The flop was truly spectacular. I was told that the company had tried to ignite the fever in-house that spring, instituting Arena Football Apparel Days. On certain days, it was mandatory to show up for work in Russell Athletic Philadelphia Soul or Colorado Crush or Tampa Bay Storm merchandise. But despite HD coverage across multiple platforms and constant advertising, even with prime space on SportsCenter and the BottomLine, America never fell in love with the "50-Yard Indoor War." This is how bad it was: scheduled online chats with star players were so poorly attended that employees had to enter the chat rooms, submit fake questions. For all the money it spent on arena football, ESPN hadn't bought any actual fans.

I've been thinking about this a lot this past week, what with a similar campaign underway, conducted by the same entity. This time, there's a lot more money on the line, and the product is world-style football. It occurs to me that this offensive has hurdles in common with the arena football thing, namely that opening hearts and minds is different than opening space on the American sports buffet table. The key difference between us and the rest of the world is that we have a crowded sports menu and too many games. We have MLB, NFL, NBA, college football, college basketball, golf, tennis, NASCAR; beyond those there are minor sports like the NHL, outdoor lacrosse, poker, indoor lacrosse, X Games, open-wheel racing, Olympic sports, college hockey and lingerie football. And lately, above all, sports celebrity culture too. But there are only so many hours in the day, a ceiling on the benefits of ADD, no room at the inn.

The Great Recession has been especially tough on dudes. This trend has been pored over for a while now from a number of angles, and the socioeconomic impact is so powerful that it's caught the attention of America's thinking class. Just today, I got my copy of The Atlantic with a flaccid male symbol on the cover, and a feature article called "The End of Men." It's your basic new-journalism piece, full of shock illustrations and pullquotes designed to scare half the audience and validate the beliefs of the other.

Beyond the window dressing, it's a good article! ("Good," of course, meaning "I agree with it.") That the salary scoreboard is changing is indisputable fact, based on raw numbers and observed evidence. And I'm not here to defend my gender. I'm more interested in American male population's internal dynamics, or rather, where my brothers are at right now.

While the IOC worked long and hard to convince the sporting world that a modernized ancient Greek concept was a good idea, the rise (and genius) of FIFA can be credited to its basic success in tapping into a deep-rooted cultural instinct most of the world already had: the urge to kick a ball around with other people in an organized fashion. True love is always more powerful than shrewd marketing -- when taken from that perspective, it's no wonder that this single sport left all the other Games in its wake.

But ever since soccer was dropped from Los Angeles 1932, mostly for financial reasons and a lack of local interest, the sport grew up weird in the United States. For starters, it took on a different name in the 1940's, resulting in a sort of Babel-tower disconnect with the rest of the world. Other sports, like baseball and basketball and American-Style Football, became the national pastimes, and the "global game" spent most of the 20th Century struggling to stay in our top ten. The U.S. relationship with soccerfootyfootball has been bizarre all along, and it's not really getting any more stabilized or normal. In most countries, the sport Just Is, like the sky and water and particle physics. Here, the bond is loose, complex and highly theoretical.

I wasn't simply plucked out of the crowd for this honor, that's just not the way these things work. Somebody knew someone else, and the first one in that short chain was someone who's been a longtime supporter of my basketball web initiatives. The conference representative's e-mail name-checked this person as a way of introduction, and it mentioned that I'd raised tens of thousands of dollars to pay for travel and that I'd managed to turn a profit with a paywall website, and who's my agent? There was something about a round-trip plane ticket and three nights' lodging, and you just don't throw that stuff around unless there's a timeshare exchange involved.

It was all quite flattering, but I'm not going to do it. I could have flatly turned them down because I'd never heard of the organization, but I didn't, or I could have told them that I don't do things like that because I'm afraid of crowds (that's not true, just ask anybody I went to college with). As it turned out, I just didn't get back to them.

Since then, though, I've thought about what words of wisdom and authority I'd offer about raising money on the internet -- and what I'd have to offer to a group of (presumably) paying listeners who would likely be subsidizing the panelists' travel expenses. After practicing my speech in my head a few times, I'm convinced they wouldn't like my advice. "First rule," I might have said. "Scare off or ignore most of the available market."

For the past day or two, I've had this feeling that the recent resurrection of Leslie Harpold's proto-webzine smug (1997-2000), by means of mirrored archive, should be a bigger deal somehow. Jason Kottke, a web aggregator who's been at it for 12 years and who makes money off his blog, pulled out the "get off my lawn" line, and well, there you go. I don't know if this is really like finding DaVinci sketches in your basement; to me it's more like rediscovering a stash of high school newspapers in the attic, and realizing that they're a lot more awesome than nearly everything since. We just didn't realize the full genius of it at the time. How could we have? We were all so young then.

Leslie Harpold died in December 2006 mysteriously, alone. They didn't find her for a few days, and it might have been longer if her readers hadn't noticed that she'd stopped updating her site. This would have been like any number of similar American deaths, but she'd written hundreds of thousands of words online and made friends all across the (far less crowded) World Wide Web. There were many remembrances on blogs and message boards in the days following. It seemed like everyone knew her.

Later on, we were playing at Marietta High School. Charlie Hood was the coach there, a living legend in Atlanta-area high school ball. His team at the time featured Dale Ellis, who went on to the University of Tennessee and hit a lot of 3-pointers for the Seattle SuperSonics. A lot of people forget that Dale had a twin brother named Darryl, who was an exceptional athlete in his own right.

And both Dale and Darryl were on this team. Marietta was a powerhouse, ranked second in the state.

Marietta had us down by 25 points at their place, and time was winding down. I called time out, and everybody came running over to the bench.

"Guys," I said. "Remember what Bart Starr said about champions? He said that you can always tell a champion, no matter if he's up 30 or down 30. He's still playing and giving the best that he's got. The game's never over. Remember when he said that?"

Said all the players in unison, "Yes, sir!"

"Well, this game's over," I told them. "We're getting beat like dogs."

They all looked at me, dumbfounded.

A guy on my team named Russell Simmons - I loved him for being such a competitor - spoke up. "C'mon, coach, we can still win!"

"Nope, game's over," I repeated. "We're down 25 points with a minute to play, and there's no 30-point shot in the rulebook. We're beat."

"But here's what we're going to do," I continued. "We're going to have some fun for the rest of the night. We're not going to let them destroy us, we're not going to be down and out and unhappy because they beat us like a bass drum. We're going to leave here happy. So who wants to bloomer-leg one?"

The players were stunned. They didn't know what I was talking about.

"Ummm, coach, what's a bloomer-leg?" asked Russell.

"You get the ball, you put it down between your legs," I explained. "Just like Rick Barry shoots foul shots. Then you underhand that ball with all your might up towards the rim. So who wants to bloomer-leg one from half-court? Kevin Foster, what about you?"

Kevin was kind of a shy kid. "Welllll," he said tentatively, before his face broke out in a big smile. "Okay, I'll do it."

I knew Marietta was going to sit in that 2-3 zone and stay off our shooters, so I had Kevin dribble the ball up to half-court where it said "M.H.S." in big letters. He looked over at me, and I gave him a little wink.

"Let 'er fly, big man," I said.

And he took the ball and put it down between his knees, and Kevin Foster bloomer-legged it from half-court. When that ball hit the rim, my whole bench stood up. They thought it was going in. But it rattled off the iron and bounced out.

Robert Thomas grabbed the offensive rebound and dribbled out to the top of the circle, and then he bloomer-legged one too. That shot almost knocked a hole in the backboard.

The game was over, Marietta won by 25, but we made our statement. They might have won the game and embarrassed us, but we weren't going to let it ruin our lives. We weren't going to leave that gym feeling sorry for ourselves.

I DON'T MIND HITTING BOTTOM, I JUST HATE DRAGGING
by Tony Ingle with Kyle Whelliston
with a foreword by Hubie Brown

Release date: November 2009

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When Tony Ingle grew up in the government housing projects of Dalton, Georgia, he was so poor that he had to fish his first pair of basketball shoes out of a dumpster. And after a horrific knee injury during the national junior college basketball tournament ended his playing career, he set about chasing his championship dreams as a coach. His long climb up "the ladder" from high school to college was chock-full of high-octane offense and circus plays, culminating in a dream job as the interim bench boss at Brigham Young University. But after a nightmarish 0-19 campaign full of season-ending injuries and blowout losses, BYU put Coach Ingle out on the street. During his three years in basketball's wilderness, he performed a series of odd jobs to provide for his wife and five children -- including carpet salesman, TV pitchman, and stand-up comic. Coach Ingle's second chance finally came at Kennesaw State University, a small college near Atlanta, where he took the Owls from utter mediocrity to the Division II National Championship in just four years.

With a foreword by Basketball Hall of Famer Hubie Brown, "I Don't Mind Hitting Bottom, I Just Hate Dragging" will entertain, motivate and inspire. It is the engaging and unique story of a life full of resilience, perseverance, faith and family... told by a man the Deseret News once called "the Will Rogers of basketball."

I lost my sensei today.

Thomas Rubick was my primary graphic design professor when I lived in Oregon, he was the best teacher I ever had, and he passed away Sunday morning just before 8 a.m. Pacific time. He had brain cancer; he and his doctors thought he had it beat with chemo this past summer, but it came back much worse once autumn arrived. I've promised to always speak of him in the present tense, a high respect afforded only the greatest of artists, but I can do so only when it doesn't end up confusing the timeline.

When he died, it was three hours later here on the East Coast, and what I was spending my Sunday morning doing was -- of all things -- drawing a three-panel cartoon on a bristol pad. I was having trouble rendering an expressive hand gesture, and I was thinking about him. I was remembering a time back in school when I stayed up all night on a deadline and completely screwed up an illustration by putting somebody's thumb where the pinky would be. Thomas made me draw 50 hands if I wanted to save my grade. Twelve years later, wearing through the pad with pencil scratches and eraser snibbles, I could swear I felt pressure coming from over my shoulder.

I didn't find out until much later in the day that he had died.

This wasn't a random spiritual experience or anything. I've been thinking a lot about Thomas for the past seven months, and I wrote extensively about him here back in March. Mostly, I've been racked with regret that I didn't keep in better touch beyond annual three-paragraph Christmas cards (his were always signed, "Your Sensei"), and that I never figured out the proper way to say farewell while I still could. But that's what people do. We're programmed to take things for granted, to forget about things when they're present and abundant, to despair and panic when their scarcity and absence become evident.

Human loneliness, and the sheer desperation that too much of it inevitably causes, is the 21st Century's most potent and powerful driver of everyday action in the First World. I'm convinced of it. Nearly all bad life-changing decisions come from wild and selfish desires for human connection, and our municipal court hallways are littered with the endings and by-products of desperate acts: gang shit, quickie divorces, restraining orders, and children of ridiculous unions cursed at and by birth.

None of this fits into the narrative structure we've commonly accepted as entertaining or enlightening -- except maybe for the shows on the teevee down at the laundromat during which viewers are invited to pick a side whilst ignoring the larger picture. There's no place in Joseph Campbell's hero-story arc for a journey that ends in a victory over desperation; it tends to be a second-act problem for Good Guys, who are saved by quest completion, religion or a Good Woman. It's a first-act issue for villains.

The ability to refrain from making stupid decisions is not, sadly, considered a superpower. They'll never make a movie out of any of those old German novels in which the protagonist achieves a victory over a baser self by way of internal monologue, or from Saul Bellow's Herzog. As a result, there's no real cultural roadmap for breaking the desperation cycle, no hero to turn to. Is this, too, something the internet and its new complex media can help with?

(Image via DTMM)

The modern way to make online friends with virtual strangers is to make soft, safe statements about popular topics. In June 2009, here are some good ones to start out with:

• Iran's ruling government is bad
• iPhones are cool, but AT&T's policies are bad
• #inaperfectworld, cats would audibly speak in LOLcat language

All this will get you, however, is a tiny and anonymous place in a massive crowd, which can be a lonelier existential state than the emptiest room. Some internet-people rebel against this dejection by saying the exact opposite, in order to draw a sharp reaction. Examples include, "Ahmadinejad is awesome!" and "I like killing kitties with my gun." These people are called trolls, which is a bad name for them because there isn't anything particularly fearsome, powerful or Norse about them. They're just dicks.

Sure I love Twitter. I love teh tweets so much that I ditched my "personal" account and opted into a read-only experience. Twitter is history's most advanced way yet of obtaining small blips of useful information... anywhere you are. On the desktop, on the phone, in the van, in the can. I'm not so convinced that its legacy is as a interpersonal communication tool.

A lot of people are going to point to recent situations on Moldova and Iran as proof that Twitter has come of age, supplanted traditional journalism, changed the world. These people won't likely mention that week of endlessly cascading Swine Flu misinformation and paranoia last month, or the service's losing battle against truth verification and endless spam. Try this: read 1,000 scattered updates from #iranelection, then read a dispatch from a BBC reporter who's lived in and studied the region for years. After that, go ahead and tell me what the future of journalism is all about.

Recently, I came across the 1936 B-Western California Mail on Turner Classic Movies. The late Dick Foran, who had the worst teeth of any of the singing cowboys, has top billing, and there's a thin plot about romantic jealousy, mistaken identity, and the end of the Pony Express.

But the real star is Smoke the Wonder Horse, a grey palomino with an complicated harness who's credited as "himself" and is responsible for all the major plot turns. I was watching the movie in the "background" while doing some divorce paperwork on the couch, but halfway through, Smoke turns on a bad guy who's stolen and mounted him, throws him off, then kills him with his front hooves before galloping off and leaving the man for dead. I was, like, "Whoa! I didn't see that coming!"

Then, in the climactic chase scene, Smoke runs down another black-hat and stomps him until he dies. It's shown in quick-cut edits (because of the Production Code, most likely), back and forth from close-ups of the dying man's frightened, bloodied face to the rearing horse shown from an upward perspective. The blood-curdling neighs and the screams signaled the day was saved. I leapt from the couch and gave the film a standing ovation, much as folks in the theater must have all those years ago!

Finally, I checked the Internet Movie Database so I could find out what other movies Smoke appeared in. He was in 13 other B-Westerns from 1936 through 1941, forgotten films like Empty Holsters and Winners of the West. He's credited as Dick's Horse, Red's Horse, Rod's Horse, Chip's Horse. The grey wonder-steed never found a regular rider, never had the opportunity to be Silver to any Ranger, lone or otherwise.

Millions of other people have made that decision for themselves, too. Twitter is telegrams without the news, a ball-point pen, a subway platform conversation, maybe even the second coming of the telephone itself. Twitter challenges creative folks to shoehorn big thoughts into 140 characters, and it's a way for others to consume celebrity culture in unprecedented ways. What's fascinating to me is that such a uncomplicated data construct is capable of being so many different things to so many different people.