On a recent Saturday afternoon, 12 miles from the Canadian border, the hometown Scobey Spartans prepared to kick off to the Wibaux Longhorns in an 8-man high school football game. The Spartans were 0-6 coming into that game, but they had not always been bottom feeders of Montana's Class C Eastern Division. Only 10 years ago, they won a state title and in the 1990s they regularly played close games against the Longhorns. Corey Begger, who played offensive and defensive end for Wibaux back then, remembers one game when the wind gusted so powerfully across the prairie, punts landed behind the kickers. "There were dust clouds blowing across that field," he says, gesturing north toward Canada. "People parked busses and trucks behind the end zone to block the wind." He says Scobey had more kids going out for football then. He says it "was very different." Wibaux only won by two.

Montana 8-man football is played on a field 80 by 40 yards. All but three linemen are eligible to receive passes, and most teams run far more than they throw. When either team is ahead by 35 points or more, a mercy rule takes effect, and the clock runs without stopping until the end of the game.

So far this year, Wibaux has mercy-ruled six teams in a row. None of the players or coaches or any of the 20 or so parents who made the three-hour drive north expected the game against Scobey to be any different, and soon after the Spartans kicker sent the ball end-over-end into the waiting arms of the Wibaux return man, the game was already over. Senior Jake Bakken, who also plays quarterback and safety, paused to let a wedge develop, and took off. His blockers slammed into Spartan players and kept running. Junior Trent Farnworth, who sports a mullet and who everyone calls "Boz," lowered his shoulder and flattened an undersized opponent. Wyatt Miske, a 235-pound lineman, did the same, clearing a route for Bakken, who seemed to glide through space. Ten seconds and 76 yards later, he was in the end zone. Two minutes after that, the Longhorns were up 16-0.  A quarter later, with nine minutes remaining in the first half, the score was 42-0.

Wibaux is like Scobey. It's the same as Plevna and Ekalaka and Hysham; a no-stoplight town on the extreme eastern side of Montana, the flat, dry side, where making a living solely from raising beef and growing wheat has proven more difficult with each generation tasked with trying. In a county with barely a thousand people spread across nearly 900 square miles, half live in Wibaux.

By nearly any metric — population, school enrollment, the age of the people who live there — Wibaux and so many other towns in that part of the state are dying. But Wibaux is also different. Of the eight schools that originally played in the Montana Class C Eastern Division, seven of them are now too small to field 8-man teams and have either dropped to 6-man or quit playing altogether. Only one team has bucked the trend. In one way, at least, Wibaux still thrives.

***

Beaver Creek meanders through the center of town like a snake in tall grass. Wibaux was built around its curves, and there was a time when residents were sustained by its slow current. It's as wide as a tennis court and people say you can catch walleye and northern pike in the deep holes. It flows under Highway 7, past an old grain elevator, the fueling station and a dirt-pocked little league field with a rusted chain-link backstop. The creek comes within a block of downtown — its storefronts mostly vacant but not yet shuttered — and the trucks parked outside of the Shamrock and the Rainbow clubs, storefront bars where you can buy a box of bullets with your beer and where wall calendars track the birthdays of the regulars and their families.

Today, Beaver Creek is mostly used for cooling off in the summer. Wibaux is sustained by something else.

Veterans Memorial Field lies within the footprint of a dilapidated gravel and clay track on the opposite side of downtown. On the rare days when the wind doesn't blow, you can hear the growl of semis on Interstate 94, and the whistle of a coal train miles before it speeds through town without slowing down.

The week after beating Scobey, the Longhorns returned home for the final game of the regular season against a mediocre co-op squad from Froid and Medicine Lake (high schools combining student bodies to field teams is common practice in Montana Class C). As is usual during the regular season, no one in Wibaux expects much of a game — since 2001 they've only lost six times — but, like parishioners outside of their church, people still gather.

An hour before kickoff, Dodge and Chevy pickup trucks are backed up to the edge of the track, camping chairs unfolded in their beds. The adults, some parents of players, huddle around tailgates. Young girls sit in the bleachers and wear hoodies and lean into one another to fit under blankets. Younger boys roam the sidelines in packs. Behind the uprights, they play games of two-hand touch that seem never to begin or end.

The LaBelle brothers.

South of the field, below a soft rise at the top of which stands a statue of Pierre Wibaux — a prominent rancher, who in 1895 decided Mingusville was an unsatisfactory name for a place — a group of blue-and-gold faithful gather between trucks and under a party tent and eat sausage and chili. Among them is Tracy Bakken, wife of assistant coach Shane Bakken, and mother of Jake, Jeff and Joe, all of whom play or played quarterback for the Longhorns. She stands with her mother, Sally Witkowski, a self-proclaimed "sports buff," who has lived in Wibaux all of her adult life. When asked how a town that in most years has fewer than 30 teenage boys can win so often, Witkowski replies as if anyone who didn't already know wouldn't understand the answer. "They're winners, they all are," she says. "They take football real seriously."

Tracy responds by describing her family. She says that when her middle son Jeffrey was in junior high, he stood on the sidelines at games, heard the crack when his older brother, Joe, slammed his helmet into the helmets of his teammates and watched as he ran onto the field and led the Longhorns to victory after victory after victory. She says her youngest son, Jake, did the same. "It's just pounded into their heads," she says. "They don't want to let the older generation down by having a losing season."

Senior lineman Heath LaBelle knows this pressure. His teammates call him Vito — for his resemblance to the MTV reality star — and at nearly 300 pounds, he's of typical size for men in the LaBelle family. His oldest brother, Jordan, graduated in 2007 and played for a state championship in 2006. Their middle brother, AJ, played for three titles before graduating in 2010. When the three of them sit together, they make furniture seem like playthings and Longhorn football seem like the center of the universe.

"It's expected. It's weird to say, but Wibaux football is just expected," says their father Greg. "We're expected to do well, and it doesn't matter who's on the team," he adds, pointing out that this pressure gave all his sons an edge. "Jordan will always say he's better than AJ and AJ says Heath isn't as good as the other two. It's community wide — that's your competition."

No LaBelle boy has lost more than five games in four years of football. And while no LaBelle has won a state title, they continue to measure success on whether or not the team finishes as the best in the state. When asked if it's possible that the Longhorn brand may be changing — considering that in 2012, Wibaux High was the smallest high school playing 8-man football in Montana and three of the four teams that made it to the semi-finals that year drew from students bodies more than twice Wibaux's size — they are incredulous. "They've said it for years, ‘They're not going to be as good, they're not going to be as good,'" says AJ. "I think Wibaux has the mentality. I don't care how many kids are in your school. Being in Wibaux is different. We have the tradition. It's a football town."

Today, that tradition and the power it wields over younger generations is evidenced by other familiar names on the Longhorns roster. There's a Bakken and a Bertelsen, a LaBelle, two Miskes, two Nelsons, two Dschaaks, two Schneiders, and a Quade — Jhett — whose uncles were Longhorns. His father, Kevin, also played and is remembered by people in town as the consummate Longhorn fan. In 2006, during a semi-final home playoff game, he hired a plane and a photographer to take aerial photographs of the 3,000 people in attendance. In photos from that day, the field is unusually green and surrounded by people on all sides. It seems to be the only thing in town still growing.

***

The tallest structure in Wibaux is a water tower, at the center of which the word "Wibaux" is painted in red so that it faces the interstate. Second tallest is the grain elevator on the other side of Beaver Creek. Otherwise, Wibaux creates a squat horizon line of two-story buildings and trees. Driving south on Highway 7 or east on I-94, it's a matter of seconds before Wibaux disappears in the rearview mirror.

When head coach Jeff Bertelsen was in high school, he and some friends plotted to climb the tower. There was nothing much to see, they just wanted to see if they could get all the way to the top. Their plan, though, was foiled by a passing deputy sheriff, and the group scattered, running down streets and through yards to escape. Only a single member of his crew got to the top. Bertelsen laughs when he tells the story. The water tower itself is empty.

Bertelsen moved to Wibaux from the mountains and trout streams of western Montana when his dad got a job as a county agent in 1987. His freshmen year of football was the last year for then-coach Rob Bushman, the man who most Longhorn fans credit with inventing the Wibaux brand of football. "We ran the ball," he says. "Up the gut, hard-nose football." The next year, under a new coach, Wibaux suffered its first losing season since anyone could remember. It would be their last.

Everyone in town — including his players — calls him Bert. He has a face like Paul Giamatti, but he has the physique of someone you wouldn't want to mess with. He wears khaki cargo shorts to every game, no matter the weather, and when you ask him if he would change anything about his job with the Longhorns, it'd be painting the fields. He is not just the coach, but also the grounds crew. "That's the worst thing I do at this job. I measure and paint that field before every game," he says. "It used to take me six hours."

Thirty minutes before the Froid/Medicine Lake game, Bertelsen addresses the Longhorn players in a cramped locker room beneath Wibaux High's gymnasium bleachers. The game is meaningless; Wibaux has had the Eastern Division's No. 1 seed clinched for weeks. Some teams would take the starters out in the first half in a game like this, no matter the score, to preserve them for the playoffs. Not Wibaux. Bertelsen searches for a way to motivate — to remind his players that even in games that don't matter, final scores transcend win/loss columns. Complacency, not the opposition, represents the real challenge to Bert's boys.

"They're gonna come, and they're gonna come hard. You have to take that out of them. They got nothing to lose. This is their state title game for their seniors. It's the last high school football game they'll play," he says and reminds them that they, too, will someday take the field for the last time. "Think how'd you play that game."

Head coach Jeff Bertelsen in his signature khaki shorts.

Bertelsen knows what it's like to play that game, and unlike anyone else in the locker room, he knows what it's like to win it.  In 1991, his junior year, the Longhorns cruised to the school's first state championship. They did it again the next year, and although Bertelsen had already left to play at Dickinson State, the Longhorns did it again in 1993. Bertelsen was a star defender, and he still remembers the rush of bringing home the state title. "Once you know what that feels like, there's sort of nothing else like it," he says. "You want to have that feeling again. I want these kids to have that feeling."

The Longhorns won the program's fifth state title in 2001, Bertelsen's first year as head coach. Since then, they've gone 125-18 and have made it to the championship game five more times, but have yet to win again. "It's title or bust every year. I've heard people say, ‘Oh, he can't win the big one.' You feel the pressure and you know it comes with the job," he says. "I think sometimes I just try to be naive about it — to protect myself. Just do what we do every day and try to get better."

After Bertelsen addresses his team, Rob Bacon, a first-year assistant coach, speaks to the players. He played for the 2006 Longhorns, which Bertelsen describes as "the best Wibaux team to not win a title." After winning a semifinal game, the Longhorns lost the title in overtime. Bacon remembers returning to Wibaux late the night after the loss, the fire engine escort for the Longhorns' bus and the people who had stayed up to honk truck horns and welcome the boys home. "It was bittersweet," he says. "If you grow up saying you want to be good at football, that's one thing. But we grow up saying we want to win state. We know we're going to be good at football. We want to win state."

"We know we're going to be good at football. We want to win state."

When Bacon talks to the Longhorn players about their opponent, he channels the frustration that comes with coming up short in the face of extraordinary expectations. "They have a new coach this year and maybe he thinks things have changed, but they haven't. It's gotten uglier ... Take some pride in that, you are the guys who are going to be knocking their dicks in the dirt. Make them get it. Make every member of that team get it," he says. "Let them know what we're about."

The players stand up and touch hands and count to three. They march out of the locker room and turn right to exit the building and run across a parking lot onto the field. Turn left instead, stairs lead to the polished wood surface of the Wibaux gymnasium, where five state title banners hang from a cinder block wall: '91, '92, '93, '00 and '01. Most people in Wibaux find it disappointing there aren't more, but most people in Wibaux, like assistant coach Shane Bakken, also think it would be cheap to hang runner-up banners. He played quarterback in the '80s and has watched his sons play in four state title games. He believes there is only one way to measure a successful season. "Once you get a taste, that's the drive. You want to get back there again, and we have it. If you're not playing to win it every year, why play?" he says.  "No one remembers second place."

***

The Longhorns score on the first series of the game against the Red Hawks. They proceed to recover the ball on an onsides kick and score again. On the first Red Hawk possession, they struggle to crack the line of scrimmage and are forced to kick from inside their own 5-yard line. The punter receives a low snap as blue jerseys crash the backfield. He doesn't appear to panic so much as make a calculation and then a quick decision. He turns his back to the field, drops the ball to his foot and gingerly boots it out of the back of the end zone. The first quarter ends with the score 38-8.

When the Longhorns are playing well, it's like watching a video game between a committed gamer and someone who left the controller on the coffee table — something doesn't quite seem fair. On a special teams play, Chase Bertelsen, who has the same stacked-brick physique as his father, Jeff, draws gasps from the sideline when he topples a Red Hawk gunner flat on his back. Jake Bakken fields a kickoff and moves through traffic like a spooked antelope, his strides covering more ground than seem possible. The Red Hawks don't tackle him so much as shoo him out of bounds.  Although every team has its stars, not every team wins so gaudily game after game, year after year. Not every team is the Longhorns.

A few minutes into the third quarter, the score is 57-8, and Bertelsen begins to take the starters out of the game. Bakken and Bertelsen, LaBelle, Miske, Farnworth and Colton Tousignant, the starting running back who is as adept at breaking up passes as he is at running around tacklers, have their places taken by underclassmen.

Colton's younger brother, Chas, a 100-pound freshman, gets in at running back. He receives a handoff and is knocked over before he makes it to the end. He is promptly taken out. When he was younger, Chas watched his older brothers play football at recess. He remembers they would pretend to be Longhorn players of the day — Travis Bertelsen, Rob Bacon, Derek Hartse — and when his brothers got to high school, Chas played recess ball himself and pretended to be his brothers — superstar athletes playing on the biggest stage in the universe. As a ninth grader, he only sees the field when the Longhorns have mercy-ruled a team, if at all. But wearing that jersey is a dream realized, and he's already experienced the chemical surge of winning and the rush it gives him. "It just comes to you," he says.

Nearly to the end of his first season, he does not yet know what losing feels like.

***

The pavement of Hodges Road ends just after it passes the football field on the western edge of town. From there, the county uses crushed red rock to cover its clay surface. Four and a half miles west, Hodges intersects Ranch Access Road. Ranch Access winds over gentle rises and across dry creek beds for almost nine miles before dead-ending in a gulley of ash trees at the Tousignant family ranch. It is here, on land like this, land the family refers to as the "home place," where the boys who have always played football at Wibaux are born.

Bill Tousignant's mustache frames the corners of his mouth, and he is fond of telling the story of how he met his wife, Lisa, on horseback, a few miles from where they now live, just before a hailstorm. He says that despite the county's efforts, the road to his family's home is sometimes impassable. When it rains too much, the clay turns to wet cement and cakes on truck wheels until they no longer spin. When it snows, the road is sometimes unplowed for days, and his boys have to clear stretches of it themselves. It's not uncommon, he says, for his family to be stranded on their ranch "for a day or two."

The Tousignant brothers.

Hours before the game against the Red Hawks, Bill and his sons, Colton and Chas, woke before dawn. The boys each have a mat of tightly curled hair and electric blue eyes, which never shy from eye contact. That morning, a veterinarian was due at the ranch to do a pregnancy check on their stock of heifers. As dawn became day, the Tousignant men guided the 1,200-pound animals down a shoot of wrought iron fence, at the end of which each head of cattle was examined with an ultrasound wand. They had to work quickly, because the boys had a game.

Bill and Lisa are proud of their sons. As did their older brother before he left for college, Colton and Chas do every job the ranch demands. In February and March, they take turns waking up every two hours throughout the night to check on the pregnant cattle, and if one is in labor, they help relieve her of the 80-pound calf. They have never been on a spring vacation, and they spend their summers cutting hay and rolling it into enormous cylindrical bails. Some weeks, when the weather is right, and the grass is neither too wet with dew or too dry and brittle, they work for 20 hours a day.

On a recent Sunday morning, Bill drives his Dodge up a steep, dirt incline and gestures across a draw to where a church-sized stack of bails slumps in the wind. "That's no small feat," he says of the work his boys do each summer and adds that there are more stacks around the ranch. He says Colton and Chas cut 2,500 acres of grass last summer and put up 7,000 bails of hay. Sometime in the following months, when snow covers the ground, they will unfurl the bails one-by-one. The Tousignants' cattle will survive through the winter because of the work the boys did in the summer.

Ranch life is cyclical. Every task — preg-checking heifers, branding calves, trucking steers to auction — exists on the rim of a wheel, pushed around its axis by the changing of seasons. A job is completed only so the next one can begin, and some jobs, like mending the 40 miles of fence on the Tousignants' property, are never finished. The Tousignant boys aren't football fans — there is little time for that luxury, and these are not boys accustomed to sitting around. They show no allegiance to any team other than the one they play for. On weekends, when they are not playing football and if there is no work to be done, they'd rather play paintball or ride ATVs or hunt than sit and flick between televised football games. Colton doesn't care about Peyton Manning's comeback or concussions or who will win the Heisman. He'd rather show you the skin of a bobcat he trapped in a snare not far from his house. The pelt is silken and mottled tan and gray with dark spots. He says it's a female and rubs a hand over the teats on her belly. He says it might earn him $500 but a big tom could get $1,000. "They kind of dock you because she was milking," he says.

In Wibaux, the Tousignant boys are called "ranch kids," and while they are not the only ranch kids on the Longhorns, they are of a vanishing world. Corey Begger, the team's statistician, remembers just a few decades ago, when he was playing, there were more boys like the Tousignants, himself included. "There's not as many farm kids now as there used to be back in the early '90s. When I grew up, we were always on the farm," he says. "Wheat and putting up hay, working cows. We always had other kids helping us." He's not sure why, but he thinks that families are smaller than they used to be. And, he says, "Kids just aren't coming back to work on the farm." Wibaux, where nothing ever changes, is changing in this way.

The ways small towns die are unmistakable.

The ways small towns die are unmistakable. One day, a family moves away, and no family moves in. The next day, the closed sign in the window of the town's only restaurant stays facing the street, and the post office announces it will only be open four days a week. The school shrinks until there are too few kids to field sports teams. So they practice with schools from neighboring towns, compromise on new uniform colors and mascots. They punctuate the team's new name with a slash. Then goes the gas station and the library. And, in time, the school closes because all of the children are gone.

Wibaux is not Ingomar. It is not Opheim or Custer, towns much closer to drying up and blowing away. But it has gotten steadily smaller, its residents steadily older, and the land there is as unforgiving as anywhere else in that part of the state. The median age in Wibaux is over 50, about 14 years older than the national average, and getting older. High school enrollment is down to about 50 students — 30 years ago there were more than 80, and today, in the playoffs, Wibaux routinely plays against school with twice as many students. But Wibaux survives, and compared to so many other towns, almost seems to flourish. Not because of sheep or cattle or wheat, but because of America's appetite for something else.

***

In 1953, four years after engineers in Pennsylvania successfully used a technique for extracting oil from subsurface rock called hydraulic fracturing, a geologist named J.W. Nordquist discovered a shale formation beneath wheat fields belonging to a North Dakota farmer named Henry Bakken (no relation to the Wibaux Bakkens). In time, it was determined that the formation covered nearly 200,000 square miles and stretched from western North Dakota to southern Saskatchewan to eastern Montana. Estimates put the amount of extractable oil in the hundreds of billions of barrels.

Companies like Halliburton, Exxon, and Tesoro laid claims, and in recent years, towns like Williston and Watford City, N.D., and Sidney, Mont., have transformed into boomtowns, full of people from someplace else, where men live in trucks and trailers or else commute long distances to earn a wage.

One hundred miles to the west, Wibaux is sustained by its proximity to the explosion of industry. Bill Tousignant doesn't spend his days on the ranch. He spends about 300 days a year working as a consultant on drill rigs. He says that if he could stay home, he would. Ranching is what he loves, but without the work in North Dakota, he isn't sure his life as a rancher would persist. AJ LaBelle says he'd love to find a job in town, but "they're paying $16 an hour at the McDonald's in Dickinson." He works inspecting and selling tubing for pipelines, while his brother, Jordan, commutes to Dickinson, N.D., to work as a mechanic. Their youngest brother, Heath, wants to do the same.

Wibaux may be slowly dying, but it is also still a living place, with a high school and a post office and, significantly, a line of trucks at the ticket booth on Saturday afternoons in the fall. As long as there is football, traffic passing on I-94 will know the name "Wibaux" on that water tower means something. But what will happen when more people move off the ranch, have fewer kids and the enrollment at the high school drops to 40, to 30? What happens when the Rainbow closes, or the Shamrock? Or when there aren't enough boys to work a ranch when their father is away?

Some people say it will never happen — they refuse to admit the possibility, just as their ancestors once refused to bend before the wind. Jeff Bakken, who played quarterback and graduated in 2008, says Wibaux will never go the way of Terry, Ekalaka or Savage — former 8-man schools who can no longer field 8-man teams. He says the 6-man game, with every player eligible to catch a pass, "isn't even football."

"If Wibaux had eight players on their football team," he says, "we'd still play 8-man football."

Jordan LaBelle agrees, because without Longhorn football, the place he grew up would cease to exist. "There is nothing else without football," he says. "I mean, what else is there?"

But others acknowledge change is coming. Wibaux High currently has large junior and freshmen classes, but elementary school numbers are critically low. Jeff Bertelsen isn't sure how much longer he will coach, but he says a drop to 6-man would force him to retire early. He is willing to concede the inevitability of the move. "It's a numbers game. Saturdays will still be here. If we're playing 6-man, they'll still be here," he says. When asked what would happen if the Longhorns were playing losing 6-man, he laughs and looks up at the ceiling. "I don't know," he says. "It's never happened."

Begger wears a Longhorn sweatshirt everywhere. He travels to every away game and records every yard gained, touchdown scored and tackle made by the Longhorns. Before home games, he listens to a recording of the 2006 radio broadcast of the playoff game in which the Longhorns snapped the 44-game winning streak of a team from the western side of the state. When he talks about Wibaux football, the corners of his mouth turn up slightly and his eyes widen, as if suddenly awakened. Standing in the lobby of the high school, he takes pleasure in revealing that the longhorn steer whose head is mounted on the wall was raised on his family's ranch.

He doesn't like to think about what may happen to his team. The idea of losing Longhorn football — the thing that in some ways has defined his life — is unbearable. But he knows it's possible. He remembers the days when Scobey played the Longhorns tough for four quarters — when they had more kids out for football. He doesn't want to predict the future, but Begger is willing to imagine it. "I can't even fathom coming into the locker room without thinking we're going to win. Nobody here believes it. It's going to be tough when it becomes a reality. I think all them dreams will — " he says and catches himself. "Once that dream goes away, do you ever start dreaming it again? I don't know."

***

The ceremonies before a high school football game never vary, no matter who is playing or what they are playing for. Hours before kickoff, people mingle in the parking lot and on the bleachers, picking up conversations left off the week before. Some of them are friends and some only know each other because they feel connected to the same school, the same team and the same game. They huddle around each other until their chatter is disrupted by the chanting and shouting of the hometown players as they sprint from the locker room onto the field. It starts again, the rituals that bring them to this place each fall. The captains, sons who were themselves sons of fathers who played on this field, in freshly washed uniforms, shake hands and flip a coin. The ball is placed on a tee and the teams line up on opposite sides of the field. A whistle blows and the ball is kicked into the air and the players hurdle down the field toward one another.

The end of the game, though, has nothing to do with its beginning. Time simply runs out and suddenly the white lines painted on the grass mean nothing. The final seconds tick off the clock and the shrill of a whistle announces that the game is over, the score Wibaux 65, Froid/Medicine Lake 16. The Red Hawk and Longhorn players stand up straight, take off their helmets and reveal mops of sweaty hair. They shake hands. Parents and siblings walk onto the field and wrap arms around their shoulder pads. A group of girls surround a player and hug him so that he smiles awkwardly and appreciatively. The scene is celebratory but also cathartic. It is as if everyone gathers on the field after the game to reassure each other that it is still here — that whatever had been anticipated has come and gone, and that in another week or another year, it will happen again. No one seems to notice the younger boys, whose game of two-hand touch continues and has spilled onto the field and licks at the edges of the crowd.

As the sun begins a slow dip toward the horizon, the wind dies down and trucks begin to pull away from the track. Some folks head downtown, to the Shamrock Club or the Rainbow, to have a beer and talk about the game and prognosticate about the playoffs. Despite another blowout, Longhorn defensive backs were beat twice, resulting in Red Hawk scores. In two weeks, the Longhorns will host a playoff game as the No. 1 seed in the east, and Shane Bakken knows other teams will not be so forgiving. "I was pissed that they scored twice," he says. "We have stuff to work on. Our season really begins in two weeks."

Others drive back to their houses on cracked pavement, past the water tower and across Beaver Creek. And still others, like the Tousignants, pull away from the field and have miles of dirt and clay and red gravel to cover before reaching home. It's a road they drive every day, and they've seen it unplowed and indistinguishable under a blanket of snow. They've seen it turn to muck in a heavy rain and stick to the tires of their truck. Sometimes that road is impassable, but on a Saturday in October, it's clear and cuts through a wind-swept grassland that in a muted autumn light suggests nothing more than a season that may well never end.

On Nov. 23, Wibaux lost the state championship game against Ennis 68-56, the Longhorns' fourth loss in the title game in the past six seasons.

The intersection of hip-hop and basketball has been well-documented. Rappers want to be ballers, ballers want to be rappers, and every MC worth his salt has name-checked the NBA. From the early hip-hop days ofBig Bank Hank getting a color TV to watch the Knicks, through Ice Cube's good day when the Lakers beat the (dearly departed) SuperSonics, and on to young global dudes like Joe Budden honoring Drazen Petrovic and Action Bronson repping Arvydas Sabonis, rapping basketball is a time-honored tradition. And yet, for all the rhymes devoted to hoops, one 30-year-old song reigns supreme.

(Kick it.)

They're playing basssketballlll, we love that bas-ket balllllllll ...

(Step up to the mic, John Condon.)

Now rapping basketball, No. 1, Kurtis Blow.

(Do your thing, Kurt.)

Basketball is my favorite sport, I like the way they dribble up and down the court ...

This is the story of "Basketball."

In 1984, Kurtis Blow dropped his fifth album "Ego Trip." The Harlem native was already hip-hop royalty as the first rapper signed to a major label, the first to tour the United States and Europe, and the first with a gold record, his 1980 smash "The Breaks." Other hits include his debut record "Christmas Rappin'," the Run-DMC collaboration "8 Million Stories," and "If I Ruled the World," which would be famously sampled by Nas. Blow's had a long career and remains one of the few rap game elite who actually were down from day one.

KURTIS BLOW: I've always been a big music lover thanks to my mom, who'd been a great dancer in Harlem at the Renaissance, the Savoy and the Cotton Club. She was popular throughout the neighborhood. I followed in her footsteps. Guys used to come get me for the local dance competitions, I became a B-Boy. I also used to play all the music for the family, spinning James Brown, Motown, the Isley Brothers, Jackie Wilson — all the stuff my mom loved. The first time I ever DJ'ed was in 1972 at my buddy Tony Rome's birthday party. I was 13 and I put together two component sets, my mom's and his mom's, and we had continuous music throughout the party ...

WILLIAM "BILLY-BILL" WARING (Lyricist, "Basketball"): Kurtis and I are lifelong friends. We grew up together, maybe 100 yards apart. We started out breakdancing in 1972, house parties and block parties.

BLOW: William is three years older than me and he was the only kid my mom would let me hang around with because he was headed to college. He was doing something good with his life, not like a lot of the other thugs and criminals in Harlem. Billy-Bill was the guy who got me into all the parties to breakdance.

WARING: Eventually, we were dancing in the clubs. We learned to appreciate the elements of hip-hop before such a thing existed, but we didn't start writing anything down until the late 1970s.

BLOW: I was doing my thing in Harlem and the Bronx, keeping up with what the better known DJs were doing, when I met Kool Herc. This was seven or eight years before the first hip-hop record came out, but I knew that here was something new and fresh. As a DJ, I was already different because I wasn't playing disco. Billy-Bill and I saw ourselves as rebels, that was our ideology for people who came to our more obscure parties, what I called "ghetto discos."

MICHAEL OBLOWITZ (video director, "Basketball"): I was part of the No Wave movement, which came out of the downtown arts scene, punk rock and experimental film and the like. Around that time, the first hip-hop shows were taking place in the South Bronx. I‘d become good friends with Charlie Ahearn, who would go on to direct "Wild Style," and we'd cruise up there on the subway to these concerts. It was amazing, an art form that only existed in the Bronx, parts of Brooklyn, and the upper reaches of Manhattan. It was super dangerous, and I was definitely the only white kid from South Africa up there, but I'd never felt anything like it. Television was banned under the apartheid government and I was coming from a place of surfing in the morning and diving for lobsters for lunch. Here we had chain-link fences surrounding these basketball courts, and hundreds of people jammed in there to hear Afrika Bambaataa or Grandmaster Flash. I saw Kurtis Blow rap "The Breaks" up there, it was insane energy.

PAUL EDWARDS (author, "How to Rap" and "How to Rap 2"): Kurtis Blow wasn't particularly ground-breaking on a technical level, but that wasn't what he was going for, he was going for hits, sort of like the Will Smith of his day. He was a "party MC" who made dance songs that people could sing along to — and I don't say that disparagingly at all, it's a very important area of hip-hop and he was crucial in making it a viable force in the marketplace and music industry. People like to focus on the more virtuoso lyricists of the time, such as Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee, but the genre needed the balance brought by people like Blow in order to spread it far and wide and get it on the radio.

BLOW: I went to City College of New York, where I met Russell Simmons. I majored in Communications and Broadcasting and learned that building up a track record in the boondocks was the path to follow. Every record store had its own chart, its own top 10, which coincidentally, is how I learned to read, by studying the charts. I figured out to compete in the big city with the 40 or 50 other popular DJs, I needed to come in with a couple of No. 1's in a secondary market. So Russell and I opened up a club in Hollis, Queens called Night Fever Disco, where I worked on being a DJ and an MC for about two years. A writer from from "Billboard," Robert Ford, did a story on hip-hop and they listed the best DJs in the city, including a young college kid, Kurtis Blow Walker.

J.B. MOORE (producer, "Basketball"): I was in ad sales at "Billboard," but I'm a musician by trade. Robert Ford covered the R&B charts and together, we'd discovered this new thing coming up from the streets, like in the early days of rock ‘n' roll. I believe Robert wrote the first ever article about hip-hop for an aboveground publication. We both knew it was going to be big, we could smell it. We wanted to produce a rap record, talked to Russell, and decided Kurtis was the guy. He was an incredible performer. I'd seen him wake up groggy as hell in the nurses office at Wollman Skating Rink, shake it off, and absolutely kill on stage. I knew it would be easier to sell the label on a perennial, so our first record was "Christmas Rappin.'" We followed that up in the 1980 with "The Breaks." It sold like a son of a bitch that summer, everywhere I went "The Breaks" followed me out of those giant boom boxes kids carried around back then. If PolyGram would have backed it, that song would've gone platinum.

BLOW: Having a major label means having major press. PolyGram was flying me all over. I'd get to the office and there would be a full day of press in every city, TV, magazines, newspapers, it was documented all over the world. London, Paris, Belgium ... I'm traveling to places I've only read about and there's paparazzi clicking my picture? It was incredible.

MC SERCH (rapper, former member of 3rd Bass, talk show host of "Serch"): In the beginnings of hip-hop, Kurtis Blow was a bigger-than-life character, almost iconic. He wasn't a battle rapper, he was designed to be a party rapper. Kurtis' influence on hip-hop is in his showmanship and the fact that he made songs, he didn't just rap over beats.

Coming of age in New York in the late-60s/early-70s meant rooting for Knicks teams that competed for, and actually won, NBA championships year-in and year-out. Kurtis Blow remains a Knick fan for life, but his deep love for the game was actually inspired by a high-flyer from Long Island who never called Madison Square Garden home.

BLOW: I played everything as a kid: baseball, tennis, track, swimming, football, and basketball. I was actually a better football player than basketball, because I'm kind of short, you know? As a spectator, I liked them all, but basketball became my favorite after I met my idol. I loved Walt Frazier, Dick Barnett, Earl Monroe, those Knicks teams of course, but I was a big, big fan of Julius Erving. Dr. J., he was the guy and I hated — hated— that he was in the ABA. Things would have been much better for everybody if Dr. J. was winning those championships rings in the NBA where he belonged.

WARING: In 1973, the Rucker Tournament moved from 155th Street to CCNY and Dr. J. was who everybody wanted to see. When Julius would come to Harlem, he'd have people sitting on top of the roofs and in the trees overlooking the courts. People couldn't get seats, but they had to get a glimpse of him. I was totally inspired by Dr. J., he was doing things on the court I'd never seen before.

BLOW: At 14, I was in the CCNY summer youth program, which had all kinds of sports activities. My track coach, Barbara Floyd, had gone to college with Julius Erving at UMass. Coach Floyd knew I was Dr. J's biggest fan. One day, we'd returned to CCNY from a meet where I'd won three big trophies. All the sudden, here comes Dr. J. getting ready to play in the Rucker. He's walking down the block and stops to get a hot dog. I tell Coach Floyd, ‘You know him! Call him over! Call him over!' She said, ‘Julius, come over here and give me a bite of that hot dog!' He took a bite, and handed her the rest. She introduced me, and Dr. J. saw my trophies and said, ‘Man, you had a good day.' I could hardly breath, ‘Iwonthe50yarddash Iwonthe100yarddash Iwonthe4by400relay itwasagreatday.' Then Dr. J. said, ‘I'm glad to meet you little Kurt, you keep up the great work.' From that moment on, basketball and music was it. I grew up without a dad, so I created these fictional "Pops" in my head. James Brown and Dr. J. were two of my Pops.

"Basketball" was the second single off of "Ego Trip." Breaking it down into its components, the song is made up of the concept, the lyrics, the hook/chorus, the sound effects, and the guys-at-the-playground-riffing-about-hoops that closes it out.

BLOW: The idea came from my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time. She said, "You need to make a song about basketball, it's the No. 1 sport for African-Americans and nobody has done it yet."

MOORE: First time Kurtis mentioned it, I knew it was a terrific concept precisely because it hadn't been done. I thought it could have a larger life than some of our other records. We'd been disappointed with the reception to "Party Time," which we thought would be a breakout hit, but I still had confidence in the basketball idea. I was a fan, but Robert Ford knew everything about the sport. One time, he was in Indiana at a VFW or something and he got into a conversation about basketball. He knew more about the Indiana teams than they guys at the bar. Ford knew oceans about hoops, so if he believed the record would be a good thing ...

MC SERCH: Kurtis always had that amazing ability to pick regular everyday themes, like Christmas or basketball, and turn something ordinary to extraordinary.

Hover to read "Basketball" lyrics

BLOW: Billy-Bill and I think a lot alike and we talked basketball all the time, so he knew exactly who to put in the song. He chose the players and included all the greats. We wanted the guys we grew up watching who were all out of the league by the time the song came out, and the best of that time.

WARING: The only explicit thing Kurtis told me was Dr. J. had to come first.

BLOW: Almost every guy in the song is in the Hall of Fame, except for maybe Darryl Dawkins — but we had to have him, he was the first guy shattering backboards — and Ralph Sampson. But during that time, Sampson was the hottest cat. He was destined for the Hall of Fame, it's hard to believe he didn't make it. He got hurt a lot, and got sidetracked or whatever, so he's forgotten a little bit, but in college, Sampson was the man. End of story.

WARING: I wrote the lyrics quick. Sometimes creatively, it just comes to you. Only a few little things got changed. I didn't write the line "Or when Willis Reed stood so tall ..." at first. My original was "When Marv Albert made the call, Yes and It Counts! That's basketball." When I submitted it, I guess they knew the legal ramifications of getting clearances from Marv or whatever, but there's also an old practice where producers put in a line or two to get a songwriting credit. I'm not mad at ‘em. I was cool with the change because it was still about the Knicks.

MOORE: We recorded it at the Power Station, which has a 8088 Neve console that allowed us to just kick the shit out of the track. The tremendous equipment and supremely talented engineers allowed us to do some mind-boggling stuff. We wanted "Basketball" to sound a bit removed from what was going on then in hip-hop. It all starts with that catchy vocal hook.

EDWARDS: Blow was instrumental in introducing choruses to hip-hop, as most of the earlier records were just one long continuous rap with no hook. Kool Moe Dee even calls Kurtis, "The inventor of the rap hook."

BLOW: The hook was all mine. That was my thing, hooks were my specialty. I did the hooks on "8 Million Stories," "Fat Boys," "Fat Boys are Back," "If I Ruled the World ..." Simple sing-y melodic hooks stick in your head.

MOORE: To our very good fortune, we had Alyson Williams doing the backing vocals. She nailed it. I also had Jimmy Bralower, the drum machinist, make a sample of a basketball being dribbled on the studio floor. We got the best recording of it we could, pre-digital, and sent it off to be burned into a chip. Every drum on the record has a bit of that basketball in it. I don't know if it made any difference, it's hard to tell, but it was a nice piece of ear candy.

WARING: I was thrilled when I came into the studio and they had John Condon doing his thing, "Now rapping basketball ..." I don't think he knew what he was getting into, but he was the voice of the Knicks, the guy we saw from the Garden every Sunday, and I knew fans would love it. He died a few years later, so we have history on top of history on that track.

MOORE: One underrated or forgotten part of the record is the riffing, the guys just talking hoops.

WARING: I wanted to rap on the record, but they didn't let me. I did get on the track though, at the end. That whole section was ad-libbed. I'm the guy who says, "Did you see that kid Michael Jordan?" He was still in college. I'm a prophet, for better or worse.

EDWARDS: If you're making a concept track, which this essentially is, then it helps to stay on topic, which "Basketball" does. It includes a surprising amount of detail with its references. It's nothing intricate, but it moves way past the simple "wave your hands in the air" style of most party tracks.

MOORE: Everything just came together, that song kicks ass six ways from Thursday.

MC SERCH: The main thing that makes "Basketball" so special is that Kurtis was reflecting on what we all dug about the game. He was talking about athletes of the time, running plays, streetball vs. NBA ball, taking the temperature of fans and what they loved about the sport both on-and-off the court.

Kurtis Blow actually had bigger selling records, but "Basketball" took off in ways no previous recording of his ever did.

BLOW: "Basketball" got huge radio play. But as a record, it didn't sell like "The Breaks," which as a 12-inch almost went platinum at 940,000 units. "Basketball" was also put out as a single, but only 50,000 records were released. Once those were gone, the record company put out more copies of the album "Ego Trip," which went gold.

WARING: Kurtis ended up meeting a lot of NBA stars, they loved it. I didn't travel around with him as much, but I remember the Knicks had a backup forward named Eric Fernsten who got us tickets to a game. That was cool.

BLOW: I met ‘em all, Ewing, Starks, MJ, Oakley is a good friend of mine, Isiah ... I made a point to reach out to the guys in the league. It was bigger than the NBA though, it became the theme songs for teams everywhere. College, high school, summer youth, elementary school. I heard all the time from professionals and amateurs that "Basketball" was the backdrop for the layup lines. I can absolutely say it's the No. 1 layup line song of all time.

WARING: I don't think it's the best song I ever wrote, but it certainly had the most impact.

BLOW: When the song was peaking, the NBA started flying me around to do shows. They would send me to a game like the Cleveland Cavaliers vs. the New Jersey Nets, games that weren't even close to being sold out. I would do a live performance right after the game to fill the arena. We sold out the San Antonio Spurs stadium and Goerge Gervin came to the show. The Iceman was the first player mentioned in "Basketball" that I met. That was amazing, but in Philly, Dr. J. came backstage and gave me a huge hug. He thanked me for putting him in the song and he's still a good buddy of mine today.

At a time when few black artists, and no rappers, were seen on MTV, a crazy "Basketball" video was shot featuring cheerleaders, martial arts, Adam West-esque Batman graphics, players dunking on short hoops, nunchuks, a blue sky, a lightning bolt jumpsuit, an old-timey photographer, random black-and-white shots of Michael Ray Richardson, Lite Beer from Miller jerseys, a mascot in a chicken costume, the Fat Boys, Whodini, and a man inexplicably eating a giant hot dog slathered in mustard.

OBLOWITZ: I made this experimental avant-garde punk film called "King Blank" that played as a midnight movie double feature with "Eraserhead" at the old Waverly Theatre. Somebody saw it, and off of that, hired me to direct these really slick videos for Carly Simon of all people. I think I may have directed the first videos ever shown on VH1. Anyway, from that, I got hired to do "Basketball," which was ironic because there is a sequence in "King Blank" set to rap music, which I also don't think had been done before. At first I thought I was being hired to do a video for a re-release of "The Breaks," so I was really excited. I even wrote a treatment for it. I so wanted "The Breaks," it would have been a game-changer, a life-changer, and the song talks about universal experiences. I knew next to nothing about basketball. I was basically straight off the boat from South Africa, I'd never seen it. I came from a country where black people were basically enslaved. The main sport the government supported was rugby, a brutal sport of the white ruling class where big drunken burly descendants of Germans and Dutchmen banged their fucking heads into one another like Vikings. And here you have a finesse sport where tall graceful descendants of Nigeria fly around the court. It was so far out of my frame of reference. To me, basketball was the hip iconic image of America. When I got to New York City, streetball was everywhere, it was part of the Bob Dylan line, "Music in the cafes and revolution in the air." It was fucking great.

BLOW: The video was shot before the song became a hit, so the NBA didn't want anything to do with it. Our initial idea was to get footage of all the players in the song and we couldn't get clearance for anyone except Michael Ray Richardson. That was the only guy they gave us, so we used his photos. He's not even in the song. Not quite the same as having Dr. J. soaring to the hoop.

MOORE: Unfortunately, Kurtis split with Robert and I before the video was made. Had we known what was going to happen I think we would've marched into the studio with a gun to put an end to it. Ford had all these personal connections to the NBA and I think he could have gotten the footage, which would have made for an all-time classic video.

OBLOWITZ: It was the first thing I ever made through my own production company and we had a $25,000 budget. My concept was to use those motifs from the Bronx, the chain-link fence, the gang-bangers, the martial arts. I wanted it to be edgy. I wanted to get some of those gnarly dudes from the Bronx involved, recreate what I'd seen, but PolyGram had other ideas.

BLOW: I didn't have any understanding of why the director wanted the martial arts and the gangs and stuff. Looking back, it's a little bit cheesy to me, but I was excited to have cameras focused on me, now I'm a super-duper-star. Let's do it.

OBLOWITZ: One thing the label demanded was blonde MTV babes.

BLOW: All the cheerleaders in the video are white. Oh, do you know the problems I had with black women around the country? All the African-American militants started coming at me, saying I wasn't real and I sold out ... I wasn't thinking about all that, I was just happy we had cheerleaders. I mean, c'mon, they were cute girls.

OBLOWITZ: One of the cheerleaders is a light-skinned black girl, but I guess that's a cop-out. I decided to just go with it, to make it a pastiche of all the things I'd seen on TV and at Madison Square Garden. This is what PolyGram wants? Let's have fun with it, let's just make it a blur of colors, cheerleaders, a guy wolfing down a huge hot dog, a guy in a chicken suit, the Fat Boys shuffle, and a fetishization of television itself. It was supposed to be funny, but Kurtis and I had a seriousness of purpose, to get in heavy rotation on MTV.

BLOW: It was cool to get my friends in the video, the Fat Boys and Whodini came and did a guest appearance, but some stuff I didn't understand. What was with that guy in the chicken suit?

WARING: I wasn't in the video. I'm not disappointed about that.

OBLOWITZ: I couldn't believe how much flack we got for the white cheerleaders, for selling out, for not being street enough. I got slammed, but what choice did we have? Without the record label, the "Basketball" video doesn't exist. Besides, we had a hell of a lot of fun making it. I built a court and we had hoops of all different sizes. We had vivid colors and a real Pop Art aesthetic. It was all stylized. I shot from the ground, and used slow motion, and we had trampolines, all to give the appearance of guys flying through the air. And they were real players, semi-pro or something, who showed up with matching jerseys, which I thought was fantastic. Whodini is here? Let's put them in. The Fat Boys? Go for it. One thing I remember from the shoot is how much pizza The Fat Boys ate. Mountains of pizza and piles and piles of cardboard boxes.

MOORE: When I first saw it I was pissed off, "What the fuck is this?" It was so stupid, so not Kurtis Blow. I knew it wouldn't do a whole lot of damage because it never played on MTV.

BLOW: I believe that was the first rap video that got on MTV, but Run-DMC claims it was one of theirs, so I don't know, but there was no rap videos before us, that's for sure.

OBLOWITZ: We did what we set out to do, it played on MTV and millions of people got to see Kurtis Blow, this ball of energy who hadn't been exposed to the country.

EDWARDS: It's a slick, commercial rap video, before that kind of thing became widely prevalent. Girls, basketball, flashy editing for the time ... it even has a martial arts thing going on in the background at times, nearly 10 years before there was such a thing as a Wu-Tang Clan.

MOORE: So this was all PolyGram's doing? My apologies to the director. I take it all back. I've been bad-mouthing the poor guy since 1984.

OBLOWITZ: It was sanitized, sure, but I still think the "Basketball" video works as a surreal moment of its time. The HOF International Film Festival in Germany recently did a retrospective of my work, and "Basketball" was one of  two videos of mine they selected, the other being "Chill Out" by John Lee Hooker and Santana, and it's not like MTV ever showcased blues legends either. I blew it up to 2K, real cinema HD, and it really popped. The crowd went nuts. The world at-large loves it. I love it. The video was fucking full-on fresh. Even today, it really flows. "Basketball" doesn't have over two million YouTube views by accident.

On its 30-year anniversary, "Basketball" is still played wherever people gather to shoot or watch hoops. And while Kurtis Blow hasn't had a hit rap record in years, he's had a long career performing Christian music, leading the Hip Hop Church, a musical youth ministry for any church to teach kids about the gospels, Jesus, and salvation, all with a hip-hop flair. He's even branched out into rock music, collaborating with Bride Dressed in Black on the new release "Hip-Rock."

BLOW: A classic song never dies, but "Basketball" did get new life when Michael Jordan put it in NBA 2K12. It's the first thing you hear when you pop in the game. Nothing lasts forever though. Last year, I was at All-Star weekend, I introduced myself to LaMarcus Aldridge, told him I did "Basketball" and that I had him on my fantasy team. He just shook my hand and walked away. Younger kids don't know me, but the OGs do, so it's all worth it.

WARING: Kurtis and I have talked about updating it, getting all those guys we missed out on like Barkley, Olajuwon, LeBron, Duncan ... I think we could pull it off.

BLOW: I have connections with the Miami Heat and I've thought about a new version and letting guys like LeBron and Wade rap on the record.

MOORE: I think a 2013 "Basketball" is a great idea and I'd love to do it. I think the world is ready for a record that's all whacked up like we used to do it, old-school style.

MC SERCH: Rap in the 1980s existed in a New York bubble, you didn't think about rhyming for California, Texas or Florida, it was for your city, your borough, your neighborhood, for the dudes on your block. In 3rd Bass, we made a song about streetball, "Soul in the Hole," and other artists have attempted to make songs about the sport, but Kurtis still owns it. The original survives. It's not that the record was that great as it was great back then. I'm always happy to hear it on Backspin in that moment, but I don't want to hear it 60 times a week. It takes me to when I was young, so I don't know if it's a good idea, no matter how talented Kurtis is, to duplicate or remake it. Maybe if he did it with A$AP Rocky or Action Bronson, some of the young guys to get their take on basketball, that would be interesting ... I'm torn to say the least. I think he should leave it alone. Certain things should just live in their own cosmos.

WARING: We were first, we were pioneers in that way. It was a group of talented people doing what they do best. We taught people the history of the game.

MOORE: To this day, I regret that I didn't listen to Russell and move Kurtis in a harder-edged direction, which is where rap was going. But his songs stand the test of time, why else would we be talking about "Basketball" 30 years later? I take a lot of pride in the music we made together.

OBLOWITZ: I was a draft dodger from South Africa, I skipped out on my country because fighting on behalf of an apartheid government was not something I was ever going to do. But living in downtown New York City back in those days was still living apart from the United States. The country ended at the Verrazano Bridge. We never left. Working with Kurtis Blow was my gateway to America. It opened all kinds of doors for me and got me all kinds of work.  After "Basketball," for the first time, I felt like I had a place in America.

BLOW:The live performance of "Basketball" is big time. Everyone knows the hook, so when it starts I ask all the ladies to sing along, then I do a thing where I ask the crowd, "What is the name of your favorite team?" And say I'm in L.A., I go through the Knicks, Heat,  Bulls, and say the Lakers last. Huge crowd roar. Then I ask their favorite player, "Is it LeBron?" Booooo "Kevin Durant?" Booooo "Kobe Bryant?" Big cheers. Then I end it with, "I know everyone loves Michael Jorrrrrrrrrrrrrdan!" The fans scream, go nuts. "Basketball" is a house rocker.

After all these years, people still love it. I thank God for basketball, the song and the sport.

"This train is bound for _____." The MARTA train splits Atlanta into four quadrants and greets you with this introduction every time you board. It is both a statement of fact and a nod to Atlanta's - and Georgia's - strange, wonderful, contradictory history.

"This Train" is a song that, like Atlanta itself, encompasses the entire South in origin and influence. It was recorded by artists from Mississippi and Tennessee, among others, and it was first made popular by Rosetta Tharpe, an Arkansan by birth. Around the time Sister Rosetta was making headway with the song, Gone With the Wind was debuting in Atlanta, a city of about 275,000 at the time.

This train don't carry no gamblers, no whiskey drinkers, and no high flyers

This train don't carry no gamblers, this train

This train is bound for glory, don't carry nothing but the righteous and the holy

This train is bound for glory, this train

This train don't carry no liars, no hypocrites and no high flyers

This train don't carry no liars, this train

This train is solid black; when you go there, you don't come back

This train is bound for glory, this train

This train don't fit no transportation, no Jim Crow and no discrimination

This train is bound for glory, this train

This train don't care if you're white or black; everybody's treated just like a man

This train is bound for glory, this train

It is, like the 1930s themselves, a song at once optimistic and tragic, hopeful and pointed. It tells us what is right and almost acknowledges that we're all wrong. It is a heavy, heavy song. And Atlanta in its current state is a heavy city, lifted up by its accomplishments and weighed down by its flaws. Its history as one of America's great cities is short, relatively speaking, but it is loaded with canonical events, history and sports.

Atlanta has tried, and still tries, to get everything wrong. The MARTA takes you through so much of this contradiction. Oakland Cemetary, the crowded, disturbingly pretty home of everyone from Bobby Jones to Margaret Mitchell, is about a mile from downtown, or too far removed from a couple of the stadiums that have to be vacated the moment they are erected. When it gets something wrong, it tries again. When it gets something right, it tries again.

All of our best and worst tendencies are magnified in Atlanta, from our love (and occasional forgetfulness) of history to our dependence on sweet, sweet, empty calories. Atlanta residents seem to resent all there is to resent about this place, then defiantly love it anyway. They want to flee right up until they decide they'll never leave. "I can talk bad about this place, but you better not." That sort of thing.

If you are a fan of an SEC school, Atlanta is exactly where you want to find yourself on the first weekend of December. The Georgia Dome has hosted the last 20 conference championship games after Birmingham's Legion Field held the first two. It is where Florida won its second, third, and fourth SEC titles of the Steve Spurrier era. It is where Kevin Prentiss tiptoed down the sidelines in 1998 and Peerless Price responded in kind. It is where LSU eliminated Tennessee from the national title game in 2001, where Georgia head coach Mark Richt broke through in 2002, and where Nick Saban won his first conference title in 2003. It is where Georgia stunned No. 3 LSU in 2005, where No. 2 Florida took down No. 1 Alabama in 2008, and where No. 2 Alabama whipped No. 1 Florida in 2009. It is where the Honey Badger solidified his legend in 2011 and where Georgia came up six yards short in 2012.

As the SEC positioned itself as the dominant force in college football - and while it may not be the best conference every season (one could certainly make a case for the Pac-12 this season), it is easily the best on average - Atlanta became the capital of the sport. (This is doubly true now that downtown Atlanta has booted baseball, even if only in a, "You can't quit; you're fired!" kind of way.) In the Georgia Dome on the first Saturday in December, a makeshift national semifinal tends to take place; the winner of the SEC Championship Game has made the national title game for eight straight seasons.

When I arrived in Atlanta for my initial SEC Championship experience, it was a full 60 degrees warmer than it was in my home town. The locals were worried about a cold front moving through; it might get into the 40s! But for the weekend as a whole, the weather was neither pretty nor unpleasant. The city is both at all times.

THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR GWCC

The SEC Championship is basically the conference's annual banquet. The Georgia Dome next door is the main ballroom, but the Georgia World Congress Center contains the breakout rooms - the SEC Fanfare event, the school alumni association "tailgates," the pep rallies, etc. - and the refreshments.

People are wearing company colors, wearing placards, and walking by posters and sponsorship signs. (The number of corporate sponsors for this event is, as Gary Pinkel might say, mammoth. Acknowledging each sponsor during the game takes up almost an entire, CBS-sized timeout.) As it will be in the stadium, those in black and gold are drastically outnumbered by those in orange and blue, but that was to be expected. Auburn is about six times closer to Atlanta than Columbia, its ticket base is larger, and its fans didn't have to cross a swath of ice and snow and hell to get to the game.

Members of both sides mingle politely, talking about how concerned they are about the opponent's given strength (Auburn's pass rush and option game, Missouri's defensive front and big receivers) and getting along swimmingly.

This has been a big year for Missouri. In the Tigers' second season in the SEC, they took their first East division title; they have now been to as many conference title games as Mississippi State and South Carolina and more than four other schools (Ole Miss, Kentucky, Vanderbilt, Texas A&M), three of which have been in the SEC much, much longer.

Pinkel and Missouri can compete in the league that was supposed to chew up newcomers and spit them out.

USA Today Images

After the struggles of 2012, in which Missouri suffered a wealth of injuries at quarterback and on the offensive line and limped to a 5-7 finish, its first without a bowl game since 2004, the Tigers didn't only bounce back in Year 2: They surged. And while there were changes in scheme and structure - more blocking from the tight end, tighter splits on the offensive line, etc. - this is a Gary Pinkel team, stocked with two- and three-star athletes and chips on shoulders. The Pinkel process of unearthing diamonds in the recruiting rough, winning a small handful of bigger recruiting battles, developing, developing, developing, and plugging his players into a tactically sound system is not likely to produce a Spurrier-at-Florida-esque run of conference titles. But if 2013 proved anything, it's that Pinkel and Missouri can compete in the league that was supposed to chew up newcomers and spit them out.

(This last point, by the way, has been a source of insecurity for some. CBS color commentator Gary Danielson, who will spend part of the upcoming game chuckling about how Mizzou might regret coming to the league and calling a long, strong touchdown by MU receiver Dorial Green-Beckham a "cute little play," told a radio audience that the early success of Missouri and Texas A&M have weakened the conference. For some in the league, the appearance of strength is more important than strength itself. That Missouri and Texas A&M were able to improve the SEC actually hurt it, because they proved it could be improved.)

Missouri fans, exhilarated, along for the ride, and for now humble and pleasant, have made a lot of new friends. They kept Steve Spurrier out of the conference title game, which made Georgia fans and others rather happy. And they sure seemed to have a lot of new friends in Tuscaloosa the week before the game began.

Mind you, the admiration will wear off. Opposing fans simply haven't gotten to know Mizzou well enough to hate it; if the Tigers continue to win some big games and threaten for division titles, the pleasantries will fade. But for now, there's a freshness and an eagerness to please.

Auburn fans, meanwhile, are wearing shirts that say "Powered by Gusoline" and riding an incredible wave of good fortune perhaps not seen since, well, Auburn's national title run in 2010. That year's Tigers were powered by one of the SEC's greatest players (quarterback Cam Newton) and seven wins by a touchdown or less, improved steadily, and peaked at the right time. They stunned Alabama with a huge comeback and took both the SEC and national titles.

It's not supposed to work this way, by the way. In the years after Auburn's national championship, head coach Gene Chizik changed up the offense - he let offensive coordinator Gus Malzahn leave for a head coaching job at Arkansas State and moved to a "pro-style" offense that wins recruits and has no idea what it wants to accomplish - and generally wasted a couple of years of good recruiting. AU fell to 8-5 in 2011, then 3-9 in 2012, and Chizik was fired fewer than 24 months after lifting college football's crystal ball. Malzahn took over, and while he was familiar enough with the surroundings and a lot of the players, it still seemed presumptuous to assume much improvement in his first season. I was confident enough in marginal first-year progress that I agreed to a bet with an Auburn fan. Now that they have drastically overachieved my own predictions, I will be sporting an Auburn Twitter avatar (limited time only) pretty soon.

I still stand by my thought process, though. Immediate turnarounds are a lot rarer than we want them to be, and let's just say that if you picked a season like this from Auburn, you were using criteria that will make you wrong about 99.9 percent of the time. But you would have been right this time.

Auburn was mediocre to above average in September, good in October, and both very good and blessed in November, winning two games with absurd finishes; the Tigers beat Georgia with a tipped, 73-yard, fourth-and-long touchdown with 25 seconds left, then tied Alabama with 32 seconds left and won with the first walk-off return of a missed field goal in the sport's history. Even with spectacular tactical acumen - something Malzahn clearly possesses - a turnaround like this would both take a bit of luck and prove that the last head coach was mismanaging his talent to a pretty serious degree.

But apparently Gene Chizik might have been doing just that.

THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR THE END ZONE

Everything good goes corporate eventually. On Saturday, we witnessed the absorption of MACtion by college football's strongest collection of businesses. We have grown to love those mid-week MAC games on one of the ESPN channels because of the bunches of yards and points, the trick plays, the big turnovers, and the general wackiness. The first half of Saturday's SEC Championship featured all of those things.

Missouri set up a field goal with one fumble recovery and returned another for a touchdown. Auburn ran for yards and yards and yards and seemed to take complete control of the game. Missouri struck back with a key stop and the "cute" bomb from quarterback James Franklin to Green-Beckham, and despite Auburn's running game playing the hot knife in the Missouri defense's metaphorical butter, the score was 28-27, Auburn, at halftime.

You know a game is great when all of the known entities, all of the known stars, come up big.

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Halftime was the damnedest thing. The bands played, and some fans clapped. But in all it was just about the most sedate halftime I've ever seen. After a two-hour first half that featured 55 points and nearly 700 yards, everybody needed to regroup. The action would start again soon enough.

You know a game is great when all of the known entities, all of the known stars, come up big and, in some cases, exceed expectations.

Auburn's Nick Marshall, the magician in charge of Gus Malzahn's offense completed six of six passes (all to star receiver Sammie Coates) for 94 yards and a touchdown while running option keepers for 51 yards and a score in the first half. He would rush for another 50 yards and pass for 38 more in the second half.

Missouri's Green-Beckham, the No. 1 overall recruit in the recruiting class of 2012 by numerous recruiting services, caught a one-on-one touchdown in the first quarter (one that might have been overturned as incomplete had it been reviewed), blazed by the Auburn secondary late in the first half, took a screen pass from west to east and south to north in a 37-yard gain in the third quarter, and finished with 144 yards on six catches.

Auburn's star corner (and Iron Bowl hero) Chris Davis, meanwhile, got the best of DGB on a couple of key fourth downs late in the game and navigated a couple of nice punt returns.

Missouri's Henry Josey, subject of a College GameDay profile earlier on Saturday thanks to his complete recovery from a one-in-a-million knee injury, ripped off a 65-yard run to set up a much-needed Missouri score late in the third quarter.

Missouri's star defensive end Kony Ealy, partner to SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam, racked up three tackles for loss and stripped Marshall twice. Auburn's four defensive ends, so good against Texas A&M's Johnny Manziel (and others), combined for two sacks and four hurries.

But through all the star power, the afternoon (and early evening) belonged to Auburn running back Tre Mason. The junior from Palm Beach who chose Auburn in January 2011, fresh off of the 2010 national title, was both the beneficiary of perfect play-calling and blocking and a superb breaker of tackles. He rushed for a title game record 304 yards on 46 carries.

Mason's work between the tackles, always good, was superb. His ability to hit the corner before a sealed-off running lane could close was impeccable. He was powerful and fast. If we still made posters like we did in the early-'90s, we could say he posterized each and every Missouri safety, sometimes running through their tackles and often simply leaving them grasping at air. If he wasn't a Heisman finalist at the beginning of the day, he had left no doubt that he would become one by nightfall.

That Missouri was able to keep up as long as it did was confirmation of the resilience and maturity of Pinkel's Tigers. They took a 34-31 lead 10 minutes into the third quarter, but just as it looked like the Mizzou defense was figuring out ways to slow down the Auburn attack, Malzahn's offense responded with perhaps its most brutal stretch of the game. Within minutes, the score was 45-34, and though Missouri responded with Josey's long run and a Franklin touchdown to make it 45-42, Auburn had no plans of stopping. The Tigers from the Plains scored quickly to make it 52-42, and Mizzou finally began to crack. A long, first-down pass to a well-covered L'Damian Washington keyed a key three-and-out, and Missouri's final two possessions ended in fourth-down failures. Mizzou averaged 7.5 yards per play for the game and gained 534 yards, but they forever needed more.

At halftime, it felt like Auburn should be winning by more than one point. In those instances, the second half follows one of two narratives. Either the team that should be winning begins to get frustrated and fray a bit, making uncharacteristic mistakes and allowing the opponent to take control, or it simply keeps grinding and eventually pulls away. Auburn did the latter and claimed the SEC title with a thrilling, exhausting, sea-change of a 59-42 win.

THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR THE FUTURE

Points scored in the SEC Championship game: 101. Points scored in Friday night's MAC title game: 74. Points scored in the Big 12's makeshift, winner-take-all title game (Baylor-Texas): 40.

One game does not typically change the world; it does not signal a new way of life. It's just one game. But watching Auburn's offense click at this super-human level was startling. It raised some existential questions in this football fan.

I have 12 games of visual and statistical evidence that I can use to confidently tell you Missouri's defense is pretty good. Ole Miss gained a school-record 751 yards on Troy the week before the Rebels played the Tigers. Texas A&M gained 628 yards on Alabama. In 120 minutes against these two offenses, Missouri allowed 757 yards and 31 points. In 60 minutes against Auburn, Missouri allowed 677 and 59.

It wasn't the fact that Tre Mason went crazy, or that the play-calling was sound that was so startling; it was the ease with which Auburn created numbers advantages. On the first possession of the game, Missouri proved ready for power running. Auburn blocking back Jay Prosch was lined up in the backfield at an H-back position, as Missouri assumed he would be, and the Tigers first stuffed Marshall for a loss, then sacked and stripped him. But by the second possession, Malzahn was already adapting.

First, he lined up Prosch wide, motioning him into, and sometimes back out of, the backfield. Sensing his team was struggling to block Kony Ealy, he made Ealy the read defender in Auburn's nearly flawless zone read, leaving him unblocked and reacting to his reactions. The result, first, was some big gains by Marshall on option keepers. And as Missouri moved to a frequent 3-3-5 look to counter Auburn's counter, Auburn simply used motion to create four-on-two and five-on-three blocker-to-defender advantages. AU still needed its young offensive line to gel at a higher level than what it showed in September, and the line did just that. And the Tigers needed a back as fast as Mason to get to the edge and take advantage, and he did just that. Talent matters, but the way the talent was deployed was stunning.

For the rest of the game, Missouri moved from 3-3-5 to 4-2-5 to 4-3. It didn't matter. By the second or third possession of the game, Malzahn was two or three steps ahead of Mizzou defensive coordinator Dave Steckel, and when Auburn was able to break a (frequent) big gain, the Tigers used tempo to prevent substitution, to keep the same mismatches on the field, and to break Missouri again and again. Knowing it didn't have time to experiment or change defenses much, Missouri stuck to its base zone defense. And it kept getting burned.

After the game, Gary Pinkel was asked how one should go about stopping this offense when Malzahn has it going at this level. His response: "You know what, I'm the wrong person to ask, because I'd have stopped it if I could have. [...] Gus (Malzahn) does a great job with it and [has] a great quarterback. He has a lot of good people that can damage you. They have a lot of talent. You put that with a good scheme, and you've got problems. So obviously, I'm not the coach to ask that."

"I'm the wrong person to ask, because I'd have stopped it if I could have."

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When you pull off a game like this on such a big, national stage, people tend to notice. And when you do this a week after you rushed for 296 yards against Nick Saban's Alabama defense, people perhaps start to copy you as well. As Smart Football's Chris Brown is fond of saying, football is about numbers. If you can create scenarios in which you have more blockers than the defense has defenders, you're in business. But it's not supposed to be this easy, especially against a defense that, for so much of the season, took away opponents' strengths and prevented big plays. Sometimes Missouri's gameplans simply fail; Mizzou fans still haven't moved on from when Navy trounced the Tigers with a completely different style of option football in the 2009 Texas Bowl. But Auburn's precision and execution in this game were so strong that it didn't seem to matter what Missouri wanted to do. This was Steve Stone's curveball, Michael Jordan's shrugged shoulders. From a schematic standpoint, this was one of the most impressive arrangements (and counter-arrangements) of chess pieces I've seen in person.

Football is as cyclical as any sport. It might be the most cyclical of all. Offensive coaches figure out some new ways to move the ball; copycats move in, and after a while, a majority of teams have taken on the look of what was once rare and deadly. It happened with the Split T, it happened with the Wishbone, it happened with the pro-style offense of the late-1980s and 1990s, and it has happened with the spread over the last half-decade or so. (Some were doing it before then, yes.) Defenses always adapt. The 5-2 defense was a pretty logical counter to the Split-T. Wishbones lost a bit of their effectiveness when defenses shifted to faster, more flexible 4-3 defenses. And in recent years, we've seen defenses try to get even smaller and faster to counter the effects of the spread. To some degree, it has worked.

But after a couple of decades of tinkering at virtually every level of high school and college football, Malzahn has settled on a set of components that can keep his offense a step ahead of most defenses. It took a while for his offense to reach this point - after all, Auburn barely beat Washington State and needed a huge passing day from Marshall to beat Mississippi State because the Bulldogs kept the Tigers ground game grounded. Those teams' combined records: 12-12. But in recent weeks, Malzahn, Marshall, Mason and company have reached a new level of understanding.

We'll see if they can keep it up in the BCS title game. When you are in this sort of rhythm, the last thing you want to do is wait four or weeks for the next game; just ask 2008 Oklahoma. We'll see if the Tigers can find the same man-on-man advantages against a Florida State defense that might be the best in the country. And we'll see if they can keep it up next year, once opponents have had time to collectively react and adjust (and catch their breath).

Last year, Nick Saban famously asked, "Is this what we want football to be?" in reaction to the high-paced attacks that had even begun to permeate the vaunted SEC. The reaction from many corners of the college football universe (especially those based online) was a resounding "YES."

After watching this Auburn offense reach its most potent (I think) possible level, I can without hesitation say that I want Malzahn and Marshall and company to reach an even higher place next year, and for two main reasons. First, it's hypnotic and beautiful to watch. This is old-school power and new-school spread and everything in between. But second, I want to see how the great defensive staffs of teams like Alabama and LSU react and adjust. LSU caught an Auburn offense in only third gear or so and built a big lead before having to hold on for dear life in a 35-21 win, Auburn's only loss of the season; Alabama, meanwhile, was victimized in a way that Alabama is rarely victimized. Let's see how they counter.

THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR DALLAS

Missouri's seniors look old. And they should. They've been through a lot in their four or five years in Columbia. James Franklin, once a baby-faced freshman who manned the Wildcat formation for a 10-3 Missouri team, has been beaten up through the years. His eyes have sunk back into his face a bit. He has suffered an impressive number of ailments in his career, from a torn labrum to a sprained MCL to a concussion to a severely sprained shoulder. He suffered the slings and arrows of his own fanbase. And then he went a full year without losing a start.

Offensive lineman Max Copeland graduated high school in Billings, Montana, and just showed up in Columbia one fall. He started for most of the last two years, first because of necessity (Missouri barely had five healthy linemen in 2012), then because of experience. His beard is wild even by offensive lineman standards, and he has a wound on his nose that reopens each game.

Cornerback Randy Ponder was a walk-on from Edmond, Oklahoma, who was first told he would probably never get a scholarship, then went out and earned it. He kneeled and prayed so long in the end zone before the SEC Championship that a teammate came over and played Coach Norman Dale to his Strap: "God wants you on the field."

Receiver L'Damian Washington became a guardian to his two younger brothers when their parents died with them at a young age. He had ample opportunity to go down the wrong path; he did not. He caught what ended up being the deciding touchdown against Georgia (Mizzou beat Georgia 41-26. Not really a deciding touchdown if you win by two scores, right?) and reeled in a 96-yard touchdown against South Carolina, and with one game remaining in his senior season, he has 853 yards and 10 touchdowns.

Like Washington, Michael Sam was a recruiting afterthought. He fielded spare offers from mid-majors before Missouri swooped in after missing on bigger-name targets and landed him just before Signing Day. Almost 60 months later, he was named the best defensive player in what is generally regarded as the best defensive conference.

This group of seniors helped Missouri to a 10-3 finish and a win over BCS No. 1 Oklahoma in 2010 (Franklin had a key fourth-quarter touchdown in that game), held steady at 8-5 in 2011, collapsed to 5-7 in 2012, and rebounded to win the SEC East. They fit the hell-and-back cliché.

The "FIRE EVERYONE" portion of the Missouri fan base was out in full force by the second half (probably earlier) on Saturday, and while that's as predictable as the wind blowing in Oklahoma or the weather changing hourly in Missouri, it was still frustrating. This team was told it didn't belong in its new league by anybody who could get its collective ear: national talking heads, regional media, opponents, opposing fans. Given long odds of finishing better than about 6-6 or 7-5, Missouri came within one quarter of finishing the regular season undefeated. After a gut-wrenching loss to South Carolina, the Tigers were forced to win their final four games to take the East division, and they did it, only once winning by fewer than 14 points. With nearly every moment of expected comeuppance, the Tigers responded with victory. That they were only the second-best turnaround story in the Georgia Dome says everything in the world about Auburn but takes nothing away from Pinkel's squad.

Still, from Randy Ponder to Internet fans, everybody knew the gravity of this moment. You don't get many chances at a breakthrough in this conference; you get even fewer chances at an SEC title. Mississippi State has waited 15 years for a second chance. Three schools have waited more than 20 years for a first chance. Arkansas got three chances in 12 years, failed in all three, and have waited seven years and counting for a fourth opportunity.

Missouri will get another chance at some point. Hell, the Tigers might get another chance next year. With a division still in flux and the division's top three teams all losing their starting quarterbacks - Franklin, South Carolina's Connor Shaw, Georgia's Aaron Murray - perhaps the experience Maty Mauk got in replacing Franklin and, at times, thriving will give the Tigers a strong chance at a second straight title. But after 2014, a lot of this year's key pieces leave. Pinkel will be relying on a new cycle of recruits, his first from a new recruiting region, to keep the machine moving forward. There's no guarantee that he will. There's no telling what the future holds, and there's no promising that whatever happens will result in a return trip to the Georgia Dome.

The only guarantee: Missouri will get a shot at old conference-mate Oklahoma State next month in the Cotton Bowl. A win would give the Tigers their 12th and a shot at their second top 6-7 finish in seven seasons. A loss wouldn't take away the 11 games this resilient group has already banked.

THIS TRAIN IS BOUND FOR PASADENA

The breaks went right, of course. With the way Auburn's luck has been over the last month or so, one simply had to assume that the Tigers, likely in need of a Michigan State win over Ohio State in the Big Ten title game to reach the BCS Championship, would get just that. The Spartans rolled in Indianapolis, and Auburn will roll on to Pasadena.

This was unthinkable even three weeks ago. But just when we think we have everything figured out, leave it to Auburn to throw us all for a loop. Gusoline powered Auburn through the SEC's December banquet, and Atlanta was once again the home base for stories of failure and redemption. Auburn will fail again one day, then return to Atlanta some day after that. It is the story of life in the SEC, and on the Plains, both the good and bad parts of the story tend to move along at a pretty rapid rate, just like Auburn's offense did in the Georgia Dome on Saturday afternoon.

More from SB Nation

Act I: Knicks locker room, pregame

Metta World Peace was holding court. We should provide some context here because context is everything, especially when gifted with random Metta World Peace quotes that are of course bizarre and funny, but also illuminating in their way.

“I’m not chasing (a championship). Listen, whatever team I’m on is never rebuilding. When you get Metta World, you’re officially championship mentality. Right here, officially championship. I know everybody’s talking about division in here. I’ve heard that a lot. But that’s not what Metta World brings. Metta World brings a championship. That’s it. One thing. That’s what I do.”

The Knicks are in last place, the coach is on the proverbial hot seat and the inevitable trade rumors have started. The trade rumor in question involves Kyle Lowry, the tough but ornery Raptor point guard who is very much available and would be an upgrade over injured starter Raymond Felton. The price for Lowry includes Felton, World Peace and a future first round pick.

Best of Sunday Shootaround

* Brad Stevens and the Celtics' tomorrow
* Dawn of the Paul George era
* 'Tank' is a four-letter word
* Anthony Davis is already here
* Bill Russell gets his statue in Boston
* Stats, storytelling and Sloan
* New Orleans dreams big
* The rise of Paul George
* The stories of 2012-13

“There’s nothing to deal with. What am I dealing with? Getting paid to play basketball? Is that what I’m dealing with? I know some guys take trade rumors a little more personally.”

On its face that’s not a bad deal. Lowry is better, younger and healthier than Felton and has one less year on his contract. The pick is the cost of doing business, but it’s a defensible move for a team with playoff aspirations that has fallen on hard times, especially in a division as bad as the Atlantic Division when more than half the teams ahead of the Knicks probably wouldn’t be upset if they got their game together and passed them in the standings.

“I love challenges. All the teams that called me last year I wanted something that was going to be an adventure: China, the Knicks and Arena football. That was it. What else is an adventure, you know what I’m saying? This is the adventure that I was talking about. I didn’t know what adventure I was getting, I just wanted to hop into an adventure. And hey, let’s do it. Sometimes it’s good to be ready for the unpredictable.”

Here’s where it gets all Knicky because this is exactly the kind of trade that always comes back to haunt them. They already dealt first rounders in 2014 and 2016, so the earliest pick they can trade is in 2018, which is the one that would get them Lowry. Because the Knicks traded those picks to Raptors GM Masai Ujiri and the basketball world laughed at them, it’s been reported that owner Jim Dolan squashed the deal because he didn’t want Ujiri to make him look bad. Again.

“Patience is a weapon. I learned that from my Laker days.”

Metta World Peace played 11 seconds on Friday against Boston.

“When you take on a challenge some things are out of your control. If you go to work and your boss moves your desk, it is what it is. It’s similar. My desk has been moved from playing to riding the bench. But it’s OK, you know?”

Act II: #TakeThatMasaiUjiri

Mike Woodson decided to start Pablo Prigioni, mainly because Felton is injured and Prigioni is the only capable point guard left on the roster. A man of convention, Woodson rarely deviates from the tried-and-true Basketball Starting Lineup consisting of two guards, two forwards and a center, despite the surprising success the Knicks enjoyed playing unconventional lineups the previous season.

This is well-worn territory for most Knick fans, but it’s worth mentioning because with Prigioni handling the ball the Knicks looked a lot like their 2012-13 selves for long stretches of the game. Carmelo Anthony was in catch-and-shoot rhythm, dropping 20 first half points as New York clawed its way from back from a 17-point deficit. This was a lot better than just five days ago when the Celtics came to New York and won by 41 points on the Knicks home floor.

“We’ll have to play a perfect game,” Woodson had said prior to the action, which was both depressing and not entirely true. His team was hardly perfect and the Celtics aren’t exactly the juggernaut of old, but for about three quarters the Knicks looked surprisingly good. That was when Melo went to Prigioni and suggested that he use him as a decoy and instead feed Andrea Bargnani, who banged home a couple of fateful jump shots:

"Take that Masai Ujiri. Bargnani's two straight jumpers give #Knicks a 69-62 lead. Why are fans thinking Ujiri won that trade? TBD."

-- Marc Berman, New York Post

Predictably, that’s when everything went to hell. The lead evaporated. The Knicks scored just 13 points in the fourth quarter as Bargs and Melo took a dozen shots and made just two of them in a familiar haze of isolations and broken sets.

Melo wasn’t the only one with ideas. J.R. Smith decided -- without prompting -- that the Knicks would be better off if he didn’t shoot, which is a rather astonishing development for a guy who came into the game with 186 attempts in 486 minutes. Of course, he’s made just 34 percent of them so maybe he was on to something. The Celtics came roaring back and held on for a 90-86 victory.

Act III: Postgame

J.R. Smith: “I was going into the game trying to make opportunities for my teammates to excel. We need playmakers more than just scorers. My job is to get my teammates the easiest buckets we can, and we’re not getting those so I took it upon myself to sacrifice my shot to get other guys going. And it might not be the right way, it might be the right way, I don’t know. Just trying to figure this thing out.”

Mike Woodson: “I don’t know what that’s about.”

Smith: “We‘ve got enough guys on the offensive end. In order to get those guys going we have to have somebody to make the plays to get them easier shots and I’ll take that upon myself.”

Carmelo Anthony: “I don’t think it was his fault but we want him shooting the basketball. I don’t want to look up and see he took one shot. We need guys to do what they do well.”

Woodson: “Bargnani passed up on about three shots and we missed the mark for a big, opportunity to go high/low with him when he was wide open and that’s just the difference.”

Anthony: “Everybody’s trying to figure it out. Whether it’s helping us, hurting us, who’s to say. Everybody’s trying to figure everything out in a small period of time.”

Smith: “The pressure should have been on two and half, three weeks ago. My panic button’s been on. We have to figure out as a team how to make it work.”

Anthony: “I mean, It’s tough. If I said it was not tough I’d be lying to you, but what are we going to do? Stop playing now, and stop fighting and stop believing, we can’t do that.”

Kenyon Martin: “When it rains, it pours.”

The NBA released its first All-Star voting update and you know what that means: Time for everybody to freak out about who’s in seventh and how many votes Kobe Bryant received. How dare fans not want to watch Roy Hibbert in a fast-paced, defense optional exhibition game! It’s like they don’t break down every game on Synergy.

But picking All-Stars is fun, so here’s how we’d vote.

EASTERN CONFERENCE

FRONTCOURT (Vote leaders: LeBron James, Paul George, Carmelo Anthony)

LeBron James: Obvious.

Paul George: Also obvious, and good on the fans for getting this one right.

Roy Hibbert: Hibbert’s the choice because of his defensive impact, but you could also make a reasonable case for Anthony, Al Horford, Brook Lopez or even Andre Drummond. Melo will probably get the vote and it’s really not worth getting worked up about.

GUARDS (Vote leaders: Dwyane Wade, Kyrie Irving)

John Wall: We’re going with Wall who has posted better numbers than Irving, and has the Wizards generally playing up to expectations. The Cavs have been a huge disappointment and Irving has to bear some of the responsibility.

Arron Afflalo: I’m picking Afflalo over Wade because they’ve had very similar production, but Afflalo has played significantly more minutes. Let’s do the side-by-side comparison heading into play on Friday:

Afflalo: 21.6 ppg, 4.6 rpg, 4.0 apg, .591 TS%, 19.6 PER, 828 minutes
Wade: 18.4 ppg, 4.8 rpg, 5.4 apg, .572 TS%, 21.0 PER, 539 minutes

WESTERN CONFERENCE

FRONTCOURT (Vote leaders: Kevin Durant, Dwight Howard, Blake Griffin)

Kevin Durant: Yes.

LaMarcus Aldridge and Kevin Love: Let’s take these two together since this is where the argument will come into play. Despite Minnesota’s slide, Love is averaging 24 points and leading the league in rebounding while posting a 26.3 PER. Aldridge is averaging career highs in points and rebounds for the team with the best record in the league.

It’s hard to argue against either one of these two picks, but because it’s the West there are other deserving candidates. In some order: Howard, Griffin, Tim Duncan, DeMarcus Cousins and Dirk Nowitzki should all get consideration. (Let’s pour one out for Anthony Davis, who would be awesome in the All-Star game, especially the one that’s going to be played in New Orleans.)

All of these players are great and having fantastic seasons. You can’t really go wrong with any of them, but the rules say you can only have two more and we’re going with Love and LMA.

BACKCOURT (Vote leaders: Chris Paul, Kobe Bryant)

Chris Paul: Still the “third-best player” in the league, but it’s getting tighter.

Steph Curry: He’s behind Kobe, but not by much and it won’t be long until he’s a fixture in the starting lineup. Let’s make a pact that if an aging all-time great who is either the first or second most well-known player in the league and who returned to the lineup after a scary career-threatening injury gets voted in by the fans, that the basketball community won’t shriek in horror about the injustice in the world.

MONDAY Lakers at Hawks

Let’s give Mike D’Antoni some credit here. The Lakers have been without Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant for most of the year and Pau Gasol is a pale imitation of his former self. Yet thanks to players like Jordan Hill, Wesley Johnson and Xavier Henry they have been hanging around the .500 mark despite a subpar offense and wretched defense. This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but here they are. Hill isn’t that much of a surprise. He just needed time and the right system. But Henry and Johnson? Those guys had one foot out of the league. Regardless of what happens, they can thank D’Antoni for rescuing their careers.

TUESDAY Thunder at Nuggets

A man can go crazy trying to figure out the Nuggets. Wiith the slow start and a long winning streak behind them, things have started to slow down. They’re on a four-game homestand and will play 11 of the next 15 in their building. That’s 11 chances to run people out of the gym and into that cold, unforgiving altitude. Let’s see where they are in mid-January before trying to figure them out.

WEDNESDAY Pacers at Heat

Sorry ‘Bron, but this is the best rivalry in the league right now. (See 'Say What?')

THURSDAY Spurs at Warriors

This is the second night of a back-to-back, the third game in four nights, the fifth game in seven and the last road game of a difficult four-game road trip. That sounds vaguely familiar, but there’s no way Pop would rest any of his starters for a TNT game though, right?

FRIDAY Bobcats at Pistons

Disclosure: I didn’t buy into the Pistons’ preseason hype, even though that hype was generated by really smart analysts whose work I admire, respect and trust. Just when I was ready to start gloating, they pulled it together and won six of eight. Then they lost three in a row. Given that the rest of the conference is in such a sorry state, the Pistons have the luxury of time to get things right so I will continue to withhold judgment. Love those Bobcats though.

SATURDAY Mavericks at Suns

The Suns have been hanging around the fringes of playoff contention in what feels like a happy accident, and now comes word via Scott Howard-Cooper that GM Ryan McDonough would consider trading some of the bevy of draft picks he’s acquired for an impact player now. It was always unlikely that he would keep all of them and if he can get an impact player now then why wait for the lottery?

SUNDAY Celtics at Pacers

Brad Stevens returns to the Hoosier State in what will surely be an emotional homecoming -- I can’t even type that with a straight face. Stevens didn’t set out to be the anti-Doc Rivers, and comparisons between the two are grossly unfair, but this will be the opposite of Doc’s teary return to the Garden last week.

December 15 is the unofficial opening of the trade market as players who signed as free agents are now eligible to be dealt. With that in mind, here’s a look at some of the teams, players and execs who will play a central role in trade season:

1. Omer Asik: The Rockets have reportedly set a deadline of Dec. 19 to move the disgruntled big man -- Mark Deeks explains why that date is significant here -- and there are no shortage of suitors.

2. Masai Ujiri: The man is a wizard. That’s the only plausible explanation for how Ujiri could trade Andrea Bargnani and Rudy Gay and come out ahead in the transactions. Now he’s offering Kyle Lowry and the point guard market has opened wide, thanks to injuries in New York, Golden State and elsewhere. Someone will bite and they will probably regret it in the morning.

3. New York/Brooklyn: In order for there to be a trade there must be a seller and a buyer. This season more than ever, there are way more sellers than buyers, which would normally produce -- wait for it -- a buyer’s market where the well-heeled shopper can choose from a wide assortment of discounted players. That’s normally how things work, unless the shopper is flush with cash and desperate to make face-saving deals in the harsh glare of failed expectations. And that’s why we’re talking about first round picks in the year 2020.

4. Danny Ainge: The Celtics have been notably quiet so far this season. There have been few leaks and the ones that were out there, i.e. Rajon Rondo, were shot down so quickly that they barely registered a blip. Despite their better-than-expected start, the Celtics are not desperate to do anything, and it can be argued that things have actually worked out quite nicely for Ainge’s master plan. Veterans like Courtney Lee, Brandon Bass and Jordan Crawford have played well under first-year coach Brad Stevens and youngsters like Avery Bradley and Jared Sullinger have upped their value with healthy, productive seasons. Since making his big moves last summer, Ainge has felt like he is operating from a position of strength. This is the first test of that resolve.

5. Oklahoma City: The underrated part of Sam Presti’s work is beginning to take shape as Jeremy Lamb, Steven Adams and Reggie Jackson have all assumed larger roles with the Thunder. The question is whether Presti will make a big move that strengthens the roster now at the expense of the future. However, Thabo Sefolosha has stopped making shots, Kendrick Perkins is Perking and you only get so many chances with Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook. It feels like the time is finally right to make a big move and Presti has the pieces.

We like watching college football, from the kickoff of Sun Belt Tuesday to whenever the last Mountain West game ends, from opening night at Williams-Brice to the second song after Army-Navy. We like reading and watching and studying it and talking about it, too.

We have many different opinions on which players and coaches delivered the best performances this season, as do all of you. Dozens of our network's writers from all around the country filled out ballots for this year's picks. We welcome your feedback in the comments below. Thanks for making us a part of your college football, all year long.

Only Johnny Manziel and Jadeveon Clowney might've generated more discussion in 2013 than Florida State's Jameis Winston. With FSU less than a month away from the ultimate statement game, that's unlikely to cease anytime soon. The rest of his backfield here, Boston College's Andre Williams and Arizona's Ka'Deem Carey, each dominated despite facing frequent eight-man fronts.

We planned on awarding two wide receivers and two tight ends, but due to a tie, we're spreading our offense out. Mike Evans might not have the eye-popping numbers of fellow first-teamers Brandin Cooks and Davante Adams, but when you put 566 yards and five touchdowns on the country's No. 2 and 3 teams, you're in.

The pieces of our starting offensive line powered four of the country's 15 best offenses, according to Football Outsiders. (And then there's Arkansas.) Two were blue-chip recruits, one's the son of a Pro Football Hall of Famer, and all will be among the first players drafted at their positions.

Pittsburgh's Aaron Donald blew up more plays per game behind the line of scrimmage than any defender since 2007. He's joined by a leader of what Nick Saban called the SEC's best front, a Big Ten beast who was the subject of an SB Nation longform, and the state of South Carolina's surprise sacks leader.

Is this the deepest position group of the year? The middle of the defense made for our tightest vote, and our second-team linebackers could serve as a starting trio without dropoff. Fun fact: our No. 1, the explosive Anthony Barr, has only been playing the position for two years now.

The top defensive backs on two of college football's best defenses and maybe the two best ballhawks give us a secondary that could shut down any passing attack. Justin Gilbert led what was the Big 12's best pass defense in yards-per-attempt and second in passer rating.

Though special teams seldom gets the credit it deserves (we miss you, Jim Tressel), it proved to be one of our most contentious votes. Three or four kickers warranted top honors, and a number of punters are just as deserving. And the most notorious return play in college football history isn't enough for Chris Davis to make the cut.

Let's keep going. And because this is SB Nation, you get our choice for the best GIF from 2013. It's only natural.

David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the first installment of his five-part series.

The defining thing about airports is that no one really wants to be there. Everyone in every airport would rather be somewhere else, someplace more like home, and preferably soon. This goes for all the people selling denatured food to people who don't much want to eat it; all the travelers who would just as soon be wherever they're going; the tired-eyed gripe-magnets overseeing security; the wan salespeople in the Duty Free grimly spritzing cologne on scowling Russians.

Airports' international terminals are mostly the same sort of non-place. That place is an expensive one. It is a world Free of Duty, but also inhabited and ruled by the sullen and uncompromising familiarity of global luxury brands. Those can be found in the Duty Free stores, not so much being sold as announcing to travelers coming or going what kind of place they're moving through -- a world merciless and seamless and innocent of discount, recognizable and ubiquitous and familiar in the least-comforting ways.  Those shirts are made in the developing world for Hugo Boss, and they cost $155. The sunglasses say Prada and Ray Ban on them, and will run around $200. There are Mont Blanc pens gleaming sleekly from inside glass cases, and the choking floral omnipresence of cologne and perfume, and also there are these giant goonish jugs of Johnnie Walker Blue Label that cost $600 and are too big to be anything but exemplary how-you-like-me-now purchases. (They might as well have Maybach Music logos on them.)

Everything's expensive-looking and artful enough, but there is something both robotic and almost poignant about it.

There are handbags blocky and impossibly expensive, sitting on little platforms, red and fat as spotlit hunks of pastrami.

There is probably a video playing someplace, too, and that video will be weirder than you'd expect: The Mentalist chasing a beautiful woman through Paris so he can give her an umbrella in a rainstorm; androgynous dancers, poker-faced while performing elaborate choreography in front of a gleaming black sedan.

Everything's expensive-looking and artful enough, but there is something both robotic and almost poignant about it. It's the same feeling you'll get while watching a movie in which a robot appears to experience fear or doubt or some other human emotion. The cold futility of human-ish things washed over the steel and circuitry of a bloodless precision-engineered future that does not necessarily require us. It's hard to say why that might inspire any emotion besides a sort of pity. It's complicated.

The idea of the great international Duty Free experience, it seems to me, is to communicate a simultaneously comforting and unattainable/aspirational depiction of globo-luxury. The brands you see in the international terminal are international themselves because they are recognizable as the More Expensive Option most anywhere in the world. They symbolize the idea of linked ubiquity and wealth, the promise that money is always with us, wherever we might find ourselves. If you want to get something with one of these resonant names on it in an airport -- something that says Dior or Armani -- you will be buying either cologne or perfume, quite literally paying for the smell of internationally recognized wealth.

The poignant part is that luxury, at least as these brands define it, is pretty transparently a joke. All the flouncing and smoldering and whimsy in perfume ads, all those global ambassadors of elegance smugging over their fat-faced wristwatches -- it's not just that this sort of thing isn't reality for the vast majority of people on Earth. It is that it is so wildly and weirdly unreal that it's nearly impossible to do anything but laugh when confronted with its sweep and pomp. Keira Knightley escapes a handsome suitor (wait, why?) and lifts off in a waiting hot-air balloon (oh?) and smiles mysteriously and we are supposed to think of something, and want that thing we're thinking of. It is difficult to see how that might work.

To be in the Duty Free nowhere of the international terminal is to see all that very plainly -- all these expensive things, honestly far too expensive to buy, price-tagged and just sort of presenting themselves for their own sake. These stores are in the airport mostly to remind you that they are there, that luxury brands are wherever you are going, as cruelly overpriced and possessed of the same symbolic heft at one end of your journey as on the other. They are the constants, the things that money makes everywhere, de-linked and uncoupled and sublime and ridiculous, unreal by design. They signify wealth and airless consensus; they're a reminder that, wherever you're going, it will probably be important to have as much money as possible.

Okay. Now imagine a country like that.

Or, look at it another way. Imagine a country without water that for most of its existence was a harsh place paced off by nomads. Islam came there sometime in the seventh century and stayed. Other rulers came and went, too; there are fireworks along the gulf on December 18 to celebrate National Day, which is when the country kicked out the regional rival that had dominated it for nearly a century. In the souks, in early December, you'll see the chintzy-shiny outfits for sale that little kids will wear on National Day; Doha's kids will be dressed like little bedazzled flags. There are scarves and t-shirts with pictures of the emir, mustachioed and unsmiling.

Anyway, the British came, inevitably, and stayed for a time, too. As the British tended to do, they turned some towns into cities, even small ones on the coast that existed modestly, off the trade generated by pulling things from the sea. (Fish or pearls, mostly). There were never a lot of people in this country, or in its largest city. This is a tough place to live: exactly as arid and hot as you might imagine, even in the capital, even along the Corniche that curls along the Arabian Sea, where there's at least a breeze.

The British left for good only two generations ago. The country was different, because it had discovered that it was located over the largest natural gas deposit known to exist in the world. This remote place was suddenly very much of interest, and just unbelievably gob-smackingly ridiculously wealthy. And so it went about making itself over into a place that looked more like the wealthy nation that it suddenly was.

There is a way that this can be done very quickly, but it's not necessarily the sort of thing that your freer countries can do readily. You will need a great many workers to do it. You will need to wring a lot of out of them. You will need the absolute right to raze whatever is in the way of the five-star hotel or glass-clad office building or statement-making architectural masterpiece or mall or soccer stadium that should rightly be there, as well as the means to build that thing.

Qatar, which is an emirate and an absolute monarchy, can do all that. There is a vast and opaque state. Politics, such as they exist, are of the bureaucratic and Palace Intrigue variety. There's also consultative semi-parliament, to which citizens were supposed to begin electing some members in 2005, and then in 2013, and anyway maybe sometime in the future.

There are laws, and they are enforced, but there is not quite accountability as it's commonly understood elsewhere. Mistakes get made in the churning. There is a great deal of money, though -- Qatar has the highest per capita GDP in the world and 14 percent of (citizen) households are millionaires -- and a great deal of ambition. And so there is a great deal of churning.

That is both how and why Qatar built and is building Doha so fast. It is also how China built cities for millions of people from something like scratch, and how nearby gulf states such as Abu Dhabi and Dubai became the glassy, glossy petro-boomtowns they are. To build a nation quickly, and from scratch, requires a certain amount of planning, but mostly it is a matter of doing and making. Planning is important, but it tends to seem less important as things speed up.

And so big buildings are built on delirious spec, little streets suddenly have entirely too many Mercedes Benzes on them. There is no way to tell how many malls are too many, and the government is not saying no to any kind of development, really, and so it's left up to the market and the market says YES, HELL YES and up they all go.

Architects and artists work for hire, and can be hired; wealthy people and universities and petroleum types will go where the money is, wherever the money is, and they will want places to eat and sleep and play and park their boats. The necessary labor can be imported from abroad, and very inexpensively; contractors will facilitate both that human inflow and its implementation. It can be done, if you can afford it and if you really want it.

And if you really want it -- if you really want it done, grandly and quickly, to your specifications -- you can do it this way, and quickly.

Except that the rest of the world, which is slower and different, did not and mostly does not do it this way. There is going to be some natural shock at this sudden city, and some distaste at the way in which it's being made -- rightly, in some instances. The government is not necessarily capable of or interested in keeping the closest eye on those contractors, whether for reasons of cynical expedience or the sheer impossibility of keeping up with anything as fast and vast as what has been loosed. Also those contractors do not necessarily have to do all the things they have to do elsewhere; there are laws, even somewhat strict laws, but they are not fully enforced or enforceable. And so the contractors don't do what they have to do.

Human Rights Watch notices the results of this: the horror of the market left fully alone, of workers sleeping 12-to-a-shipping-can somewhere out of sight or in un-air-conditioned rooms next to old chemical waste and dying over and over on the job, whether in falls (over 1,000 laborers died this way in Qatar in 2013, a rate nearly three times that of similar fatalities in the UK) or when their hearts blow up under the unbearable heat, the unbearable pressure of making a world city happen immediately.

The contractors sometimes don't pay the workers when they should, or at all. The contractors, due to a Qatari law called kafala, sponsor these laborers' presence in the country, and the laborers cannot change jobs or leave the country unless the contractors let them, which they of course won't. The contractors can make the laborers sign statements saying they'd been paid wages they hadn't been paid, which they of course do. The International Trade Union Confederacy notices this and calls Qatar a "slave state." Amnesty International notices and puts out, just before Thanksgiving, a 169-page report called "The Dark Side of Immigration," which credits the Qatari government for seeming to want to do things the right way, but points out that contractors have a hugely casual relationship with the nation's labor standards, in large part because the state has been unable or unwilling to enforce any other kind.

It is all happening so spectacularly fast, maybe too fast, but the idea has always been to do it quickly, to get the buildings up and shining and full, to make Doha the sort of showpiece city that Qatar can afford. The idea is just to do it, to make someplace great -- peaceful, beautiful, luxurious and yes expensive, and so finally a brand in itself to the extent that people will hear "Doha" and understand it the same awed and abstracted and faintly reverential way they understand DIOR or PRADA or JOHNNIE WALKER BLUE LABEL. At which point... well, what, then? That's a goal, but is it an ending?

And so Qatar is also that. But we are not even there yet. I got in late, wrung out. The map on the little monitor in the cabin showed us flying over some of the world's unhappiest and most dangerous places -- the little animated plane moving over and around the smoldering names of Baghdad and Isfahan and Damascus, en route to what is by some measures the richest and safest and fastest-growing city in the world, the capital of the country that will host the 2022 World Cup. So we're there, now. We are really in Qatar.

David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the second installment of his five-part series.

Previously: Part I, Destination everywhere.

On the first bleary trip into the city, in a cab that sped me along the Corniche to what turned out to be the wrong hotel, the cheerful-seeming cabbie pointed out various things. There on the left, watched over by no fewer than 11 towering construction cranes, was the glass-clad desert rose of the Qatar National Museum, designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel, half-bloomed already and open sometime in 2014. Then on the right: the Museum of Islamic Art, lit by searing spotlights planted on green lawn. And near that, a massive box that seems to be wearing the signature multicolored dots of... wow, no, that really is a giant exhibition of the British artist Damien Hirst, in the Al Riwaq exhibition hall.

Hirst is famous for his bisected cows sealed in lucite, his massive sharks floating in formaldehyde, his various installation pieces made of prescription pills and diamonds and dead butterflies and living flies and various forms of meat. Thoughts on how good those works are or aren't vary from observer to observer. Their general assaultive garishness is universally agreed upon, though, and they have, either despite that or because of it, been among the most expensive pieces of art sold anywhere in the world over the last two decades. It makes sense that they'd be in Qatar, and also it really does not.

Because I had barely slept over the course of two long flights, and because I was so startled to see this towering polka-dot art hangar dedicated to this particular artist, I must have said something about it to the driver. Either he didn't quite understand what I was saying or didn't feel like sharing his opinion on Damien Hirst, either of which would have been reasonable. He answered back, "in Doha, everything is new, new, NEW."

Which is a non-sequitur, but also both true and actually a pretty good answer to someone wondering what a comprehensive exhibition of one of the art world's most relentless provocateurs -- or "provocateur" or ex-provocateur, I'm not telling you what to think about this dude and his multimillion dollar formaldehyded sharks -- is doing in a traditional and conservative country. This exhibition is new, after all, and it will not become old.

Something else by someone else, some other artist of international renown will be in that big space in a month or so. That will be new, too. It will be a very handsomely mounted and thoughtfully curated exhibition, just as the Hirst exhibition was very handsomely etc, and it will also be big. It will also, like all museums in Doha, be free to visit.

And people will visit. The nearby Museum of Islamic Art is the showpiece, a big sand-colored cathedral of a place designed by the architect I.M. Pei. It's nearly windowless and, on the inside, cooled seemingly less by air conditioning than the hushed temple chill that seems naturally to attach itself to such places. It is only five years old, but owing to the ambition of both its aesthetics and mission -- nothing less than relating a thousand or so years of Islamic history through art -- there is a hallowed, austere hush about it already.

The art inside is old and beautiful, if abstracted in the way that very old things invariably are. Whatever critical intent or cultural significance or satire or other subtext was or was not once attached by this unnamed 13th century Iraqi artist to this statue of an impish monkey in what appears to be a hat, was lost long ago. What's left is interesting enough -- it's a mischievous monkey in a hat, it will always work -- to attract a large and varied crowd to the museum.

Where things were notably paler at the Hirst exhibition, this one looked like Qatar, or like the Qatar that Qatar would like us to see. Women in niqabs moved in quiet, whooshing groups or laughing pairs or pushed twisting, burbling kids in strollers; it's anecdotal, but I observed that Fendi handbags have penetrated this particular market segment to an impressive degree.

There are also men in traditional white dishdasha and men in casual clothes; women in head scarves or more conservative abayas or even-more-conservative niqabs or full burqas. There are Germans and sun-crisped Brits, because it is a museum in a foreign country and so of course there are. And there I am, too, gulping water and a little hungry and fresh off a dual-language chastisement -- in English and then (a little show-offily, I thought) in German -- for attempting to enter the museum through the wrong entrance. I look at the calligraphy for a while, the beautiful ripple and rise that comprise words that have been written and rewritten for a thousand years and more, the subtleties that make the letters beautiful. I wonder if I'm seeing it.

This is Qatar, and so there is a restaurant on the fifth floor by Alain Ducasse, a French chef whose golden-fingerbowl approach to fine dining was too high-toned for Manhattan even during the turn-of-the-century boom years.

In the rotunda there are the sounds of voices doing that museum mutter that people do, in various different languages. Also a tour group starting out (in English) and little reports of kid-noise; whining and sudden exultations and high laughs, the usual sort of thing. Little kids slide giddily on the slick stone floors. Look through the narrow window that looks out the back of the museum and onto the Arabian Sea and there is a towering Richard Serra sculpture on a spit of land that sticks out into the green water. There is also, faintly and small as a toy, the buzzing back-and-forth of someone skipping a Jet Ski through the museum's artificial moat. When you've had enough, you can leave.

There are more than two ways of thinking about art, but two useful ways to think about it are as something people make and something people consume. They are fundamentally connected and interdependent, obviously. But it is, for a variety of reasons, somehow easier and more pleasant to think about the former than it is the latter.

This tension is reflected and refracted through all types of human expression, sports very much included. We as humans enjoy being surprised and moved and shown things that we hadn't previously seen, or things that helped us to see, in the everyday familiar, little kindlings of grace or transcendence that had previously been hidden. We watch the things we watch (or listen to what we listen to, or do what we do or go where we go) to find this sort of startlement. As well we might.

It's generally to our credit that we know this sort of thing has value, and are willing to pay for the privilege of being transported and surprised. We are willing, sometimes, to pay quite a lot. Again, this is pretty excellent of us, and one of those human behaviors that both makes sense and is sort of reassuring. More urgent material essentials aside, what would you really want to spend money on if not something that makes you think and feel things you otherwise wouldn't, or couldn't?

But there's a difference, in magnitude of expenditure but also just a difference, between spending money on museum admission and spending money on art. In the notably cool Al Markhiya Gallery, down an alley from a Yemeni restaurant in Doha's Souk Wakif, two Qatari artists had mounted a show of very distinguished, and expensive, paintings. The gallery aims to showcase the work of young and Qatari artists whenever possible. Most had sold, despite prices ranging north of 60,000 Qatari Riyals, which is more than $16,000. I talked to Addis, a graphic designer for the gallery and Qatar native whose resemblance to former Top Chef contestant Sheldon Simeon gave him an instant shortcut into my heart.

"You'd think more would sell to Qatari buyers, because this is Qatar," he laughed. "They can afford it." But instead, he said, most of the work is sold to "people from outside," he said. "Lot of Scandinavians."

What do Qatari buy, I asked him.

He laughed again. "Phones! And credit."

Museum of Islamic Art (Getty Images)

In November, the New Yorker ran an inexplicably fascinating feature about the Swiss-born, New York-based gallerist and art dealer David Zwirner, who recently sold a triptych by the painter Francis Bacon for a record $146 million. What's interesting about the article, though, is less the massive figures quoted and more its exposure of how the art market works -- as an unregulated and, unsurprisingly, often unethical and wildly speculative global trade between the supremely rich. The assets in play happen to be some of the greatest treasures of our shared human heritage, but again: what's more valuable, or more readily bought and sold, than that?

After that historic sale, the New York Post quoted an unnamed source attesting that the unknown private buyer for the $146 million triptych was Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, a 30-year-old Qatari. She wasn't, as it turned out; this is the Post we're talking about. But it wasn't a bad guess.

The Sheikha, who is the sister of Qatar's emir, is the head of the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA), and oversees an annual budget estimated to be around $1 billion. The New Yorker article notes that Zwirner was recently named the second-most influential person in the art world by ArtReview; Sheikha Al Mayassa was first. She wears the traditional black abaya, is a Duke graduate with an advanced degree from Columbia, and gave a TED Talk called "Globalizing the Local, Localizing the Global" in 2010. She oversaw the QMA's purchase of one of the prescription pill installations on display at the Al Riwaqh Hearst retrospective; it cost $20 million. No one in the art world spends nearly as much money as the sheikha does. No one can. The QMA spent 30 times what New York City's Museum of Modern Art did in 2013.

The Sheikha has bought pieces of art that the QMA doesn't show in Qatar, and pieces it can't show in Qatar. Though it was planned as a permanent piece of public art when the QMA purchased it, the Algerian-born artist Adel Abdessemed's "Coup de Tete" -- a massive sculpture depicting Zinedine Zidane's infamous World Cup headbutt of Marco Materazzi -- lasted just a little over three weeks on Doha's Corniche before being taken down. Qataris complained that it violated an Islamic tenet that forbids the depiction of humans and animals in statues. The argument was that the statue was idolatry, and it was an argument the QMA had no choice but to accept. Think of the whole affair, maybe, as the Yankees spending a bunch of money on Jaret Wright and Carl Pavano some years ago -- an expensive miss, to be sure, but one remedied easily and swiftly enough with another purchase of similar size.

"As the art market and art scene generally has globalised, we are seeing a dominance of that sense of art as being something that is exchanged," ArtReview editor Mark Sappolt told The Guardian. "What's happening with Qatar epitomises that. It is symptomatic of a trend that you can have someone buying up western art, importing it to what is essentially the middle of the desert."

To bring the World Cup to Qatar, the emir is prepared to spend hundreds of times what his sister spends on art; one estimate places the total associated costs at around $220 billion, with a fucking B. The same principle applies, broadly, to both endeavors. And while soccer is not a western art form -- it belongs to the world; some things are true even if Sepp Blatter says them -- Qatar's hugely expensive, ethically suspect and generally queasy procurement of the 2022 World Cup reflects the same general trend. It's not a new thing, really: what is for sale will be sold, for as much as possible and to whoever values it the most. And, tautology of tautologies, what is most valuable is what's most valuable.

After dinner in Souk Wakif -- more about this later, but it's a new simulacrum of a traditional Arabian market built, with occasionally obvious Disneyfied detail, on the footprint of Doha's vanished original standing souk -- I went back to visit 7, the Richard Serra sculpture that towered, twisted and dramatically lit, out on that long finger of land in the park built around the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA). It's the tallest sculpture that Serra ever made, seven twisting panels of thick oxidizing steel that present as a closed column from afar but which is, like many of Serra's sculptures, actually open for viewers to enter.

It is, also typically for Serra's pieces, a weird and warping thing to be within -- the sky appears and disappears at various points, closing on a narrow septagon at the top. It is warm and close there at the bottom of the silo, as the steel holds onto the heat of the day even hours after sunset. It was balmy and beautiful all that day -- all throughout my visit, in fact; there was no sense of how furiously, ridiculously and relentlessly hot it is in Qatar for most of the year. I could only imagine how the whole thing would shimmer during Qatar's long summer, when the average temperature sits around 106 degrees.

Late in the afternoon, the park around MIA filled quickly with families and kids. Lush green grass -- the springy, mossy kind you'll find on golf courses in South Carolina -- does not really belong in this climate, but an ambitious enough sprinkler system can put it anywhere. It's almost everywhere along the Corniche. As the big black plastic "superbales" of peat moss and teams of jumpsuited laborers working in clouds of dust and car exhaust will attest, that grass will soon be everywhere along the Corniche that it presently is not.

MIA Park's lawns undulate and roll, which makes a proper soccer game difficult to get going. On the positive side, the green space is vast enough to fit a bunch of overlapping, hugely improper games. Pudgy and spindly and otherwise kid-shaped kids in Messi jerseys chase pudgy kids in different Messi jerseys. Dads in dad attire are in the game, too, directing traffic and making sure the smaller kids -- boys and girls both, tear-assing around in sneakers that light up with each footfall, or barefoot -- get some touches. I sat on the faintly damp tangle and watched and then closed my eyes for a while. A little kid dropped a woman's shoe a few feet to my left and smiled. He paced off several steps and dropped its partner. This would be a goal; I was on the field of play.

Those games were over after dark, although some of the tables families had set up hours earlier were still there, still wreathed in conversation. In the lamplight along the path out to the sculpture there were middle-school kids on bikes, at loose ends as middle-school kids invariably are. There were other kids attempting to fancy dribble and stutter-step past their buddies. There were young couples in casual western-style clothes or variously austere traditional garb, walking to the point and back, hand in hand or arm in arm or at a modest distance. (Or both looking down at their phones.)

There were a great many baby carriages, whether parked on the high berm beyond the cafe or in motion. The Arabian Sea was all around, flat as a fitted sheet and reflecting the glassy pulse of the West Bay skyline. This is the image you've seen of Doha, all ultramodern skyscrapers filigreed and bright and flashing with LED life. Stray cats, skinny and staring, skipped around on the rocks. Ancient-looking dhows were done up like Mumbai cabs, their little lights blinking out on the bay. Arabic pop dipped in and out of earshot, from the cafe and maybe the distant dhows, many of which have jarringly good sound systems. At the end of that narrowing piece of land was the Serra sculpture: steely and reaching, strange on the inside, still hot to the touch even in the dark.

And that is how I expected to end my day, happy if maybe a little lonesome for the simultaneous proximity to all that humanity and distance from the people with whom I generally share those moments. But, while walking back to the hotel, I heard what first sounded like impatient, beep-intensive traffic -- that is, sounded like Doha -- but eventually revealed itself as something else.

These were air horns, not car horns, and the more the rhythm of these wamp-wamp-wamps emerged, the more it became clear that they were coming from a soccer game. So I walked past the hotel and down an increasingly dingy avenue I'd wandered my first night in Doha, past industrial supply stores and dim small hotels and the garish Oscado Saloon, which was not a saloon but a salon whose young haircutters -- all sporting identical Drake-ish squared-off cuts -- hung over a rail smoking cigarettes.

And then a left along Al Muthaf Street. There were no more hotels. There was a shisha bar in which men smoked hookah dispassionately under fluorescent light; there was a far brighter Pakistani grocery. There were low dun-colored apartment blocks, nameless and with all the windows unlit, either abandoned or occupied by people who used them only for what hours of hard sleep they could get.

This was what every service employee I talked to -- Pakistani, Filipino, Nepali, Kenyan, Indian, Ghanaian, Bangladeshi -- told me when I asked what they thought of Doha. "Only work," a Ghanaian cabbie said. "Work and sleep." A Filipino cabdriver, blasting a homemade CD of Queen songs, bemoaned the lack of karaoke options. This neighborhood was it -- the place where the less well-paid foreign laborers lived, and how they lived. A place to sleep and maybe eat, quietly and out of the way. The streets were dusty and tired. A woman in an abaya, her sleeping daughter slung over her shoulder, climbed grim yellow steps into an apartment building. An airplane roared up over the rooftops, huge and shockingly close.

The drums and air horns were loud at this point, and I was following them toward the lights of what I saw, now, was a small green stadium built right up to the sidewalk. This was Doha Sports Stadium, and it was less impressive than it sounds. It was a cinder-block oval, faded and slouched, with a balding green rectangle at its center.

It was, also, crushingly and implausibly full. If ticket-takers had ever been at the gates, they'd long since gone home; the match was nearly over, and not only the concrete bleachers but the concourse down to the sidewalk was choked with shoulder-to-shoulder dudes. I craned and tiptoed and saw players sitting on the field, watched by somewhere between 2,000 and 200,000 men. I tiptoed again and saw a player doink a penalty kick off a crossbar. I asked the man to my left what teams these were, and he told me they were from India. This was as much as I ever learned; the score was not in the Doha papers.

I do know how the match ended, though. After the missed kick, some spectators left. Another fan invited me to stand next to him on the bleachers and I scrambled up with his help. I watched the goalie dive to the right and the kicker calmly roll the ball left. "Weeeeeen Yellow!" my bleacher buddy said, and patted me on the back.  Air horns wamp-ed without cease. Drums, too, or whatever was being used as drums -- there were too many men to see who was even making the noise, besides everyone. Team Yellow mobbed itself in the far corner.

I thanked everyone in sight, reflexively, and floated up and out in the crowd, amid smiles and emphatic conversations in dialect. This is not the sort of soccer experience that the Al Thani family will spend 12 figures to bring to the country in 2022. These also are not the people who will make noise at those games, although when the games come the men in Doha Sports Stadium or men like them will bring those visitors tea and turn down their beds and drive them to and from the new airport. They will take tickets on the metro system that Qatar is building for the World Cup. They will do most everything, because that is how it works over there.

This was the same game that would bring all those people to Qatar, of course, but also different. What the emir is buying from FIFA is a complicated investment product, which can indeed be bought and brought to the middle of the desert without any diminution in value. It is a thing traded among very rich people, like art or any other commodity.

This is not an idle comparison. Art has value because it has value; Qatar's whole brave, fraught investment in the World Cup has no value if not for the game that brought all those tired men to the Doha Sports Stadium that night. But the game, by itself, is just one of the world's favorite things to do; the World Cup is not just soccer. And anyway Qatar is not just buying the World Cup. It's an investment, like every dollar the nation spends on any other masterpiece.

Ken Sheely sits on a couch with a photo album on his lap. He flips the pages. His son, Derek, gets older with each turn. Smiling at the beach. At Disney World. At Gettysburg. There's even a picture of him in a baseball uniform. He played that sport only one season.

The bigger Derek gets in the pictures, the more he looks like himself. Permanent teeth replace baby teeth, and the smile grows into the one beaming from a picture in a frame above the fireplace, the one that hints at mischievousness. His wavy hair becomes more manageable. His neck thickens. His knife-flick dimples, the same ones his mom has, sink deeper into his cheeks.

His mom, Kristen, and dad tell me stories about these pictures. The surprised look on his face as he opens a present? Totally faking it. He knew he was getting the video game. Another about Derek and his sister, Keyton, getting up before dawn on Christmas, even when they were grown.

Most of the pictures are pre-growth spurt. Some are during it, as he grew from a boy into the 5'11, 225-pound man he was when he died playing football.

We talk about Derek for hours. Ken pounds his fist into his leg and Kristen cries and they both laugh. All the while stories about Derek tumble out of them. They start one and that reminds them of another, which reminds them of a third story, and by the time they finish the first one they've thought of yet another still.

We also talk about their bottomless and permanent grief over his death, their fury over the circumstances and their desire to make sure no parent has to endure what they are. Not what they have endured, but what they are still enduring, and what they will endure for the rest of their lives.

I have already talked to many of Derek's friends, teammates and coaches. My notebook overruns with stories about him, some his parents know, some they don't.

They ask what I've been told. I tell them a story about Derek staying up into the wee hours with his high school buddies at a hotel on the beach, unable to sleep, bouncing around the room, singing songs by an artist whose name I can't recall. "It was probably Pastor Troy," Kristen says.

She's right.

I pull out my notebook and find a quote from one of Derek's friends about Derek's well-known ability to bullshit people. I read it to them: "You'd be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.' And you'd go back to your room and think about it. Then you'd come back out and say, ‘What are you talking about?' And he'd say, ‘Yeah, I was BS-ing you.'"

Ken says, "That was probably Dwayne."

Right again.

As I get ready to leave, Ken and Kristen Sheely make a request I've never heard in all my time as a reporter. After my story is published, if I have leftover stories about their son, would I share them?

Stories are all they have left of Derek now. They want as many as they can get, even though hearing them burns open wounds.

Derek started playing football in a Pee-Wee league near York, Pa. A 49ers fan, he wore a Steve Young jersey to practice every day. The coaches didn't know his name yet, so they called him Steve Young. He asked his dad to position lawn chairs in the backyard like linemen, so he could practice running through the holes.

He loved video games and got good grades. "The only time I ever got a call from a teacher was because he was too sarcastic in class," Kristen says. "One time we went in for a conference and the teacher confided in us that the other kids didn't understand that he was just joking. They weren't quite up to speed. What are you going to do? I, of course, encouraged him."

The Sheelys say their son carried himself with confidence, even back then, when he was small for his age. Shortly after the family moved to Germantown, Md., a bigger kid came up to him on the bus and said, "You're in my seat." Derek, a middle schooler, stood up. He looked down at the seat. He said, "I don't see your name on it."

Two kids roughed him up for that. The bus driver didn't see anything, and the principal denied there was a problem, so nothing happened. The kids went after him again, and this time the bus driver saw it. They got kicked off the bus for the rest of the year. All the other kids thanked Derek for standing up to those kids, because they had been bullying everybody on the bus for two years.

Dwayne Washington's family — the Dwayne of the bullshitting story — moved to Germantown around the same time as the Sheelys, to escape a rough neighborhood. As Washington describes it, this was a key time in his life. As a young black kid, Washington wondered how he would fit in with his mostly white classmates.

His first friend in Germantown was Derek. "No matter where you are, there's always going to be a bad crowd," Washington says. "He definitely got me on the right levels as far as who to hang with."

When Derek joined the Northwest High School junior varsity football team, he was still small. Then-coach Randy Trivers loved his work ethic and pulled him up to the varsity team at the end of his sophomore year, though he didn't get on the field. When he finally grew, he became an important leader and player. He played fullback and linebacker, and his teammates voted him one of five captains for his senior year.

"He's not that guy who's going to impress you with numbers, his 40 times," says Andrew Fields, then-Northwest's offensive coordinator. "But whatever needed to get done, he got done. In my 15 years of coaching, if I've coached 1,500 kids, he's a top 10, top 5, not just in football smarts, but book smarts."

His friends say he was a natural at school, particularly in history classes. One called him "easily smart," yet he worked hard anyway. Northwest gives out an award each year to the senior who best combines on-field performance with a high GPA. Sheely won it.

Derek ate lunch often with his teammates in Trivers' office, where they teased each other and their coach. Bus rides home after wins were a hoot. Chris Patterson, a co-captain with Derek, told me the players copied the "Jump in, Jump Out, Introduce Yourself," chant from cheerleaders. Instead of introducing themselves, as cheerleaders do to opposing squads, they introduced various teammates and unloaded insults to the delight of everybody on the bus.

"I don't think of him with his shoulder pads and helmet on," Fields says. "I think of him in a meeting, or at a banquet, or at an event, with his teammates, with a smile on his face, holding court."

When Derek's high school football career ended, it seemed his football career would, too. He wasn't big enough or fast enough to play DI football. In the winter, some small schools showed interest in him, but Derek decided to enroll at Penn State, where his parents went, where he had always wanted to go.

He started classes in the summer, and when August rolled around, he told his parents he changed his mind. Dwayne Washington and a bunch of his other high school teammates were going to Frostburg State, a DIII school in western Maryland. He wanted to enroll there and play football with his friends.

His parents did not like the idea. They worried transferring was his attempt to relive his high school years. They believed the education he would get at Penn State would be much better than the education he would get at Frostburg State. They tried to talk him out of it.

They told him if he stayed at Penn State, he would get a full-ride "parent scholarship," but if he transferred, he'd have to pay for his education himself. He would have to buy his books and pay the first $3,000 each year. They would loan him — not give him — the rest. The loan would be interest free, but he would have to pay it back in three years.

Derek told his dad, If I loved golf or basketball or tennis, I could keep playing it forever. But I love football, and this is the last time I can play. If I don't play, I'll regret it.

Ken drew up a contract laying out the rules, hoping to convince Derek to stay at Penn State. In addition to spelling out Derek's financial obligations, the contract demanded he maintain a minimum GPA. If he dropped below it, he'd have to leave Frostburg State. Ken made Derek initial each page and sign the last one, so he couldn't come back later and claim he didn't know what he was agreeing to.

Ken wondered if he was being too tough. "Is he really going to be able to make it on his own? Is he really going to be able to balance his checkbook and not spend it all on video games?"

To his parent's delight, he did it. "He had never worked a day in his life, so $3,000 a year might as well have been $1 million. To his credit, he made it happen. He signed it. He did it. He started working summer jobs. He started busing tables and made $3,000 the hard way," Ken says. "Each summer he got a better summer job and a better summer job. The point of the story was, just doing this would be a better education than he gets in college."

And every job meant more stories, stories people still talk about when they talk about Derek, like the one told by Katrina McFarland, a waitress at now-closed Café Mileto in Germantown. As a busboy, Derek befriended her. He delivered food occasionally, and she let him borrow her car to do so.

One time when he returned to the restaurant, he intentionally parked her car so close to the next car, within only a few inches, that when she left work to go home, she couldn't even squeeze between the cars on the driver's side, much less open the door. She had to climb through the passenger's side to get in.

Frostburg teammates Anthony King, Dwayne Washington, Derek, Josh Volpe.

Derek thrived at Frostburg State. On the field, he twice was named to the academic all-conference team. A fullback, he gained a reputation as one of the toughest guys on the team. He blocked for two of his closest friends — quarterback Josh Volpe and running back Anthony King, both of whom he also blocked for at Northwest.

When Derek scored a touchdown, he and Dwayne Washington, who also went to Frostburg State and played linebacker, had their own handshake, their own dap — Washington's right hand would smack Derek's left, then vice versa, then they'd lean back. They also had a gentlemen's agreement not to hit each other in practice. Rashad James, a defensive back, wasn't so lucky. He tried to avoid contact with Sheely. "It was like running into a Mack truck," he says.

Off the field, Derek had no problem maintaining the minimum GPA required by the contract he had signed. Washington tells a story about when they got report cards. "He said, ‘Man, I got a 3.9.' I'd be like, ‘Man, you're upset about that? If I got a 3.9, my mom would buy me a new car.'"

Washington says he probably would not have graduated from college without Sheely's help. As part of his course work, Washington often had to produce short films and documentaries. Sheely always made time to appear in them. In one, Sheely calls football, "the greatest game ever invented on the face of the earth."

He might have had a future as a teacher. Garfield Lampkin, a running back at Frostburg State, said he and Sheely had the same professor for a political science class, but were in different sections. They reviewed the study guide together, and Sheely insisted that Lampkin repeat the information back to him. When Lampkin struggled with a particular part, Sheely re-taught it another way. "He wouldn't let me leave until I understood it," Lampkin says.

He called his parents once and told them about an encounter with a professor after she returned his paper with "F, plagiarism," written on it. It was a Russian literature class, and he dropped several very specific Russian history references into the paper. She accused him of lifting them from another source without providing a citation.

Derek didn't panic or get mad. He told her he was taking a Russian history class so he knew all that stuff already. Why should he have to cite stuff he knows? She changed the grade to an A.

His friends admired his ability to get good grades, play football and enjoy the college life all at once — and in that order. He set aside time for each activity. If his girlfriend came over when he was playing Xbox, one friend told me, Derek would say, "You know this is my Xbox time, right?"

In his final summer, he interned at the Department of Energy, where his dad worked. That got him interested in civil service. After graduation, he wanted to work overseas for the CIA.

In August 2011, Derek returned for a fourth and final season at Frostburg State. He already had enough credits to graduate, but he returned to play football as a fifth-year senior. He figured he would add another major as he played a final season. A few days after his parents dropped him off at school, Ken and Kristen dropped off their daughter, Keyton, at Penn State.

Ken's phone rang.

It was a surgeon. He wanted permission to operate on Derek. During practice, he had suffered a terrible head injury. He was unconscious and had massive swelling. Ken pulled over and listened as the surgeon spoke. He said that he doubted Derek would survive the procedure.

Ken and Kristen rushed to the hospital in Cumberland, Md., just short of two hours from State College, Pa., panicked that Derek would die before they got there. He survived the surgery and was transferred to the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, in Baltimore.

Doctors there propped him up in an attempt to use gravity to get the swelling in his brain to go down. Seeing him vertical startled his friends.

Sitting by his bed, Ken and Kristen talked to their son. They told him they loved him. They told him they were there for him. They told him he was a fighter. They played Pastor Troy.

They bargained for his life.

That week, an earthquake and a hurricane hit Baltimore. Dwayne Washington said he thought the earthquake represented Sheely's fight. He sat with Derek for hours.

On Saturday, Aug. 27, as Hurricane Irene threatened to batter Maryland, the Sheelys told family and friends to come to the hospital to say goodbye. Derek was going to die.

"People kept flooding in and flocking in," Ken says.

"It was unbelievable," Kristen says.

So many people showed up the hospital employees asked what was going on. It got so crowded that they ushered some of them to a separate room. Ken couldn't believe, and still can't, that a young person touched so many people.

Everybody wore their despair. "When you looked into his mother's eyes, you could just tell, it was like a piece of her was not there," Washington says. "You just wanted to do something for her, to make her smile, to give her a glimmer of hope."

So Derek's friends started telling stories about the man they called "Sheely." His friends and family laughed and cried at the same time. In the last hours of his life, Derek Sheely's parents got to know him better. "We always thought he was great and wonderful," Kristen says. "But then you hear these people you don't even know telling such detailed stories ..."

There were the stories about him helping people with schoolwork, about how he was never in a bad mood and about how he knew when to put his arm around people and when to kick them in the pants.

Washington told a story about cereal.

He loves Frankenberry. He can never find it at the store so he orders it online. On Super Bowl Sunday, while Washington was out of town, Sheely threw a party. One of their teammates drank a few too many beers and broke into Washington's private stash of Frankenberry.

Sheely kicked him out of the party.

Someone told a story about the day Sheely was hanging out in the football facility. A freshman walked in and asked directions to the training room. Sheely told the kid to go outside, take a left here, turn left there, turn left again, take another left one more time, and then he'd be there. A few minutes later, the kid walked back in the same door he had just gone out of and saw Sheely still standing there. The training room he wanted directions to was, and had been, right in front of him. On the spot, Sheely had sent him in a circle.

Everybody understood that one because everybody has a story about Sheely bullshitting someone, making up a story on the fly and convincing everyone it was true, like the time he got a friend all excited to buy the phone with three cameras that was coming out. Or the time he sent a teammate to the practice field in full gear when there was no practice. Or the time he outlined Frostburg State's plans to scrimmage Penn State.

Even his parents sometimes couldn't tell when he made stuff up. He knew so much history and was so good at telling stories, they didn't always know when he embellished them.

"It came to the point where I'd just stop listening to him — ‘You're not going to get me this time,'" Lampkin says. "That's not the guy you wanted to ask [a question] if you were a freshman."

Volpe, the quarterback, spent several minutes freaking out one day when he discovered a crack on the screen on his laptop, steeling up his nerves to tell his parents he needed a new one. Sheely let him twist for a while before telling him that he had moved all the apps and downloaded a fake screen with a crack. "Whenever you talk about him, it's going to bring a smile to your face," says King, the running back. "He always brought comedy into the room."

Sheely made strange bets and then was too stubborn to lose them. That explains why he once devoured a dozen or so steaks in one sitting, ate every meal for weeks without using utensils and attended every Penn State football game one season wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

He did great impressions — characters from "The Godfather," "The Simpsons," his friends and family. Nobody was immune.

Even Ken Sheely tells a story about that: "I would just go crazy on the stupidest stuff. One day I remember I was home, and there were three bottles of chocolate in the pantry. I said, ‘Why do we have all these?' Kris would say, ‘Derek likes chocolate, it was on sale, so I got some.' Half an hour, an hour later, he's rummaging around in there, and he'd see that there were three bottles of salad dressing, and they were the salad dressing for me. He would kind of mimic me, go all crazy. He would get his point across, but you couldn't help but laugh at yourself, because you could see what you looked like."

Some of the stories that came out at the hospital were the type college kids don't usually tell parents, stories about, um, going out and having a good time, maybe drinking a beer or two, staying up into the late hours, bouncing around the room, singing Pastor Troy.

Ken and Kristen weren't surprised. They told their son's friends a story about the time they came home from a weekend away and suspected Derek had hosted a party. Ken noticed a coaster was missing and the refrigerator was slightly askew. The evidence hinted at a party, but it proved nothing. The Sheelys never knew for sure whether the party happened. As Ken finished telling this story at the hospital, many of the heads in that crowded room dropped. That told a story all by itself: They had all attended the party.

On Aug. 28, 2011, the day after everyone gathered at the hospital, Derek Thomson Sheely died. He was 22. The cause of death was traumatic brain injury caused by a helmet-to-helmet hit.

The Sheelys say school officials told them nobody knew what caused such a severe injury. It was a freak accident, the kind that happens, albeit rarely, in a violent sport. The Sheelys had no reason to believe otherwise. In interviews immediately following Derek's death, Ken made a point to say Derek's death was an accident and no one was to blame. He and Kristen went home and grieved.

Ken harbored anger at Derek for putting himself in jeopardy. He thought Derek should have known he was in danger. But then he and Kristen learned more and more about head injuries and concussions, and they learned that Derek's head injury meant he might not have been able to think clearly enough to stop playing, that his injury itself prevented him from knowing he was too injured to play. Soon after Derek died, Ken and Kristen started a head injury foundation in his name.

There is a page on The Derek Sheely Foundation website that asks visitors to "Please continue to say his name," and "Please continue to share stories about Derek with us." Seven months after Derek died, one story came in anonymously. A co-worker of Ken's at the Department of Energy, who had helped set up the website, saw it first and showed it to Ken. Ken read it. The writer said he was a player on the team and described a horrible sequence of events that led to Derek's death, of Derek hurting his head at practice, bleeding from the forehead, and a coach berating him for wanting to sit out. One line in particular has been repeated often in media stories: "Stop your bitching and moaning and quit acting like a pussy and get back out there!" the email quoted the coach as saying.

At first, Ken didn't believe it. The email was anonymous — anyone could have written it. He thought the events described were simply not true. Ken says Derek loved football and had an incredibly high threshold of pain, so the idea a coach would accuse him of begging out of practice was ludicrous.

Ken called Kristen and told her not to read the email — she had access to the website's email, too — and for months, she didn't.

An attorney named Paul Anderson contacted the Sheelys. He closely follows football's ongoing concussion problem and reached out to them when he heard about their foundation. Still, even after receiving that email, the Sheelys didn't see any need for a lawyer. Yet after Kristen shared the email with Anderson, he asked for permission to do some digging. He called players. With the email as a starting point, he uncovered a story about Derek's death that bore little resemblance to what the Sheelys had been told by Frostburg State.

Anderson learned that in the days before his collapse, Sheely came out of drills four times, bleeding from the head each time. He had a bruise on his forehead and had complained of headaches for days. He talked to the trainer about it repeatedly. But he was never checked for a concussion. Coaches kept putting him back into practice, including a drill in which running backs run over each other, and the person being run over is not even allowed to defend himself. (The drill was changed after Sheely died.)

Garfield Lampkin, also a running back, noticed his friend was woozy, not right. "I was like, ‘Dude, just sit out. It's not even that serious. It's just practice. Sit out," Lampkin says. "The next play, that happened."

Sheely took off his helmet and collapsed.

Ken and Kristen first started The Derek Sheely Foundation because the more they learned about head injuries, concussions and second-impact syndrome, the more they wanted to raise awareness about concussions — the causes and symptoms and how important it is for athletes not to play when they have one, regardless of the sport.

It wasn't about football. "I don't want to come across as a kook who wants to end football," Ken says. "Derek would be horrified if that happened."

The Sheelys do, however, want to change the culture of ignorance and faux toughness that pervades football. They propose a head injury "hero" program to reward players who have the courage to sit out with concussions — as well as coaches who force players with concussions to sit out. They created a concussion awareness kit and send out as many of those as they can to youth programs and high school programs and anyone else who will take them. They sponsor a charity run in their son's name and endowed a scholarship at Frostburg State in his honor.

On Aug. 22, the two-year anniversary of Derek's injury, the Sheelys sued the NCAA, Frostburg State head coach Tom Rogish, Schumacher, assistant trainer Michael Sweitzer and the helmet manufacturer.

The Sheelys say they didn't want to sue, but they say they ran out of options in their quest to find out what happened to their son. They wanted — still want — the NCAA or Frostburg State to investigate the case. They can't believe a young man is dead and neither has done anything to find out what happened. They can't believe the NCAA investigates parties thrown by agents, but not the death of a player. They can't believe other coaches get fired for foul language, but Frostburg State coaches have faced no consequences after a player died in practice. (Rogish resigned at the end of this season.)

The NCAA, beyond offering condolences to the family, refuses to comment. So does Frostburg State. The Maryland Attorney General's office represents the coaches and trainer. Assistant Attorney General Katherine Bainbridge filed a response in the case in November. Her filing does not address the story Anderson's lawsuit tells. It says the case should be thrown out because none of the allegations, even if they are true, meets the legal standards for any of the Frostburg State plaintiffs to be held liable.

With the NCAA and Frostburg State unwilling to seek or provide answers, the Sheelys asked the Hershey Medical Center to do a case study on Derek's death. That query is ongoing. In November, U.S. Representative Linda Sanchez of California, who grilled NFL commissioner Roger Goodell about the NFL and concussions when he appeared before Congress three years ago, cited Derek's death when she called on the NCAA to come up with stronger concussion policies to prevent players from returning to play after suffering head injuries.

After Derek died, the Sheelys expected that cleaning out his apartment would be a horrible task, and it was. They packed up his clothes, his books, his video games. But they found more than that. They found a ledger Derek had been keeping, and the ledger told yet another story. It showed that not only was Derek paying his way through college, he was paying some of his roommate's bills, too. He didn't have the money, so Derek helped him out.

Looking at his son's careful handwriting in the ledger, Ken thought about the anxiety he felt when he forced Derek to sign that contract to allow him to go to Frostburg State. "I was just dumbstruck, thinking how much I was worrying about him, if he was going to be able to manage his life," Ken says. "Here he was not only managing his life, but taking care of other people."

Two years after the Sheelys found that ledger, Dwayne Washington is buying a house. The only reason he has credit good enough to do so, he says, is because those were his bills Derek was paying.

Kristen took Derek to get his driver's license when he was 17. When he got to the part about whether he wanted to be an organ donor, he checked yes. He told his mom that if he died he wouldn't need the organs anyway.
At the hospital, as his death approached, doctors took Ken into another room and presented him with a list of organs. Which would he like to donate?

Whatever Derek could give, Ken gave. He checked yes to everything.

When Ken finished signing the papers, he and Kristen stood with their son for the final time. "We were told we could be with him. But only for a few moments," Kristen says. "Because they had to do what they had to do."

As soon as the Sheelys left the room, doctors went to work. The organs always come out in the same order: Heart, lungs, liver, pancreas, kidneys. They don't necessarily go to recipients in that order, because the recipients could be as close as the next room or as far as several states away. The heart can live for five hours in between bodies, and with good planning and preparation can be taken up to 500 miles. The other organs last longer between removal and transplantation, and other tissues, such as tendons, can be kept and used for months. Due to the amount of medication doctors gave Derek after he was injured, some of his organs could only be used for research.

Donor families and recipients are anonymous at first — and they only meet about 30 percent of the time. Donate Life Maryland, which oversees transplants in Maryland, coordinates the first point of contact. If the donor family and recipients choose, they can reveal their identities to each other after that.

In the 27 months since Derek died, the Sheelys have heard from five other recipients. Like that horrible email about Derek's death, letters about his gifts of life arrive anonymously. "They're excruciating. You go right back to the hospital in a second," Kristen says. "Even though you just read the news that a man can see now, because of Derek. And I want Derek."

The letters tell stories of lives that Derek changed. A man can play soccer thanks to Derek's ACL. Two men can see because they have Derek's corneas. Two men are alive because each has one of Derek's kidneys — one speaks Spanish and the other works at the Department of Energy, where Derek interned and Ken has spent his entire career.

Experts in the organ donation community say a person as young and healthy as Derek could have his organs and tissue go to dozens, even a hundred people. "You could have a whole room full of people with pieces of Derek," Kristen says. "I would really like that Army, that's for sure."

She would love to tell members of that Army stories about the special man whose parts they now carry in their bodies. But Kristen says the thought that some recipients might not respond, might not want to hear Derek's stories, and might not want to tell their own stories of how Derek helped them, scares her. That's why she can't yet bring herself to answer the letters she's received or to send letters to recipients she hasn't heard from yet.

It's safer not to ask and to just know this: Somewhere, out there, the members of Derek's Army are sharing their own stories today, not about Derek, but because of him.

David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the third installment of his five-part series.

Previously:

Part I, Destination everywhere

Part II, Buying a masterpiece

I will be honest: I was going to give Abbas some money even before he sort of saved my life. He was the first person I'd spoken to in something like five hours, I believed his tale of woe, and he seemed like a nice enough dude. Also, like most people, I'm a soft touch for Canadians.

More than that, though, it was too easy, after wandering the shimmering, towering, skronkingly loud and somehow also shockingly desolate construction zone of Doha's West Bay, to imagine Abbas just walking those blocks forever, waiting in vain to see another pedestrian. It was easier still to imagine him walking home later that night, still sick in the gut and broke as a joke, the traffic bright and blazing and close for all seven miles along the Corniche.

But he grabbed my shirt and so prevented me from chest-bumping a white Range Rover that was suddenly hauling tinted-window ass around a blind corner. The corner had been blinded by a banner depicting the tower that would rise there, whenever but probably soon. Work was happening above us in that tower, the intermittent flares of welders working on 20 stories up sparking through the open floors and off the raw ceilings like practical lightning. I could not see this from where I was standing, of course. It was later, when I was once again impossibly lost, that I realized I was standing across a wide and buzzing avenue from the same building, and that its upper extremities were alive with work.

Anyway, we watched the Range Rover that didn't hit me as it elbowed into the loud traffic; another nearly identical SUV followed hard behind and did the same. It is possible that they were racing. It says something about how people drive in Doha that it's tough to know for sure.

I know that I saw other cars that definitely were racing. Two black Corvettes, identical, roaring after each other; a pair of motorcyclists, gone loudly and in an instant. Always, there were drivers who were not so much racing each other as racing the inevitable consequence of their own ultra-aggressive driving. In retrospect, I guess this was Doha's inner life playing out in swerving real time -- a city going in its various directions, the million stories in any city, all of them in this case pure 2 Fast 2 Furious fan fiction. At the moment, though, small and isolated as we were on an unfinished sidewalk, it just sucked.

I was out of sorts when I bumped into Abbas, both of us walking down a semi-alley between an unfinished convention center -- a shift of jumpsuited workers were arriving on white buses, incongruously bouncy Bollywood filmi songs bumping from the stereos, the men's faces mustachioed and blank in the windows -- and the sprawling City Center Mall.

I was, again, facing the eight harrowing lanes of Omar Al Mukhtar Street.

This was the third or thousandth time I'd hit this particular howlingly lively dead end. There was construction dust and concrete barriers and thrumming traffic and blinding sodium lights illuminating a trench that, another of those ubiquitous signs noted, would eventually become the track for Doha's planned metro system. What it meant was that I would have to once again switch back across the ass end of some other construction site or parking lot, and then do all this over again. And then, after enough consecutive right turns up and over rubble-strewn lots, I'd somehow find myself having to cross these lanes one more time. If you've been lost in a strange city, you know this feeling. The strange part was that I was, for most of the time I was lost, utterly alone on the sidewalks.

"Look at these people," Abbas said as the Range Rovers chased each other off, his voice chopping high in the same chirping register it had occupied for the last few minutes. "Look at how they drive. They don't care about nobody." Which is not fair, exactly, and also: "these people." But it had been a long day.

It was now dark in the West Bay, although the construction sites, which were everywhere, provided little bursts of scorching light and activity. I had been more or less lost -- first without a sense of where to go, and then without a sense of where I was -- for most of the day. I was prepared to accept Abbas' exhausted assertion that nobody cared about nobody, that this whole city was a terrible stupid cruel tasteless prank, a cruel and crass neoliberal gouge-scape, its architecturally distinguished skyscrapers a Potemkin fraud, each an elegant and bejeweled and jutting middle finger at the idea of a city as a place where people might live.

Also I had accepted that we would never get home. Or that we would, Abbas and I, finally somehow walk home, running out of sidewalk here and there as you do in Doha and so scrabbling up rocky moraines or darting out of traffic or being forced into the more dangerous realms of Extreme Jaywalking. Both of us doing that for something like seven miles, both of us hungry and cursing the city and meaning it, but only I being able to go home.

One alternative that occurred to me was to give Abbas cab fare -- it wasn't that much -- and to walk until I either figured it out or gave up. I could have paid for my own cab, too, of course, if I could find one. I was not thinking right. "Only for the rich," Abbas was saying, the shiny SUVs rushing by in the new dark, weaving, honking at each other but not really bothering with us, two poor idiots trying to walk through a neighborhood that didn't exist yet.

In all the time I spent walking around Qatar looking western and lost and so probably pretty vulnerable, Abbas was the only person to ask me for money. Even in the souk, where ordinarily merchants would be demanding that I touch or try on or sample or smell whatever they were selling, the mood was oddly sedate. One man wiped some strange chartreuse root-derived essential oil on my hand without quite asking me if he could, but he also said both please and thank you. There are no beggars in Qatar in part because there are virtually no unemployed people in Qatar -- the unemployment rate as of June 2013 was an astonishing 0.1 percent.

This is very much by design. People like Abbas -- a Canadian citizen born in Pakistan, he introduced himself by flashing his passport -- are not allowed in the country without a job. They are very much their sponsor's responsibility, and expressly not the responsibility of the state. There is no path to citizenship in Qatar, and so for the vast majority of the people in the country -- for Abbas and the Filipinos working in the Starbucks at City Centre and the well-paid American geologists working for the national petroleum corporation and the South Asian laborers building the 84,000 hotel rooms Qatar will need for the 2022 World Cup -- the relationship with the state is strictly a business one. Foreign nationals looking to work in Qatar cannot enter the country without a work contract with their future employer. When the contract is fulfilled, and only when the contract is fulfilled, they can leave.

This is a thing that happens to the poor, faceless laborers imported from Bangladesh and Nepal to work on unnamed infrastructure projects -- the new stadiums for the World Cup have not yet broken ground -- but not just to them.

The Algerian soccer player Zahir Belounis was marooned in Qatar for 19 months after a dispute with his team, which refused to pay him $164,000 in back pay and also refused to let him leave the country. He finally got out in November, about a week before I arrived. "I heard that maybe Qatar will change the rules for footballers," Belounis told the BBC after his release. "But for me, the value of a football player and a worker is the same. If you cancel the system for a football player, you need to cancel it for everybody." For all the many real and laudable reforms already underway or planned in Qatar's labor system, the kafala, or sponsorship, system doesn't seem to be going anywhere. It reduces massive migration into a frank business transaction, and that is how Qatar wants it to work.

This sounds a lot cleaner and clearer than it is in reality. In Doha News, a very good English language paper widely read among expats, a longtime Qatar resident of Jordanian descent explains how the system doesn't work as part of his argument for the creation of a new, "permanent resident" status:

I have spent nearly all of my life in Qatar. I have been through the school and university systems and eventually got a job here, and am trying to get my career on the right track. If one day, I decide to change jobs and am unable to get a No Objection Certificate from my current employer, I would have to leave the country and could not return to work for two years... That possible future makes it difficult for people like myself and others in the same boat from feeling stability and security in our lives. That little niggling doubt, that it could all come crashing down over a piece of paper, is always there.

It is maybe surprising to learn that Qatar has comparatively progressive labor laws on its books. Workers may not work more than 48 hours per week. There are 10 hours of legal overtime at a rate of time-and-a-quarter, a mandated "rest day" each week, and guaranteed "breaks not less than one hour and not exceeding three hours, for prayers, rest and meal taking." The Ministry of Labor has struggled, for various reasons, to enforce these laws during the current period of furious expansion, although there have been indications -- and even some criticism in what's generally a quiescent national press -- that the state regards this as an embarrassment.

More importantly, the regime is moving -- both through the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee Workers' Charter (very happily given to me by the PR people for the World Cup bid) and another, not-yet-public charter at the Qatar Foundation -- to make dramatic and laudable changes above and beyond improved enforcement of the laws already on the books, changes aimed at breaking the broader institutionalized system of exploitation that exists in the international labor market.

Still, the fundamental economic relationship is not likely to change: while in Qatar, the contractor is effectively the sovereign authority for the workers in its employ. Qatar is home to something like 250,000 Qatari, and 1.8 million independent contractors.

Abbas is one of those. He was due to start a job in several weeks at one of the city's posh shopping malls, and would soon be joined by his wife of three months -- "She is just 21," he told me, "and very nice," before noting with not a little frustration that his very nice wife had not wired him the $200 he needed to pay for necessities. His time in Qatar had not been a positive one. He was paying 1,500 Riyals -- about $500 -- a month to rent a bedroom in an apartment near the airport, probably not all that far from Doha Sports Stadium.

"Right away I eat one meal and I get infection," he told me. "I am in hospital for 14 days, spend fucking 9000 Riyals because I have no insurance. I make a mistake, now I have nothing until the job. This whole country, it is too fucking expensive. Only for the rich. You can't even get a job without money." The food at the City Centre mall is too expensive and no good, he tells me. As established earlier, the drivers are terrible. The bus system -- surprisingly comprehensive, if seemingly not widely utilized -- requires the purchase of a multi-ride card for 30 Riyals, even though individual rides cost just three Riyals. "It's bullshit," he concludes, referring to the food at City Centre and the new bus card system and, it seems safe to say, everything else.

This is the (unverifiable) experience of one unlucky guy, of course, and he was quick to allow that he had it better than many others. When his job starts, he will have a place to stay with his wife and what he described as a good salary. He will pay no taxes, like everyone else in Qatar. After all that he's been through, and with all the problems he has with the country, Abbas plans to settle in Doha. He and his wife are adopting a girl from their village in Pakistan -- "my little niece" -- and the plan is to bring her up in Qatar, where she will never be a citizen but will almost certainly be better off in a number of ways than she would have in a small village in Pakistan.

This is the puzzling crux at the heart of Qatar's growth. It is almost certainly different for the city's sex workers -- they're there, of course, reportedly in the bar at the W Hotel -- and may be different for the nation's many domestic workers, a community about which Amnesty International will issue a report in 2014. But for all the big and small miseries that routinely befall them in the country, and despite the essential and fundamental shittiness that awaits them there, the people who will make the World Cup possible came to Qatar because they saw an opportunity that did not exist in their homelands. Knowing what they know thanks to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International and The Guardian and the rest, they are still doing this. If Qatar itself can sometimes seem like a very architecturally distinguished funhouse specializing in refractions of globalized neoliberal economics' various false inevitabilities and forced choices, what brings these workers there is notably less complicated, simpler and crueler. They are making a new country happen, but the choice that brings them there is not new at all.

For those men -- and they are overwhelmingly men -- Qatar is as good a place as any "to make develop," as a Filipino cabbie put it to me. He'd been in the country for eight years, and while there was nothing there to do besides work and sleep, he said it worked well enough for him. He had an apartment and was making enough money to send a good amount home and still get back to Manila every two years. This may not sound like a good deal to you, but of course it's not your deal to make.

I left my hotel on a beautiful late morning for the long walk to West Bay, and saw the city rising and risen as I walked. There was work being done everywhere. Construction cranes are a sort of skeletal super-skyline everywhere in the city, if nowhere more so than in West Bay; they are there to complete Doha, and in a sense spindly shadows on the horizon already complete it, serving as they do of a reminder of how much is not yet finished.

Smaller construction machinery was everywhere on my walk: digging up the in-progress park along the Corniche, or rising and falling behind various barriers, or idle while workers caught a few minutes of mid-day rest, sprawled in earth-mover-shaped shadows. On a small island near the West Bay, I saw a lone tree, no buildings, a rudimentary boat landing and an orange construction vehicle.

The closer I got to the West Bay, the more clear it became how unfinished it was. The Corniche was bustling, here, with westerners jogging or riding bikes and Muslim families sprawled on the sod in the sort of slow-motion picnic I'd seen in MIA Park the day before. But the buildings that comprised the already recognizable and intensely photogenic skyline -- the pyramidal Sheraton on one end, looking every bit the Reagan-era architectural marvel it is, and the tubular Doha Tower in its light-up scrim and the twisting glass of the Qatar World Trade Center at the bright middle -- were not representative of the neighborhood. There was, more to the point, not a neighborhood to represent.

I crossed the Corniche and found that the buildings were mostly inaccessible. Several of the ones that stood out most dramatically from far away were, up close, revealed to be either unfinished or just not open. At one dramatic sand-colored tower that rose nearly 50 stories from a dramatic Taj Mahal of an entrance, a fountain trickled over purple mosaic tile and plastic sheeting blew in the breeze where the doors should have been; the front gate was high and locked up tight. Some of the tallest and most dramatic buildings on the skyline were half-clad in glass; the upper floors were naked and visible straight through. The stooping cranes dressed them, slowly.

One avenue in from the Corniche and there were smaller buildings, government ministries, all older and less ostentatious and very much closed. Back around into Al Reyyan and there were a few hotels along the coast, either office buildings for sleeping in or identikit colonial fantasia along the lines of the Four Seasons.  In between was, almost exclusively, construction -- buildings in various frantic, sparking states of becoming, but decidedly not yet places to be.

The city just sort of stopped west of the Hilton. There were some trailers and then there was just raw beach, lovely and seemingly un-owned. Well west of that were the lights of the luxury beach community at Katara, and far beyond that -- bright and characteristically unfinished -- were the new towers on The Pearl, a man-made island with its own Twitter account and what it touts as "one of the most exclusive marinas in the world." A very distant Doha, but still Doha, just further along and further out.

In the Doha in which I was lost, laborers -- faceless and shrunk and more movement than shape so high up -- could only sort of be seen. They were there, but not strictly visible. The sidewalks were windswept and empty; at first a few westerners bustled by, but then no one. Turn a corner and find a bunch of jumpsuit-clad South Asian workers eating identical brown-bag lunches and drinking chai out of paper cups. Turn another corner and they were gone -- up in some building or swapped out for the next shift's team on one of the white buses that hissed and parked along the otherwise quiet streets. The loud avenues belonged to Mercedes and Range Rover; the side streets belonged to graceless farting Mitsubishi Fuso trucks and slug-like Tata buses.

There was no street food; no one is sponsored by a contractor to shave shawarma at streetside. There was not even any street-level retail to speak of. After blowing off the dining options at City Center, I wandered in vain looking for a restaurant, any restaurant. One option, which seemed to be named Spice Boat: Heaven's Kitchen, was in the first floor of a luxury residential building, and appeared somehow not to have a pedestrian entrance. The only other options were in hotels: a $20 burger in the smoky Zamaya bar at the Hilton, where expats drank Foster's on tap and quietly watched Bayern Munchen win a Bundesliga blowout, or an expensive sushi set at the Four Seasons. I passed and passed, and was famished when I finally ran into Abbas off that alley.

I got lost again and again on the same unnamed streets. The landmarks seemed to change: a giant orange crane showed up and got to work, rendering a familiar streetcorner new and strange. I noticed a luxury mall across an impossibly impassable avenue -- construction and construction barriers, six lanes of traffic, ditches like open wounds -- and wrote it off as another place I wouldn't be able to eat. After I don't know how many turns and turn-backs, I somehow found myself at the mall's entrance. I walked into The Gate -- "We're Almost Ready, Are You?" a banner read outside the just-opened Audi Boutique, which was indeed a boutique that sold Audis. A man at a piano began playing a psychedelically twinkly version of Lionel Richie's "Hello." The food options were a place called Montreal Bread Company and one of those bizarre crypto-pizza places that disproportionately show up in Asian luxury malls. I left and got lost again.

By then I was really hungry, it was really dark and there were no cabs to be had. I walked towards the skyline's bright, empty towers, the traffic too fast for cabs to stop along the Corniche and nonexistent on parallel avenues. The stadium lights were on at the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex, but nothing was happening there.

Then I was back on the Corniche, walking alongside a wall painted by little kids to illustrate various lessons -- the importance of exercise and eating a healthy diet, things like that. I was talking to myself at this point, I'm fairly sure, just little dumb affirmations and profanities, mostly. I know that after crossing a difficult intersection I indulged in some frankly weird overemphatic Kobe-style hand claps.

There was no one around to hear or see or notice. I was the last pedestrian in Doha.

On the Corniche, I quickly ran out of sidewalk. This had happened all day; Doha is not so much an emerging city as an erupting one, and the pedestrian pathways frequently either dwindle into sand or are interrupted by sudden piles of unplaced or displaced paving stones. I found myself waiting for a backhoe to finish doing its thing so that I could pass. It stopped, turned to me, and dipped in a sort of dinosaurian bow. I took a few steps towards it and saw the man in the backhoe's cab signaling, courtly, for me to pass. I waved and he waved back, and I passed under the rumbling orange machine's resting trunk. A few minutes later, I somehow found a cab. Some minutes after that, I was ordering a kebab at an Iraqi restaurant in Souk Wakif.

I can tell you what it tasted like -- lamb-y and delicious, soft with fat and braced with onion and spices, frankly fucking heavenly between torn bits of flour-y clay oven khubz bread -- but that would not convey the relief I felt upon tasting it. I had walked into and out of a Doha that did not yet exist, where I saw a great many people grimly building a planned city for people who also did not yet exist: the guests who would stay in those unfinished hotel rooms, during the World Cup and maybe after, people who would work in those still-naked offices and who would someday cook dinner in the condominiums presently swept through by the breezes off the Arabian Sea.

I left that city and made it back to the other one, the one that already existed. I ate in an artificial market, built by an authoritarian government on the footprint of another market that had been there for hundreds of years before being razed for something newer and cleaner. I ate there, at an outdoor table oversweetened by the sickly shisha smoke from the restaurant next door. I watched tourists and non-tourists walk by over clean new cobblestones. I watched two men in dishdasha laugh and drink tea. A couple at the next table playfully debated ordering dessert in German, then ordered it in English. And I was free to come and go as I pleased. I was the luckiest man in Doha.

David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the fourth installment of his five-part series.

Previously:

Part I, Destination everywhere

Part II, Buying a masterpiece

Part III, Only for the rich

Well, it's complicated. Just because it's FIFA and it's the World Cup and so of course it's complicated. But a short version I guess would be that FIFA is FIFA, which is to say it's this sort of smuggo mafia of puffy, predatory globo-elite males in suits, all of them dedicated to extracting some sort of rent from the world's totally helpless and justified love for soccer. And FIFA being FIFA, it has all these wildly un-transparent internal processes -- everything done by design in secret, endless dodgy handshake deals between men whose handshakes are mostly worthless -- that seem almost to incent lawlessness.

And so the result of this is that the very fact that the World Cup is awarded in the way that it is, by the people that award it, creates this ambient sense of corruption. It's just very difficult to imagine this bunch of crooks using the system they built to make a reasonable decision for the right reasons. And this is true even if they make the right decision! Because it's the bribe-takingest, patronage-swappingest and generally sketchiest organization of its type in the world, it's basically impossible to assume FIFA picked Qatar to host the World Cup in 2022 because of how good Qatar's bid was. There is no reason to assume that this organization is awarding World Cup bids, or doing anything else, for anything like the right reasons.

It seems reasonable to suspect anything, in fact. There are both good reasons and bad reasons to believe that Qatar crossed various ethical lines in its pursuit of the World Cup, but maybe more to the point what lines are we talking about, exactly? None of these suspicions would seem quite so credible, let alone suspicious, if not for FIFA's involvement.

But yeah, of course voters were not persuaded solely by Qatar's stirring and well-produced 35-minute video pitch and the star power, fulsome Francophone praise and granitic grin of Zidane. Of course not. Who and what are we talking about, and can we maybe talk about it like grown-ups?

I was sitting on a prefab veranda behind a hotel called the Grand Heritage, drinking sweet Moroccan tea, when I said some version of the words above. It was a beautiful late afternoon in Doha, and the sun was setting over the Aspire Zone, the sprawling sports facility built in 2004 by Qatar's previous Emir. I could hear birds singing in the trees surrounding the Aspire Zone's new soccer fields; a woman who worked for the 2022 bid later told me that this birdsong was fake, piped in through speakers planted around the premises.

I was speaking to James Dorsey, a Moroccan-born writer on soccer in the Middle East and professor at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. He is an old hand in the Gulf, and first visited Doha less than a decade after independence. "This was 1981," he told me. "They called the Sheraton," a grim pyramidic Reagan-era ziggurat at the far end of the Corniche "an architectural marvel." I was trying to answer a question he'd asked, and had admittedly run long in my answer. He shook his head: no. "That's how Qatar got the World Cup," he said. "I asked why Qatar got it."

This is an easy enough question to answer in one sense, both the how and the why, for all its apparent and crude sportscaster-y overdetermination: Qatar wanted it the most.

This is not just a cliché: each nation bidding on the World Cup makes some calculation regarding how much it's worth to them, and the World Cup was worth far more to Qatar than it was to, say, Australia. We can see this simply in the calculations that both contenders made: Australia was willing to spend in the tens of millions of dollars to get itself World Cup-ready, and Qatar was willing to -- if only because it needed to -- spend in the hundreds of billions-with-a-B dollars for the same thing.

"Every bidder does a cost/benefit analysis," Dorsey said. "Australia puts a dollar figure on that: $45 million, that's what it's willing to gamble in hopes that it wins the bid. Could they put $200 million on the table? Of course they could. It wasn't worth it to them. But if you're doing this as a key pillar of your defense and security, your cost/benefit is very different. It's worth that much more."

Qatar would, of course, also have to spend that much more to make it work. There were three large-ish stadiums to be expanded to World Cup standards, and nine new stadiums that needed building. All of this would happen in a nation roughly the size of Connecticut, and which is for the most part frankly uninhabitable. Leaving aside the question of whether or not a World Cup should be held in a small desert country that does not yet have a full slate of sidewalks in its capital city or a handle on how to enforce its own labor laws, it seems more or less reasonable that it would cost $220 billion to stage it there. This is to say nothing of the solar-powered cooling system that would make it possible - "harvesting the power of our friend the sun," per Qatar's 35-minute bid video - which could indeed "change the world forever" if ever it came into existence, and which hasn't yet come into existence. (Doha's Al Sadd Stadium has air conditioning below seats and on the field of play, but it's generator-powered.)

In his since-redacted piece for ESPN, the British journalist Phil Ball described that video as a truly inspiring cinematic work. Having seen it, I can say that it is honestly pretty good, if maybe a little heavy on the inspiring lite-Arabic music. But the video, besides showing Qatar's will and capacity to make its case -- compare this example of Qatar's pitch to this example of Australia's, note the difference in conception and execution -- is not wholly bombast, big talk and wishful thinking. Yes, it makes a big deal out of both the novelty and sustainability of holding all those games so close together, but this is another one of those things that happens to be true regardless of which sketchy soccer entity is saying it.

To have the World Cup in Qatar is to have the World Cup in very close quarters, which is not necessarily bad -- fans could indeed see two or three games in a day, and could conceivably swipe their Qatar MetroCard to see those games without so much as getting into a car. In the video, Pep Guardiola smilingly makes this very point. Granted, this would involve taking a Metro that does not yet exist to stadiums that do not yet exist, and then watching two teams play in a microclimate made bearable by world-changing technology that also does not yet exist. But a salesman is got to dream, and also, crass as it may seem, if such an implausible multi-layered miracle can be bought, Qatar would be one of the nations that both could and would buy it.

But, again, with all the things in this world on which to spend money -- Damien Hirst installations are just the beginning -- and with the dismal track records of such expenditures paying off for the nations that spend on this sort of thing, given all that: why so much, and why on this?

The answer is complicated, and certainly more complicated than Because The Emir Wanted It. Of all the risible sentences in Ball's retracted report from Qatar, the one that came to seem the most ridiculous after talking with people working for the World Cup bid -- call it Q22 if you really want to sound like you know what's up -- and familiar with Qatar was this: "at the swish of the emir's gold pen, new laws come into effect." Bizarre huzzah-for-authoritarianism tone to the side, this is not really correct. It's confusing a country without democracy for a country without politics. Qatar has only the barest cosmetic modicum of the former, and a suffocatingly large amount of the latter.

Domestically, that politics expresses itself through a vast half-Soviet, half-Dilbert bureaucracy -- "everyone has to change one sentence in everything," one person told me, "and then they get to say 'I fixed it'" -- and factionalism within the ruling Al Thani family.

Complicating things further, the Al Thani family is, and pardon my political jargon, freaking huge -- a staggering 20 percent of Qataris are related to the ruling family. Some Al Thani's write defiant defenses of Qatar's conduct against "imperial Western Islam-o-phobia" in the Qatar Chronicle; other people with the same last name will argue for more moderation. (Sometimes it's even the same Al Thani doing both.) None of these Qataris vote, of course, but that is not to say that their opinions don't matter. "There are different schools of thought within society, and they run the gamut," Dorsey told me. "The emir ultimately has to balance that. This is a country that is not immune to coups."

So it's complicated, and of course it's complicated. Qatar's regional situation is even more so: the nation is, geographically and politically and in terms of sharing its massive natural resources, caught between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are the only two nations on earth that adhere to the strict Wahhabist sect of Islam, but religious affinity aside, Qatar's relationship with this ambitious, idiosyncratic and not widely loved regional power is as complicated as the rest of the world's. This is one of the most difficult places in the world, and Qatar -- which was not really a nation 50 years ago, and is figuring out both how to become one and what kind of nation it wants to be -- is in one of the more difficult spots in that difficult region.

This doesn't excuse any of Qatar's excesses, but it might help explain them somewhat. It's possible to view Qatar's collection of international luxury symbols -- Qatar's sovereign wealth fund owns Harrod's department store in London and Paris Saint-Germain soccer team in Paris and those diamond-encrusted Damien Hirsts and, yes, the World Cup -- as simply rich people collecting rich people things.

But there's almost certainly more to it than that. Qatar's quest to become a global brand, not in the glib corporate-Twitter-account sense of #brand but in terms of becoming a thing recognizable as an agglomeration of attributes and values and so on, can and probably should be understood not strictly as an exercise in autocratic vanity, but as a sort of public diplomacy and as an attempt to assert soft power.

This is another way to look at all those donations that Qatar may or may not have made to all those national soccer foundations during the FIFA bidding process, or to view Q22's promise to donate the upper tiers of the modular World Cup stadiums -- 170,000 prefab seats, ready to be filled -- to nations TBD after the World Cup. This helps Qatar avoid what one Q22 PR person described as "the white elephant issue," while also functioning as yet another valuable gift from a country that cannot afford to be averse to buying friends.

That sort of financial diplomacy -- or, if you prefer, "spreading around bottomless oil money in a desperate but not unwise attempt to create alliances" -- worked exceptionally well for Kuwait. It worked both in terms of raising its international standing and ensuring that, when the region's reigning bully came kicking in the door, the rest of the world came to throw him out. Qatar's vast wealth will do more to protect its future than its poignantly small army -- less than one-twentieth the size of Saudi Arabia's -- ever would, or could. Of course the World Cup is not just a collection of soccer games. But it's not just a boondoggle, either.

The Aspire Zone, which Qatar built to host the 2006 Asian Games -- by all accounts a great success -- consists of sprawling buildings built for swimming, diving, basketball, team handball and other sports, a number of Technicolor-lush soccer fields (both field turf and grass), the Aspire Sports Academy, and the requisite miles of windswept flagstones. Here and there people burble up: Aspire Academy kids heading to or from practice, expat kids fresh out of the pool marching out of the Just Family Fitness Center making fart noises with their armpits, the idle security guards that are everywhere in Doha. One of them chases me, slowly, off the Aspire Academy campus. He's exceedingly polite about it.

The other notable feature of the Aspire Zone, besides the towering and rather garish Torch building, is the Villagio Mall, which is "inspired by Venice" in the same way that the food at The Olive Garden is inspired by that of Mario Batali. It's a sprawling, rather endearingly over-the-top mall that features both a canal system and a hockey rink. It would be possible for someone with a good enough arm to step out of the Applebee's in the Aspire Zone and throw a baseball over a South Asian man paddling a gondola and through the window of a Tom Ford boutique. There was a terrible fire there in 2012; adults and children died in a nursery that was not built to code. The people responsible, who included a member of the Al Thani family, went to jail for it.

Walk through Villagio and you will see the things you usually see at malls -- also a hockey rink and a Pizza Hut serving a "minted beef flatbread" and other strange things -- and for the most part hear only one language spoken. Seats are segregated by sex at the multiplex, but the films showing (I saw an Aussie buy a ticket for Bad Grandpa) are in English. Cash register conversations and the ubiquitous welcome-to-the-store greetings and prices and menus are all in English. This is not the native language of Qatar, of course, but it has become something very much like it.

"A local Qatari checks into this hotel, he doesn't do that in Arabic," Dorsey said. "You go shopping, you're shopping in a foreign language in your own country. The issue of Qatar for the Qataris is real, there's a real fear of losing identity, of losing control. It's unique to this part of the world. There is no other part of the world that has this demographic layout. When you talk about national identity here, you're talking about existential fear. On one level, it's simply 90 percent of your population is foreign and you're six percent of the labor force. You've got all the money in the world, but on the other hand, deep down, you know that it can't go on this way."

What Qatar wants with the World Cup, and why it wants it, is yet another a complicated thing. But Qatar is a complicated place -- a deeply conservative nation confronted with the necessity of wild, enormous change, all of it due immediately. The 2022 Committee talks about the World Cup as a catalyst of change, and is not totally blowing smoke. But, as can be seen everywhere in the erupting-market chaos of the city, there is a point at which change is no longer a choice or a thing that can be directed, but a sort of gravitational fact.

At that point, things change much more than they are changed. Money can be spent to try to shape the change that's coming, but there isn't enough money in the world to stop it. There's something poignant about watching Qatar figure this out. It wants the world to come, and then it wants the world to leave; it wants to be seen, and it wants to be left alone; it wants to consume all the extravagances of modernity without losing any of its traditions. This is a complex and contradictory and maybe impossible collection of wants, but that's how wanting works. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with getting. That takes care of itself.

David Roth traveled to Qatar for a closer look at the World Cup's future home. Below is the final installment of his five-part series.

Previously:

Part I, Destination everywhere

Part II, Buying a masterpiece

Part III, Only for the rich

Part IV, They wanted it more

To arrive in Doha is to walk into the airport of a vanished nation. The arrivals terminal can be reached only after a long bus ride through a sprawling tarmac-and-sand moonscape. At one point, the bus will pass other buses on a four-lane road on which only airport vehicles drive.

This was the first of several times during my visit to Qatar that I was reminded, incongruously, of the scrubby, sweltering strip mall goofscape of Southern California's desert nowheres. There are similar rectangular storage facilities for living, similar oafish two-story highwayside retail, a similar Gaussian distribution of your shittier fast food franchises. I counted three Hardee's, three Pizza Huts, two KFCs, a Popeye's and a Ponderosa Steakhouse. In the wide spaces between and around all the gloss and new marble, there is a shockingly large amount of Riverside in Doha.

The arrival terminal in Doha, too, could be in San Bernardino, if San Bernardino were a Muslim monarchy. It's a skinny orphan out of a past that Qatar has dedicated itself to making unimaginable, and crowds further out into the desert every day. That is not what the departure terminal is like.

That one is and feels newer, glassy and high-ceilinged and futuristically impersonal, and so is probably more like what the sprawling and characteristically ambitious new Hammad Airport -- "runways amongst the longest in the world," a plaque on the wall promises, because of course -- will be like when it opens. Receive the necessary x-rays and pick up the exit stamp on your passport and you walk into a frenetic Duty Free mall that spans the length of a football field. There are perfumes and watches; there are souvenir t-shirts that read:

QATAR
I Love Camels
I Love Camels
I Love Camels

and there are five different types of dates from Saudi Arabia (I recommend these, they're delicious) and cigarette cartons wearing garish warnings ("CIGARETTES ARE HIGHLY ADDICTIVE DON'T START") and the inevitable Toblerones the size of Dustin Hoffman.

Most notably, there is a bustling liquor store. It is one of just two places selling bottles of liquor in the entire nation, and you'll need to show your boarding pass to buy whatever you want to buy, be that one of the weird blended scotches that seem to exist only in foreign Duty Frees -- King Robert II, Passport, the delightfully named "Hankey Bannister" -- or some of the more expensive whiskies in the world.

There are no real deals to be had here, and I didn't feel like carrying a bottle of Hankey Bannister around for the next 22 hours, but I did settle in that section to watch what must have been the foremost whiskey salesman in Qatar doing his thing. Insistently, and with what might have been entirely fraudulent knowledge, he maneuvered a man from the triangular mid-shelf whatever of Glenfiddich to the left, and then to the left again, where he framed up a choice between an old and ostensibly limited Macallan single malt and a $160 bottle of 15-year-old Jura.

The shopper was wary; the salesman was insistent. The salesman popped his finger off the dark blue box that held a bottle of Macallan; its price was probably something like two weeks' pay for him. "One taste," he said, "you will know that this is different." The shopper drifted unconsciously back rightward, and the salesman kept talking. The salesman placed the Jura back on the shelf behind him in what was in retrospect a very risky no-look pass.

There are several things to make of this, depending on what you want to make of it. Maybe this failing sale is a microcosm of the whole Qatar thing. Here was a laborer from the global south, far from home and in strange clothes, doing his utmost to provide an Internationally Recognized Luxury Experience to a wary out-of-towner, at no noticeable discount beyond the symbolic freedom from duty. The Single Malt Salesman of Doha was selling good stuff, although he had likely never tasted of it. But he was also bluffing hard, overplaying his hand in an atmosphere of buzzing artifice and extraction as the sale slipped away, pursued too hard and feeling maybe a little hustled.

Or it's not that, and it's just the market doing what the market does, the usual back and forth devourings. At least officially, Qataris do not drink, and neither do they make it easy for non-Qataris to do so. The one liquor store in the nation, QDB, is by all accounts a pain in the ass. This other one exists only for those who will not drink the booze that they buy there in Qatar. This is the fundamental duty-freedom of the market: whiskey (and gin and cognac and wine and everything else, it was a big store) is a thing people like to buy in airports to bring home. And if they want to buy, it would seem foolish not to sell.

There is a potential workaround for everything in Qatar, a price that when paid opens options up. That happens to be true more or less everywhere, but if you want all this to reflect some appalling cynicism or telltale hypocrisy or sinister expediency on the part of the Qataris, then it could very well reflect all that. But why would you want it to reflect that?  This is not to say that the enterprise isn't cynical or hypocritical or sinister/expedient. It's just to say that it isn't unique.

(Photo by RoB, via Wikimedia Commons)

It would also seem worth mentioning that there are bars in Doha, although they are all in hotels and offer from my limited survey exactly none of the things people go to bars to enjoy. Besides alcohol, that is, although drinks are comically expensive: a Manhattan made with Canadian whiskey cost nearly $20 at the smoky, grumpy bar in the Doha Hilton.

In that bar, a half-dozen men grimly, wordlessly smoked cigarettes and drank pints of Foster's while watching Bayern Munich win a Bundesliga game 7-0. This was during my lost afternoon in the West Bay; I wanted a beer as badly in that moment as I ever have, and was far enough into my wanderings that I might have settled for a Canadian Manhattan, and another. But I left the bar without having, and no longer wanting, either.

Which is another push/pull transaction playing out in the Doha fashion. Qatar will make available to visitors all the things visitors want, but they will always and only do it on their terms. It will be possible to get certain western things, but it will also be illegal to get them. An expat I spoke with explained the equipment necessary to watch a Big 12 football game in Doha. You will need, for starters, a stateside Slingbox workaround and some light smuggling, but it can be done. Friends of a friend live together as a gay couple in Doha, despite the fact that homosexuality is illegal in Qatar. Things can be done. People are doing it.

A great deal is possible in Doha, but the hosts will decide when and how it becomes possible, and the more you hurry them the slower they will go. These hosts, gracious as they are in some ways, will do only what they want to do, when they are ready to do it. They keep their own counsel, and will decide what they want to do per that counsel, and then when they are ready and not a moment earlier, they will do it. They will not go through the usual conciliatory motions at any point; they will, in fact, possibly act considerably less conciliatory than they actually are, for their own reasons.

When Qatar's willfulness manifests as the slow-walking of reforms and enforcement that could not just improve but save the lives of the nearly two million people pulling this dream nation out of unyielding sand, it seems unconscionable, repellent and even hateful. When it plays out as ambitious and concerted strategic action on reforming those very problems, which actions are undertaken in secret because they did not want to be seen as pressured into action, it is notably stranger.

"The Qataris are their own worst enemy," James Dorsey, the Middle East soccer commentator, told me in the Aspire Zone. "They actually have a reasonably good story to tell in terms of what they're doing on labor, and they're not telling it."

I was in touch with a number of people who do or have done business in the Gulf, none of whom were willing to speak on the record, a number of which pretty transparently resent this ritualized performance and signature shadowplay, and who see the Qatari as -- context and culture and circumstance aside -- kind of jerks.

But Qatar's sheer bloodymindedness and unyielding will -- and this is true even if every single allegation and suspicion of bid-rigging, bribe-greasing, favor-trading FIFA fuckery is true -- are what won Qatar the rights to spend its $220 billion on the World Cup in 2022. Look at it out of context, and it's hard to imagine a more inexplicable winner. Here is the most important sports event in the world: played in a tiny country, in impossible conditions; in massive stadiums that have not yet been built, and which will be accessed through a vast network of state-of-the-art infrastructure that also does not yet exist. (This includes fans staying in one of 84,000 or so new hotel rooms that have not yet been constructed.) Those nonexistent stadiums, Qatar still insists, will be cooled with a solar-powered technology that has not yet been invented. There would seem to be no limit on what limitless money can buy, but it is hard to escape the sense that this, right here, may be that limit. And yet.

And yet Qatar won this, willed it and won it knowing what that would cost and what it would mean. The nation seems committed to making it work, and it may well be that it could work. Whether they deserve it or not is both a strange question and now beside the point. They won it, however they won it, and their task now is to earn it. If Qatar takes that challenge as seriously as they did the bidding process, we might admit the possibility that they somehow pull that off, too.

There is both single malt scotch in the Wahhabi emirate and some strained but functioning justification for it. There are wills and there are ways, and if the will runs the right way, this will have worked. That process will almost certainly bring, in its own frustrating time, more rights and better lives for the people who do the dirty, dusty, dangerous work of making this strange new country from scratch. That is important.

That is the most important thing under discussion here. If what's given on the human rights front will invariably be given grudgingly and too late and in a way that will probably seem somewhat peculiar, Qatar will at least give it. They'll give it in their way, because -- in its wealth and its weirdnesses, its uglinesses and uniqueness and strange stilted beauty -- Qatar will defiantly and always and only be Qatar.

That means it will be an idiosyncratic sort of apartheid state, top-heavy and authoritarian and unfree, wildly rich and wildly unequal, great and small at once. Qatar wants more than anything to remain Qatar, and for that reason I believe it will. That may not be a place you'd want to live, but they don't really want you to live there, either.

In its profound multi-layered opacity and Byzantine family-business politics, Qatar will always be an especially foreign nation among foreign nations. But there is something recognizable in its defiance, its dedication not to be told what to do or be seen to have been told what to do. Nations in general tend to be this way -- self-justifying and self-defeating and selfishly stubborn and blinkered and too slow to change, even when they know they must. One good reason for this is that humans also tend to be that way.

I got a box of Saudi dates at the Doha Duty Free. My wife loves them, and I became a fan on my visit, devouring them wherever I saw them, which was most everywhere. At the duty free register, in the maelstrom of all this merciless and blearily automatic multilingual commerce -- it was also 1:15 in the morning, I should note -- I asked the cashier about the swaggering whiskey salesman. Who is that guy, or something like that.

The cashier smiled and rolled his eyes, either at the mention of the salesman or at this goofus American making such strange conversation in the middle of the night. "Well, he...," the cashier began, and a European couple suddenly beached themselves next to me, bumping the cash register's podium with a meaty and near-simultaneous thud. They asked the cashier if they could pay there. He said yes and they got in line behind me. It was time to complete the transaction.

So I paid my money down and got what I wanted. The cashier asked how I wanted my change: in dollars or Riyals.

INDIANAPOLIS -- When Danny Granger checked into the Pacers’ lineup late in the first quarter against the Rockets on Friday night he received a thunderous standing ovation. A few minutes later he blocked a shot by Dwight Howard and the cheers came cascading down from the balcony. He took seven shots and missed six of them, which was to be expected after missing all but five games the last two seasons. But the one he hit also brought the crowd out of their seats.

"It was awesome," Granger said. "Just to be able to play in front of my home crowd again was a breath of fresh air."

The crowd’s reaction wasn’t surprising. This is Indiana after all, not Philly. But there was some angst about Granger’s return to a team that has become one of the league’s best. Pacer coach Frank Vogel isn’t worried. A few weeks prior when the team was in Boston, he told me that Granger would "be a beast" when he returned and that it was only a matter of time before he got his legs under him and recaptured his form.

During his pregame chat with the Indiana press, Vogel deflected question after question about how the former All-Star forward will fit on a team that now features Paul George at Granger’s old small forward position and the mercurial Lance Stephenson on the other wing.

"He’s a team first guy," Vogel said. "I don’t think it’s going to be a challenge at all. I don’t think it’s going to be a matter of fitting in. It’s going to be an adjustment period. The only way anyone can evaluate his play over the next month or so. He’s going to have some nights where he looks like the All-Star Danny Granger and some nights where he looks a little bit off."

Vogel isn’t hung up on traditional nomenclature, preferring guards, wings and bigs as his personnel groupings. To Vogel, Granger not only adds scoring punch, but also offers another big wing who can match up with the likes of Carmelo Anthony, LeBron James and Kevin Durant.

What did make Vogel happy was how Granger moved the ball, didn’t force the action and dug in on defense. It didn’t hurt that the Pacers played perhaps their most complete game of the season and buried the Rockets by 33 points, making his return a happy subplot as opposed to a main focal point.

"That’s exactly what he needed to do for this basketball team and I thought he had a great performance despite the numbers," Vogel said.

Granger’s return is an interesting reference point for a team that relied so heavily on his scoring for years, and then took off to unexpected heights when injuries forced him to the sidelines.

Best of Sunday Shootaround

* The Knicks: a disaster in three acts
* Brad Stevens and the Celtics' tomorrow
* Dawn of the Paul George era
* 'Tank' is a four-letter word
* Anthony Davis is already here
* Bill Russell gets his statue in Boston
* Stats, storytelling and Sloan
* New Orleans dreams big
* The rise of Paul George
* The stories of 2012-13

On the one hand, George has become a superstar in his absence while Stephenson has emerged from a curiosity into a force, albeit an unpredictable one. On the other, he fills an immediate void on the wing in their second unit that has tried to make do with the likes of Gerald Green and Orlando Johnson. It’s also telling that the Pacer players have few reservations about Granger’s return, believing that he will fit seamlessly back into the rotation.

"I think you saw it all tonight," George said. "He was able to share the ball. He was drawing guys to him. He didn’t force anything tonight and when he had opportunities to be aggressive offensively and look for his shot, he did. That’s what you’re going to see. Some nights he’s going to explode offensively. Some nights he’s going to miss a couple."

In some ways Granger is fighting the ghosts of the old Pacer teams that were coached by Vogel’s predecessor, Jim O’Brien. It’s an unfair proposition because while those were Granger’s most productive seasons, those teams are not remembered fondly here and Granger made sure to draw a line between then and now.

"I haven’t played that way for four years," he said. "Even when I was the leading scorer we punched the ball inside to Roy (Hibbert) and David (West). I led the team in scoring, but I got offense in transition, spot up three’s, coming off pindowns. Two years ago when we lost to Miami I wasn’t like a catch the ball, go one on one. I was never that type of player anyway. That kind of stopped after OB left where I just had to shoot a lot of shots. I think people forget that. The way I score, I don’t have to have the ball in my hands. That’s important with this team because we’ve got guys who are really good with the ball in their hands."

As for starting, Granger says he hasn’t given it a second thought. His only concern was getting back on the court. As for worries that he’ll disrupt what has become an excellent team in his absence, he was even more succinct. "No, that’s all I’m going to say. It doesn’t bother me."

On Nov. 22, the Boston Celtics scored just eight points in the third quarter against the Indiana Pacers, en route to their sixth straight loss. That game came on the heels of a disastrous road trip that saw them not just lose but get blown out by the Timberwolves, Rockets and Spurs.

It left them with a 4-10 record, which was essentially where everyone thought they would be at that point in the season. The losses mounted, the draft beckoned and no one gave them much of a second thought.

The next night in Atlanta, coach Brad Stevens moved Brandon Bass back into the starting lineup ahead of injured rookie Kelly Olynyk and the Celtics beat the Hawks. They won at Charlotte two nights later and ran off an 8-4 record including wins over Denver and Minnesota. They also beat the Knicks twice, including a ridiculous 41-point spread at Madison Square Garden.

Even in losses, the Celtics looked far better than they had earlier in the month. They dropped a game to an inspired Nets team, played the Clippers to the wire and lost by a single point against the Pistons who had roughed them up earlier in the season.

Suddenly they were in first place, albeit in the woeful Atlantic Division, but they kept that in perspective. Even the woeful Knicks are only a few games out of first. The real story was found deeper in the numbers where an offense that lacked creativity and scoring suddenly came alive, averaging 104.9 points per 100 possessions, per NBA.com.

During that 12-game stretch, Avery Bradley shot 48 percent from the floor and 50 percent from behind the arc. Jared Sullinger averaged 15.4 points and 7.4 rebounds. Jeff Green played consistent basketball. Word that Rajon Rondo was getting closer to a return brought further optimism and then came the rumors of a deal for Rockets center Omer Asik.

It’s important to keep everything that’s happening with the Celtics in context. There is opportunity for someone -- anyone -- to emerge among the crowded field of mediocrity in the Eastern Conference, and a team with Rondo, Asik, Bradley, Sullinger and Green instantly becomes decent, for lack of a better word. ‘Decent’ is enough to enjoy a solid season and maybe even a playoff round or two considering the sorry state of the conference, but that’s not the end game.

That may seem like a curious route for the Celtics to take considering they are in the early stages of a rebuilding process. Why should they strive to be decent now when the lottery holds so much promise? The answer again is opportunity.

When Asik became available, Danny Ainge offered two players in Brandon Bass and Courtney Lee, whose contracts that extend past this season, and a protected future pick. Those are not prime assets. The Rockets rejected it and the Asik dream died on the vine when Houston’s self-imposed deadline passed. What’s telling is that the Celtics didn’t up their offer.

The chance to add a player they like at the cost of contracts they don’t want and a protected pick is a chance any smart front office would take. If it makes them better in the short run and opens up cap space in the long run, then all the better. Ainge has been clear from the beginning that he’s not putting all his chips on securing a top pick.

As has been noted in this space before, Ainge feels like he is dealing from a position of strength thanks to his young nucleus, his treasure trove of draft picks and Stevens, who has adapted quickly to the pro game. There is a constant evaluation process happening in Boston and no one should be surprised if they make a move that feels like one step forward, or even two steps back.

Christmas Day is arguably the NBA’s biggest regular season event and we’ve got no less than five games on the docket. Unfortunately, the schedule-makers did us no favors with some of these matchups, but we’ll play along.

12 P.M. ET Bulls at Nets

Take your time opening presents. Enjoy a late brunch. Go out and make a snowman. There’s nothing to see here except two beaten down teams staring at the harsh glare of tattered expectations and broken dreams. But hey, maybe Kevin Garnett and Joakim Noah can get into the holiday spirit. Just keep those courtside mics on a 35-second delay.

2:30 P.M. ET Thunder at Knicks

This will be hyped as Kevin Durant vs. Carmelo Anthony and that’s fine as far as it goes, but it might be time to introduce the Sunday Shootaround Drinking Game to help us get through this one. Take it slow, we’ve got all day.

Drink once whenever:
Mike Woodson stares incredulously at the court
Andrea Bargnani takes an ill-advised jumper
J.R. Smith takes a shot, any shot
The Knicks botch a 2-for-1

You should be good and toasty by halftime and on the same elevated plane with your favorite Knicks bloggers who have been absolutely brilliant during these trying times.

5 P.M. ET Heat at Lakers

The following matchups would be better than this one:

Miami vs. Indiana
Miami vs. San Antonio
Miami vs. Oklahoma City
Miami vs. The Other L.A. Team
Miami vs. Golden State
Miami vs. Houston
Miami vs. Portland
Miami vs. Kentucky

8 P.M. ET Rockets at Spurs

Ok, now we’re talking. Two good basketball teams and traditional rivals to tip-off the evening slate. You’ll probably have to involve the whole family so here’s some talking points:

1. Dwight Howard’s free agency was less about a pampered star wanting his own spotlight and more about establishing a new paradigm in franchise building.

2. Extol the virtues of the corner three and both teams’ significance in making it such an integral part of the modern game.

3. Explain why that angry man in the sideline interviews is in fact doing performance art.

4. Have a Euro-step contest during commercial breaks.

5. James Harden’s beard: Real or fake?

10:30 P.M. ET Clippers at Warriors

This one is for us. It’s our present from the league from suffering through an abominable slate of early games. Let’s all meet up on Twitter and talk about it.

The Shootaround goes on holiday hiatus next week, so let’s check in on some of the awards before saying goodbye to 2013.

MVP: LeBron James, Miami

Let’s get down to brass tacks, which means Kevin Love, Steph Curry and LaMarcus Aldridge have got to go. Great players having fantastic seasons, but it’s time to get serious. We’d love to include Paul George, but not yet. That leaves us with three choices: LeBron, Kevin Durant and Chris Paul.

You can make a solid case for all three. Durant is the best scorer, CP3 is the best playmaker and LeBron is the best combination of everything really, along with being the superior defender. It’s that last bit that separates him -- along with that insane .680 True Shooting Percentage -- but it still is a very thin line of distinction.

That says less about LeBron than it does Durant and Paul, and as always with the MVP race, there is a risk in overstating narrative. Bron’s backers will decry any attempt to unseat him as illegitimate, while his detractors will use any excuse to anoint a new king. That’s unfortunate because this should be about three wondrous talents having exceptional seasons. Right now, today, LeBron is the pick.

Rookie: Michael Carter-Williams, Philadelphia

Considering the struggles of Anthony Bennett and Cody Zeller, along with injuries to Otto Porter, Alex Len, Nerlens Noel and C.J. McCollum, this is one of the more underwhelming rookie classes in years. Even the front-runners have had injury problems.

That left Victor Oladipo by default and he’s veered wildly between great games -- like going for 26-10-10 against the Sixers -- and truly awful: witness his 1-for-12 outing against the Jazz. While inconsistency was expected as he adjusts to a new position and Oladipo still looks like a gem, it doesn’t make for a Rookie of the Year.

Despite missing 11 games, Carter-Williams has posted numbers superior to the other guards, so he’s the choice. Utah’s Trey Burke is also making a push now that he’s healthy. This race, depressing as it is, has barely begun.

Sixth Man: Reggie Jackson, Oklahoma City

Jackson is averaging about 12 points and 4 assists and rebounds per game, which are solid numbers to start the discussion. But bench play is about impact and changing the flow of the game. The Thunder are 16.2 points better than their opponents per 100 possessions when Jackson is on the court, per NBA.com. They are essentially neutral when he’s on the bench.

Jackson plays great when teamed with OKC’s other young players like Jeremy Lamb and Steven Adams and he’s also been a great fit with the starters, which is what sixth man play is all about. Honorable mention to the great Manu Ginobili who has recovered from his injury-plagued season and is doing Manu things again.

Defensive: Roy Hibbert, Indiana

He’s the anchor of the best defense in the league and his impact is so noticeable that it would be difficult for him to not win the award this season.

Coach: Terry Stotts, Portland

Brad Stevens and Jeff Hornacek deserve tons of credit for making their teams competitive and playing a style that suits their respective personnel. Charlotte’s Steve Clifford has made the Bobcats respectable with even less talent.

But the vote here is for Stotts who has led the Blazers from also-ran status to one of the best records in the league. That’s an immense jump and even more difficult than taking a bad team on paper and making it competitive.

Chapter 1

You have to understand what kind of pressure I was under. No kid -- and at 23 I was still definitely a kid -- should have to be under that kind of stress. The day the Yankees called Jimmie and me to the majors, the club president, Ed Barrow, sits me down and says, "Now look here, young fellow. It is my job to spend Colonel Ruppert's money, and spend it wisely. I paid $100,000 to the A's for you and only you. Your partner Reese, being older, cost a lot less." As if he thought I hadn't gotten it, he leaned over his desk, all crazy caterpillar eyebrows, jutting jaw, and bulging eyes, and poked a finger into my chest, saying, "You!"

"Yes, sir," I said. What do you say to that?

"You know how much the Colonel paid Harry Frazee for the Babe? Do you?"

I shook my head from side to side.

"He paid $100,000, the same as I paid for you. You see what I mean?"

I shook my head up and down. I mean, I did see it and I didn't, but I understood that "yes" was what I was supposed to say.

"Good. Then welcome to the New York Yankees." He extended his hand. It was gigantic, like a pot roast. I heard later he had been a bare-knuckle boxer in the last century, that he had challenged the Babe to a fight and the Babe, afraid for his life, backed down. I don't question the Babe's courage; I would have backed down too. I shook his hand, which had the texture of sandpaper. My own palms were sweating. He didn't seem to notice. "Someone outside will direct you to the ballpark for your uniform. Good day, Mr. Lary."

So that's how I began with the Yankees, and what was worst about it was that Barrow hadn't even told me what I was doing there. I was a shortstop, but they had several with the club. Mark Koenig had batted second for the 1927 team, which everyone felt was the greatest team of all time, even, or especially, the players who were on it. That was why, Hug explained to me later, they felt they could let up every once in awhile -- they had already done the greatest thing anyone would ever do on a baseball field, so why try to do anything at all? Hug -- Huggins to you -- he was the manager. Little guy. Very little. They killed him with that attitude, you know, literally killed him. Maybe Koenig was something like that, and that's why they were looking at kid shortstops that year, I don't know.

In addition to Koenig and me they also had this noisy Boston kid about my age, a little rat by the name of Leo Durocher. Yes, the very same who would later become famous as the manager of the Dodgers and Giants. I don't call him a rat because we were in competition for a job, but because he really had that kleptomaniac quality rats have, covetous and calculating, dressing up in borrowed or rented clothes, stealing what he couldn't borrow right out of someone's locker, hitting the swankier speaks after pawning somebody's class ring.

Miller Huggins (Wikimedia Commons)

Oh, how Hug loved him. That was the one way I never understood Hug. He was a civilized man. He was a lawyer, you know. He smoked a pipe, and so I always associated him with my father, and my father was a gentle man, quiet like Hug. Yet, Hug wanted the rat to win the job over me. He didn't say so, I could just tell, the way he kept Durocher on the bench with him when he wasn't playing, talking and pointing at this and that on the field, pointing at me sometimes. That was another strike against me, that I was up against the manager's pet. I'm not saying Hug ever treated me unfairly, because he wasn't like that unless you wronged him. I just mean you knew where he stood on the matter. I never could understand it, Hug and Durocher.

Durocher couldn't hit like me, in fact he couldn't hit at all. The Babe, who disliked him even more than I did, called him the All-American Out. The Babe was as coarse as they say in many ways, and often misguided, but there was also no darkness in him, and he couldn't tolerate it in others. Still, even he had to admit that Durocher was a joy to watch in the field. He stole grounders from the outfield grass like he stole watches from the clubhouse.

Was it any wonder that whenever I got out there I started fumbling like I'd never seen a baseball before? A batter would knock one my way and I'd scamper after it and snag it in plenty of time, then straighten up to throw over to Lou at first and something odd would happen. Instead of just letting go and throwing the pill on a line, straight on like a bullet to the target, I'd start to think. Sometimes it would be about some girl who had turned me down in high school, or someone in the stands would catch my eye and I'd be sure it was my father, or ask myself, Who the hell wears a red sweater on a hot day like today? Sometimes, I'd just think about thinking about the throw. That's when bad things would happen, terrible things. The ball would end up in the stands, or the outfield, or Lou would have to dive for it and strain his back, and then everyone would be wondering if the Iron Horse would have to break his consecutive games streak because of me. And we'd lose games, games we would have won had I just been able to make a simple throw like I had been making all my life.

One game against the Red Sox I let one go through my legs with the bases loaded. Runners are flying everywhere, fans screaming and throwing bottles. It was one of those times when you're bent over, all you can see is the ground and you don't want to straighten up, but you know you have to. All right, I'm a man, I tell myself, I'll face it. I straighten up -- and I swear the runners are still running, an endless line of them, like more than four men can score on a play, and Meuesel hasn't even run in to pick up the ball, and there is Hug on the field. At first I figure he is  going to hook the pitcher, but he's making a beeline for me, his finger repeating this "C'mere, c'mere" gesture. I look closer and Durocher is right behind him, pulling on his glove, and it hits me that I'm the one being hooked.

As I went past Hug on my way to the dugout, he said, "I didn't ask for you." I didn't say anything. I didn't know what to say. I knew he hadn't, so why fault the man for his honesty?

About a month into my stay in the big leagues, we were in Washington -- everything happened in Washington for some reason -- and I pretty much made us lose all by myself. We were up 3-1 in the bottom of the ninth when Bennie Tate grounds one right at me and I boot it. The next guy up -- that little second baseman they had, I can't recall his name -- he grounds one far to my left, but not so far I couldn't have gotten it if I hadn't been so lost thinking about the last one that I got a late jump on it. They call that a single, but forget it, that one was on me. We get an out somehow, probably because I had nothing to do with the play, but our pitcher is rattled now, and though Hug made a switch or two, we never got another out that day. It was just single, single, single, and suddenly we're walking off the field losers.

I'm coming in from short, walking with my head down, when I hear someone say, "Hey." I look up and Bill Dickey is coming towards me, all smiles. Bill had come up a year earlier than me, so even though he was younger than I was, I looked up to him as a veteran. I see the way he's grinning and I think he's about to tell me not to take it to heart, to forget all about it and go get ‘em tomorrow. I haven't even gotten as far as saying, "Hey yourself, Bill," when I saw a blur of motion and something struck me so hard on the jaw that I fell down, face first.

It was only after I felt the cool grass on my cheek that I realized that what had hit me was Bill's fist. I was trying to pick myself up when he grabbed me by the shoulder, flipping me over so I was looking up at him.  The smile was gone. "Get serious!" he said, puffing. We started at each other a moment. He extended his hand and I took it and he pulled me to my feet. I spit blood and never said another word about it.

Lou Gehrig, Joe Cronin, Bill Dickey, Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Gehringer, Jimmie Foxx, Hank Greenberg, 1937 All-Star Game (Wikimedia Commons)

* * *

Chapter 2

After that, I managed to pull it together for awhile, mostly because Hug gave Durocher the shortstop job outright and moved me over to third. It was hard for me to watch him playing my position, especially when I was doing my damndest to be worth $100,000, and no third baseman had ever been worth that -- Pie Traynor was, maybe, but I knew I wasn't him. What I wanted even more than to be Pie, though, was to be a big-leaguer and not get sent back to Oakland. The Oaks were good to me, and on the Pacific Coast League circuit you could see bigger crowds and get better pay than in some big-league cities, but once you'd been up it wasn't the same.

I somehow hung in with the bat from then on despite spending most of my time listening to  a steady stream of Durocher's profane, self-congratulatory chatter coming from my left. Hug had moved me up in the order and was hitting me second nearly every day (for all his love of Durocher, Hug parked him in the eighth spot and never considered moving him) and I paid him back by hitting .300 for awhile. In late September, Art Fletcher told me that Hug wanted to see me in his office. Even though I had been hitting, the club hadn't been doing so well. We were 15 games behind the A's and it was a cinch that the Yankees wouldn't be going to the World Series for the first time in four years. As far as I could tell, the only thing different on the club from the year before was me, so I figured that being called in meant that Hug was ready to tell me that he had figured out where to pin the blame.

Hug was at his desk, his chair tilted back, his eyes closed. He wore a pained expression. He was sitting under some kind of lamp, and even though his face was bathed in its yellow light, I could tell that his skin was ashen. I closed the door behind me. He didn't open his eyes, but said, "Lary? That you? Sit down."

I sat across from him. "You've really surprised me these last weeks, the way you've played."

I thanked him, still waiting for the axe to fall. "You've changed my opinion. You're going to be around for awhile. That's why I wanted to talk to you."

I smiled, or I think I sort-of smiled. By that time, even I wasn't sure I belonged. I wasn't taking anything for granted, especially not with Durocher still on the team. "I've had it with this club," he went on. "A lot of the men who have been here, they're through, washed up with me and Barrow. They've won too much too easily, and now they're fat and happy, thinking the game owes them something, like a World Series share. I told Barrow that once it's all over we're going to have to back up a truck, cart ‘em away, and start over."

Leo Durocher (Wikimedia Commons)

I stared, wide-eyed. Break up the club? Scatter Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Combs to the four winds? "There's going to be some real kicking when they figure it out. They're going to be bitter that they've pissed this ...this great thing away" -- he swept his arm widely, taking in the thing, whatever it was -- "something that never has happened before and will never happen again." He scratched at something just under his left eye. When his hand came away, it had left a mark, red and angry, the one spot of color on a field of grey. It didn't fade the whole time I was with him. "Don't let them get to you. Don't let them poison you. We built it once and we can build it again, with or without them. Without anyone. You understand? It may not be the same, it can't be. They will write ‘Here lies the manager of the 1927 Yankees' on my grave." He opened one eye, but didn't look at me. He seemed to be staring right into the lamp. "You weren't part of that," he said.

As if he had to remind me. I swallowed once and nodded. "It's good that you weren't," he said, eye closed again. "You're unspoiled, see? Sure, you make mistakes, but you're not one of those who keeps the club's detectives busy at night, who looked at me when I got here and saw nothing but a shrimp that they could push around." He winced and touched his finger to the mark on his face, so that I didn't know if the pain came from the memory or from the mouse under his eye.

"Some of them are going to be awfully sore that they're gone, but the ones who are still here and see the writing on the wall will be worse. They're going to be shouting, cursing me, cursing the man upstairs and the man above him. When you hear them, and you will, I want you to take away something different. They may be cursing my name, but what you'll hear is in its place is ‘I,' all right? It may be ‘Hug' coming out of their mouths, but they have no one to be mad at but themselves, and they know it. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He tilted his head back in his chair and angled his face so that the mark was up close to the light. He breathed deeply, and the sound that came out of him was the sigh of what my father used to call the noise of a 40-hour man working a 60-hour week. I never knew if pop meant it as praise or condemnation, I just knew I was looking at it then. I must have made a sound myself, because he said, "You still here? Run along now like a good boy."

I stood and got out of the room as quickly as possible. He hadn't looked at me the whole time. As for me, it was the last time I saw him alive.

* * *

Chapter 3

Things happened quickly after that. Hug was gone. That sore under his eyes, it was ... something like a time-bomb. I never did find out exactly what it was, but it festered and poisoned him. They took him away with a temperature of 105. Does that scare you? It does me, though even now, all these years later, I can't help but think about it sometimes. Imagine, him then, the pipe-smoking lawyer-manager, the sane center of any room he entered, even -- and especially -- the Yankees' clubhouse, reduced to hysteria, the little man's hard-won dignity stripped away at last by the fatigue of years, by Babe Ruth and Carl Mays, and a tiny spot on his face that boiled his brain until all he could see were demons. He died screaming.I think I gloat on that a little, for what he put me through. Does that make me a bad person, or does that just make me human? Some of the things I've seen, I think maybe that's an artificial distinction.

Durocher had lost his best friend on the club. It didn't take him long to make the best of it. About a month later, somewhere between the stock market crash and Christmas, he told Barrow to go fuck himself during a contract negotiation. Before the words were out of his mouth, Barrow had had the flashy little son of a bitch blacklisted in the American League and packed him off to the last-place Reds. They could do that in those days, push you out whenever they wanted, and there wasn't a damned thing you could do about it.

When the stock market fell, my money followed Durocher out the door, just as if he had filched my wallet before leaving. I didn't care, not much, because I knew what the rat's exile meant for me: shortstop was down to just Koenig and I, and if they had liked Koenig, why bring me and Durocher along in the first place? The job was a cinch if I could just keep my head on straight. Still, when I reported to camp the next spring and the new manager, Bob Shawkey, told me I had made the team, I had to ask, "Really? On the level?"

Yankee Stadium monuments, L to R: Lou Gehrig, Miller Huggins, Babe Ruth (Getty Images)

"You hard of hearing, kid?" Shawkey said. Once again I was getting off on the wrong foot. It's a talent, and I was consistent with it, unlike fielding grounders. Still, I didn't start, not once, for the first six weeks of the season, just sat there, watching. I barely even pinch-hit. Shawkey stuck me on the end of his bench and forgot about me, or so I thought. Even then, I wasn't too upset. I mean, you know what the last man on a major-league bench is? A major-leaguer. That's what I wanted to be, and I figured the chance to do more would come later. Besides, I had muffed my first chance so badly that I figured I could only hurt my cause by going out there. On the bench, I brimmed with unutilized potential. On the field, well, that was a different story.

What I didn't know was that Hug's promised housecleaning was still on, even with Hug out of the picture. Barrow had heard what he'd said about changing things, and he was determined to honor the skipper's wishes. Even if it were too late to do him any good, it might still help the ballclub. Shawkey may have been manager, but to Barrow he was just another ex-ballplayer jerk. At the end of those six weeks, Barrow waived those thick arms and poof: Koenig vanished to the Tigers and I was the starting shortstop.

I still threw too many balls into the stands -- one is too many, really -- and I can only guess that I held onto my job because Shawkey was stuck with me. My mental confusion was persistent, despite my every attempt to change the subject, to distract myself. I got to know and love New York, especially the theater. I saw so many shows, left the clubhouse in evening clothes so many times, that the Babe started calling me "Broadway." I even started seeing my name in Walter Winchell's column alongside the actors and gangsters. It was embarrassing, but in a good way -- it inspired the kind of self-deceptive thinking I needed. It made me feel like I belonged. I was too young then to realize that just because you're mentioned in the same sentence as some famous actor or playwright or even Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth doesn't mean you have been accepted as one of them or even by them. You're just there. True acceptance follows accomplishment, and I didn't have that.

One night around that time I woke up panting from a nightmare. I had dreamed I had been in line to enter a great church, a huge granite structure that reached up towards a darkening sky. Over the door, carved in letters a hundred feet high, was the word NO. I asked the next fellow in line what it meant, and he said, "Everyone is told that Jesus died for his sins. Well, mister, maybe he died for mine, but he didn't die for yours. You ain't earned that yet." I didn't get a hit for three days after that.

All of this, this thinking, it cost me. In late June we were playing the Tigers and Liz Funk -- I bet you didn't know there used to be ballplayers with names like Liz Funk -- was on first. I was lost somewhere again, maybe thinking about some show I'd just seen or humming the tune to "St. James Infirmary," or wondering where my father was at that moment, and I hadn't quite realized that Lazzeri had flashed me the sign that said I was the one to cover second on a steal attempt, or that I had acknowledged same. I must have; I still don't know. Picture me, standing on the dirt, half fixated on home plate, half on "Ten Cents a Dance," none at all on Liz Funk, who has a lead I don't even notice:

Ten Cents a dance
That's what they pay me
Gosh, how they weigh me down!

Funk has crossed his left foot over his right and is pushing off down the track.

Ten cents a dance
Pansies and rough guys...

Shouting now. I come out of the dream too slowly, see him halfway down the line, see Hargrave already has the pitch and is rising out of his crouch to make the throw, and too late I break for the bag.

...Tough guys who tear my gown!

All three of us arrive at the same time, Liz Funk, the ball, the Rodgers and Hart tune, and me. Liz is safe, there's no doubting  that since I don't even have the ball yet, and I know that my main job now is just to catch the thing and keep it from going into center field.

Seven to midnight I hear drums...

I extend my glove hand, Funk extends his legs, and the ball is just the ball, moving hard and fast. Both Funk and the ball hit me in the thumb at the same time, so I'll never know which of them broke it.

Loudly the saxophone blows...

I could never listen to that song after that. I sat for two weeks with that thumb, but I didn't have to worry at all. Right off, Shawkey told me that my job would be waiting for me when I was ready, no matter what happened while I was ought, and everyone on the team rubbed my head and called me "Kid" and joshed me in a gentle way that told me that whatever I had been doing wrong, they hadn't been bothered by it. At least, that was what I thought at the time; it never occurred to me that they might have just been being nice. All I knew at that moment was that it took a broken thumb to tell me I could finally relax, that I had made it. Oh, what a fool I was.

* * *

Chapter 4

Even in my moment of triumph, I felt a little guilty, because as my on-field stock was rising, Jimmie's was plunging. Let's face it, though, it takes a special player to beat out a Tony Lazzeri, and Jimmie wasn't him. I don't know what the Yankees were thinking, asking him to try, or maybe they had to take him to get me. They called us the Keystone Kids in the PCL, and maybe the Oaks pitched us as a package. Maybe Barrow figured I'd play better with my double-play partner in town. I didn't, though; Jimmie couldn't help me with my problems because he had troubles of his own -- they made him Babe Ruth's roommate. I don't believe he got a good night's sleep the entire time he was in New York. Neither did I, but that was because I was going to shows, not running interference with Ruth's dames.

With Jimmie preoccupied with the Babe, 1931 was the year I got to be friends with Lou Gehrig. See, Shawkey was only 39 years old then. He had been a pitcher and one of that 1927 gang Hug had warned me about, and it must have been that Barrow thought that having been one of them, he would have their respect, or failing that, he could give ‘em as good as he got. Barrow couldn't have been more wrong. They knew Shawkey too well. They knew everything about him, what he liked and what scared him, what he would put up with and what he wouldn't, and they always pushed him to within an inch of every line they knew he had. Lou and I were the only two on the club not trying to walk all over "Sailor Bob," and so we became comrades, the only two serious guys on the club.

Jimmie Foxx, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Mickey Cochrane (Wikimedia Commons)

I say "comrades" and not friends because while I thought of us as friends at the time, looking back, I don't think that was true, and not just because of what happened later. When I think of all the talks we ever had, I can't think of a single thing he said or a conversation he ever started. Look at the pictures of him now, the same expression on his face in every one. That's the expression I remember, smiling serenely, mouth not moving, letting you know he was happy to be there, but nothing more than that.

Yet, what's your definition of friendship? Someone you can go to the game with? Grab a drink together on the night the wife lets you out? That's not mine. Mine is: A friend is someone who, when called upon, will make every effort to save your life. That was what Gehrig did for me.

But first I did something to him, that's how it began, and although I didn't realize it right away, that's also where it ended, never moving off of that same spot. It was yet another mixed-up year for the club, the third in a row of us chasing Connie Mack and the A's. We could hit with anybody, mostly because we the Babe and Lou were almost a whole offense by themselves, but despite old Sailor Bob having been a pitcher, we just couldn't get anyone out. Bob hadn't been the club's first choice to follow Hug, but their fourth, Barrow and Colonel Ruppert having been turned down by Donie Bush, Eddie Collins, and Art Fletcher. Even though they were fond of him given all the good pitching he'd done for the club over the years, when it turned out Shawkey had no special insight as to how to make anybody else pitch better, neither Barrow nor Ruppert felt strongly enough about him to argue for keeping him. In came Joe McCarthy, a career busher who had just been let go by the Cubs after a kind of coup by Rogers Hornsby.

Just like Durocher, Shawkey was gone before he even knew what had happened. There was no warning or explanation, just a thunderclap and some other guy standing in your place. It was a good break for me, because Joe had been watching from afar, had seen what I had gone through, and was impressed that I had stuck it out. Maybe because he had just been run out of Chicago he was impressed with someone who hadn't been run out of New York, I don't know, but he stuck me in the lineup and kept me there, and I finally started playing with some confidence. I got hot early, hitting .300 right out of the gate and knocking my first home run in the fourth game of the season. The rest of the team was right with me. The veterans on the team had walked all over Sailor Bob because he had been one of them, but McCarthy demanded respect and got it from everyone except the Babe, who thought he should have been offered the job. Even he didn't kick, not publicly, but only sulked whenever McCarthy wasn't looking.

In the meantime, he went right on doing his job. We were winning nearly every day, and even the Babe said we were going to win the pennant. "Who's gonna stop us?" he asked me one afternoon after he had knocked me in twice on two home runs off of George Earnshaw. Who indeed. How was he to know that the answer to the question was me?

That April, I caused Lou Gehrig to hit a home run that retired the side and lost us a game. It was my signature achievement in the major leagues. In my career I scored 100 runs three times, even led the circuit in stolen bases once. That year I drove in 107 runs; no Yankees shortstop before or since has driven in more than 78. Yet, what I did to Gehrig that day remains my monument to myself, the moment where my talent for turning gold to dross reached its zenith. After, I wanted to kill myself. I would have, if not for Lou.

It was a cold, wet, dark day in Washington, one of those afternoons where no one would have complained if they had just called the whole thing off even if no single element -- the steady, light rain, the high winds, the lack of sunlight -- was enough to cancel the game by itself. It's not like Clark Griffith had a good gate to lose, since the Babe wasn't playing. He had crashed into Charlie Berry on a play at home plate when we were in Boston a few days before. Nothing was broken, but he had lost all feeling in his leg and had had to go home in a wheelchair. He was still on bed rest and hadn't made the trip.

Griffith Stadium (Wikimedia Commons)

What point is there to playing a baseball game, any baseball game ever, really, without Babe Ruth? We played anyway. Well, you could call it playing. We gave up an inside-the-park home run when Ruth's replacement mistimed his dive on Ossie Bluege's line drive and not only missed the ball but dislocated his shoulder so that he could only lie there in pain and shock as Bluege circled the bases. That hurt, because Ossie would sometimes go a whole year and hit but one or two home runs. That was also the end of our only spare outfielder, because the Babe was in bed. Sammy Byrd, the usual reserve outfielder, had started in left so Ben Chapman, normally the left fielder, could play second so that the second baseman, Lazzeri, could play third in place of Joe Sewell, who McCarthy had benched for being from Alabama. Joe was a great manager, but he had one blind spot, which was he just hated guys from the deep south. That always struck me as odd given that he'd spent half his professional career in Louisville, but then again, maybe that was why. Rather than undo the whole mess by unbenching Sewell and sending everyone back to their regular places, Joe had Red Ruffing, maybe our best pitcher, go out to right field. Red could always hit, so I guess that made sense in its way too.

Things actually got worse from there. Byrd played the game in a strange funk, pulling up on a fly ball hit by Buddy Myer and making out like it was my play even though the ball was halfway to the fences. Later, with us down 8-7, he ran to third base on a comebacker Jimmie hit to the mound only he had neglected to notice that Chapman was still standing there, Ben having been held by McCarthy on the ball back to the pitcher. Joe Judge, the Washington first baseman, simply strolled across the diamond and tagged him out, killing the rally. All of that, though, came after my star turn.

I batted second that day. Dusty Cooke, who would shortly tear his arm out its socket, was batting third, Joe apparently not wanting to shake up his batting order any more than he had to with Ruth out. Lou, as he always did, batted fourth. Well, Earle Combs grounded out to open the game. I worked a walk, always a specialty of mine. Cooke struck out. That's when Lou came up and socked Firpo Marberry's first pitch a long, long way to center field. I lit out for second base and then third, knowing that given where he hit it either it was going to drop and I would be safe or it would be caught and the inning would be over.

The thing was, with the wind whipping the rain in my face and what a long trolley ride it was to deep center in Griffith Stadium, I had a hard time seeing exactly what had happened. I looked up and saw the ball come down, blinked the water out of my eyes, and saw Harry Rice tossing it in without any urgency, lackadaisical-like. I looked behind me and Lou was just kind of jogging along with a kind of disgusted look on his face. The crowd was quiet because there was no crowd. I made an inference, drew a conclusion: the ball had been caught, the inning was over. I touched third and turned for the dugout, wondering why Joe's eyes were bulging so as I passed him in the third base coach's box.

I skip down the dugout steps, take a drink of water, and look up just in time to see Lou jog down the third base line and touch home plate and the umpire's fist go up. "Out!" he called, Lou, three steps to the dugout, turning, a look of confusion and fury on his face.

"What?" I said cleverly. Griffith Stadium had a bizarre kink in the outfield wall where some homeowners had refused to make way for the ballpark 20 years earlier. As a result, center field featured an inward-projecting triangle like a ship's bow that cut around the holdout properties. The left-center field bleachers were snug against the bulge, so at any given game there was a sizable collection of fans for whom the action in right field (i.e.: the Babe) was only a rumor. If you were standing at home plate, the combination of white shirts and strange angles made it very hard to place the ball's exact location. Somewhere in that area, Gehrig's ball had been given an extra kiss by the wind and it had gone out -- that is, had been a home run -- and then bounced back in. Rice had thrown it back in because he hadn't known what else to do with it. When I peeled off for the dugout and Gehrig passed third, he had passed the runner ahead of him and therefore, according to the rules, was out, home run or no.

McCarthy rounded on me. "What was that?" he shouted.

"I thought -- " I began.

"You thought?" he roared, incredulous. "With what?" Give Joe credit, though. He left me in there. He didn't have a doghouse. You were either on his team or off it, and I was on his team. I started every game that year. Of all the Yankees, only Lou and I could say that.

At that moment, though, my only thought of Lou was somehow making it up to him. He was furious, and he was not a man easily moved to emotion of any kind. Instead of a home run, he had a triple. Instead of two runs batted in he had none. Ballplayers care about those things, especially the great ones like Lou, and that goes double if they have to play in the shadow of the Babe, to whom Lou was usually the runner-up in performance and acclaim. I couldn't look him in the eye when he came off the field, but later, after we had lost the game by the two runs I had cost us, I tried to apologize to him, but he turned his back and pretended I wasn't there. "Too bad about Cooke," he said to no one in particular. "Shame it couldn't have happened to somebody else."

* * *

Chapter 5

I didn't go back to the team hotel after the game. Not really thinking about where I was headed, I hopped a trolley car outside of the ballpark and rode it down into the center of town, where all the government buildings are. Paying no attention to the rain, I walked until I found myself standing at the edge of the Tidal Basin, the manmade inlet of the Potomac where they have all the Japanese cherry trees. I sat on a bench and watched the water rise and the grey sky fade to blue, then black. The wind that had made the game such hell whipped across the basin and threw up a fine mist that made interlaced patterns of moisture with the light rain that had continued all day. I was like sitting under a cold shower. I was shivering, but I wasn't truly aware of it except to think that it was no more than what I deserved. I wondered if the water in the basin itself was warmer than that coming down from the sky. I wondered what it would be like to walk in until the water was over my head, and keep going, and never come out again.

Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C. (Wikimedia Commons)

I intended to find out.

I sat down on the bank and pulled off my shoes and socks. I dangled my feet over the side and prepared to push my body over into the water, counting one, two --

Someone was calling my name. "Lyn! Hey, Lyn!" I turned. It was Lou. "What are you doing out here? Don't you know I've been looking for you all over?"

I hadn't been aware anyone had been looking for me and said so. "How did you find me?"

"You said something to Reese about taking a look at the waterfront." I had? I didn't remember speaking to anyone. "Gee, I felt terrible about the way I'd treated you and was worried you took it hard. I guess I'm the sap. Here I thought you were upset and instead I found you making like a duck, paddling your feet in the water." He paused, looked around, seemed to take note of the weather for the first time. "Come to think of it, that's not normal. You sure you're all right?"

"Did I say I was?"

The rain intensified. He pulled his hat down, sending a pool of water that had collected on the brim cascading down to his shoes. "Say, you could catch your death out here."

"That," I said, "was the general idea."

"So I was right, you are down about the game."

"Wouldn't you be? Think about it, Lou. When I joined this team in 1929 it was the defending world champion. Since I got here we haven't won anything. We've been through three managers in three years, and the only reason I'm even still with the club is that the first one died before he could make Leo Durocher his shortstop. I still throw away too many balls for my job to be safe and I always will. And today I pull a rock like that on the bases and I cost you a home run. Let's face it, the club would be better off without me."

He reached down, took hold of my arm, and pulled. I let him get me standing. "Listen you bird," he said, looking me in the eye, "I was plenty steamed about that home run, I admit it. But then I got to thinking: I figure if I'm lucky I can play until I'm 37 or 38. I'm going on 28 now, so that gives me about 10 years still to go. I've been coming to the plate about 600 times a year, so that means I'm going to hit another 6000 times. Simple math, right? I've been hitting around 45 home runs a year, so let's say that's one every 15 times up. It's a little better than that, really, but we'll allow a little room for a slump now and again. That means that if I keep going on in the same old way, I have another 400 home runs coming to me after this season."

"Or about 398 more than I'll have," I said sourly.

"The point is, I think I can afford to lose one now given that I'm likely to make it up later. Besides, if it's 399 or 400, who is going to miss one home run more or less? But" -- here he put on a mock-serious expression -- "if Colonel Ruppert cuts me for hitting one fewer home runs this year than last, it's coming out of your pay, got me?"

I forced myself to smile. "It will be my pleasure."

"Glad we got that straight. Now, come on, let's go before I catch a cold in my back and Joe fines us both for not being smart enough to come in out of the rain." I let him lead me away from the water, hopping awkwardly after him as I pulled on my shoes. Instead of going back to the hotel, Lou insisted we go to the movies. We saw the new Chaplin picture, City Lights. One long scene had the tramp trying to stop a friend from committing suicide by jumping into the water. I glanced at Lou to see if he registered the irony. His expression gave away nothing like comprehension.

When we parted company at the end of the evening, he patted me on the shoulder and said, "Get a good night's sleep and forget all about today. It could have happened to anybody, okay?"

"Okay," I agreed, smiling gratefully at his great generosity.

James Cagney and Joan Blondell (Wikimedia Commons)

I played the next day. Unable to concentrate, I went 1-for-6, made an error, and left Combs stranded on base three times as we lost in 12 excruciating innings. That night Lou insisted we go see another film, The Public Enemy, with James Cagney as the titular bad-guy. There is a scene, which later became famous, when Cagney smashes his girl in the face with a grapefruit half. It reminded me of the time Dickey had hit me after I had fumbled a game away. Again, I looked at Lou, and again I saw only a man enjoying a movie.

By the time we finally got off the road, Joe had dropped me from second to seventh in the batting order. I figured that was the writing on the wall, that the next step after "down" was "out." Lou must have noticed, because after our first game at home was over he said, "I'll be by for you around 6 o' clock." I shrugged and nodded -- we hadn't made any plans, so this was my first inkling we were going out that night -- but that was Lou's way; he wouldn't say two words when one would do, and wouldn't say one if a grunt or a nod would suffice.

He knocked on my door at the appointed hour. If it had been the Babe who had taken an interest in me, I might have opened the door to find not only the big man himself, but also a girl on each of his arms, one of them reserved for me. But Lou was unlike the Babe in every way, and when I opened the door I found him out in the corridor alone. To that point he had shown little interest in women; the veterans on the club couldn't recall him going on more than a couple of dates. Most afternoons after the game he went home to his doting parents. At least, that's what I thought; that day I found out the truth was a little different.

Not knowing where we were headed, I dressed up in my full "Broadway" get-up, which included a derby hat and spats. Seeing me dressed up like that, Lou gave me a queer look but made no comment. We took his car out to Westchester, where we stopped in a little Italian restaurant, a mom and pop place where the owners knew him. They favored us with garlic bread, antipasto, plates piled high with spaghetti and sausages. It was delicious, the best food I had tasted in some time, and I tucked in with a vengeance. I noticed Lou was a little more reserved in his eating. He seemed to enjoy my enthusiasm, though, and I was happy to please him.

It was early evening on a warm spring night. What were a couple of well-fed single ballplayers to do? Left to my own devices, I might have gone to a show, hoisted a few at a speak, maybe called up a girl and asked her to go out dancing. We didn't do any of those things. We hopped back in Lou's car and drove a few miles away to Rye Beach, a place I had never been before. We get out of the car and I see a boardwalk, rollercoasters, and a dance hall, and for one disconcerting moment I really thought Lou had taken me on a kind of date, a feeling that was redoubled when he paid my way into the amusement park.

We go inside and Lou makes a beeline straight for the biggest rollercoaster, a wooden monstrosity that seems to go on for miles and rises about 100 feet in the air. Before I can register an objection we're in the thing, the two of us sharing a car as we climb up, over, and through wooden rafters, plunge through tunnels, and are hung out over the water like dizzy seagulls. At least, I was dizzy. I looked over at Lou and there is the same happy-to-be-here expression he wore at most times.

Somewhere in the tunnel my derby flew off my head and vanished into the darkness.

About three and a half minutes later we stumbled off and the only thing I could think of was not muffing another play, this one involving cleanly depositing the contents of my dinner in the nearest trashcan rather than on my spats. Lou stood a few yards behind me while I retched up gallons of half-digested Italian food. "When we're at home I come here by myself most nights and ride the Dragon until closing," he said. "It relaxes me."

Airplane coaster, Playland (Rye, NY) (Wikimedia Commons)

"Relaxes?" I sputtered, trying to keep from heaving the rest of my guts out. "You really are the Iron Horse." I put my hands on my knees and took deep breaths, trying to stop the world from spinning.

"It never gets me that way. Maybe the Airplane will be more your speed."

"Airplane? I'm not getting on any airplane."

"It's not an actual airplane, it's another coaster, a little more tame, maybe."

"You sure?" I said skeptically.

"Oh, yeah," he said with what sounded like a little doubt in his voice. "It banks a little more, maybe, and it has that corkscrew feature about halfway -- "

"Lou," I said panting, "I can barely get through a ballgame without hurting myself. I don't think I am meant to corkscrew."

"Aw, shucks," he began, "I just thought we could --  That is -- " As he stammered, I realized I was looking at a disappointed little boy in the body of a grown man.

"That's all right," I said. "You go on ahead and ride the Airplane. I'll watch."

He brightened. "You sure?"

"Positive." I forced a smile. He nodded and hurried off to get in line.

That was how I spent most of my nights in the spring of '31. If we were home, Lou would take me to the amusement park, where I would watch him ride the rides. Sometimes we would go back to his house where Mom Gehrig would stuff me with sauerkraut and bratwurst, but I had learned my lesson -- I'd consent to go there after the trip to Playland, only after. On the road, we'd grab dinner and a movie. Once or twice he even consented to letting me take him to a show and introduce him to the kind of hoofing and warbling that got me going more than any roller coaster ever could. My first attempt, a Jerome Kern musical called The Cat and the Fiddle, came to a sudden halt where Lou was concerned when, right after the second act curtain, the ingénue sang "She Didn't Say Yes:"

She didn't say yes, she didn't say no
She wanted to stay, but knew she should go
She wasn't so sure that he'd be good
She wasn't even sure that she'd be good

He blushed furiously, jumped out of his seat, and high-tailed it to the lobby like he was legging out a triple. Being a bit thick, my next choice was that year's installment of the Ziegfeld Follies. I hadn't realized that the Depression had taken a big chunk out of old Flo Ziegfeld's gate receipts and the Follies, which had been running pretty much continuously since 1907, were on the verge of folding. The Follies had always been known for having the most beautiful girls on Broadway, but Ziegfeld figured he needed to add an extra touch of sex beyond that and engaged the notorious fan-dancer Faith Bacon that season. Well, Lou got one look at her in the altogether, shot me a look that if anything was even more harsh than the one when I negated his home run, and stormed out.

From then on we stuck to the amusement park. Over the weeks that followed I gradually forgot my depression and settled in to play the best baseball of his career. As for Lou, he went on just as he always had, but better: he played every day, batted .341, set an American League record with 184 runs batted in (which should have been 186) and hit 46 home runs. This last led the league -- well, sort of. He tied for the league lead with Ruth. It was as close as he would come to beating the Babe during his prime. Lou would finally win a home-run title outright in 1934, their last year together, when Ruth was a fat and gimpy 39-year-old playing part-time. If not for me, Lou would have beaten him at his own game when he was still close to the peak of his powers, another wound on my conscience I would struggle to heal.

* * *

Chapter 6

Baseball throws people together and it tears them apart. Lou's time as my friend and guardian would prove to be short. The same month that I hit bottom as a ballplayer I met my future wife. As you might have guessed, Mary was an actress. I'd seen her the year before in a film version of Good News singing "I'm Lucky and Love" and cleaning up broken dishes while the male lead sang "The Best Things in Life Are Free" and hadn't succeeded in getting her out of my mind for too long since then, a pert little brunette in an apron a guy could dream on. Well, in '31 she came to New York in a play and I wrangled an introduction. Things went quickly from there and we were wed in July. We've been in and out of love a few times since then and even broke up for awhile, but we're together now and I expect we'll stay that way.

Somehow, Lou met someone too, a lovely girl named Eleanor he'd met at a party in Chicago that same year. They began a correspondence, probably the best way for Lou to get to know anyone, and they were married in September of '33. She couldn't sing and dance like my girl, but she was perfect for him, smart enough to know how to draw him out and athletic, too -- she could ride a horse, whip you at golf, hold her liquor no matter how bad the speakeasy rotgut or bathtub gin you were serving, and finish out the evening by taking your money at the poker table. Most importantly, she had the gumption to stand up to Mom Gehrig and spring the big guy from her house.

As Lou and I were becoming less important to each other (if I was ever important to him), I was becoming less important to the Yankees as well. I opened up '32 hitting well enough, but that June I hit a slump both at the plate and in the field I just couldn't shake. I didn't make any more right turns at third base in the middle of someone else's home runs, thank goodness, but I wasn't helping either. I guess Joe got to the point he couldn't wait for me anymore, and that July he sat me down. A kid named Frankie Crosetti took my place at short, and although he couldn't hit like I could when I didn't have my head stopped up with songs and fathers and failure, I saw the plays that he could make, acrobatic, whirling stops and throws that I could only dream of, and I knew I wouldn't ever get my job back. And I was right -- Cro held onto that position for 10 years, until Phil Rizzuto came along and took it from him.

Frankie Crosetti (Wikimedia Commons)

I lingered on the Yankees bench for awhile. That fall I watched as we finally got back to the World Series and whipped the Cubs in four straight. That was the one when the Babe supposedly called his shot. I was looking right at him and I'm still not sure. What I do know for certain is that after the Babe hit his, Lou came up and hit one as well, though he didn't do anything dramatic like pointing. They both hit two that day. They were no longer talking by then due to some silly argument when Mom Gehrig criticized the way Claire Ruth was raising the Babe's daughter Dorothy and the Babe criticized Mom Gehrig, and the Babe was getting to the end of his big years, being 37 and having let himself go a little. They'd be together two more years without getting back to the Series, so it seems to me that if you were lucky enough to have been at that game you saw the two greatest teammates a team was ever lucky enough to put in one lineup at the last possible moment they were both in full possession of their mature powers. And I, for all my faults, I saw it all.

Then again, I had no choice but to watch: Joe went with Crosetti right down the line in that series. I didn't get off the bench for even one pitch.

I stayed on the sidelines all throughout '33, backing up all over the field. The next spring, after I'd begged Ed Barrow to send me somewhere I might play and get my career going again, he finally traded me -- to the Boston Red Sox, a team that had finished seventh or eighth almost every year since 1920. Well, fine, if that was what it took to get back on track, I'd make the best of it.

After announcing the trade, Barrow told the writers that buying Jimmie and me was the most disappointing deal he'd ever made. "Frankly," he said, "I've got to be ashamed of it."

I'd be traded many more times after that, and no one else ever felt the need to apologize for me as I went. I never did find much in the way of consistency. Some years you might have put me on the All-Star team if you had been picking it (though I never was named to one), others you'd wonder what I was doing on a major league roster -- and I'd be right there wondering with you.

By the winter of 1940 it seemed likely I was all done. In '39 I'd started with the Indians, been purchased by the Dodgers, where I had the pleasure of being put on waivers by my old rival Leo Durocher, and finished with the Cardinals. With all the moving around I never could get untracked, and I hit just .179. In '40 the Cards released me without even letting me get into a game. The Browns picked me up, but I couldn't do anything at the plate and in mid-August they gave me my release. I went home to California and waited for the phone to ring. It never did. At least Mary went with me; we had divorced in January, but by September we were ready to give it another try.

You know what was happening to Lou at the same time, how he started slowing up in '38 and then in '39 that he could barely play at all. On May 2, he finally took himself out of the lineup after 2,130 games. That June, he went to the famous Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and received the diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, slow paralysis, and on July 4, after he and the Babe had finally made up with an embrace before nearly 62,000 fans, he looked at all that surrounded him and pronounced himself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth.

Maybe I will sound selfish if I say this, perhaps you will think less of me, but it is the truth: at that moment, absorbed as I was in fighting for both my career and my marriage, I hardly took note of any of it.

Late that December, feeling panicked about my chances of ducking the onrushing end of my time in the majors, I took the train east to ask Ed Barrow if he might be interested in giving me one last chance with the Yankees. Crosetti was only 29, but he had slipped badly that year, hitting only .194 while playing every day. The Yankees had missed taking their fifth straight pennant by just three games, and I knew that inside the team's offices on 42^nd street fingers had to be pointed at Cro just as they  were once pointed at me.

Barrow was willing to see me, but he made me cool my heels for a few days before he would grant me an appointment. By the time I got to see him it was December 24^th, the day before Christmas. This last meeting went no better than our first. I had guessed correctly about their disenchantment with Crosetti, but was wrong about the shortstop's job opening up because Rizzuto was on the way. In fact, not only was he considered to be ready as of spring '41, but Barrow and Joe felt that the only reason they had failed to reach the World Series was that they had hesitated to call him up already, an oversight, Barrow said, "Which can only be chalked up to a kind of epidemic bout of stupidity" among McCarthy, the farm director, George Weiss, and himself. "Frankly," he said, "I've got to be ashamed of it."

I showed myself out.

Phil Rizzuto (Wikimedia Commons)

Before he and I had gotten down to business, Barrow had given me an update on Lou's condition and suggested I look in on him while I was in town. "He and Eleanor don't get out much now that his condition has worsened, and I know it would give him a lift to see an old friend." At a loss for anything else to do -- I had no contacts among Horace Stoneham's Giants circle and Durocher's Dodgers had already decided they wanted nothing more to do with me -- I pitched myself into a phone-booth and rang the Gehrigs' house in Riverdale.

A maid answered. I wished I could have afforded to give Mary a maid. She put Eleanor on. "Oh, I do wish you'd come," she said after I'd explained I was in the city. "Lou always feels so encouraged when one of the old gang drops by." I jotted down the directions and, not wanting to impose, said I'd be there after dinner."

Eleanor had done up her and Lou's house beautifully. Flowers burst from every border and crevice. The colors were so vivid and varied that it was as if the house was at the center of a static fireworks display. It made me sad to think that Lou no longer got to see it.

The maid answered the door and escorted me into Lou's library, which was really a trophy room that also happened to house some books. Every award he'd received going back to his Columbia University days was on exhibit. I marveled at his two Most Valuable Player awards, the silver trophy given him on that funereal day in his honor with the signature of every one of his then-teammates inscribed upon it. Prominent among them was the name Joe DiMaggio. Lou had had one year after the Babe had been let go to enjoy the spotlight on his own. He'd had what was, for him, a soft year, the team finished a close second, and the next year DiMaggio had come, captured all the headlines that used to be Ruth's, and the pennants had resumed. He was fated to always be standing in someone's shadow -- first Ruth's, then DiMaggio's, and finally the grim specter of his own withering illness.

I made a point of examining the row of World Series keepsakes, a series that began with plaques, graduated to inscribed watches, and finally arrived at rings. I was wearing the first of the rings, for the 1932 Series, in hopes of reminding Barrow of the better times I had made possible by getting out of Crosetti's way.

"Lyn, I'm so glad you could come," Eleanor said from behind me. I turned to look at her. The last time I had seen her she was 29. Now she was 36 and still beautiful in her trim and intelligent way, but I could see that worrying had taken something out of her. "I'll take you upstairs to him in a moment. Only, there's something I must ask of you, as I ask it of all his friends. You might have read in the papers about his disease, speculation as to his prognosis..."

She trailed off. I had read about it, but I was more impressed by how a doctor-friend of mine had put it: "It's a death sentence." "He doesn't know?" I asked.

"We don't talk about it," she said, clearly uncomfortable. "We always speak of the future, of his getting better."

"I understand," I said. "I won't say anything."

She put her fingertips on my forearm, a gesture of appreciation that I could see she had made many times now. "Thank you. Come on upstairs."

She spoke as I climbed behind her. "It's hard for Lou to get around much now, so we a good deal of time up here." At the top of the stairs she turned and spoke into an open doorway. "Lou?" she said. "Look who's here." My heartbeat quickened. I realized I was scared to see him. "It's Lyn Lary!"

I followed her into the small bedroom. Lou was sitting up, supported by a mountain of pillows. His once-muscular frame had shrunken; he had lost so much of the muscle mass he used to carefully maintain by lifting weights, one of the few ballplayers of his day that did so. The grin was perhaps not quite so wide as it had been in the past, but his eyes were alight and smiling, and at once I felt relieved. "Lyn," he said. The voice was mumbling, quiet, hard to hear. It pained me to see him so reduced.

The room was immaculate, but underneath the smell of clean sheets and freshly-washed blankets was the cloying odor of the hospital, the smell of decay and bodily waste that no perfume or disinfectant can completely disguise. He gestured with his left arm at the chairs that ringed the bed. It flopped alarmingly, but I understood what he had intended and took a seat.

What followed was one of the most difficult hours of my life. Because of Lou's difficulty in speaking, the three of us did not converse so much as Eleanor and I chatted in front of him, a performance for his benefit. She asked after Mary and I told her that things were good between us, which, for the moment, was the truth. I bragged a bit on my son, Lyn, Jr. The Babe was his godfather. Why the hell, I wondered to myself, had I not asked Lou? It was so typical of the hand this man, my good friend, had been dealt. In that moment I felt terribly, terribly guilty.

You have to understand the kind of pressure I was under at the time. No kid should be under that kind of stress.

Well, we talked about Crosetti's slump, the presidential election just past, and the war in Europe, and it became clear that Eleanor and I had run out of things to gab about, but there was Lou, still looking at us eagerly, she and I being his only windows on the world. Desperate to fill the silence, I started in to reminiscing about our days together on the Yankees. Inevitably, like a man running his tongue over a diseased tooth, I found myself talking about the worst day of my life, April 26, 1931, the day I had taken his home run away. The more I talked, the darker his eyes became, and although I could tell he was no longer enjoying the conversation, I couldn't stop myself from running on and on about it. Though Eleanor, sensing his displeasure, frantically tried to aid me by laughing in the right places and asking questions, it was clear I had done something terribly wrong. And yet, I could not stop.

"Isn't it funny," I said, knowing it was not funny at all, "that in '27 Ruth led the league in home runs and you finished second. In 1929, 1930, same deal. In 1932, Jimmie Foxx shows up and starts beating both of you, but even though the Babe's not number one anymore, he still beats you out each season. And then there's '31, when you tie him. Well, when you beat him, except for that little difficulty I got into on the bases."

His face reddened. Eleanor looked alarmed. "Lou?" she asked fearfully. He held up his hand again, struggling to control its spasmodic movement so as to make a gesture we could understand. I looked at her, she at me; it seemed to both of us that he was beckoning us closer. We both leaned in close. He was struggling to say something, to give voice to the thought that had agitated to him. We leaned still closer, until we were mere inches from his face. We held our breaths so that the sound of our respiration didn't compete with him. He spoke then in a guttural near-whisper. From that day to this I have replayed the moment in my head countless times, but while it remains possible I misunderstood him, it always comes out the same way. He said, "This is all your fault!"

I recoiled, shot to my feet, thanked them both for a pleasant evening but said I had to be leaving. Eleanor said she would walk me to the door. I fled downstairs, she following a moment after. She caught up with me at the door. "He didn't mean that," she whispered insistently. "He's frightened."

"Of course not. Think nothing of it. My fault? How could it be my fault? It couldn't have been."

"It isn't," she said. "It's not anybody's fault."

"Isn't it?" I asked. I felt like I was losing my mind.

"No. As far as they know it's just something that happens."

"If it were my fault," I held up a hand to silence her inevitable response, "if somewhere it were, I would give anything to change it."

"I know," she said softly, and smiled at me. I accepted her offered kiss on the cheek and fled that place forever.

In my haste to leave I neglected to have a cab called to pick me up and return me to the train station, and so I found myself walking the tree-lined streets of Lou's neighborhood. A short distance away I found myself standing in front of a church, all lit up and awake for Christmas Eve. I am not a religious man, but at that moment, in my confusion, I sought succor and sanctuary. I went inside and fell into a pew. The hour of midnight was approaching, and families filled in all around me. Before they had even begun, I got down on my knees and began to pray. The other worshippers would soon celebrate the birth of the man who died for their sins. I, with tears in my eyes, prayed for the man who was dying for mine.

* * *

Chapter 7

Not six months later, Lou was dead. He was not quite 38 years old. I was playing for Milwaukee of the American Association when I heard. I never did get another shot at the major leagues.

Lou Gehrig's plaque at Yankee Stadium (Getty Images)

You really should have seen Lou play. He wasn't the biggest man in the major leagues in his day -- the Babe, for one, was two inches taller -- but he was built like a tank, with a fullback's big shoulders and driving legs. He could hit the ball as far as anyone, but he could also leg out a triple even if, especially if, I wasn't there turning his home runs into three-baggers. He stole home all the time, not because he was the fastest man in the league, but because he was smart. Although he struck out some when he first came up, by the time he matured he was pretty good at handling the stick. He was different in that way from the Babe, who was always taking that big uppercut to hit the ball into the seats. Lou also won the triple crown, something Ruth never did do. In all the years since, there has never been another player quite like him. For all his standoffishness, his odd, cloistered habits, I miss him very much.

As for me, I go on. Once I stopped playing, as many ballplayers do I put on a few pounds. I have a touch of diabetes nowadays and I have to watch what I eat. Even so, someday, just as Lou's creeping illness soon got the best of him, I know mine will get me. When I do, if I wind up in the Good Place, I'd like to think that Lou will be waiting for me with that big goofy grin of his and open arms. We are matched, you see, we make each other's presence in that place possible -- he for forgiving me, and I for forgiving him.

* * *

"There’s no such thing as carry-over. We’re not going to win games because we won last year."

Stanford head coach David Shaw told me that in an interview last offseason. He gets excited talking about his team's "David [vs. Goliath] mentality," how despite recent success, "we haven’t cemented ourselves in the football world’s psyche as much as we should have. There’s always the idea that we’re going to slide."

It's getting more and more difficult to convince outsiders that either of this year's Rose Bowl participants, Stanford and Michigan State, is going to slide anytime soon.

When head coach Jim Harbaugh left after Stanford's 12-1 season in 2010, we might have assumed the regression was coming. When quarterback Andrew Luck went pro following the 11-2 campaign of 2011, it was even easier to think the end was near. But that was two Pac-12 titles ago.

Why you should root for Stanford

by Jack Blanchat, Rule of Tree:

I could tell you that you should root for Stanford football. But chances are you already do.

At least, that's what a poll said before this season started: Stanford is the least hated of all college football teams.

Now, the astute observer could say that "least hated" does not necessarily mean most well-liked, but this is the world of college football, where nothing makes sense and equating those two distinctions is not a stretch.

So why do people from all over the country root for, enjoy watching, or at least not hate Stanford football? And why will many be rooting for Stanford in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day?

It's because Stanford football is an everyman's kind of religion, with a maniacal, googly-eyed tree mascot leading the way.

Put more directly, Stanford football occupies a space in the college football world where it can align with almost anybody's belief system.

If you hate SEC football, you can safely root for Stanford without having to align yourself with Oregon's garish ensembles or USC's overt obnoxiousness. If you're an SEC diehard, Stanford is more of an SEC analogue than perhaps any other team in the country: simple uniforms, an emphasis on the power run, and strong defense. (Although the SEC's insistence on the run game and strong defense is sometimes in flux, unlike its insistence on bow ties, dark liquor, and Parliaments.) One way or another, people just love watching Stanford play. Or they're at least in awe of it.

Stanford has gone 23-4 since the start of 2012, reeling in big recruits, crafting an offensive style around the components at hand, and tearing your head off on defense. After winning 33 games in the eight seasons following head coach Ty Willingham's departure for Notre Dame, Stanford has won an incredible 46 in the last four, with a chance at 47.

Michigan State has taken a similar road to the same place. The road was about as bumpy when Mark Dantonio inherited a Spartan squad known for perpetual underachievement. In 2003 under John L. Smith, State reached ninth in the country before fading to 8-5. Two years later, the Spartans reached 11th, then collapsed to 5-6.

They had been to only one bowl in five seasons before Dantonio arrived in 2007, a drought almost as bad as Stanford's. They haven't missed one since. And after averaging about seven wins per year in his first three years, they've averaged 10 in the last four, and that's with a 2012 campaign that saw them finish 7-6 and lose five games by a combined 13 points. State had never won more than 10 games in a season before Dantonio came to town; now they've done so three times. (And this was all before Dantonio name-dropped rapper Rich Homie Quan on national television. Time to reap the recruiting whirlwind!)

State was close to a breakthrough for a few years, and it finally came in 2013. Ohio State is not preparing for the BCS title game right now, because the Buckeyes ran into a Spartan sword in Indianapolis.

The reward: a long look in the mirror. Stanford and State will attempt a lot of the same tactics in Pasadena, and this game will probably look like a different sport than the one being played when Baylor and UCF face off in the Fiesta Bowl. If Baylor-UCF is basketball, State-Stanford is rugby. And both will be entertaining.

How they got here

Stanford's season to date

For two straight years, the tortoise caught the hare.

Remember when Stanford had an Oregon problem, when the Ducks were basically the only team Stanford couldn't figure out? The Cardinal went 23-1 against teams not named Oregon in 2010 and 2011, leaving control of the conference in the hands of the green and yellow squad up north.

In the last two seasons, however, Stanford has allowed Oregon to steal the headlines and tantalize with high-paced offense, then laid the hammer down, one-on-one. Stanford's victory over No. 2 Oregon on November 7, one that saw the Cardinal build a huge lead and hold on for a 26-20 final margin, turned the tables in the Pac-12 North race.

And despite losses to both Utah and a smoking-hot (at the time) USC team, the Cardinal went 7-2 in conference, then pasted Arizona State in the Pac-12 title game. If Stanford had figured out a way past either Utah or USC, the Cardinal are quite likely in the national title game right now. As it stands, they'll be attempting to win their second-straight Rose Bowl for the first time since 1971 and finish in the AP top 10 for the fourth -- fourth! -- consecutive season.

Michigan State's season to date

Two things kept Michigan State out of the national eye for a while. First, the Spartans' offense was abominable in September. It was what kept me from signing onto the Spartans being a darkhorse national contender in the offseason (whoops), and it was at times comically bad, averaging a combined 3.8 yards per play in the Spartans' first three games against FBS competition.

But State named Connor Cook the starting quarterback early on, stuck with him, and played to his strengths; it paid off. The offense was still rather hit-or-miss overall but averaged at least 5.5 yards per play in six of State's final eight contests, and that was more than good enough to pair with a defense that allowed six or fewer points in five of those eight games.

Following a frustrating 17-13 loss to Notre Dame on September 21, State wasn't seriously challenged for four straight quarters the rest of the year. The Spartans won their final nine games by an average score of 30-12, whipped Ohio State in the Big Ten title game, and went from unranked to fourth in the country in just over a month. It was a stunning rise for a team with one of the most enjoyable defenses in the country.

Data dump

Stanford's biggest advantages

Get used to second-and-long. The stereotype for both of these offenses is probably something in the neighborhood of "run on first and second down, throw a safe pass on third down, punt away safely on fourth down."

Why you should root for Michigan State

by Chris Vannini, The Only Colors:

The season began with questions at quarterback and running back, with no real answers. The offense was a punchline, and everyone felt bad for the defense being paired with it.

Four months later, MSU had set a school record with 12 wins and reached its first Rose Bowl since the 1987 season.

How did this happen? And why should you root for Michigan State?

Because Connor Cook came out of nowhere.

Quarterback Cook was a three-star recruit out of high school without any major offers outside of MSU. He replaced starter Andrew Maxwell in last year's Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl and led the game-winning drive in the final minute. He replaced Maxwell in the opener against Western Michigan and got his first start the next week against South Florida. Still, his numbers were ugly, and fans were calling for a true freshman. But Cook finally got it going against Youngstown State and never looked back.

He went from completing 44 percent of his passes with no touchdowns through two games to Second-Team All-Big Ten by the end of the season, culminating in his 300-yard MVP performance in the Big Ten Championship. He kept Ohio State out of the national championship game. Isn't that enough?

Because Jeremy Langford finally got a chance.

The junior running back has moved from running back to cornerback to receiver and back to running back through his first three seasons, playing special teams and garbage time. He finally got a chance to be the top guy at running back, and he made everyone forget about Le'Veon Bell, putting up more than 1,300 yards and almost five yards per carry with a Big Ten-best 17 touchdowns.

He'll also put the dagger in the heart of the opponent, breaking off a run of at least 34 yards late in the fourth quarter of the past six games, five of which were touchdowns.

Because of that defense.

Yes, seeing 50 points a game is fun and all, but you can still appreciate defense, and you just don't often see it the way MSU plays it anymore. Broyles Award-winner Pat Narduzzi, who once said he wanted "60 minutes of unnecessary roughness," will blitz all night with Denicos Allen and his linebackers. He'll trust his defensive backs in one-on-one, including Thorpe Award-winner Darqueze Dennard, who gave up the fewest yards per pass attempt since the NFL Draft folks began tracking it in 1968.

Through two games, the MSU defense was outscoring the offense, with four returns for touchdowns, including three from defensive end Shilique Calhoun (nickname: "Bane.")

Because of Jim Bollman's mustache.

For all the jokes about his hire as co-offensive coordinator and MSU's offensive struggles early on, that side of the ball has to be one of the most improved in the country by season's end. He didn't call plays, but he worked on strategy and helped with the offensive line, which was the best in the Dantonio era.

Also: his mustache is fantastic.

And finally, because you want to see Mark Dantonio dance to Rich Homie Quan one more time.

Granted, that's not entirely inaccurate -- both teams are going to run, run, run on standard downs -- but both offenses are a lot more adept at bailing themselves out on second- or third-and-long than one might expect.

That said, while Stanford's offense isn't great on standard downs, Michigan State's is pretty bad. At 109th in Standard Downs S&P+, the Spartans rank behind, among other offenses, Purdue's (99th). That's a bad look, and it puts a lot of pressure on Cook to succeed on second- or third-and-long. He has done so quite a bit, and that's great, but he hasn't done so against Stanford yet.

The Cardinal don't do any one thing brilliantly on passing downs; the pass rush is almost better on standard downs, and this isn't an inordinately great secondary when it comes to breaking up passes. But they do everything well enough to rank 11th in Passing Downs S&P+. Odds are good that they will take away the rollouts Cook enjoys and force the Spartans to move to Plan B. If there is a Plan B.

You can get your hands onCook's passes. There's no question that Cook has made serious strides in 2013. His passer rating was 116.1 in September and around 140 afterward. His development is exactly what you wish for when your team starts a sophomore quarterback.

But he's still been a bit lucky overall. On average, a team will pick off about one pass for every four it breaks up. Opponents have only picked off one for every eight against Cook. You can make a case that some of that is due to good placement or safe passing, and you could be right. But there's at least a little bit of luck involved, too.

In a game with minimal possessions -- whereas each team might have 14 or 15 possessions in the Fiesta Bowl, Stanford and Michigan State will be happy with just eight or 10 -- turnovers are magnified. And with two dominant defenses, the team that loses the turnover battle will be in an extreme hole. State almost never fumbles (nine times in 13 games), but if Cook is indeed forced to stay in the pocket and make passes downfield to move the chains, those PBUs could become INTs pretty quickly.

Stanford tilts the field about as well as anybody. So does Michigan State, of course; it's amazing what forcing three-and-outs does to your field position prospects. But Stanford has one of the best special teams units in the country.

Ty Montgomery is an incredible kick returner (31.2-yard average, two touchdowns), Kodi Whitfield is a decent punt returner, Stanford covers kickoffs well, and Jordan Williamson is almost automatic within 40 yards (13-for-14). Michigan State isn't awful in this regard, but Stanford's is better. Any unit with Montgomery returning kicks is probably going to be the better unit.

Michigan State's biggest advantages

The Cardinal want to run the ball. The Spartans welcome them to try. Stanford runs the ball 67 percent of the time on standard downs, 21st in the country. It is part of the Cardinal identity, something they will always do.

The problem: They're not very good at running the ball. And Michigan State is ridiculously good at stopping the run. The Spartans have 50 non-sack tackles for loss, 24 from linebackers Denicos Allen, Max Bullough, and Taiwan Jones. (The bad news for Michigan State: Bullough, a senior play-caller and two-time captain, is suspended.)

If Stanford cannot at least distract you with the threat of Tyler Gaffney left, Tyler Gaffney right, and Tyler Gaffney up the middle, it will be more difficult for the Cardinal to get rolling with the deep passing game. Quarterback Kevin Hogan has been able to connect deep with Montgomery and Devon Cajuste (combined: 1,528 receiving yards, 11.3 per target, 18.0 per catch), but if the safeties aren't distracted by run support, it's difficult to imagine that connection working out too well here, especially considering whom Michigan State lines up at cornerback.

Kevin Hogan can make up ground on passing downs. The Spartans welcome him to try. If you can break a big play against State, chances are pretty good that it will be a very big one. And lord knows Montgomery is a terrifying threat even on second- or third-and-long.

But you're probably not going to get more than about one of those per game. And without the deep ball, Stanford is limited to dump-offs or scrambles from Hogan, neither of which is likely to help Stanford avoid three-and-outs.

If you cannot stretch the field against Michigan State, you are going to find life quite difficult near the line of scrimmage. State takes you out of your comfort zone and dares you to do things college offenses cannot normally do; if neither team can get the running game going, we could see a lot of three-and-outs.

You can dink and dunk against Stanford. Stanford's defensive numbers above look about like what you would expect. The Cardinal are fourth on standard downs, seventh in Rushing S&P+, and fourth in Adj. Line Yards. They are 11th on passing downs, sixth in Passing S&P+, and a still-solid 27th in Adj. Sack Rate.

They prevent explosive drives, thrive in power situations, get into your backfield with ease against the run, and do a lot of the things one would expect from such a big, physical, experienced unit.

One number stands out, however: Stanford ranks just 115th in stopping methodical drives. A full 20 percent of its opponent drives go at least 10 plays. Part of this is by design, of course -- if you limit big-play opportunities, then college offenses will dink, dunk, and eventually make a mistake.

Lord knows Michigan State isn't particularly great at long, drawn-out scoring drives. But you know the Spartans are patient, willing to pound away with running back Jeremy Langford (20.7 carries per game, 5.0 yards per carry) and throw short rollout passes to the likes of Bennie Fowler, Tony Lippett, Macgarrett Kings Jr., and Aaron Burbridge.

If Michigan State can rip off a big play or two and manufacture a couple of 10-play scoring drives, then the math begins to work in the Spartans' favor.

Overreactions for 2014

We tend to overreact to particularly positive or negative bowl results when it comes to projecting forward for the next season. How might we overreact to this game?

The 2014 season will be a test of Stanford's staying power. The running game will be hitting the rest button after replacing Gaffney, No. 2 running back Anthony Wilkerson, and the entire interior of the starting offensive line. Plus, most of the defensive players you've heard of -- linebackers Shayne Skov and Trent Murphy, end Josh Mauro, nickel back Usua Amanam -- will be gone as well. (Somehow free safety Ed Reynolds is only a redshirt junior; it feels like he's been in Palo Alto since about 2007.)

Shaw has recruited well enough, and Stanford could simply reload once again. But unless Montgomery (junior) and Cajuste (sophomore) torch a lovely State secondary, the Rose Bowl is probably not going to have much of an impact on how we view the Cardinal's 2014 prospects.

State, meanwhile, will enter a weakness-gets-stronger, strength-gets-weaker situation next fall. Almost everyone of consequence returns for the State offense, but the defense will have to replace, at the very least, both starting tackles (Tyler Hoover, Micajah Reynolds), Bullough and Allen at linebacker, and Darqueze Dennard and Isaiah Lewis in the secondary.

If State goes out and puts up 35 points or something on Stanford, that could cement pretty high preseason rankings, but otherwise I expect pollsters to knock the Spartans down a few pegs.

Summary

F/+ Projection: Stanford 20, Michigan State 11
Win Probability: Stanford 73%

The numbers love Stanford. The Cardinal showed a little bit more big-play ability on offense than State and did so against a tougher schedule. But they faltered against a mistake-free quarterback in the Utah loss, and their offense fell apart when USC stopped their run game and forced Hogan to make plays.

Michigan State feels like exactly the kind of team that can beat Stanford in 2013. But that will depend on whether Cook and the State offense can maintain their late-season consistency after a few weeks of sitting and getting patted on the backs. Stanford has been here before and has faced a tougher schedule, but State won't need many breaks to pull this one off.

As a whole, the BCS did a decent job of choosing top teams for top bowl games. In terms of the F/+ rankings, the top five teams are all represented, as are six of the top seven and seven of the top nine. Considering limitations -- a two-team max from a given conference, automatic bids for conference champions -- that's not terrible. But there are a couple of selections that raised eyebrows.

One in particular stands out, a team that ranked no better than 27th in either offense, defense, or special teams, one that barely limped past the No. 47, No. 60, and No. 80 teams at home and suffered losses by an average of 22.5 points. When we're talking about elite teams deserving of elite bowls, there's just no way we can include this team in the conversation.

I'm talking, of course, about … Oklahoma. What, you thought I was talking about somebody else?

Throughout November, we heard complaints about UCF's likely inclusion in a BCS bowl thanks to its upset win at Louisville. We heard these complaints from fans of both teams that would be excluded in favor of UCF and teams that might have to play UCF instead of a real team (like Oklahoma).

Why you should root for Baylor

by Mark Seymour, Our Daily Bears:

Come for the offense, stay for the defense.

Everyone knows by now Baylor's calling card: pointsplosions. From the 2011 Alamo Bowl that saw the Robert Griffin III-led Bears put up 67 points through a 2013 that has Baylor just 13 points away from 2005 Texas' record for points in a 13-game season, the offense has carried the water.

You've read the longform on Art Briles and his record-breaking scheme that challenges the bounds of time and space. You've seen post after post, hype video after hype video expressing what it feels like to be a Baylor fan these days in the way that only a great visual can. You've probably found yourself tuning in to see the next offensive onslaught from Bryce Petty and friends, feeling the schadenfreude that comes from seeing a more established Big 12 power laid low by a coach Spencer Hall described perfectly as a mad arsonist.

Now with the Fiesta Bowl, divested as it is this time of any major-conference rivalries, you have a perfect chance to don your secret stash of green and gold and root for the Baylor Bears. Don't worry, SEC fans, it doesn't have to be a conference thing. Throw up your Sic Ems and join in the revelry of a team and fanbase that have waited for this moment so long it doesn't quite seem real. How many others have redshirt players crowdsurfing on the sidelines? This program is the definition of fun, and it's about time you had some.

While you're doing that, you'll probably notice that this team, despite its reputation, isn't nearly so one-sided as it used to be. Phil Bennett's much-maligned defense actually finished the regular season ranked 17th in total defense, 19th in scoring defense, and 15th in FootballOutsiders' F/+ combined rankings. This is not your father's Baylor defense, or even your slightly older brother's.

Listen, I can't convince you to shed your loyalties forever and move your family to the greatest state in the Union, nor would I try to. What I can do is tell you that for this one day, this one game, there's room on the Baylor bandwagon, and all comers are welcome. Whether it's with us at ODB, where our Fiesta Bowl hub has everything you could possibly want to know about the game, or elsewhere, find yourself cheering on Wednesday night for Baylor.

The Knights don't belong! Look at these bad teams they're barely beating! And they're UCF!

To some degree, these complaints were right. At 24th in the F/+ rankings, UCF bears no claim to elite football. The Knights play strong offense and special teams and get by with big plays on defense. They've been all over the map in 2013, playing well against good teams and poorly against bad ones.

But they are virtually indistinguishable from No. 23 Oklahoma, an at-large selection, and they're closer to No. 15 Clemson, another at-large selection, than Clemson is to Baylor or any of the top seven teams. They're better than a lot of previous Big East champions were, and they're certainly strong enough to hold their own for a while against a Baylor team that won the Big 12. Underestimate George O'Leary's Knights at your own peril.

Make no mistake: If Baylor brings its A-game to University of Phoenix Stadium, the Bears should win by a couple of touchdowns. That I'm going to these lengths to differentiate an underdog from an underdog still means UCF is an underdog.

But there's a difference between that and not belonging on the same field as somebody. If we're going to complain about UCF, we have to complain about Oklahoma, too.

How they got here

UCF's season to date

Viewed from afar, UCF reached 11-1 and won a conference title in relatively normal fashion. The Knights went 1-1 against teams ranked in the F/+ top 25 and went undefeated against everybody else. They split the scoring against top-25 teams and outscored teams ranked No. 26 to 50 by two points, No. 51 to 75 by about six points, No. 76 to 100 by about 14 points, and No. 101 to 125 by almost five touchdowns.

This fits the profile of a pretty decent team. But it doesn't do justice to the drama UCF created for itself at times.

The Knights led South Carolina by double digits at halftime before fading just enough to falter at home, 28-25. A couple of weeks later, they where the ones charging back from behind on the road; they let Louisville go up, 28-7, midway through the third quarter but erupted for 31 points on their final five possessions to steal a stunning 38-35 win. They crushed UConn and Rutgers to make the overall scoring margins pretty satisfactory but had to hold on for dear life against a decent Houston team and bad Temple, USF, and SMU teams.

Their reliance on passing-downs conversions and big defensive plays made them capable of high heights and low lows. It almost caught up to them on multiple occasions but never did. They held serve, and the Louisville upset held up well through the end of the year.

Baylor's season to date

A couple of months ago, talking only about Baylor's conference title, as opposed to something greater, would have felt like a bit of a letdown. The Bears began the season 9-0, and thanks to late losses by other undefeated teams -- Alabama, Ohio State, etc. -- an undefeated Baylor squad would have indeed reached the national title game.

Instead, a banged-up team fell inside a frigid, hostile Boone Pickens Stadium on November 23. Oklahoma State ended Baylor's national hopes with a 49-17 romp, but thanks to Oklahoma's upset of OSU and the fact that Baylor won out against TCU (barely) and Texas (comfortably), the Bears somewhat backed into the Big 12 title regardless.

For the season as a whole, the Bears were easily the Big 12's best team. They scored 69 or more points in five of their first six contests and, despite injuries, still averaged 42 points per game in the final five. And while the defense regressed upon the loss of star linebacker Bryce Hager, the full-season numbers still represent a staggering turnaround; Baylor ranked 79th in Def. F/+ in 2012 and 15th in 2013.

In so many ways, Baylor and Texas A&M switched bodies this year. A&M was the team with the albatross for a defense, while Baylor was the team with an aggressive D capable of taking advantage of desperate opposing offenses.

Baylor ranked as high as second in the F/+ rankings this season before fading to seventh late in the year. The Bears are now closer to full-strength than they have been for quite a while, however.

Data dump

UCF's biggest advantages

UCF has as good a chance as anybody of stopping Baylor's explosive drives. The stats tell you what you would expect: Baylor's offense is absurdly explosive, the second-best in the country at scoring quickly. And against UCF (just like almost anybody else), the Bears will have some quick scoring drives.

Why you should root for UCF

by Rodger Sherman, SB Nation:

I have two preferred ways of pronouncing the word "Bortles."

1. A high-pitched, Professor Frink-esque voice. Sometimes comes with a long "mmmmmm" beforehand.

2. In a voice not completely dissimilar from Christian Bale's Batman voice. Perhaps a bit deeper and significantly creepier. Sounds like a person who drives a van and uses the word "moist."

For reasons completely unbeknownst to me, I have said the word "Bortles" in one of these two voices probably more than any other word in the English language over the past three months. I often say it over and over and over.

UCF will be the last team to play in a BCS game solely because it won its conference. And they might be the least loved.

The Knights are amongst the least deserving. This year's AAC winner shouldn't really make a BCS game, since it's a semi-conference robbed of the majority of its competitive members before the BCS could strip its automatic-qualifier status.

But after showing near-big-conference credentials by beating Penn State and nearly beating South Carolina, UCF beat a very good Louisville team -- a team many of us were hoping would topple some more traditionally strong foes -- and squeaked out close wins against dismal Temple, SMU, and USF to go undefeated in conference. UCF is the bare-minimum BCS team.

The Knights don't traditionally have a huge fanbase of their own. Despite the Orlando school having the second-largest enrollment of any university in the country, they haven't built up huge support as they've trickled up to the American from other leagues.

They don't even have they "INTERNET-ENDORSED KOOKY UNDERDOG IN A BCS GAME" thing going for them, because the team they're playing against, Baylor, spent the entire year being the internet's mascot. The Bears are fun. They bomb atomically. We love their gaudy scores. To the internet, UCF is a team with a quarterback named Bortles and a running back named Storm, which is fun, but also with a coach who's sorta awful.

But I'll tell you what UCF does have. One game. One damn game, and nothing else.

UCF came into the AAC this year from C-USA, so this is the Knights' first year in an AQ conference. On account of the fact that the AAC will not be an AQ conference next year, this will very possibly be their last game at this level. (The top-ranked non-AQ team will have one slot in the New Year's Day bowl rotation from here on out -- UCF fans would've had to root for Fresno State and NIU to lose, basically.) Their star quarterback -- Bortles -- is probably gone after the year, with a potential top-10 Draft selection on the horizon.

In all likelihood, UCF's chance at football relevance comes down to the Fiesta Bowl. This is the Knights' moment, their crowning victory or their chance to scuttle back into college football's shadows. Blake Bortles is throwing up his mom's spaghetti onto his shirt. Storm Johnson is hiring Martin Scorcese to make this night into a movie and getting all his favorite musicians to come play along.

I want UCF to have its night, Baylor be damned. In the last year sans Playoff, everything should be screwed, and nothing would be more perfectly screwed than a team from a faux-conference being kings of the college football world, if only for a night.

But while UCF's defense is deficient in some areas, the Knights are quite strong at preventing said quick drives. Safeties Clayton Geathers and Brandon Alexander (combined: 7.5 tackles for loss, four interceptions, 16 pass break-ups, three forced fumbles) are outstanding last lines for this aggressive defense, and UCF manages to combine a backfield presence (fourth in Stuff Rate, 50 non-sack tackles for loss) with steadiness in the back.

You can peck away at the defense, but it will get its shots in, and it could make some stops along the way. We'll see how UCF handles the uniqueness of a healthy Baylor attack, with two ridiculous big-play threats lined up wide and track-speed running backs ready to split you up the middle if you get spread out too far, but the Knights have passed big-play tests thus far.

If special teams matters, that's good for UCF. Sean Galvin is among the nation's best kickoff specialists, booting 23 touchbacks in 65 kicks, and the kick coverage unit is allowing fewer than 20 yards per return. Combine that with Shawn Moffitt's quality place-kicking (perfect on PATs, 16-for-17 on field goals under 40 … though you probably don't want to be attempting too many field goals against Baylor) and a solid return game (Rannell Hall returning kicks and J.J. Worton returning punts), and you've got a special teams unit that could be worth a few points.

Blake Bortles is a passing-downs magician. UCF's standard-downs offense is solid, ranking 25th overall and featuring a decent balance of run and pass. The run game has two strong weapons, with the emergence of big freshman William Stanback to complement Storm Johnson, and three different targets (Hall, Worton, and Breshad Perriman) averaging at least 8.9 yards per target on standard downs.

But junior quarterback Bortles has quickly moved up the Draft charts -- expect announcers to pound you over the head with that one during the game -- in part because of his ability to make plays when UCF falls behind schedule. UCF ranks sixth in Passing Downs S&P+, with Bortles completing 62 percent of his passes to Hall and Worton (at 9.1 yards per target) on such downs and finding Perriman for more than 21 yards per completion once or twice per game. UCF does a wonderful job of picking up blitzes and giving Bortles time to look downfield, and he does a similarly wonderful job of finding players.

Baylor is fast and aggressive but doesn't necessarily come after the quarterback well, at least when taking rates and opponents into account. If Bortles has time, he could do some damage, both demoralizing the BU defense a bit and keeping the BU offense off the field.

Baylor's biggest advantages

Bortles might have to be a passing-downs magician. Like UCF, Baylor's defense is adept at stopping rushes in the backfield. The Bears rank ninth in Stuff Rate, and while the UCF offensive line is pretty good at getting a push, it's leaky, ranking just 112th in Stuff Rate. (Storm Johnson dances a little bit too much at times, too, which hurts these numbers.)

If Baylor's aggressive front is making first-down stops, Bortles should be able to make up ground. But if you face too many second-and-12s, it's going to catch up with you, especially if linebacker/stabilizer Hager is back in the middle of the defense for Baylor.

Baylor is consistent enough in its ability to make plays near the line that it is quite difficult to move the ball methodically. The Bears rank 13th in preventing methodical drives, swarming and punishing conservative offenses. Nickel back Sam Holl is used aggressively throughout the field (10 tackles for loss, seven passes defensed), corner Demetri Goodson has almost as many defensed passes as tackles (which suggests he's not letting his man catch the ball very often), and linebacker Eddie Lackey has become the primary hits-maker near the line.

UCF has a reasonably balanced offense, but the magnitude and volume of negative plays will be the key. Even magicians can only pull so many rabbits out of hats.

This is evidenced by UCF's occasional offensive struggles. The Knights were volatile in 2013, averaging 6.9 yards per play against Louisville but only 4.1 against Memphis, and 8.6 vs. Temple but 5.2 vs. South Florida. That's how you almost beat South Carolina and almost lose to ... lesser teams.

UCF's defensive line can be pushed around. As it has for much of the O'Leary era, UCF has lived off of aggressive plays near the line of scrimmage.

This year, the Knights have attempted to reach a happy medium: solid speed on the outside (end Miles Pace is 242 pounds; outside linebackers Troy Gray, Sean Maag, Michael Easton, and Justin McDonald average 199.5) with beef on the interior. Starting tackles E.J. Dunston and Demetris Anderson each weighs in a hair over 300 pounds, and star middle linebacker Terrance Plummer is not lacking for size.

But the balance is still a bit off. UCF can't rush the passer very well, and while the Knights frequently get into your backfield, when they don't, they are probably getting pushed a few yards downfield. And while this Baylor line isn't amazing, it's big and meaty. Guards Cyril Richardson and Desmine Hilliard go at least 6'4, 330 each.

This offense really is ridiculous. The term "video game stats" is painfully cliché now, but it's hard to figure out another way to describe what Baylor's offense was doing before Tevin Reese and company got hurt.

Reese, who missed the final four games of the season with a wrist injury, was averaging a ridiculous 15.8 yards per target and 25.0 yards per catch. Without Reese, Antwan Goodley's numbers sank a bit, but he still finished the season at 12.9 yards per target and 19.5 yards per catch. Of the 299 FBS players targeted at least 50 times in 2013, Reese ranked a distant first in yards per target. Goodley ranked seventh. It's unfair to have both of these guys in a single receiving corps. And Reese is expected to return against UCF.

It's equally unfair to combine these two with Lache Seastrunk, Shock Linwood, and a running back unit that also had its depth tested late in the year. Though left tackle Spencer Drango is still out, Baylor is nearly full-strength at this point, and a full-strength Baylor offense, with its speed and nearly unmatched tactics and aggressiveness, is almost untouchable.

If you can take away the deep ball and still man the middle of the field reasonably well, and if you can force Baylor to dink-and-dunk and remain patient, there's no guarantee that the Bears will do so effectively. Baylor ranks only 78th in Methodical Drives, after all. But nobody was able to do that to Baylor when the Bears had their full arsenal.

UCF is going to have to force a couple of turnovers, make a few other stops, and hope that its offense can score 45 points. Maybe the Knights can pull that off, but the margin for error is minuscule.

Overreactions for 2014

We tend to overreact to particularly positive or negative bowl results when it comes to projecting forward for the next season. How might we overreact to this game?

There is almost no senior presence on the UCF defense, a unit that sank from 42nd to 48th in Def. F/+ this season. O'Leary has a long history of producing solid defenses, and he should be able to do so again next year with a well-seasoned unit.

The question is whether the offense can match its recent output, and with every top-10 Draft projection we see for Bortles, that becomes less likely. The UCF skill positions are almost completely devoid of seniors as well (the line has three senior starters), but it would be difficult to put another top-20 unit on the field with no Bortles. At least, that's how we're all going to perceive it.

If the UCF defense keeps Baylor around 35 points and Bortles has a great game and announces his return to school in 2014, UCF should be a top-15 or top-20 team to start next year. But without Bortles, it will be difficult for the Knights to generate the same amount of attention, fair or not.

As for Baylor, the bowl might not matter much. We're already seeing signs of Baylor being placed in or near the preseason top 10 next fall, and that's before we find out how many ridiculously talented juniors -- quarterback Bryce Petty (who's said he's coming back), Seastrunk, Goodley -- might go pro in addition to seniors like Reese, Richardson, Lackey, Holl, safety Ahmad Dixon, and Goodson. We seem to be under the assumption that Baylor is here to stay as a top-20 caliber program, no matter who comes and goes.

Summary

F/+ Projection: Baylor 40, UCF 31
Win Probability: Baylor 74%

How long can UCF keep up, from a big-play perspective? Big plays are the name of the game for most college football teams, but Baylor has distilled big-play football down to its essence. The Bears will break off 20-, 30- or whatever-yard gains. They will make stops in the backfield. They will play more aggressively than you, and if you lose your will, you're done.

UCF can keep up in this regard, at least for a while. The Knights have two big, strong running backs, a trio of big-play receivers, and a quarterback who can distribute the ball well. They also have stat hogs on defense that rack up TFLs and pass break-ups almost as well as Baylor does.

The Knights can do a lot of the things Baylor does, but the story for 2013 has been margin for error. They don't always make big plays until they have to. When healthy, Baylor makes them in the beginnings, middles, and ends of games.

UCF's good to very good. But Baylor is often great. And that should make the difference in this one.

[Game recap here: "Big Game Bob" and the Sooners pulled off the Sugar Bowl shocker!]

The "Big Game Bob" moniker for Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops has lived a long life and served a couple of different purposes.

At times, it has been a statement of ultimate respect. Between bowls and Big 12 title games and Red River rivalry games, Stoops' Sooners have really had some nice runs through the years. He won five straight games versus Texas from 2000 to '04. He won seven of eight Big 12 title games. And he won his first BCS title game as well, a 13-2 win over a Florida State team favored by 10 points in 2000.

Why you should root for Oklahoma

by M. Hofeld, Crimson and Cream Machine:

When the Sugar Bowl matchup between Alabama and Oklahoma was announced, the crimson line was drawn in the sand between the two fan bases. Historically, this game pits two of the best programs in the nation against each other, and while rabid fans are on both sides, a nation of people tuning has no vested interest at all in the outcome. The case for Oklahoma is simple and can be made in one easy statement.

Everybody loves the underdog.

Bob Stoops doesn't have to play the underdog card very often, but when he does, he's a master at it. The underdog role has been a season-long theme at Oklahoma, where injuries have robbed key leaders on both sides of the ball from a team that was already in the midst of a youth movement.

Losing the likes of fullback Trey Millard, linebacker Corey Nelson, and defensive tackle Jordan Phillips has resulted in 11 freshmen and nine sophomores on Oklahoma's current two-deep. Lining up across from them is going to be an Alabama team that's laden with experience and hasn't lost a bowl game since the 2008 season (it was the Sugar Bowl, by the way). Dare I break out the David and Goliath analogy?

Everybody loves a success story.

Just the fact that Oklahoma is playing in the Sugar Bowl is a success story in itself. The Sooners earned their trip to New Orleans by winning two of their last three games on the road, including their in-state rivalry game at then-No. 6 Oklahoma State, in which they were double-digit underdogs. Landing this team in a BCS bowl may be Bob Stoops' best coaching job since taking his team all the way to the BCS Championship Game in 2008.

Winning the Sugar Bowl with this group would make this season the best success story since OU won the national championship in 2000. Who wouldn't want to see that?

But over time, "Big Game Bob" has been a phrase of slight derision. In 2003, OU was not only upset but pummeled, 35-7, by Kansas State in the Big 12 title game, then lost to LSU in the BCS National Championship as well. The next year, the Sooners were destroyed by USC in the title game. In 2008, OU fell again in the title, this time to Florida. Stoops ceded control of the Red River Rivalry to Texas for a while, losing four of five from 2005 to '09.

We focus on the big games, but under Stoops, Oklahoma has been one of the steadiest winners in the country. Starting with his second season in 2000, the Sooners have won at least 10 games in 12 of 14 years. That's incredible. They've finished ranked in the AP top 25 in 13 of those 14 seasons and finished in the top 10 eight times. And again, they've won seven conference titles in what has been, on average, the second-best league in college football.

And despite turnover and injuries on both sides of the ball and a relatively significant change in overall identity, Oklahoma's upset of Oklahoma State in Stillwater on December 7 gave the Sooners a 10-2 record yet again and allowed them to sneak into a BCS at-large bid through the back door.

If you're looking for a crack, though, simply consider this: Oklahoma really did have to upset Oklahoma State. The Sooners rank outside the F/+ top 15 for the first time since 2005 (they're currently 23rd).

And for the third time this season, they are double-digit underdogs. Alabama is favored to win the Sugar Bowl by just north of two touchdowns. In Stoops' first 14 seasons in charge in Norman, OU was a double-digit underdog just twice.

If you're looking for hope for an upset, you could point out that OU is 2-2 as a double-digit dog in Stoops' time; the Sooners did beat FSU in 2000, and they did beat OSU a month ago. Granted, the other two times as big underdogs -- 2013 against Baylor (a 41-12 loss) and 2005 against Texas (45-12) -- turned out terribly, and the odds are pretty good that the Sugar Bowl will finish in a similar way. But it's not a given, at least not yet. "Big Game Bob" might still have a couple of tricks up his sleeve.

He better, anyway. Because otherwise this could get ugly.

How they got here

OU's season to date

How did OU get here? I ... I don't know.

The Sooners reinvented their offense around mobile quarterbacks and shuffled through a multitude of them because of injury and a bit of ineffectiveness. They crafted a pretty decent power-running offense but didn't really seem to like running the ball. They fashioned an attacking, fast defense -- sort of 3-3-5, sort of 3-4, sort of other -- that handled Big 12 spread offenses relatively well but didn't do much against the run. They won at Notre Dame and Oklahoma State by a combined 23 points but beat West Virginia, TCU, and Texas Tech by a combined 20 points at home.

Oklahoma in no way a bad team; the Sooners rank in the top 30 in both Off. and Def. F/+, and their special teams unit is somewhere between competent and good. But they also haven't been particularly good at anything in 2013. But thanks to the upset of OSU and the name on the helmet, here they are in a BCS bowl.

Bama's season to date

Alabama lost a game in each of its past two title seasons. But the Crimson Tide waited too long to do it in 2013; their crazy, once-in-a-lifetime loss to Auburn not only kept them out of the SEC title game (an impediment they overcame in 2011), but it also bumped them just far enough down the pecking order that they came up short of a third BCS title game appearance in three years (and a fourth in five).

It would be a shame to boil Alabama's season down to a single game, but that's where we are with Alabama at the moment. "Did they make the BCS title game: Yes/No." They did not this year for the first time since 2010, the last time Auburn did. This season will go down as disappointing for that reason, but with a win, Bama would move to 73-8 since the start of the 2008 season. And if the Tide's last non-title bowl appearance is any indication, they'll be ready to seize Win No. 73.

(By the way, this is neither here nor there, but Alabama has been ranked No. 1 in part of each of the last six seasons. The best Bear Bryant did was five of six years from 1961 to '66. Just throwing that out there.)

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