature of the games as a virtual kaleidoscope. And so, I thought, maybe Olyslangers had it right, that the only way to make sense of such a spectacle was to open a journal, to write down everything I felt, to hold it and remember it so I could reflect on it. I also assigned a grade. Paris 2024: A+++++, on into infinity.  

Free of an authoritarian host and dystopian pandemic restrictions that necessarily plagued Beijing and Tokyo, Paris 2024 effused joie de vivre. That is not to suggest there were no geopolitics (there always are), or the host city taking insidious quasi-civic advantage (they always do), or that COVID was gone (it wasn’t, and it isn’t), or even that mendacious cultural warriors abstained from combing through the event schedule to locate chum (such charlatans can always be counted upon). But if a lot of b.s. happens at the Olympics, to paraphrase Team USA men’s basketball player Kevin Durant discussing the nation he represented, a lot of great things happen too. Indeed, if the realist in me holds the ills of the Olympics in one hand, the romantic in me holds holy in the other the idea of the athletes as the central actors in this quadrennial gathering. And like Australia’s Jessica Fox mastering the elements in a canoe on whitewater, or America’s Steph Curry at the end of the gold medal men’s basketball game obliterating a fortnight of commentary about his struggles by honoring Zeus with four immaculate three-point thunderbolts that momentarily transformed every spectator into a wide-eyed child, it was as hard to deny that the athletes were ever better than in Paris 2024 as it was any host ever providing a grander setting for them than the city of lights.

More than any Olympics I can recall, Paris integrated the city into its experience, events and architecture so often all but inseparable, creating myriad breathtaking stages worthy of the competitors. Beach volleyball might have been more appropriate dispatched to the south of France, but then again, as one of the game’s most exalted practitioners Karch Kiraly once noted, it’s a lifestyle sport. And Paris is a lifestyle city, and the Eiffel Tower is the symbol of Paris, and setting that manmade beach down in the iron lady’s shadow proved perfect. The women and men’s road cycling time trials did not just take riders on a tour of the city by weaving through it, they were beholden to omnipresent precipitation which made conditions taxing but also, in their way, brought to life the adage that Paris looks just as beautiful in the rain.

No sport was as seamlessly or resplendently interwoven into its venue as fencing which took place at the Grand Palais. If laypersons like me have always dreamed of Olympic fencing being a little more like Errol Flynn squaring off with Basil Rathbone, Paris would make that dream come true by having fencers descend the grand staircase, blades in hand, before settling matters in the nave beneath the magnificent, vaulted glass roof that low-angled TV shots rendered truly cinematic. France’s Yannick Borel won silver, not gold, but his 12-11 quarterfinal comeback against Japan’s Masaru Yamada that ended in sudden death when one touch with the épée would win really did feel like Hollywood. Then again, when Ukraine’s Olga Kharlan, who was nearly banned from the Olympics by the sport’s pissant governing body in the wake of her refusing to shake hands with a Russian rival at the World Fencing Championships last year, won bronze with a remarkable comeback of her own and fell to her knees weeping, it might have looked like a movie. But Kharlan dedicating the medal to Ukranian athletes killed by Russia reminded you this was very much real life.

Not every event took place in Paris, though, or even in France. After debuting in Tokyo, surfing returned and was contested almost 10,000 miles away off the coast of Teahupo’o on the island of Tahiti in French Polynesia. Camerapeople bobbed in the water to provide spectacular shots of massive waves forming from below, and cameras in the air provided views of the awe-inspiring backdrop of lush green mountains. In some ways, surfing was the sport most like Paris, or I should say, the most like sitting at a Parisian café, competitors having to wait until a wave came along, asking, nay, demanding your patience, to just sit and watch the world go by. When one aerial view showed two surfers as two tiny specks in the ocean, it felt less frightening than serene. I jotted down what I felt, but snapped a picture of my TV too, so I could return to it, like Jamie Foxx’s postcard of the Maldives in “Collateral.”

The men’s Olympic surfing gold medal was won by Kauli Vaast of the host country, though he is a native of French Polynesia itself, where he first surfed when he was eight years old. Upon winning, he noted the locals’ relationship with the surf, saying “we call it the ‘mana,’ and in this contest I felt it the whole time.” If mana undoubtedly exists in a place like a Teahupo’o, it might be harder to fathom in a place like the Paris Aquatic Centre in the northern suburbs of Paris. On the other hand, it was only a half-hour from the Basilica of Saint Denis, named for a patron saint of France, and so maybe there was mana in the pool where Léon Marchand became hero of France in winning four golds after all. None were as thrilling as his victory in the 200m butterfly. Well, thrilling is not quite the right word. If Marchand trailed Hungary’s Kristof Milak for the first 150meters, upon making the turn for home, he closed the gap so mercilessly underwater that when he emerged, he was suddenly, nearly neck-and-neck with Milak, and the word that popped into my head was terrifying. The way Marchand surfaced; it was terrifying. Indeed, it must have looked like a horror movie to all of Hungary as the Frenchman surged ahead to win. As much as any moment in Paris, it maybe was not one upon which to reflect, just to let course through your bones.

What I tend to love about the 100meters is the pointed lack of reflection. For all the build-up of the race, and bravado of the sprinters, the end is clear-cut in the clock and the finish line. Either you crossed the line first, or you didn’t; either your time was fastest, or it wasn’t. The starting gun sounds, the earth turns, and it’s over. Except, in Paris, just as the runners reached the finish line in the men’s 100m final and the moment of exhilarative clarity beckoned, what transpired instead was a bewildering photo finish as the most bigheaded of all athletes were laid bare, just staring up at the scoreboard like everyone else in the stadium, trying to see who won. To the naked eye, or at least, to my naked eye, it appeared to be Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson, so much so that I had failed to notice America’s Noah Lyles, in last place with 60 meters to go, hitting the gas and pushing past Thompson at the finish line by the slimmest of margins. In watching the replay, I realized NBC didn’t mention Lyles once during the race, mimicking my own lack of vision. It felt like one of those Cool Papa Bell anecdotes, the fanciful kind old Negro Leaguers would tell to try and capture the centerfielder’s fabled speed: Lyles was so fast, I didn’t even see him win. Technically, he recorded the same time as Thompson, 9.79, but broke down, he won by five-thousandths of a second. Whether it was the most sensational 100m final of my life, or the most surreal, or both, or something else altogether, I can’t say. It might take five thousand years of reflecting.

The clarity I sought in the men’s 100m was instead revealed in the 4x400 mixed relay when Femke Bol received the baton for Team Netherlands on the anchor leg in fourth place and manifested that famous line from “Chariots of Fire,” taking on each runner ahead of her one-by-one and running them off their feet. Because this is present-day Earth, she went viral less for her feat of strength than her voice in a post-race interview, an unexpected sort of squeak, Mickey Mouse-like, as many faux comedians noted. Well, if she was Mickey Mouse, then she was the sorcerer in “Fantasia,” the horizontal rather than vertical way she held the baton rendering it as her magic wand. In winning the men’s 400meter race by also coming from behind, America’s Quincy Hall was her aesthetic opposite. If Bol effected the illusion of pulling back the runners in front of her bit by bit on an invisible rope, Hall looked like a mountain climber on crampons digging his way past them. The late Kenny Moore, paragon of track writers, once noted that “the essence of the quarter (mile is) holding on,” but Hall reconfigured that essence into something else: going and taking it. 

In winning the 400meter hurdles, meanwhile, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, WGA (world’s greatest athlete), of the U.S. once again made the arduous look easy. She was so far ahead by the end, that she mirrored the photo snapped by Richard Heathcoate for Getty Images (see below), appearing to exist on a plain all by herself, in breaking her own world record for a sixth time, an athletics explorer continuing to push on, alone, to new frontiers. If I close my eyes, I can still see myself standing in the vaulted two-story living room of a friend’s relative’s Aurora, CO home when I watched Michael Johnson run 19.32 in Atlanta in 1996 and now, I will never forget sitting in a brewery in Asheville, NC on a rainy afternoon watching McLaughlin-Levrone run 50.37 in Paris in 2024 with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife lovingly telling me not to make a scene in public. 

Every Olympics I choose a country from one team sport and adopt them as my team for the ensuing fortnight, transferring all my enthusiasm typically reserved for Nebraska football, or Chicago Sky basketball. This Olympics, I chose the French Men’s Handball Team, partly because I’m a Francophile, and partly because their team nickname is Les Barjots, roughly translating to The Bananas. Perhaps feeling the pressure not only of playing at home but defending their gold medal from Tokyo 2020-in-2021, Les Barjots began the preliminaries 0-2 and in their third game, trailed Egypt by a single point with but a few seconds left. Needing to win or tie to stave off elimination, Ludovic Fabregas’s buzzer beating goal to knot the score 26-apiece was bananas, keeping them alive with a European version of an old college football headline, France Beats Egypt, 26-26. They succumbed in the quarterfinals to Germany when Renars Uscins connected on an even more improbable buzzer beater, an irony so brutal, I confess, it was beautiful.

I feel as I have been reflecting on the athletic exploits of American swimmer Katie Ledecky and gymnast Simone Biles forever. If both are permanently etched in the annals of the Olympics, each one is no way the same. In her last race, Ledecky was pushed, but also never really challenged, never subjecting herself to clichéd hosanas of an aging athlete’s grit and guile. No, in the end she still looked like someone who just loved swimming laps more than anybody else. Biles, however, bore all the scars of magnificence giving way to mental health struggles and back to magnificence, continuing to recalibrate the idea of excellence in a sport that demands it by pushing the boundaries with routines so difficult and mind-altering, that when it came to the judges, she could afford bobbles and wobbles and infractions. If she was great, nay, the greatest of all-time in winning the hallowed individual all-around, she was not perfect, echoing the same grace she allowed herself as a person. When she nailed her first tumbling passage in the climactic floor exercise, you could see the moment when stress gave way not just to relief but joy as she burst into a wide smile. I thought of Phillipe Petit in “Man on Wire” saying the moment he realized the wire strung between the twin towers he was walking on was secure: Now, he said, I’m going to perform.

Kristen Faulkner authored an equal story of dominance in the women’s cycling road race. Only gaining entry when her teammate bowed out, Faulkner narrowly missed a massive crash that wiped out several contenders, and then tracked the two leaders in tandem with a Belgian rider, the two functioning as temporary teammates. In the scenic nature of the course, they caught the leading duo as they pedaled through the Louvre courtyard, only underlining the virtual masterpiece that Faulkner was about to paint. Almost as soon as they merged into a quartet, Faulkner so emphatically broke away that the other three surrendered, watching her go, turning the finish into an improbable and awesome coronation in the shadow of the Tour Eiffel. It turned out that an Alaskan who rowed crew at Harvard, who had ditched a career in venture capital to pursue her dream of becoming a professional cyclist had now won gold? Was this real? It was and proved the most important lesson of all – no amount of VC money, kids, will make your real dreams come true.

Faulkner’s dream was only slightly less unlikely than the dream of America’s women’s rugby sevens team. I learned about and fell in love with rugby sevens during its 2016 debut in Rio and have since decided that if I ever move to Europe, it will have to be my sport because it’s the closest international one to college football in so much as it resembles flexbone military academy CFB teams going back and forth sans pesky TV timeouts. In other words, it’s awesome! Rugby sevens, though, as the US women’s team has outlined, is mostly limited to college club programs rather than NCAA-sanctioned ones, making it difficult to build up a national program a la rugby mad Australia who the stars and stripes just happened to square off against for the bronze. And America was in dire straits, losing 12-7 and a whopping 95 yards from paydirt, the clock with but a few seconds left when Alex “Spiff” Sedrick shook loose and ran, way out ahead of everybody. The run took so long, and the stakes were so high that you could sense the liminal space, at what was about to happen, but had not happened quite yet, all brought home when the camera switched to an angle from behind the goal toward which Sedrick was streaking and you could see her smiling. It was the best way to win, and it was the worst way to lose, and both those bore out in how each team in the play’s immediate aftermath spontaneously combusted into sobs, of ecstasy and of devastation. 

I couldn’t believe it, and I still kind of can’t believe it now, how in the space of Sedrick running, and running, and running, she seemed to embody the limitless expanse of an astonishing Olympics. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: Chariots of Fire (1981)

In founding the modern Olympic Games, Pierre de Coubertin drew considerable inspiration from time spent in England, where being a well-rounded individual, nay, gentleman was emphasized, and people, nay, gentlemen competed not to win but for glory of sport. All this can sort of be seen in “Chariots of Fire,” the 1981 film recounting the triumph of two British runners at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, the last Games during which de Coubertin served as President of the International Olympic Committee. And I’ve always wondered if that is at least in part why Hugh Hudson’s film almost always turns up on those lists citing the worst Best Picture winners. It’s an anachronistic world presented in “Chariots of Fire,” as white as the British Athletics uniforms, one in which amateurism in the face of professional sports is the noblest ideal, and featuring a character whose greatest crisis is deciding whether to run on the Sabbath. Contextually, this is unlikely to appeal to a modern audience. I get it, as the kidz say. But viewing “Chariots of Fire” strictly through that lens sells Hudson’s artistry short.

The exquisite period detail is juxtaposed with the celebrated score by Vangelis, one utilizing contemporary synthesizers bringing to life the idea of these athletes advancing the species, emblematically moving us into the future, which is what that opening credits sequence, still astonishing 43 years and a hundred million parodies later, depicts. Likewise, Hudson and his screenwriter Colin Welland also juxtapose two British runners, Scottish missionary Eric Liddell (Ian Charles) and Cambridge student Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), opposing sides of the emotional coin. The former is the one who will not run on the Sabbath, because he runs for God, to feel His pleasure, he says, and which Hudson renders in his climactic Olympic race that comes across so much less about traditional drama than a moving merger of athletic and spiritual excellence, a higher plain than winning or losing. Abrahams, on the other hand, is beset with an all-consuming thirst for victory that if you look past all the vintage tweed, appears conspicuously modern. He even hires a professional coach (Ian Holm), running afoul of the stuffy lords of Cambridge.

It is those same stuffy lords of Cambridge that we see toasting from afar not so much to Abrahams’ victory at the 1924 Paris Olympics as to how their institution can ride the coattails of that victory. Hudson then cuts straight to a close-up of Abrahams in the aftermath of his win, staring into space, his expression blank, the end point of what he has worked for and, therefore, the end of everything, in a way. And for a moment there, honestly, you can’t quite tell if he’s happy, or sad. 

Some Drivel On...False Positive

If anyone outside Track and Field circles remembers Harry “Butch” Reynolds, it is likely not as the time one-time 400meter world record holder nor even as a 1988 Summer Olympic Gold and Silver Medalist but as the runner who in 1990 tested positive for anabolic steroids. It was a result he not only publicly protested but actively fought. The US Track and Field Congress exonerated him, but, in the byzantine world of the sport, the International Athletic Association did not, upholding a 2-year ban barring him from the 1992 Summer Olympics. His case against using steroids was more than compelling, really, it was virtually open and shut, and the new ESPN 30 for 30 documentary “False Positive” directed by Ismail Al-Amin lays it out in great detail, drawing from a range of interviews from Reynolds, lawyers, and coaches. In a sport where so many innocents are presumed guilty, one who really does seem to have been innocent, is still remembered for being guilty, a rich if wretched irony that “False Positive” notes without contrasting too harshly against myriad other presumed culpable athletes. And though “False Positive” does a good job telling the whole Butch Reynolds story, it is impossible not to come away thinking this isn’t just some overview but advocacy.

As a movie, “False Positive” mostly sticks to the house style of 30 for 30 documentaries, meaning a mixture of archival footage and myriad talking heads. Especially when it comes to the specifics of Reynolds’s case and what sure seems like his innocence, however, those talking heads become necessary; even with a few visual aids, there isn’t really a way to elucidate exactly what happened without telling you exactly what happened. But Al-Almin ultimately proves clever in his deployment of those talking heads. Everyone is either looking to the left or the right of the camera, save for Reynolds, who is positioned directly in front of it in close-up with a black backdrop, underlining the intensity, looking right at us and asking us to believe him. That becomes even more acute in the ending. If Reynolds cops to a dark night of the soul in the aftermath of the IAAF refusing to clear his name, he still manages to come around and lead a happy life, though that does not automatically engender a happy ending. “False Positive” ends with Reynolds on a track in the present day. He emerges from the starting blocks, runs a short way, and then stops, breaking the moment’s spell by looking right into the camera. And so, when a subsequent title card flashes up indicating the IAAF chose not to comment when reached by the director and producers, you can practically feel them looking away in shame.

Twisters

There is a scene in “Twisters” when our dueling squads of storm chasers suddenly find themselves tracking two tornadoes at once and are forced to choose which one to follow; left or right? It’s an apt metaphor for director Lee Isaac Chung’s standalone sequel to the 1996 blockbuster “Twister” given that we exist in a world where tornadoes are becoming more frequent and intense but also in a world where 1990s-styled blockbusters are becoming rarer. In a sense, Chung and his writer Mark L. Smith are positioned at their own fork in a road, trying to decide between making a mindless summertime disaster movie or a mindful one. There is a great set piece, or the idea of a great set piece, near the end when a tornado takes out a small-town water tower, flooding the street and transforming a landlocked disaster movie into a watery one. It’s the type of disaster movie ingenuity I generally like to reward. But it’s unclear whether we are meant to ooh and aah at that ingenuity, as if it’s an amusement park ride, or feel a real sense of climate dread, and because “Twisters” never decides, this moment, like the overall movie, winds up weirdly inert.

If the original began with our storm chasing protagonist losing her father to a dread F-5 tornado, “Twisters” begins with our storm chasing protagonist Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones) losing her boyfriend and a couple colleagues to an F-5. We catch up with her several years later, riddled with guilt and having left Oklahoma for a job at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in (Pace Picante Voice) New York City. She might be nails at work, but she’s not cut out for the big city, as we learn when a cab nearly hits her as she crosses the street, such dumbed down rural v urban humor that for a moment “Twisters” does seem to skew toward goofy mindlessness. But things get real when she is approached by her one colleague that survived, Javi (Anthony Ramos), recruiting her into his corporate sponsored band of storm chasers back in the Sooner State which puts her at odds of YouTube star and self-proclaimed tornado wrangler Tyler Owens (Glen Powell), a hot dog belying the heart of a true meteorologist. 

Part of the movie’s tension is meant to be in the screwball push and pull between these two opposing characters as they clash and then discover what they have in common. Powell is game, at least, a tornado wrangler as Wrangler® model; when he is seen drinking a can of Budweiser, he somehow manages to come across not as an actor subliminally pitching a product but a fun-loving character who just likes a cold one. I think that qualifies as Movie Star. Jones, on the other hand, is oddly muted, dousing any romantic energy. This is not entirely her fault. The character of Kate is conceived as having suffered real trauma, and so that’s what Jones appears to be playing, closed off, except that the screenplay never elucidates what she is feeling, or thinking, giving an interior performance with no interior. When she first stares down a twister rising high in the sky back home in Oklahoma, she freezes up, and this seems to be the key that will unlock her grief. But it never does. Once she fails to face this twister, she’s ready to face the next one, a dramatic hurdle more than an emotional one, as “Twisters” skates right over her psychological makeup as much as it fails to reconcile Tyler’s shooting off fireworks from inside a tornado with dispensing aid in the aftermath of that tornado. The movie has no idea what to make of these contrary philosophies and, despite eventually swathing itself in so much solemnity, doesn’t really seem to care.

The emotional hollowness of the characters ultimately trickles down to the rest of “Twisters” too.  Chung sees tornadoes not as wonders of nature, to borrow a phrase from the first movie, but existential threats, dropping out of the sky to destroy communities. “Twisters” does little, though, to advance any sense of community outside its storm chasing groups. Those little kids playing softball might as well be props. The subplot of Javi’s storm chasing team being in cahoots with a shady real estate developer feels like the opportunity to explore that idea, but the tycoon never really becomes a character, neither a cartoon villain, nor something starker and more sinister, raised, then forgotten. And as for the twisters, well, despite all the advances in technology, the digital kind still cannot induce the awe and terror of that muslin sock in “The Wizard of Oz.” 

The original “Twister” turned on finding a way to increase warning times for tornadoes, but “Twisters” turns on seeking a way to snuff out tornadoes altogether. The manner in which this is accomplished, and the science behind it, isn’t my field of expertise, but comes across as suspect as how Tyler grounds his pickup truck to not fly away when inside the cyclone. But it also suggests an inherent sense of absurd fun, the kind we get when Tyler and his crew first roll into the picture, a thread that Chung never fully pulls, apparently afraid it will counteract the graver material, which never rises above one dimension anyway. The sequence that works best, oddly enough, is the last one, so I will tread carefully, except to say that it’s set at an airport and mixes a rom com trope with a corny narrative callback and a shot of the Oklahoma sky echoing the characters. It’s one of the few times all movie that “Twisters” feels clued into a precise sense of mood and I found myself wishing it could take that as a cue to rip itself up and start again.

Friday's Old Fashioned: Games of the XXI Olympiad (1977)

The official documentary of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal begins with a heart stopping shot of the Olympic Stadium, the camera far away but pressed in tight, tracking left to right, and then eventually pulling back, letting us see the whole structure in full. The construction equipment might intimate how it was never even officially completed in time for the Games, if not also how it went on to become the city’s white elephant. But in the space of this one image, you can also see the way in which the stadium was originally intended, as a futuristic superstructure meant to embody so many radical individual feats of strength. And that is what the quartet of directors, Jean-Claude Labrecque, Jean Beaudin, Marcel Carrière, and Georges Dufaux, working from what was said to be 100 kilometers of footage, choose to emphasize: the athletes, the individuals. Any sense of flag-waving is dispensed with immediately as an image of the Canadian National Team at the Opening Ceremonies gives way to assorted images of athletes in close-ups pointedly sans flags in the background, marking them as humans and individuals more than countrymen and countrywomen. When “Games of the XXI Olympiad” recounts a weightlifting event, we might learn the nations of a few competitors, but the way these scenes are composed almost entirely of close-ups and wide shots of the competitors and the barbell reduces them to nothing more than man v weight.

“Games of the XXI Olympiad” prefers a fly on the wall approach with bare bones context and narration, and occasionally, no context or narration all, that can admittedly make moments and events confusing, but other times, allows for an engrossing kind of embedding with an athlete or athletes. For the Team Pursuit in Cycling, we first see the bikes being prepared, and then the cyclists warming up, and then cyclists waiting for their turn to take the track. (We also see one of the coaches smoking a pipe right in front of his Olympic athletes about to compete at the Olympics.) And though the exact nature of this event is never explained, we feel the sensation of it anyway, the rhythm of four cyclists from West Germany and four cyclists from the Soviet Union going around and around, the roar of the crowd escalating the drama. This also goes to show how “Games of the XXI Olympiad” mines drama from lesser-known events, like Modern Pentathlon. Seen from the vantage point of the Hungarian team, it really does feel as if we are eavesdropping, listening to their strategic conversations and watching them in repose between events. They ultimately win Bronze, standing on the podium and listening to the national anthem of Great Britain, their moment essentially someone else’s. Then they walk away from the camera, grave-faced, as if without the next competition, they do not know where they are going.

That goes to show how “Games of the XXI Olympiad” does not emphasize merely the winners but the losers too, like the 100m dash where one of the favorites, Silvio Leonard of Cuba, who suffers a leg injury in the days leading up to the games and seems to know he won’t have what it takes. He does not even make the final, and when we see it, the camera lingers on his melancholy face off to the side as much as the winner’s on the track. Similarly, the most dazzling competitor of the Games, gymnast Nadia Comăneci, is seen as much through the eyes of Olga Korbut, who occupied the Nadia role at the previous Olympics and now is being passed by. (The footage of Nadia’s uneven bars routine, it must be noted, is something else. She’s not flying anywhere near as high as gymnasts do today, but the way she goes from bar to bar still looks like the future.) Watching Olga compete on the balance beam at the same time Nadia’s floor exercise is concluding becomes the past giving way to the future in real-time; when Korbut lays down face-first on the balance beam, it could be taken for competitive death. For all the vanquished, though, “Games of the XXI Olympiad” ends with a big winner, Bruce Jenner of the United States and his Gold Medal victory in the Decathlon. If the camera is mostly just a fly on the wall, here Jenner invites it in, looking right into it as the competition ends, and observing aloud, “Glad you got all this.” It’s as if Bruce Jenner, who would become Caitlyn Jenner, face of a reality show empire, had seen the future.

Some Drivel On...Atlanta

Alexandra Schwartz’s May profile of the multi-hyphenate artist Miranda July for The New Yorker noted that July’s first film was a ten-minute short from 1996 called “Atlanta.” Shot on a borrowed video recorder, July explained in a different New Yorker piece many years earlier, she “played both a twelve-year old swimmer competing in the Olympics and her domineering mother.” This piqued my interest, of course, because I’m an Olympics obsessive, but also because I, too, shot my first movie on a borrowed home video recorder purchased used from my pizza place boss in 1996. July would have been 22, and I would have been 18, but still, this intrigues because whereas I thought strictly in terms of concept and writing lines that would make my friends laugh (or maybe just make me laugh), July was already thinking like a filmmaker, how images conveyed feeling and meaning rather than merely functioning as a conduit for words in a raggedy screenplay. That’s why she’s her and I’m me. But that goes without saying. Anyway.

“Atlanta,” which is streaming on YouTube in very rough form, features the 22-year-old July playing both a 12-year-old Olympic swimmer and her mother, cutting back and forth between the characters as they give a television interview. She is taking the form of a standard-issue Olympic puff piece, in other words, and then wickedly undressing it as daughter and mother begin by espousing athlete and athlete mom clichés before gradually spiraling into mid-interview psychosis. All of this, meanwhile, is interlaced with fragmented images seen through what it appears to be swimming goggles suggesting the 12-year-old swimmer drowning in the tub. Simone Biles helped to bring the mental health struggles of the athletes to the fore in 2021, and the attendant complications of that decision, the black-hearted bad actors it automatically brought out of the woodwork upon sensing blood in the culture war water, only underlined why for so long athletes were hesitant to open up about it. And that is why, given the roughhewn yet disturbing nature of “Atlanta,” I kept imagining July somehow hijacking the evening NBC broadcast of the Atlanta Olympics in July 1996, like the Martians in “Mars Attacks!”, transmitting these ten minutes to the masses that did not want to hear it instead.