Magical Flags

Whatever happened to fact-based reality?

“In my heart,” umpire Tim McClelland said, the Yankees’ Nick Swisher left third base too early on a fly ball out. In the words of a philandering husband caught red handed: “Are you gonna believe me or your lyin’ eyes.” At least the husband cited an organ with the power of vision.

Then Mr. Napoli, the catcher for the Angels of Anaheim, tags two dolts, Messrs. Posada and Cano, each inexplicably looking at third base, not standing on it, and Mr. McClelland only calls one out. How hard can it be to enforce the rule that while the ball is in play a runner not on a base can be tagged with the ball and ruled out?

This malady is not confined to professional sports. The Southeastern Conference seems determined to keep Florida and Alabama undefeated with blatantly wrong calls against their scrappy opponents. Just this past week, Lane Kiffin, the brash head coach of Tennessee, justified his decision to run down the clock and not run another play before going for a game-winning field goal against the Tide because he didn’t want “a magical flag” to appear. It was blocked by a ‘Bama behemoth who yanked his helmet off in celebration, which should have resulted in a penalty and a re-kick, according to rules aficionados.

Those weighted yellow hankies flying haphazardly through the fall breeze and the decisions of old men in blue with questionable cognitive skills remind us that to expect a fair outcome is to believe Bernie Madoff had Faustian powers to bend the stock market to his will.

To expect perfection is delusional, but necessary. Is it right to howl when one has been jobbed? Of course. Don’t basketball coaches “work” the refs to get a favorable call down the line?

Mr. Kiffin of Tennessee, though reprimanded for his comment, has sent a not so subtle message to the SEC officiating crews that they better not be seduced by the glamour teams. The age of extra slo-mo video renders the men in blue subject to the scrutiny every man, woman and child must now endure. Tip: re-read every e-mail message before hitting send.

Kev claims no special insight into the human heart, or his own, for that matter, but “magical flags” land on our daily fields of play all the time. To not object is cowardly.

Stuck in the middle

I suppose I could take my dirty socks and underwear and beat them on a rock at the Gowanus Canal, but the wash and fold place across the street seems a better alternative for 10 bucks.

We all rely on middle men. The bartender who pours our drink. The waitress who brings us our bacon and eggs. The newspaper boy who tosses our birdcage liner. The lawyer who pleads our case. The immigrant who sells us our roses for our darlings on Valentine’s Day. The layabout blogger who thinks great thoughts for mass consumption while dreaming up a new golf swing.

All deliver a service that we could surely do on our own but don’t have the time or inclination to undertake.

Bernie Madoff, however, is the ultimate middle man. He will sleep the sleep of the righteous in a tax-paid pad and probably live to 100 and be released from some iron-pumping federal penitentiary with a physique we 50-somethings on the outside would envy.

You can’t hang the guy. All he did was steal from the rich to give to the rich. Kind of a bizarro-world Robin Hood. In truth, he didn’t rob everyone. Lots of investors didn’t buy his pitch. But his phenomenal fraud does prove the theory that everything is connected to Kevin Bacon, a Madoff investor.

In the same sense, the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart colloquy on Comedy Central, shows that middle men make for great theater if nothing else. We quench our thirst for truth, knowledge and dough with entertainers like Cramer and Stewart and Madoff because we have more fun things to do (at least I do).

Stewart, who I’m sure is paid handsomely for his self-righteous smirks, was much too glib, as, ahem, some of us are wont to be. Cramer, as much as he rubs a lot of folks the wrong way, made a simple point, though he didn't articulate it clearly enough, which is: it's not a crime to be wrong. If you don't like his opinion, don't take it. Stewart could have made the same argument about the complicity of the media in enabling the influence of the Israeli lobby or spreading the canard about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Each man is the steward of his own wealth. To think that CNBC talking heads were responsible for abetting the meltdown in the financial markets is as silly as the stab-in-the back idea that revanchists favor when they ascribe failure to some sinister cabal, not human imperfection, miscalculation and greed.

Advice is just that, not a gun to your head.

Charmer and the Charmed

It is convenient to divide the world into two camps. I do it often as a way to explain success, failure or just the amount of enthusiasm one has for getting up in the morning and facing Miss Market (I prefer to think of it as a she, not Mr. Market, for some vaguely sexist reason, I'm sure). But Mr. Madoff is off the charts. How he kept all those balls in the air for so long without Miss Market walking out on him will likely be studied by psychologists and fledgling con men for years to come.

I've tried my two-camps trick, as in "the world is divided between the suckers and the wise guys," or, "the world is divided between those who play by the rules and those who move their tee shot from behind a tree when no one is looking." But this guy separates himself. Your run-of-the-mill swindler fleeces and flees. Mr. Madoff stuck around, with a public profile as big as the Ritz, apparently never believing everybody would ask for their money at once.

Perhaps the lesson for investors is that you can't have it one way all the time. Take your best shot, and if you lose (hopefully fewer times than you win) chalk it up to fickle Miss Market and soldier on. If a money manager appears to be saying his trees grow to the sky year after year, take a look at the rest of the forest. Like picking football games against the spread, if you're right 60% of the time you're a genius, 100% of the time and the fix is in.

By the way, played at Dyker today. Putted well, tee shots were inconsistent, approach shots were atrocious. Oh well, the worst day on the golf course is better than.....Sadly, it looks like the last golf day for a time. Instead, I am devoting myself to analyzing the BCS championship game and trying to come up with a way for OU to score 60 points against Florida. I think that's what it's going to take.