Unhorsed

We can almost hear the Indianapolis Colts’ President Bill Polian shouting “An ankle, an ankle, my kingdom for an ankle!” His remarkable right defensive end, Dwight Freeney, like Richard III, has been unhorsed. A torn ligament in the crucial joint just before the battle with the New Orleans Saints in Miami has apparently pushed the spread down a point to minus 5 in favor of the horseshoes.

The news must have made the saintly quarterback Drew Brees draw a breath of hope that his blind side might be less vulnerable with Freeney possibly out of action.

Our national economy had a blind side, too. Wall Street, oblivious to its own hubris, pummeled pedestrian quarterbacks with pass rushing techniques that defied chip blocks. Exotic mortgage securities and credit default swaps eventually swamped the credit markets and the pass rushers themselves. No flags were thrown.

After dusting themselves off with the help of taxpayers, the game resumed, the pass rushers doing God’s work in directing capital to its most efficient use, which meant outsized bonuses for the saints of capitalism while unemployment stayed at 10%. “Kezar Stadium, Roman Gabriel back to pass…but no! from out of nowhere, it’s Paul Volcker to intercept!”

The lion-hearted Volcker, the first and last Fed chairman to use money supply as a target and let interest rates roam where they may, has become the left tackle protecting our blind side, essentially urging a return to Glass-Steagall, the 1930s legislation that separated commercial banking from investment banking to prevent conflicts of interest. Of course, the Goldman Sachses and Morgan Stanleys, now officially bank holding companies but retaining proprietary trading desks, do not wish to be fettered.

“Yeah. That’s it. More. That’s right! I want more!” Edward G. Robinson confessed in a bathtub to Humphrey Bogart. (Name that movie, sports fans).

But in fairness, bashing Wall Street is tantamount to bashing New York. Let’s face it; the pinstriped bankers buy lots of goods and services with those checks. Folks in Detroit similarly would love to see GM, Ford and Chrysler flourish.

But there have to be rules. It reminds us of Phil Mickelson’s use of grandfathered Ping wedges with square grooves. The United States Golf Association has banned such wedges, but a successful lawsuit allowed the Ping clubs to be used. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em was the outcome. Those without an old wedge in the garage are at a disadvantage. Those who use them may not be technically cheating, but they are akin to Judge Smails invoking winter rules on a sunny summer day. How about a Fresca?

There may not be a God, as Bishop Pickering said after being struck by lightning just as he was about to break the course record at Bushwood, but down here we need someone – the Fed, the SEC , whomever – to keep the sky from falling on the weekend duffer and the blind side safe for the Central Park quarterback. Manning, Brees, Mickelson and Wall Street can take care of themselves. They get paid plenty for it.

Evidence of a Higher Being

Golf is a perverse pastime. It requires concentration and nonchalance in equal parts. You have to care and not care at the same time. It is the blend that those of us not blessed with a carefree mind and natural athletic grace attempt to concoct to approximate the real thing.

It is our superstitious opinion that a putter contains only so many true rolls and that practice depletes that number. After all, why do so many sluggers forgo the home-run derby the night before the All-Star game?

And it is a truism, not a superstition, that a good big man will beat a good little man every day. Remember the look on Michael Spinks’ face when he saw Mike Tyson charge out from his corner? That visage of terror haunts us to this day. It wasn’t quite that bad with good little old man Tom Watson on Sunday at Turnberry, but you could tell when he pulled the putter back for an eight-footer that would have won The Open Championship that fear had conquered him.

Carrying the torch for us 50-somethings, he cared too much and then the wheels came off in the playoff. He was simply one stroke too old. As Vince Lombardi said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. And fatigue strikes the aging with much more frequency than it does the younger. This is the way God planned it and we must accept it

Now Stewart Cink, the fellow with a golfer’s tan that includes his pale pate when unhatted, a jarring sight, is no teen-age phenom, but his assertion that he felt no nervousness rings true. Doubt afflicts the older man as he grows tired. We must again go to the young genius Keats when he addressed the nightingale thusly:

What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;


Notice the modifiers preceding “man” – good, big and little. By taking one more club, the little man swinging with confidence can carry the water and set himself up for a birdie putt, while the big man with a grandiose opinion of his talent will take a pitching wedge and shank it into the wildlife clustering at the edge of the pond.

Similarly, the good young man will beat the good old man more often than not. Again, this is God’s plan. The Bishop in Caddyshack who “theoretically” could have beaten the course record in a thunderstorm missed the point when he declared in the bar at Bushwood that there is no God.

Of course there is, your eminence. He made Watson take the eight-iron instead of the nine.

All that glimmers

For all you "Caddyshack" fans, there is no god. But I do have a fleeting affinity for the one who enriches me, because it enables me to pay taxes and thus pay my share for civilization, enriching others. However, I will turn to Odin, Thor and Loki and the rest of Norse mythology, which, by the way, is my favorite explanation for the universe, before I bow to something buried in the ground. Yes, it's the gold bugs that bug me.

Gold investors, whether they admit it or not, denominate their investment in paper dollars. It is that conversion into something that can purchase goods and services that calibrates its worth. Until western society collapses and only a sliver of the metal, not a five-dollar bill, will buy a Big Mac and french fries, then gold is just a place to park dollars in the hope of making more dollars, the reason for all investments.

As George Bailey told Clarence, when the guardian angel remarked money wasn't needed in heaven: "Well, it comes in awfully handy down here."

All the gold in the world would not buy a Big Mac in such an outcome because the hamburger flippers and all the rest of us would be brigands bent on medieval-style looting and freebooting anyway. A kind of "we don't need no stinking badges" world.

To buy and hold it as the only true store of value seems irrational when the only way to realize the benefits is conversion into dollars. Should the fanciful apocalypse come and paper currency lose its power to persuade our republic to cohere, which some paranoid holders of gold expect and indeed appear to wish, then we are all in the soup.

A cellarful of it will hardly keep one warm and safe in a world lit only by the fire of torches and ruled by the mobs with pitchforks and machine guns.

I guess I've buried the lead, as we used to say in the newspaper trade, because it brings me to my latest "Manginius" point (more on the Jets and professional football culture in a future post).

I've taken the plunge and put my money where my mouth is. Recovery and inflation are coming and oil prices have bottomed. Yesterday, bought PowerShares DB Crude Oil Double Long ETN (DXO) at $2.24. This is a double-down (for all you blackjack players) on the price of oil. This exchange traded note is designed to go up or down twice as much as crude oil futures. I think it's going up. When (if) it does, I'll be looking to add alternative energy names.

I'm not buying oil because I think it's a superior god but because I expect its price in dollars to increase beyond the rate of inflation, enabling me to buy more goods and services and pay more taxes than otherwise would be the case. If you think the price of gold will increase, by all means buy and reap the benefits of more dollars. But genuflecting before a commodity (precious as it may be) is bad form. Just ask Moses.