Another month gone by. Gotta hit something out. It's already gonna be August again and then September.
I had a lot of free time during the pandemic and wrote some very fun and interesting stories over that time. Two years in a row, now, I've started a story in September that kept going until the end of October.
I had to pause last year. I get into this great rhythm of getting a nice short story running... and I get into it myself too... when they get going I'm kinda along for the ride with it. I'm still figuring out how much time I want to devote to being a writer guy. I like doing this so much, though.
Honestly, I have a good idea, for another spooky historically-inspired ghostella story again to do in September through October... but I don't know if it should become a tradition. It's a good mental exercise for my brain but it's time consuming and my reader base is pretty small.
In September, if I'm in a writing mood, I'll knock another one out, maybe. My idea is based off of one paragraph in this Wikipedia article that I find endlessly fascinating. It's an article about this house in West London that is rife with the screaming souls of orphaned children who's deathly prattles haunt the abode for eternity...
"The actor Richard Harris bought the lease for £75,000 in 1969 after discovering that the American entertainer Liberace had made an offer but had not put down a deposit. Reading of the intended sale in the Evening Standard, Harris bought it the following day, describing his purchase as the biggest gift he had ever given himself. In his autobiography, the entertainer Danny La Rue recalled visiting the house with Liberace, writing, "It was a strange building and had eerie murals painted on the ceiling [...] I sensed evil". Meeting La Rue later, Harris said he had found the house haunted by the ghosts of children from an orphanage that he believed had previously occupied the site and that he had placated them by buying them toys. Harris employed the original decorators, Campbell Smith & Company Ltd., to carry out restoration, using Burges's drawings from the Victoria and Albert Museum."
(See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tower_House)
There's too much in this paragraph of Historical celebrity haunted house datum not to extrapolate into a ridiculous short story that starts on September 1st and ends on October 31st... even if I'm the only person who would want to read something like this.
Alright, so, in September, I'm probably gonna write some Richard Harris and Liberace Real Estate Fan Fiction!*
So stay tuned for that....I mean, there's so much to work with. I just find thinking about what this would look like very interesting... and wondering how these people felt that compelled them to fight over owning a haunted house full of the wails of long-forgotten orphans. Hmmm, it'll probably morph into something else by September though. Do I really want to write Richard Harris, Danny LaRue, Jimmie Page, and Liberace Real Estate Fan Fiction about children ghosts? I think it will, if anything, be a story BASED on all these people fighting over a haunted ghost house full of orphans.....hmmmm.... I don't know.... it's got too many factors. Too many factors. I can't visually see this being...like... you know.... any good.
*Maybe, uhhhhhhh..... I'm already having second thoughts.
Alright readers, what is our topic this month? It is about the Sports World the wide-wide-wide World of Sports....
The Emergence of "GM-ism".
Oh yes, the emergence of a blight on the Sports World that has been creeping on us for so long, and now has really become the main fashion a fan "enjoys" Sports.
The fan of today's Sporting World... doesn't engage with sports in the same way previous generations did. They are still as fanatic about the game or their team but in a much different way. They all seem to want to be the General Manager of their favorite team. They don't want to play for their favorite team, oh no, they don't want to actually play the game itself, at all, that's not for them. They don't want to watch their favorite team make thrilling plays and cool moves to win against out-of-towners from other nearby towns, oh no, that's not up their alley at all.... that's not gonna keep their attention... they want to run the team! They want to be hired to make phone calls to other GMs in hopes of saving a few bucks for the owner's bottom line! They want to negotiate a 5-year deal with someone or trade a guy away for some draft picks.
This is too much, I find.
When I was a kid... I wanted to be the baseball players. I wanted to play like them, and be strong and fast as they were. I wanted to field grounders that were far to my off-side and throw a dart to the first basemen to get the runner at first. I wanted to be like the players.... they were my role models. I wanted to be fit, and fast, and good, and sportsmanlike and everything.
In a lot of ways, this is not how sports are anymore, and I'm remembering older times. Sports are different now. The players are for the most part millionaires and the GMs are millionaires and the owners are billionaires... and the fans of the game are probably pretty wealthy too.
There's a graphic going around twitter today about how it costs like 300 American buckeronees to take a family of four to one baseball game or something like that, it was. Yup, I guess the fans are pretty wealthy now too, it seems.
I come from an older time, in a way. I think people read this and they see I write pretty well and am good with computers and stuff... and they probably think I'm this skinny geeky guy. In real life, all of my jobs have been physical... some of them very physical. Manual labor. Oh yeah. People in real life are kind of surprised that I'm like 225 pounds of working person in real life.
I'm from an older view of the world in a lot of ways. Where steel workers were big Polish guys named Joe Magarac, and football players were named Refrigerator Perry or Art Donovan, and baseball players were guys like Ted Kluszewski and Henry Aaron, and wrestlers were guys like Ax and Smash... Ax who literally spoke like his meals consisted of eating concrete and cigarette butts.
Call it "Old School", I guess? In Canada, Hockey is so big... and to play hockey is tough... which I never did, by the way, I was not tough enough for that... and to be quite honest... I like my teeth inside of my friggin' mouth instead of outside. Hockey in the 80s/90s when I was growing up was guys like Ken Daneyko, who's job was to play 80 games a year, get maybe oh, I don't know, like 10 points in those 80 games... as well as 250+ penalty minutes, a few hundred body checks into the boards, a few hundred elbows in the gut, and ... let's say.... a couple dozen hockey pucks in the face. It was filled with guys like that.
What I'm trying to say is... the further back you go... the more Sports were the working person's entertainment. I'm part of that mentality. We, as kids, wanted to get stronger so we could be like these guys... not think of ways of trading them so we could save money by using other guys who were possibly as good as these guys.
In a way, the change in mentality is for the best. You know.... you're better off knowing math than being able to take a slapshot to the teeth. No one can really argue that.
But, I think kids should still want to actually play them though. Possibly safer less-violent forms of these sports. Baseball was and still is my number one sport and it is by far the safest sport, I think. Kids should want to play sports to learn team-work and common-goal oriented stuff and to get exercise.
I think a kid who's thinking about how his favorite team should trade their best player so they can free up his salary to acquire some cap-space for their draft picks who are going to be needed to be signed in two years... is wasting their childhood.
Watch your favorite player to learn how they do their stuff... and when you go out to your own little league team or in the backyard... try and do the things they do. That's what sports is all about. Getting good at doing things.
Adults are more the problem of creeping GM-ism on the Sports World, though, by far. The internet is full of arm-chair GMs explaining to the twitter-verse how to fix such fantastically interesting dilemmas ... such as... how their team should've released John Valentin back in 1998 so they could've signed Arquimedez Pozo to a long-term deal.
Man, I was on a family vacation in Boston, as a young teenager in 1998.... and the level of vitriol on mainstream radio I heard there... still is with me. It's not worse than any other town... but... I think it was just the accents of that area that made it memorable to me. An arm chair GM was on the radio, he had called in to some radio station... and wanted John Valentin off the Red Sox in any way possible. It was totally insane. Colorful very colorful.... uh.... pure hatred over the air ways for this player. Can hatred be described as colorful? It felt vibrant this insane man's hatred of John Valentin. John hit like .247 with a decent .782 OPS at third base that year... but apparently deserved jail time and banishment from the region.
It is the accent though that makes that one stick out to my memories. Just this accent from Boston I wasn't familiar with at-the-time berated at-length John Valentin. It's in every town though, Montreal Canadiens fans might actually be the most insane vitriol-infused arm-chair GMs. Most often related to the coach of the team, though. Not as often the players. I have seen people paint their entire homes in graffiti if they want the coach of the Canadiens fired. You pass by a suburban home that has "FIRE THIS COACH!" written on the garage door.
One arm chair Canadiens GM that sticks out in my memory was a guy on the radio who called in angry about the performance of Mark Lamb, who according to the reference sites, played one year with the Canadiens in like '94.... and just like the Valentin guy... with this caller... the whole universe would have been set back into order and we'd solve global problems and get a plentiful wheat harvest... only if the Montreal Canadiens would just release Mark Lamb. What did Mark Lamb ever do to anybody? This guy played like 3 minutes a game on the fourth line. That's the answer to not winning a cup that year? Firing one guy filling in for injured guys? Come on.
They all wanna run the team. All of these guys. All of these bums.
You know where it gets even weirder though? Is wrestling fans who want to be the GM... of Wrestling. This is where it gets.... almost bizarre. Wrestling is a performance more than a sport.... and there's people who want to be the General Manager of a stage show.
I got back into the Wrestling during the pandemic because I needed a few more things to follow... I didn't follow it for 15+ years or so.... and I wrote about AEW a few times.... and I like to follow it and comment on it as mostly what a fan of it should do... and that's to watch it like it's a movie or a TV show... and not break the fourth wall down.
This is not how the majority of wrestling fans watch Wrestling. They watch it like arm chair General Managers like Sports fans do.... and you read things on the internet about what their team should do, in this case their favorite team is, of course, Wrestling... like the whole World of it... and its fragments of insanity that you don't see with other forms of arm chair general manager-ism.
They'll watch a wrestling show and say things like, "They shouldn't have let that feud end like that! They should have did a run-in to have a run-off so the Champ could've had a cell-match with the top contender at the next Pay Per View!"
Or something like, "Why would they put her in a match with her!? She can't sell the underhook reversed pile buster with the same ease and finesse as that other lady wrestler can! They really gave this booker the Booker of The Year award? More like the Worst Booker of the Year!"
...let's not forget to work in ALL of the insider terms, for this is the next GM of Wrestling writing now, so we gotta put in ALL of them... and they cook up things like..."They worked his heat off like THAT? He's too green for that... they should have just gave him a kayfabe injury and let his heat simmer for a few more weeks. What a bad way for them to work off his heat!"
These guys watch the most absurd, surreal, fantastically over-the-top smorgasbord of ludicrousness that is Wrestling... and want to be the guy in the back thinking about how they could make a better "house" at the Nassau Coliseum if they only kept the Brooklyn Brawler's feud going with Koko B. Ware. Because they think that Brawler has more heat up there and could sell, maybe, 50 more tickets.
I think kids still watch wrestling for the pageantry and the excitement though. They want to do back flips and suplexes and put their hands in their pockets and cool stuff like that. This is how you're supposed to watch it. You're supposed to see a guy do a super-plex through a table and go "Oh Cool!" when you see that.
The adult wrestling fans are the FULL most insane fans in the world maybe, today. Though other bastions of geek culture could effectively make a claim to that. How esoteric they can get over it is quite fascinating. How totally out-of-touch with anything the Wrestling fan can get. Oh and when they don't like someone? Oh....my goodness. When they don't like someone. It's a big deal. Move over John Valentin! Move over Mark Lamb!
John Valentin might have made a fan in Boston feel like the Red Sox have their head-in-the-sand with him at third base. Mark Lamb might've made a fanatic in Montreal lose his mind over him getting 3 minutes of ice time on the fourth line... but... if a Wrestling fan doesn't like a Wrestler? Well....
...They are killing the entire business of Pro Wrestling.
Oh yes, if a guy misses a top-rope drop kick by 2 inches instead of 1 inch? He has, in their mind, destroyed the time-old business of Professional Wrestling in a split second and it will never-ever be a viable business model again at any point of the future.
If someone makes a tiny error in the stage show? That's it... the entire business will die. It will never be able to come back and be like how good it was back when.... back when... you know... when wrestling was "Good."
General Managing a Wrestling show, or more-so backseat General Managing a Wrestling show is sort of like someone doing that to a Broadway play. I never read like Broadway reviews... I bet there are reviewers who write about Broadway plays like that too. People probably write things in that form of writing like... "Why did they do the Ethel Merman medley AFTER the Solo!? The Ethel Merman medley should always be BEFORE the SOLO!!!"
...and I guess they want the stage manager fired over the Ethel Merman medley coming after the main Solo...I dunno... we're going on too long here, my friends. It's time to stop writing when you get to the Ethel Merman joke of an article is what I've always believed.
So, yeah, just enjoy Sports and stuff. Play them, too! It's healthy to get involved and play sports and get exercise. Don't take this stuff too seriously, okay?
K? Bye.
Oh and ... there's a 60-75% chance I will write a Halloween story this year.
