What I'm Doing For Christmas (Thinking The Lions/Essays About Stuff.)

This is the time of year that people ask other people, "So, what are your [fill-in-the-holiday] plans?"

That's kind of an awkward question for me, because the first thing I think when people say So, what are your plans? is Why, what do you want me to do? I have to be constantly on my guard against people inviting me to do something, or people inviting themselves to do something with me; if I'm not careful, people will make me go to a holiday party, or they'll have a holiday party at my house and I'll be forced to be there for it, hoping that my clever/desperate choice of serving "Black Licorice in a Decorative Glass Mug" will be seen as funny or neat, rather than the move of someone who not only forget to buy hors d'ouevres but also never had anything to put the appetizers on in the first place.

The second thing I think of when people ask me So, what are your plans is this: Why do I have to have plans?

And the third thing I think of is: At present, my plans are to continue to monitor the slow but fun deterioration of our Christmas tree.

This is our Christmas Tree, as it exists right now, in a picture I took moments ago:


There are lights on the tree, but they're not on as it's only 3:30 in the afternoon and I don't put the Christmas tree lights on until later on in the day, unless we have company over, which I desperately try never to do. So the lights aren't on yet.

Sharp-eyed and long-memoried readers will note that this year's tree not only violates every single Christmas Tree rule I was raised to adhere to strictly, but also that it is more or less entirely home-made. This tree has ornaments that touch the branches, it has ornaments that violate the tough-but-fair guidlines on what is, or is not, an appropriate color for Christmas (appropriate: Red, green, gold, silver, but only in timeless, classy shades. Inappropriate: Blue, pink, orange.) It also has yarn, something that would never have passed muster on a tree supervised and implemented by either my mom or my dad.

This is not my mom and my dad's tree. It is, though, the tree of a person who doesn't like decorating trees, and it is the tree of a person who lives in a house where Mr Bunches and Mr F also reside.

Mr Bunches and Mr F aren't really classified as "3-year-olds" or "twins" anymore. They've moved beyond those into "Forces of Nature." Soon, I worry, pediatricians and babysitters and other professionals will begin describing them using those hurricane codes, and the Babies! will be tracked on SuperDoppler radar with little warning bands across the bottom of the screen: If you live in the following counties, Mr Bunches is heading your way and he's upset because he wanted to play with the spray hose at the sink, but he did NOT want Mr F to also play with it, too, so when Daddy said that Mr F got to also play with the spray hose, that was good cause for Mr Bunches to get off the counter and to take Mr F's Astro Boy figure and run into the living room, causing Mr F to forget that he wanted to play with the spray hose and get mad, mad enough to go to the downstairs play room and tip over the empty rack that usually holds DVDs but we got smart and finally moved the DVDs, because that way when Mr F tips it over, at least we don't have to pick up the DVDs, which is good because there's no time to stop Mr F since Mr Bunches is trying to go upstairs and throw his mattress around because he's still mad, remember?

That warning would take a while to scroll past, but you'd better heed it.

Last year, we dealt with the Babies! near-total lack of civilization by building what I referred to as "Fort Christmas" :




But that wasn't a permanent solution to the problem, and couldn't have been because it required a lot of work, and also because the Babies! can climb right over the fences now. It's a terrible thing when you can no longer corral your three-year-olds and have to start treating them like actual people, but that's the phase we've reached in our lives.

(While the Babies! can climb over the fences, The Boy cannot; we had a gate that we used in the upstairs hallway to keep the Babies! out of the bathroom and our room. It was more symbolic than practical, as either Mr F or Mr Bunches could get over it without much trouble, when they bothered to try. But it slowed them down and gave us that critical extra half-second necessary to keep toys and heads out of the toilet, so we used it, until The Boy couldn't get over the gate one day and crashed down onto it. Even repairing it with electrical tape [we were out of duct tape] didn't help, and after a couple of weeks of that, we gave up on the gates and resorted to locking the doors we don't want the Babies! to get into. The result of that, I'm sure, is that one morning Mr F or Mr Bunches will spontaneously figure out how to pick locks. Or they'll just tear the door down. Either way.)

Because I didn't want to go to the effort of building Fort Christmas again, I began, about a week ago, pondering what to do this year for the Christmas tree. I'd long ago abandoned my family's strict rules on that subject, anyway, and each year that I got further and further away from those ideas, I felt more and more freedom to just do what I wanted to do. By this year, I was free enough to know that I could wait to put up the tree until the week before Christmas (unforgivably late, in my family's honor code), and I thought perhaps I could tinker even more with the whole concept of a Christmas tree.

I briefly considered "Not having a tree this year," something I would be glad to do, but which I didn't think, in good conscience, I could actually let happen.

I'd be glad to not have a tree because the tree has never been a big part of the holiday for me. As a kid, the tree was scary. We spent hours walking around Christmas tree lots up by the A&W and Red Owl, watching Dad hold up trees and shake them, and Mom frown them off. We watched Dad saw the trunk and saw off branches and wire them into different places in the tree. We went through tense moments getting the tree into our stand, and making it stand level. We tested lights, and unwrapped six big boxes of fragile ornaments, each of which had to hang a certain distance from all other ornaments, and from all other branches. We hung tinsel, strand by tremulous strand, and then we spent the remainder of the Christmas season forbidden to go near the tree at all.

Then, as a young adult, my Christmas trees posed different problems: Raised to believe that only a "real" tree is a good tree, I snuck real trees into my apartments, then worried that landlords would find them and I'd be evicted just for following the rules of Christmas trees. Alongside that I worried that the real trees would catch fire and burn down the entire building, including me. I'd never worried that the trees would catch fire at home, but it seemed more dangerous in an apartment: Why else would they have rules against having trees in an apartment, if it wasn't because "real" trees were that much more likely to ignite like matches on a hot day once placed in an apartment?

Then, once married, Christmas trees became my own battle, first with Sweetie and the kids, who preferred all-white lights to colored lights. We were never allowed "all-white" lights on a tree as a kid, and I'd grown to associate doing that with lower-class, distasteful displays that the neighbors might look down on. But Sweetie liked the all-white look, and I eventually caved to that. I had a few years of my own battles with the kids, trying to get them to understand the importance of hanging ornaments the right way, and such, before I abandoned that, too.

That history of Christmas tree problems meant that I didn't care, much, whether we had a tree or not; it had always been a source of work, or worry, or trouble, for me, and I could easily not have one, except that not having a tree made me worry that things would fall apart the way they had when I'd stopped using birthday cards.

A few years back, I opted to stop buying birthday cards, except under two very limited circumstance: One, if I didn't get you a gift at all, I might get you a card -- or maybe not; if I didn't care enough to get a gift, the odds are I wouldn't bother picking out a card, either. Two, if I sent you a gift card or check, I'd send it in a card because an envelope with just a check in it seemed a little cold (and invited thieves to steal it, and one big part of my upbringing that I've never forgotten is that everyone, everywhere, is a potential thief and serial killer, so why ask for trouble?)

It didn't make sense, to me, to give Sweetie a card with her gift. She'd have to open and read the card (sometimes a long process, because for a wife or grandmother, you have to get a card that's heavy on text and roses) before opening the card, and the card always said something like "Happy Birthday, I love you," which is what I'd be telling her, anyway, over dinner.

"Don't forget to open the card!" people are always saying at gift-giving occasions, and I began to wonder why? What's the big deal with the card? Why can't you just say "Happy Birthday" when you give me the gift?

So I stopped buying cards. I just bought gifts, and gave them to people, and that had two results.

For most people, it perplexed them. They would pick up the gift I gave them and I could see them look around, nervously, waiting for someone to say "Don't forget to open the card!" Some people even asked "Is there a card?" When I'd say No, they seemed confused, and a little disappointed, but I stuck by my guns.

That was the result outside of our house. Inside of our house, the result was to completely break down the bounds of society, devolving us to near chaos.

My simple decision not to buy cards any more was welcomed by the kids and by Sweetie, who agreed that it was dumb to buy a card and that we'd just as soon not waste the two or three or four bucks cards cost now. I was proud of myself, until I saw what came next as we descended into the maelstrom.

It's not my fault, really; I couldn't have known that greeting cards were the fragile thread that held up the safety net preventing my family from descending into savagery, but they were.

Before long, we also didn't light candles on birthday cakes. Nobody in our house smoked, making it dicey to find a lighter or match (and our stove doesn't work that way.) So we'd put the candles on the cake but not light them, and then the candles dropped away because why have candles if you're not going to light them?

Once the candles were gone, the singing faded out, too. No more quavery versions of Happy Birthday To You, with guys trying not to sing on key so they didn't seem lame, no more slight hesitation while the kids try to figure out if they should sing Mom or her name, none of that. If we weren't going to light the candles that weren't on the cake, there wasn't much point of singing, right?

Then presents were not wrapped any more. They were put in their boxes, or into a gift bag, perhaps, but there wasn't even tissue covering them up if they were in a gift bag. That, too, made sense, in the long slow slide down; we're just going to tear the paper off, and it costs money, so why waste that extra funding?

I put the brakes on when we had a birthday where Sweetie was given her gifts by the kids, still in the bag from the store, with the tags on. The cake was on the table, people were milling around, and Sweetie was surrounded by what looked like the results of a recent shopping trip. We were, figuratively speaking, one rung above ruin, "ruin" being the kids just saying "Here's a couple bucks, buy yourself something nice."

So I re-imposed some rules: Presents must be wrapped -- nicely, I had to add, one year -- and tags removed. Cards were optional but the present must be purchased and made to look nice. Even with that, I'm still fighting: Oldest had me in the extended family gift-drawing this year, and we exchanged presents at my in-laws yesterday for that. Oldest "exchanged" with me by tossing me some of my asked-for dress socks, unwrapped and still tagged. "Sorry I didn't wrap them," she said, and wandered away.

If all that could come from not giving birthday cards, I could only imagine what the result of We're not going to have a Christmas tree would be; the kids would stop wearing pants, I figured, or would take up arson. Whatever it would be, I didn't want to find out.

But we still had the problem of the Babies!, the problem being that somehow we've never really instilled in them an understanding of the dichotomy between "things that are okay to pick up, touch, and throw at your brother"and "things that are just for looking at."

We try to teach them that. But it's tough, and sometimes at the end of a long day when the Babies! are crabby and it's 8:15 and I've got a cold and I still need to help The Boy with his homework and Sweetie's cleaning up the kitchen, sometimes then I decide that maybe my cell phone is okay to play with.

And then I try to figure out the best way to get chocolate off a cell phone.

Faced with the need to have a Christmas tree in order to stave off the older kids' transformation into Visigoths, and the need to not put out a collection of glass balls that would soon be ground into the floor and tiny feet, I came up with the solution of having a Christmas tree that celebrated all the great things of the season, the great things being paper, and yarn.

I'm not kidding -- paper and yarn are two household things we can have without worries, but I didn't sell it that way, of course. I sold it to Sweetie like this:

"We could take colored paper, and print up pictures of the kids and us and the family, and cut them into shapes, and hang those on the tree with yarn as a kind of family-photo Christmas tree."

Sweetie was sold on the sentiment and celebration of family that represented. Or, as she put it:

"That way, the Babies! can't pull it down and break everything."

So that's what we did. Saturday, I got out the basics of Christmas: The tree, the lights, the singing, dancing Cookie Monster who plays "Blue Christmas" when you press a button, but with these lyrics:

Me'll have a blue Christmas
Without me cookies

To those, we also added a Santa, and a rudimentary Nativity scene. I assembled the tree and began putting on the white lights while Sweetie and the Babies! and The Boy ran some errands. I got halfway up the tree when I realized that we were going to be short of lights, as many of the strands from last year were no longer working. (You'd think that when you pay a whole dollar for lights on the clearance shelf at the drug store, they'd last longer than one season, but there you go. That's our country for you.)

I called Sweetie and told her to pick up more lights. "About 400," I said.

Then I put together the rest of the tree and began printing the pictures to cut out. Sweetie and the kids got home with the lights.

"You win the battle," she said. "Finally."

I met her in the kitchen and said "What do you mean?" She held up 8 boxes of 50-light sets, multicolored.

"You finally get your colored lights," she said.

I took her out to the half-finished tree, wired from the ground to midway up with white lights.

"They didn't have any white lights," she said, so I began unstringing the white lights and then restringing them, intermingled with colored lights, while Sweetie and The Boy began cutting the pictures into Christmas-y shapes.

"What's a Christmas shape?" The Boy had asked. I pondered, and said:

"Stars, and circles, and diamonds."

"What's Christmas-y about a diamond?" The Boy asked.

"What's Christmas-y about a circle?" I fired back. I don't give in to his terrorism.

They went back to cutting, and I only had to intervene once, when I noticed that there were a lot of circles (sort of) and not a lot of stars -- and what I'd really wanted, most of all, was stars.

Then I had to give some guidance on the pictures that didn't lend themselves to Christmas shapes, pictures where the subjects were far apart, or obscured by things The Boy didn't think should be in the picture, like milk cartons or alligators. We decided that additional shapes could be used, shapes like oblong and I did the best I could.

Sweetie pitched in by glittering some of the pictures, and, when he got up from his nap, Mr Bunches pitched in by helping take the leftover yarn, yarn I'd strung on the tree as a sort of garland, and hanging some himself. Mr Bunches wasn't as focused or diligent as I was about making the yarn hang decoratively -- but he was more energetic than I was, and hung a great deal more yarn in a shorter amount of time.




It's easy to be efficient when you're three. Mr F helped out by trying to unstring the yarn, pulling at it as quickly as I could string it back up (but not as quickly as Mr Bunches could clump it onto the branches.) Then, when Mr F finally was dissuaded from that, he opted instead to get behind the tree, standing in between it and the wall (probably so that he could push it down on me when I least suspected it.)




It took the Babies! only a few minute to realize that they could pull the pictures off of the branches to create a good, clean ripping sound, and also to make the adults in the room instinctively yell No before we settled down and remembered that this was the whole point, to create a tree that the Babies! could touch.

"If they pull them all off," I told Sweetie, "We can always print and hang more," and in saying that, I not only created the world's first Disposable Christmas Tree, but also engaged in a little of the fiction of the holidays, the pretending that we would fix the tree. I knew we wouldn't, of course, print more pictures. If the Babies! pulled them all down, we'd never print, glitter, tie, and hang more pictures. We'd just shrug and get on with our lives, the way we already were doing when they pulled yarn down and then threw it back on, creating great loopy tangles that only enhanced the charm, from my perspective.

We wouldn't print more pictures, and we wouldn't straighten out the yarn, and we would probably be slow to stand the tree back up if they pushed it down, because Sweetie and I understand that Christmas isn't about trees and ornaments; it's about not doing stuff. It's about not having plans, about not overloading ourselves with errands and work and tree-trimming and shopping and all the other trappings of the holidays.

Our holidays don't involve days and days of baking Christmas cookies; instead, we tend to stop off at the diner and buy a couple of their perfectly-frosted Christmas cookies the kids and Sweetie like, because we want the cookies, and time to sit and eat them -- not the mess and trouble and hassle of getting the ingredients and baking them.

Our holidays don't involve the massive amounts of outside- and inside decorations that light up everyone's house. We like to look at them, but we don't want to freeze our hands off and spend weeks putting them up and then weeks protecting them from the Babies! and then weeks taking them down. So we blow up the Giant Inflatable Rudolph, hang the pictures and yarn on the tree, and then go dance with the Babies! to the Lady GaGa song they like for some reason, and relax a little.

Our holidays rarely involve having a houseful of guests over, or driving someplace on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day. We'll go visit you if you want, or have you over if you insist -- but we probably won't do that on Christmas itself, as that day we'll be lounging around, still in pajamas at eleven as we sit around the kitchen table and tease The Boy and talk and watch the Babies! jumping on the couch, killing time until we make ourselves a dinner of mostly pre-prepared food and then go, as a family, to watch Godzilla or some other movie that, while not holiday-themed, is the movie the kids want to watch and will be enjoyable because of that.

Those are unorthodox choices, I know; they run contrary to the idea that we should have fancy trees with perfect decorations, not trees covered in whorls of yarn and a hodgepodge of lights. They go counter to the image of families gathering around a sumptuous table with a centerpiece of turkey or goose, of moms and kids cutting out cookies and decorating them, of friends and families gathered in Christmas sweaters to talk and joke and laugh and be loud and stay late. The way I spend my holidays now is not the way most people spend their holidays, and not the way I spent my holidays as a kid.

But it's the perfect way to spend the holidays, for me. It's perfect because there's no stress, no trouble, no bickering and late nights and hard drives and excessive clean-up. Instead, I spend days and nights around this time of year sitting and joking with the kids, reading to the Babies!, snuggling up to Sweetie as I watch Bad Santa and she pretends to sleep but is probably secretly watching it, too.

And when you ask me, What are your plans for the holidays?, that's why I hesitate a little: Not because it's hard to explain, and not because I'm embarrassed about those plans. If there's a better way to spend Christmas Eve than sleeping in followed by chasing Mr Bunches around and then playing a game with Mr F, eating lunch and talking football with The Boy, asking the girls what they hope they get most for Christmas, and then sitting in the dark eating pizza rolls and watching horror movies, I can't imagine what that better way might be.

No, I'm not embarrassed or at a loss for words. I hesitate to answer the question What are your plans for the holidays because if I told you what I'm really doing, you'd probably want in, and that'd spoil it.

Take it from me: having one job is hard enough -- and even harder if you ever actually go into the office!

For the life of me, I don't know why anyone tries to sell or rent their house on their own. It's hard enough to have one job; why take on two? That's what you're doing when you take on the task of selling or renting your own property, after all: You're trying to do a whole job: to take out ads and print up ad copy and prepare the place for showing and take photos and have showings and solicit buyers...

... see? I'm tired just typing it.

That's all the stuff that a good estate agent does for you. If that stuff is not done, you won't sell or rent your property very soon (or for very much). But YOU don't have the time or the expertise to do it and do it right. So why try, when you can instead hire someone like Coalters, the premiere york estate agents?

Coalters uses local people creating local jobs to sell or let your property the RIGHT way -- quickly and professionally and for a profit. Having built their business from one that began in a spare room to the major estate agency it is now, the people at Coalters know how to get your property on the market -- and then back off of it, sold or rented quickly.

They've won numerous awards already, and those have been earned through their friendly professionals and their harnessing of up-to-date technology to boost your property through the market: Their site is the number one Google result in York, with over 10,000 visitors per month, and they place your property there and on a bunch of other premium sites designed to harness the power of the Internet in your favor.

Do YOU know how to get your site listed on Google's number one result? I didn't think so. You don't know how to do even 1/10 the stuff that Coalters does, so don't try. Instead, you do your job and let them do theirs: selling or letting your property.

It's the 2009! Nonsportsman! of the Year! (Nonsportsmanlike Conduct!)

Drum roll, please...




Thank you! That drum roll (and other clips of my All-Time Second Favorite Christmas Movie) serves to herald a major event, the awarding of the

2009! Nonsportsman! Of The Year! Award!

You can tell it's important because of the exclamation points!

Every year, since time immemorial* (*2007, and I didn't do one last year) I have given out the Nonsportsman! Of The Year! Award!, an award that is given to the nonsportsman who had the biggest impact on sports that year.

This award doesn't go to overpaid, whiny athletes who tax our collective patience when they say things like It doesn't look like they'll be able to go Christmas shopping this year, because they were fined $7,500.

That's a true story: Milwaukee Bucks rookie Brandon "Gucci Louie" Jennings recently was fined $7,500 for tweeting too soon after a game (Why wouldn't the NBA have a rule about that?), and when asked about it, Brandon Jennings said, appropriately,

"That's a lot of money, especially around Christmas time."

That's fine, so far as it goes. But Brandon Jennings didn't shut his stupid mouth there. Instead, he went on to say...

... wait a minute. Let me first point out that Brandon "Gucci Louie" Jennings, at the tender age of 20, has already earned $3.65 million before he entered the NBA this year; he was paid $1.65 million to play in an Italian League, and signed a $2 million Under Armour Contract during that time. Then, he got signed by the Bucks, and will be paid $2.16 million this season and $2.33 million next season. So the $7,500, which is a lot of money to almost everyone, is 0.1% of Brandon "Gucci Louie" Jennings' salary.

So, Gucci Louie Jennings -- you'll see why I call him that in a moment, who first acknowledged that $7500 is a lot of money, then went on to prove he's an ignorant jerk-off by saying:

You do a lot of shopping for the family. It doesn't look like I'll be able to do that this year.

How do you feel about that, Bucks fans? Gucci Louie Jennings -- who's going to spend $2.16 million of your money this year, thinks he won't be able to do much shopping because he got fined 0.1% of his money.

Gucci Louie then went on to add:

"Twitter cost me 7500. Looks like no Gucci and Louie for Xmas."

Thereby proving he's a jerk and an idiot. Twitter didn't cost you $7,500, Gucci Louie; you cost yourself $7,500 by not knowing the rules. And then you insulted your fans; Milwaukee's median income, Gucci Louie, is about $37,000 per family. There are many many people who root for you who never get Gucci and Louie for Xmas, and you're a jerk for making jokes like that.

This is the actual tattoo Brandon Jennings has on his back.

Ah, well: With that out of my system, it's time to get back to the 2009! Nonsportsman! of the Year! award, which, as I said, does not go to an athlete; athletes get lots of meaningless awards, like the "Cy Young Award" (named for Richard Nixon, its first recipient) and the "Heisman Trophy" (given annually to that athlete who will get paid $23 million by the NFL team that drafts him the next year, and who will then never be heard from again.)

No, the Nonsportsman! of the Year! award does not recognize athletes, but instead focuses on those nonsportsman who had the biggest impact on sports in that year -- shining the light of attention on that noteworthy person who, despite not being an athlete, still managed to achieve great things in the world of sports.

Prior winners in this coveted award include:

2007: * ("Asterisk,") winning as a recognition of a lifetime of involvement on sports that culminated in the high water mark of 2007, when Barry Bonds didn't set the home run record (and had the non-record setting ball marked with an asterisk), when Videogate tacked an asterisk onto Tom Brady's career, and then even Don Shula suggested that an asterisk go on the Patriots* almost-undefeated season.

This year's recipient is almost as dignified and important as Asterisk, as we'll see in a moment. But first, a word about the person everyone thought would win this.

The first-runner-up for 2009! Nonsportsman! Of The Year! is...

Elin Woods.

Elin Woods -- here's a photo, in case you already forgot that last one...



was, almost everyone thought, the frontrunner for Nonsportsman! Of the Year!, and it's easy to see why: With a couple swings of a golf club, Elin had more of an impact on the world of sport than her gonna-be-ex-husband had in his entire career. Hamstring injuries, changes of swing, Phil Mickelson, arcane rules for intercontinental play: none of those could keep Tiger from winning 1 or more majors each year. But everyone has his Achilles' heel, and in Tiger's case, his Achilles heel was literally his heel, that being probably one of the many places Elin caught him with one of her swings, swings which cost golf its number-one draw, cost Tiger many of his sponsorships, and which hijacked the media for the past two weeks, all of which is a major impact.

And all of which would make Elin a consensus choice for the 2009! Nonsportsman! Of The Year!, and a great choice, too, because it would let me keep putting up pictures like this:


which would guarantee this blog about 30,000,000 hits, but two things held her back.

First, golf isn't a sport. Sure, Elin had a major impact on golf, a major impact that included not just "taking out the number one golfer for a year or more," but also "making people aware that some golfers think that they're athletes" (and, as a sideline, "making people aware that Tiger Woods thinks he's gangster, but then can't even properly name the band "Bone, Thugs-n-Harmony.")

But you can't be the Nonsportsman! Of The Year! if your impact wasn't on a sport, and I've scientifically proven in the past that golf isn't a sport.

Even if it golf was a sport, though, another factor would keep Elin from being the recipient of this year's Nonsportsman! Of The Year! award, and that other factor is that there's a better person to win it. That better person is, as I said, almost as distinguished and accomplished as Asterisk, and he will now have the 2009! Nonsportsman! of The Year! award to add to his kind-of impressive resume.

It's been a while since the intro, so drum roll again, please.



Did you notice? That was a one-handed drum roll. I didn't even know you could do that!

Anyway, the recipient of the 2009! Nonsportsman! Of The Year! award is:

Barack Obama.

I know, I know -- you're all saying "What? Wasn't getting the Peace Prize, and those two Tony awards he got when he filled in for a week on Avenue Q, enough?"

Or you think that I'm jumping on the bandwagon -- sucking up to the President who has promised to turn back the tides. Or, you're expecting some kind of health care commentary because I never give up on that.

But this is none of that. This is a genuine recognition of Barack Obama as the 2009! Nonsportsman! Of The Year! because Barack Obama not only had the single biggest impact on nearly every sport this year, but Barack Obama embodied sports this year.

No person, in 2009, left his mark more on the world of sports than our esteemed President. Obama began the year choosing to root for the Steelers -- a move people said was motivated by electoral college concerns. (The people saying that, though, were apparently familiar with the electoral college but unfamiliar with the fact that the election was already over.)

He hosted a Super Bowl party at the White House (and John McCain said he was invited but wouldn't come.)

This is Obama watching the Super Bowl. In 3-D.
Don't you wish you were president, so you could watch the
Super Bowl in 3-D?

Then, Obama became the first president in my memory to actually fill out and release an NCAA Tournament Bracket -- and he did it live, with coverage by ESPN, leading people (me) to wonder if someday we might have all-day coverage of Obama's NCAA Bracket filling-out, the way we have all-day coverage of the NFL draft.

Obama threw out the first pitch at the All-Star game,



(maybe doing that to make up for his ad in 2008 that delayed the start of a World Series game by 30 minutes?)

Obama plays tennis with Mrs. Obama (and beats her, she says), and attended a George Washington U. basketball game in order to cheer on his brother-in-law, the Oregon coach.


He organizes pick-up games of basketball in a bipartisan way, drawing controversy for that anyway, as he refused to invite women to play. (He did, though, invite a female to play golf, buttressing my point about that not being a sport.)

As though any more proof that golf
isn't a sport were needed, here's a photo showing
you can play the game without any equipment!

The sportsman-in-chief even weighed in on bowling, and lent his presence to the attempt to get the Olympics to Chicago.

Those accomplishments alone would merit giving him this coveted award, but more than His Omnipresence's extension into the world of sports alone is the fact that Obama didn't just affect sports; he embodied them.

Think about the world of sports, 2009: We began the year with a seeming novelty: The Steelers and Cardinals in the Superbowl, the Cardinals' improbable appearance seeming to promise changes in the world, a new era of sports with teams that traditionally hadn't fared well rising up to challenge the assumptions of the Old Guard...

... only to have the Cardinals lose, and struggle again this year, while the Steelers carried away their 160th Super Bowl trophy, the Old Guard triumphant again (and me losing my Super Bowl bet.) The message: It's hard to change the way things have always been done, something The Jump Shot-In-Chief has learned, too.

2009 saw the end of the era of "Moneyball," the idea that smart teams armed with computers and nerds could match up against the Big Spenders. All the computing technology in the world couldn't prevent the Yankees, whose payroll slightly exceeded TARP, from winning their 160th World Series, while in the NFL, teams that lingered far below the salary cap (Tampa Bay, Cleveland, and Green Bay) struggled to stay even with teams like the Cowboys, who spent more on their Over-The-Field Television Screen than Tampa Bay spent on players' salaries in 2009. That's a sports mirror held up to President White Sox Fan's fight to convince people health care could be universalized for less money -- a fight he carried on, somewhat, but nobody's really buying it; we all know big money is needed to accomplish big things.

Obama tried to bail out the economy, and sports pitched in, with baseball paying C.C. Sabathia $15,000,000 for 2009 alone (or $65,000 per inning pitched),

Or, if you want to measure it another way,
CC Sabathia could have paid for
2,000 of Gucci Louie Jennings' tweets.

... Jerry Jones spending $1.2 billion on his stadium -- and the NFL planning on building a $1.6 billion stadium next year. That's a pretty big shot in the arm for an economy that still seems to be staggering under an economic swine flue -- and both the World of Sports and the World Of The Real World face potential economic nightmares next year: Obama will continue to fight against a sluggish economy and stagnant job growth, while the NFL faces the prospect of a season without a salary cap (something that the NFL treats as amazingly unusual and complex, even though the salary cap has only been around since 1994; for most of its existence, the NFL had no salary cap and did just fine. It's the sharing of TV money which keeps small-market teams alive in the NFL, not the salary cap, and in any event, one year without a cap won't matter much, since the vast majority of players are under contract and won't become free agents in 2010.)

Obama's biggest "accomplishments" were hypothetical or overblown; he was awarded a Peace Prize based on voting that was done when he'd been in office less than a month, an award he accepted in the same month in which he sent 30,000 more troops into battle. He was given credit for "Cash For Clunkers," a program that was passed mostly because it was attached to a bill to fund war efforts (that Peace Prize is looking more and more foolish now, right?) and a program that most people agree didn't do much in the long run to increase fuel efficiency or stimulate the economy; is Obama's Peace Prize any more of an honor than the Heisman Trophy award? (Before you answer, remember that in the 74 years of that award, only 16 recipients have had anything resembling a great career, and one of the recipients now sits in prison; there is a 4-in-5 chance that a Heisman winner will not have a good NFL career.)

Like the president, the Sports World gave honors that didn't matter much: The Yankees were lauded for another World Series win, but how could they lose? They owned all the great players in Major League Baseball. Serena Williams won another Wimbledon title, a victory that seems to be given to a Williams sister the way we give Peace Prizes to people whose names are in the news a lot.

Name the MVP of the NBA Finals. Name the Cy Young Award Winner. You can't, can you? (Kobe Bryant and Zack Greinke [who?], by the way.)

The Steelers won the Super Bowl early in 2009 -- and then stumbled through the NFL season so far.

Seriously; they have literally stumbled.

Obama and the world of sports even collided on the Big Issue of the year: health care. While Obama occasionally paid attention to one of his major campaign themes (he promised universal health care by the end of his first term, remember)(hey! It's my health care reference! You knew I'd get one in!), health care was front and center on everyone's mind (except the Senate's) this year, and the world of sports was no different, as the NFL instituted its own version of Universal Health Care, which might have been called "Let's pretend we care about head injuries while not actually mandating concussion-proof helmets," and the two worlds really did collide when a 16-year-old girl who had to quit basketball because she'd suffered 11 concussions testified before Congress in support of the "Contact Act," a bill to impose protections for high school athletes.

Don't worry-- health care got no further in the NFL, or high school, than it did in the Senate: The "Contact Act" was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce in March, 2009, and has been sitting there ever since. If you don't remember what that means, re-watch this:



Died in committee. Sorry, 16-year-old girls and Ben Roethlisberger; you'll have to take care of your health the way the rest of us do: Praying our insurance company doesn't drop us.

Obama began the year on a high note, seemingly invincible as he went from rally to rally and striding forward with his TARPs and Cashes-For-Onomatopoetic-Things programs, but there were chinks in the armor: the Olympic bid failed, health care is mired down, the economy isn't turning over yet and may need another jolt, there's still terrorists in Gitmo but they'll be transferred to New York and Illinois soon...

... and who else seemed invincible but wasn't? The Saints and the Colts, both starting off 13-0 and both lagging as they hit the home stretch. The Saints dropped their first game of the season last night despite a furious rally, and Obama can only hope that the Colts, not the Saints, are the true metaphor for his first year, since the Colts struggled to 14-0 instead of fumbling away their last chance and hitting 13-1, the way Drew Brees' team did. In either case, though, the surface perfection hides a troubled turmoil underneath and the calls keep getting closer and closer, for both the NFL's two leading teams and the Frontrunner-In-Chief.

Obama was forewarned about the troubles he'd face: last year's NFL playoffs saw number ones knocked off left and right, a sign of ill omen for the Man Who Would Be Everywhere in 2009. And while he was everywhere (appearing on TV so much that the networks complained about the costs, and getting onto 5 consecutive Sunday morning shows one weekend, as examples), so much of what he was talking about seemed to not matter so much: He was killing a fly with his bare hands, or showing his dogs to Oprah, or pardoning a turkey, but where was the substance? Where was the health care, the economy, the rolling back of the tides?

In that, too, Obama was the living embodiment of Sports, 2009: It's hard to recall a year when so much was said about sports figures, with so little of it having to do with sports. Kurt Warner's age, Tiger Woods' mistresses, A-Rod and Kate Hudson, Serena's swearing, Michael Phelps' pot-smoking, the track runner who was both woman and man, the Brett-Favre-retirement stories, the continuing questions about steroids (including, at the end, one that dragged Tiger Woods into that controversy, too), and, finally, putting Stephen Colbert on the cover of Sports Illustrated...

I had a picture of the actual cover, but I very
much preferred this image, instead.

... all of that was talk involving sports but wasn't about sports, letting sports surround us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without any actual sports talk taking place. It was all sizzle and no steak this year, in the world of sports and the world of government, and Obama stands astride those two worlds like a Colossus,

Good, but not as good as the Stephen Colbert picture.

albeit a Colossus who has yet to actually pick up the world and carry it; Obama is a Colossus who's still warming up and stretching for his big feats of strength, and in that, too, he embodies the world of sports like no other person did in 2009, because Obama, as always, carries with him hope: the hope for a better tomorrow, the hope that we have the ability to do better next time.

The ability to look at the troubles of this time, and say to ourselves: We can fix this.

The ability to look at a perfect season gone awry, and say We can still win the championship.

The ability to take adversity in stride and still throw that last-minute touchdown pass to win the big game.

The ability to look at the titans of the world -- the Lakers, the Yankees, the health care industry, the economy -- and say You might have won this round, but we're not giving up and we'll keep on fighting next year.

In sports, as in the Real World, there are the ridiculous moments and the sublime. There are the stupid people and the smart. There are the triumphant victories and the terrible defeats. There are moments of glory and struggles with defeat, and each of those can be transient or lifelong; we hope the bad fades soon and pray the good lingers on, but even when it doesn't, we can look away from the bad result, lift our chin up, clench our fists, and in the manner of the 2009! Nonsportsman! Of The Year!, continue to fight on, continue to lead, and continue to hope.