From the dot-com madness to our Blackbeard-like refusal to die to making online journalism history, it's been one hell of a ride. A look back at Salon's first decade.
Ten years ago, on Nov. 20, 1995, the first issue of Salon went live. Its Web address was “salon1999.com” because “salon.com” was owned by a hair salon owner in Texas, who stubbornly refused to give it up until one of our founders flew down there and, after frank, open and increasingly Mafia-like negotiations, received the precious salon.com in exchange for a large bushel of Salon stock. (The cunning, not to say Mephistophelean, nature of the hair salon owner, and certain ambiguities in the account our negotiator, Andrew Ross, gave of the transaction, combined with Salon’s Blackbeard-like refusal to die even while being simultaneously shot, strangled, drowned, garroted and keelhauled, have given rise to suspicions that some sort of Faustian pact was struck. For the record, I have no recollection of an alleged deal in which Salon was granted eternal life in exchange for George W. Bush becoming president.)
Ten years is a long time in the history of any publication, and when you’ve been watching the cord that holds the Sword of Damocles unravel over your head for nine-plus of those years, it feels positively eternal. Salon came into existence at the beginning of the Internet Age, a Jurassic swamp swarming with strange and frightening creatures — “B to B” business models, “stickiness,” original art on every 600-word story, a biweekly publishing schedule, $25 million IPOs and other long-vanished pterodactyls. How long ago was it? Two words: O.J. Our first issue featured a round-table on race relations tied to the O.J. Simpson verdict, and if that event doesn’t carry your memory back to Old Kentucky, there is no madeleine in existence that will work on you. When Salon started, George W. Bush and Karl Rove were still safely confined in vials in a biochem storage facility in Texas. No one had heard of Osama bin Laden. Bob Dole was running against Bill Clinton. And Petfood.com was about to spring its first, decisive move upon a breathless world.
Salon has surfed — and sometimes gotten wiped out by — some pretty big waves in those 10 years. We have gone from a staff of eight to a staff of 148, and back to somewhere in between. We have been showered in massive tulipmania loot, seen our stock go from $15.13 to one cent, and cheated the Grim Reaper who comes to whack failing little rags so many times he finally picked up his scythe in disgust and went home. We have gone from being a little literary-leaning magazine staffed mostly by critics to a robust news organization with a team of full-time reporters. We have grown from two tables in an architect’s office in San Francisco to a national publication with offices in San Francisco, New York and Washington (and King Kaufman’s Sports Bureau, broadcasting from a secret offshore transmitter somewhere in St. Louis). We have gone from publishing every two weeks to sometimes publishing every two minutes. When we started, the idea of charging people money for anything on the Web except sex was unthinkable; a big part of our income now comes from subscriptions. We’ve been through layoffs and hiring orgies, we’ve won awards and been slapped with subpoenas. We have been denounced on the floor of Congress and praised by the president of the United States.
Yet through it all, in some ways we have changed very little. Salon was started by writers and journalists, and our mission was simply to put the best stories we could out there, while having fun and (hopefully) making money along the way. That hasn’t changed. The dot-com madness has come and gone, the Clinton bedroom farce has been replaced by the Bush revenge tragedy, but we’re still doing the same thing. Seen in that light, the big events, the folly and the glory, the hype and the heartbreak of the last decade, fade away, and the history of Salon shrinks down to the same scene, playing out tens of thousands of times: a writer trying to capture in words what he or she thought, or felt, or witnessed. An editor helping shape those words into a finer form. An artist making it beautiful. And a publication, kept alive by businesspeople and kept running by tech people, that makes the final story available instantly all over the world. Salon is many things, has been many things, and will become many unknown things in the future, but like all publications this is its real history, one that can only be measured in cups of coffee and bleary eyes and whatever molecular or metaphysical traces are left by untold vanished deadlines. There is only one true record of Salon: our archives.
I make no claim to offer anything even remotely resembling a real history of Salon. That is a far larger task than I have time — or frankly, inclination — for. Moreover, I am grossly unqualified to write it, for the simple reason that I suffer from Lewis Libby syndrome: I remember nothing. This debilitating condition has worsened as the years have flown past like those torn-off calendar leaves in that old-movie time-is-passing convention: The blizzard of torn-off pages is now so vast and white that it has covered up every landmark.
It is, I suppose, a great honor to be chosen to write this little memoir, when the other founders who are still connected to Salon, David Talbot, Scott Rosenberg, Laura Miller and Mignon Khargie, are equally or more qualified to do so. The warm glow I should feel at being singled out, however, is somewhat diminished by the suspicion that my colleagues do not in fact regard me as a heroic, battle-scarred veteran, but rather as the journalistic equivalent of one of those demented Japanese soldiers who is still hiding in a rat-infested cave on Tarawa 50 years after the end of WWII. Indeed, it seems all too likely that this “great honor” is in fact a desperate attempt to placate me so that I do not suddenly rampage through the office, impaling people on a bayonet. Despite these suspicions, I will do my best.
A caveat in advance. There will be many important staffers, writers, investors, friends and events in our history that I pass over here. This is not a comprehensive history. I scarcely even mention our sales or tech teams, for example, not because I don’t appreciate what they do but because I can’t cover everything. If you worked here, or wrote a column for us, or you are that guy who drove us all insane playing his electric violin on the corner of 4th and Mission for a year, please don’t be hurt if you’re not mentioned here. It isn’t a dis. I would like nothing better than to write a grand Homeric list of everyone who has ever worked at Salon or written for us, but 1) I ain’t no Homer, and 2) even when Homer did it, it could be a little sleep-inducing.
Salon is the creation, in every conceivable way, of David Talbot, my colleague and close friend for 20 years. In 1994 David was Arts and Ideas editor at the San Francisco Examiner, the flagship Hearst newspaper. (It is pleasant, especially for those of us in San Francisco, to think that the rogue journalistic DNA that ran in the veins of maverick Ex writers like Mark Twain, Ambrose “Bitter” Bierce, Jack London and Hunter S. Thompson popped up again in Salon.) For two years we had worked together on the paper’s Sunday magazine, Image. David was restless and ambitious and wanted to start his own publication. He nosed around about the possibility of starting a print mag, but the start-up costs were too high and he couldn’t find anyone willing to write him a $5 million check. I remember David telling me back in the waning Ex days about a meeting he had with a potential investor. The investor listened to his impassioned spiel about the need for dynamic new journalism to cut through the vacuity of niche publications, the critical importance of a revolution that would sweep across the formulaic media landscape. Then he agreed that, yes, a travel magazine would be a great idea.
About this time, probably late 1994, I remember David mentioning something called the Internet. I don’t think he really knew what it was (“Luddite” is an ugly word, but the great and powerful guru of electronic media still moves blocks of text by dragging his exhausted mouse up to the cut and paste functions), but he knew enough to understand that it would cost a lot less to start an Internet magazine than a print magazine. Along with Andrew Ross, the Examiner’s veteran foreign-national editor, he started scheming in earnest.
David began talking to Apple, which had plans to launch a Web network called eWorld. He convinced Richard Gingras, an Apple executive, to invest $60,000 in seed money in the as-yet-unnamed Salon, which would be part of eWorld. With that sum in hand, in August 1995 David lured Andrew Ross and the extravagantly talented Mignon Khargie, who designed and illustrated features at the Ex, to quit their jobs to work on the prototype for what would become Salon. “When Richard Gingras heard that not only had I left my job at the Examiner, on the basis of that modest investment, but lured two others with me, he was horrified,” David said. “As more people left their jobs to join our fledgling enterprise, Apple — which was in the throes of its own corporate dramas before Steve Jobs rejoined the company and turned it around — suddenly pulled the plug on its support for Salon. Adobe Ventures, whom I had sent our business proposal to out of the blue weeks earlier, suddenly came to the rescue, dropping by to see our prototype and stepping in with a $2 million investment, which got Salon launched.”
Join Salon
Special Salon Anniversary offer
Join Salon Premium today and get a subscription to Rolling Stone as well.
It was probably just as well that none of the people who left their union jobs were aware of this meticulously planned investment scheme, which appears to have been modeled on a failed lottery in American Samoa. The brave and clueless stalwarts whom David lured away from the Ex in the fall of 1995 were Scott Rosenberg, a first-rate film and theater critic who also knew more about the Web and technology than anybody who knew from Samuel Beckett had a right to; Joyce Millman, the Ex’s top-drawer TV critic; and me. Rounding out the list was a razor-sharp freelancer named Laura Miller, whom David and I had worked with at Image. With the exception of Laura, we all had years of daily experience, and we all had one ability that proved indispensable: We could write and edit really fast.
This group, along with Salon’s first publisher, David Zweig, first met at Talbot’s house in Bernal Heights sometime that fall. One of the things we did, besides gawk in confusion at sites like Feed (at least I was confused, since I had never been online before), was kick around various names for the new magazine. I cannot remember any of them except “Limelight,” which mercifully ended up in the ashcan of history. David’s wife, Camille Peri — who with my wife, Kate Moses, later launched Salon’s groundbreaking Mothers Who Think department — came up with the name Salon. Vaguely aware that the Internet would allow some kind of communication with our readers, and filled with grandiose dreams of becoming the Madame de Staëls and Dorothy Parkers of the Internet, we settled on Salon.
Salon’s first office was a humble affair. We rented out a small portion of an open-floor-design architects’ office on Main Street in downtown San Francisco. We sat at two long tables, our 28-baud modems beeping and clicking. It was a homey and intimate atmosphere — at times a bit too intimate. Occupying the large area closest to us was a middle-aged architect of choleric mien who was manifestly not pleased at the sudden appearance of a bunch of journalists who spent their time talking loudly on the phone and crawling under their tables trying to hook up their computers. One day, this architect, whose name was Art, suddenly yelled in a piercing voice that echoed across the office, “YOU HO! GET OVER HERE!”
We were somewhat taken aback by this. None of us were familiar with what sort of behavior is customary in architects’ offices, but it seemed a bit beyond the pale to summon a colleague by screaming “You ho!” We soon realized that Yuho was actually the name of Art’s unfortunate subordinate. Thereafter, whenever Art screamed out, “YUHO, GET OVER HERE!” as he seemed to do at least three times a day, it was only with great effort that we were able to suppress unseemly outbursts of hysterical laughter. I believe Art observed this, and it did not contribute to the bonhomie of the office. Neither did his habit of loudly farting as he moved about in his domain.
Soon after we arrived at Main Street several other people came onboard, including artist and designer Elizabeth Kairys, Cynthia Joyce, who was our first Arts & Entertainment editor, Table Talk host Mary Elizabeth Williams, and consultant David Weir, a longtime fixture on the Bay Area journalism scene. Lori Leibovich, now our Life editor, was our first intern. We also briefly employed a young tech consultant named Paul Vachier. Vachier just had a cup of coffee with us, as the baseball saying goes for a player who passes through so quickly he never even moves out of his hotel, but David nonetheless insisted on putting him in our first staff photo because he was young, handsome and looked cool. He made up for the rest of us who, although much younger than we are now, utterly failed to conform to even the most generous interpretation of what Hip Web Pioneers should look like. This was an early indication of Talbot’s cheesy cunning — a quality that more than any other probably ensured our existence. We also hired our first books editor, the estimable Dwight Garner, who left a few years later to go to the New York Times Book Review.
We started as a biweekly, and we thought we were cranking it out. I remember looking at the stats for the first issue. It was thrilling, coming from print where the only measure of readership was letters to the editor, to be able to know exactly how many people had read your story. It was fascinating to see what subjects drew the most eyeballs. And it was deeply depressing to realize that no matter what you wrote, half of your readers would bail after the first page. Stats are the great dirty-little-secret revealers, not just for what they tell writers and editors but for what they reveal about readers. To this day, whenever we run some lower-chakras, sexy, gossip-ridden story, one of those penis-enlargement, lifelike doll, Brazilian-bikini-wax, are-big-breasts-making-a-comeback kinda things, readers send in angry letters denouncing our lowbrow, vulgar sensibility and threatening to cancel their subscriptions. Meanwhile, our servers melt under the demand and the page views soar into the stratosphere. Strangely, no one ever writes in to say how much they liked that big-breasts-are-making-a-comeback story. In fact, not a single one of the 50,000 people who eagerly read every page of that story, as compared to the 1,000 people who read the big essay about Iraq, has ever admitted having read it. But the server, like a gentleman’s valet, knows all. When Leonard Cohen wrote, “There’s a meter on your bed that will disclose/ What everybody knows,” he was talking about page views.
We paid an inordinate amount of attention to page views not just because of the novelty but because we believed our financial future depended on them. We dimly believed that if we reached some magic but unknown number, gold coins would cascade down from the great slot machine of the Internet. In those antediluvian days, getting more than 500 page views was grounds for vaunting pride. For good reason: I have no idea how anyone even found our site, with its meaningless salon1999 address. But we had enough investment to keep going for a while, and like cartoon characters happily walking above a void, none of us looked down. Well, the people on the business side probably did, which might explain the gaunt, Edvard Munch-like expressions I would sometimes see flitting across their faces. Mercifully, I had nothing to do with that side of Salon.
We had very few ads. The biggest, which Zweig brought in, was a sponsorship by Border’s Books. We published a mix of book and movie reviews, short news items in a section called “Newsreel,” interviews and features, mostly on cultural subjects.
Our statement of purpose in Issue No. 1 is an interesting archaeological artifact. In it, Talbot proclaims that Salon stands for a “militant centrism” — the term borrowed from an expression the writer Jim Sleeper used in our roundtable about race relations. That positioning made sense in an era when black-white acrimony seemed like the biggest issue facing the country, but it hasn’t aged well. Today, the idea that Salon would describe itself as “militantly centrist” is laughable — when you think of Salon, you don’t think of a fired-up Joe Lieberman. And our utopian rhetoric about Salon becoming an interactive, Whitmanesque choir of varied American voices was about to have a rude encounter with reality. The Whitmanesque choir sometimes sang in harmony with us, but really it wanted to warble its own tunes — some good, some bad, some inspired by Yoko Ono’s Janovian Screaming period. We quickly discovered that trying to bring Table Talk readers into Salon in any kind of organized fashion was like trying to herd cats.
As we slogged along that first year, the media began to pay a little attention to the oddball little “e-zine” staffed by refugees from the newspaper world. There was a novelty factor at work that helped us. (Ultimately, it saved us. If we were a print magazine of the same quality, we would have been dead, buried and forgotten long ago.) I seem to recall being probed by an inordinate number of European reporters, most of whom were obviously working some kind of “electronic media revolutionaries” angle.
We were frequently asked if there were any inherent differences between online and print journalism. We didn’t, and still don’t, all give the same answer to that question. Talbot thought that online journalism was a different breed: faster, more irreverent, less controlled by the increasingly zombified gatekeepers of traditional media. He was also always pushing for our stories to be punchier and shorter, arguing that people didn’t want to read New Yorker-length stories on their computer. I agreed with him that we were doing something different than most print news media, but I wasn’t convinced that was because of anything unique about online journalism. Editing and writing is pretty much the same whether you’re working with cuneiform tablets or a DSL line. As for length, I wasn’t convinced readers couldn’t be trained to read long stories online. (There was some self-interest involved here; I realized that if we stopped running long pieces, I’d be out of a job.)
The reviews began to come in. Some were decent, some were mixed. One memorable piece chided our lumbering, print-journalism ways by comparing us to a “stately flying boat.”
Stung by this weird metaphor, after five months, in April 1996, we decided to trade in the mahogany-appointed Pan Am Clipper for a slightly zippier model. We went weekly. I confess I can no longer remember what that change felt like: We’ve all been boiled in the daily pot for so long that any slower pace is simply inconceivable. Toward the end of 1996 we parted ways with David Zweig and hired a new publisher, a big, amiable former University of California at Berkeley quarterback named Michael O’Donnell. Michael stayed with Salon for seven years, through the mad euphoria of the dot-com bubble, the great bust of 2001, the layoffs, the jolly Christmas party when we had just announced to the staff that we might be closed down in two months, and eventually into somewhat less shark-infested waters. Salon would not have survived without Mike. Like most natural salesmen, he was an eternal optimist — and during the post-crash years he needed that optimism.
We quickly realized that weekly wasn’t good enough in this finger-in-the-socket medium. So in 1997 we took the next step and went daily. King Kaufman had joined the week before as our copy chief, his terse call-out “You’ve got Blue Glow” to the art department adding a professional tone to the proceedings.
Join Salon
Special Salon Anniversary offer
Join Salon Premium today and get a subscription to Rolling Stone as well.
In September of 1997 an unlikely event changed the way we thought about our editorial direction. Racing drunkenly through a Paris tunnel, a chauffeur lost control of his car, and Princess Diana died. It was one of those events that hit people hard in funny ways they couldn’t explain. The mainstream media was not satisfying readers’ desires for a more intimate response. We were all over the story, running everything from news pieces to criticism to personal essays in the new Mothers Who Think section. We got unprecedented reader response. For the first time, we understood that Salon could play an important role in the media world as a kind of news vulture, not so much reporting on the big events as feasting on their remains. Fast, smart, opinionated stories making sense of events, or simply offering cathartic responses, were in demand, and we discovered we were good at them.
Over the next year, this second-day-story approach increasingly led us to do more actual reporting. With hard news playing an increasingly larger role, the final piece of Salon’s editorial puzzle fell into place. Our formula was an eclectic mixture of intellectual essays, opinionated news analysis, reviews, media criticism (I was the first editor of our daily Media Circus column; the second was an unknown young writer named Dave Eggers), reporting, personal pieces, idiosyncratic columnists (Camille Paglia, Cintra Wilson and Anne Lamott, those sibyls staring down from opposite corners of Salon’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, helped gain us early followers and attention), occasional humor and, of course, a greater than usual infusion of bawdiness. Early readers of Salon may recall a sex column called “Unzipped,” which led our traffic most of the time.
Talbot called us a “smart tabloid.” Others called it intellectual talk radio. The key was to mix it up, to keep our readers and ourselves off balance, to stick and move like Muhammad Ali. To be Beltway insiders and merry left-coast pranksters, eggheads and sex fiends. And to somehow do it all while preserving an editorial voice that sounded like Salon.
Of course, it’s possible to be so eclectic, so unpredictable that you never establish an identity, or a core readership. The tension between the desire to provoke and the need to have a recognizable editorial stance can never really be resolved. In our case, it played itself out most strikingly over politics, and our political columnists. It’s no secret that Salon is a left-leaning publication. But Talbot in particular, and the rest of the top editors, had a horror of churning out predictable lefty screeds. In our earlier years, he favored a big-tent Salon, running conservative columnists like Andrew Sullivan and David Horowitz. But for the last few years, we haven’t run many conservative writers. In part this is because we couldn’t find conservative writers we liked. But it’s also because of our own internal uncertainty about the big-tent philosophy. It’s understandable why the New York Times runs David Brooks and John Tierney, but we’re not the newspaper of record — we don’t have to be “balanced,” just fair. And while it may be an editor’s responsibility to challenge his readers — and himself — is it also his responsibility to run pieces he doesn’t agree with and thinks are poorly argued, simply to “shake things up”? There have definitely been times when we’ve run a weird and dubious piece and justified it by saying, “It’ll be a talker.” But that credo comes uncomfortably close to making us freak-show barkers.
In any case, the formula was set and it has never substantially changed, although we have had to adjust it from time to time, sometimes regretfully. Our Wanderlust travel section, edited by Don George, was one of the most unusual and compelling travel departments anywhere — you don’t find articles titled “Machete-wielding cannibals mar my Congo vacation” in Condé Nast — but it could never develop a big enough readership to sustain it, so we had to let it go. Other departments that have died unfortunate and undeserved deaths were our illustrated noir comics series, the Dark Hotel; People, an unclassifiable grab bag of features edited by Doug Cruickshank; and Ivory Tower, an occasional department about the academic world edited by Carol Lloyd.
In 1998 we ramped up our editorial staff, adding a whole slew of key people: associate managing editor Ruth Henrich, technology writer Andrew Leonard and then-news editor Joan Walsh, now Salon’s editor. Critic Andrew O’Hehir’s first cover feature for us ran in 1998. Stephanie Zacharek, who had been writing reviews for us since 1996, came on as a staffer in 1999; we put Charles Taylor on contract that same year. Deputy A&E editor and longtime “Fix” writer Amy Reiter joined us, along with copy editor Cary Tennis, who was later to bust out as a unique advice columnist. For the first time, Salon felt positively robust: There was more going on in the circus than you could see at a glance.
Probably the most significant, certainly the most lurid, event in Salon’s editorial history was the Henry Hyde story, in which we revealed that the esteemed and respected head of the House Judiciary Committee, who was standing in judgment on Bill Clinton, had had a longtime affair with a married woman. We thought long and hard about whether to run the story, but decided in the end that it was completely legitimate: We decided we had to reveal that the Clinton persecution was a hypocritical farce, driven by right-wing zealots and unopposed by a slack-jawed media. We knew we were going out on a limb — 57 other news organizations had passed on the story, and we thought we were ready for the ensuing firestorm. But we weren’t. Our servers couldn’t handle the requests. David went on TV and was ambushed by George Stephanopoulos, who waited until Talbot was off the air to insult him. Somebody called a bomb threat in to our office. There were organized electronic sabotage campaigns against us. And Tom DeLay denounced us on the floor of the U.S. Congress and demanded an investigation into whether Democrats leaked it to us. (For the record, once again: They didn’t. It came from the aggrieved husband’s friend.)
The Hyde story thrust us into the national limelight, with sometimes dubious consequences. For a time, we got a lot of tips about the sex lives of Republicans. But crawling around in right-wing bedrooms like hacks from some electronic version of Confidential magazine wasn’t really what we had in mind when we issued our lofty statement of purpose. (Issuing statements of purpose is always risky: They invite inevitable comparisons to the “statement of principles” issued by Charles Foster “Citizen” Kane, before he began firing his old friends and finishing their columns for them.)
As the Hyde saga was unfolding, we were headliners in an even weirder drama: the dot-com madness. It was a careening Mr. Toad’s wild ride like few journalists have ever seen, let alone taken part in. As a San Francisco dot-com during the gold rush, we had a front-row seat at one of the craziest eras in the history of American business. The years 1999 and 2000 were particularly egregious. (Go back and read Ruth Shalit, who did some of the best writing about advertising and branding anywhere for us. Her dissections of the manic, hyped-up corporate stupidity of those years take you straight into a different and a dreadful world.)
During those gloriously dumb years, something strange happened: We had ceased to be a publication. Now we were a DOT-COM. Dot-com! One had only to utter those words and strong-jawed, cologne-doused investment bankers in $3,000 suits would fall on their knees and grovel like Turkish courtiers before the Sublime Porte. (The other great buzzword of those days was “content,” as in the expression “content provider,” a truly scary phrase right out of Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology.”) We kept on putting out the magazine, kept on assigning and editing and writing, kept on pouring “content” into all those empty vessels out there, but we couldn’t ignore the prevailing vibe of fast, irrational wealth any more than Mark Twain could ignore gold fever when he was living on Jackass Hill. Sure, some of us had vague premonitions that something was fatally wrong with the whole deal, that if you never made any money it didn’t make sense that your company would be worth tens of millions of dollars, that what we really were was a magazine that happened to be online, that publishers never make much money. But as we planned for our IPO it was impossible not to fantasize about Fort Knox-like vaults of money, parking lots full of Jaguars, second homes on every continent. It was too hard to resist the dream that through some lucky roll of the dice, some deeply stoned cunning of Hegelian history, we were going to be the first ordinary, working journalists in history to get filthy rich just for doing our jobs.
It sounds stupid — and as events were to show, and my tax accountant can attest, it was stupid — but it wasn’t like people weren’t getting rich for absurd reasons back then. San Francisco was filled with 25-year-old know-nothings with Auschwitz haircuts who parked their BMWs on the sidewalk at night in my Nob Hill neighborhood, simply factoring in the $100 tickets. I met a number of regular people, both back in the heyday and afterward, who hit the jackpot for the most ridiculous reasons. One staffer’s boyfriend, a musician and IT guy, cashed in bigtime — if memory serves, he bought a house with the swag — simply because he had had the foresight to acquire and maintain the Web address “big.com,” which some corporation bought from him. Another nice 30-ish couple I met had retired because the husband had created some silly Web site — I think it offered online calendars or something — that was bought by some monster corporation for gazillions of dollars. He was suitably humble, appreciative, laughed at the craziness of it all — and no longer worked. Meanwhile, Salon kept losing money.
Join Salon
Special Salon Anniversary offer
Join Salon Premium today and get a subscription to Rolling Stone as well.
But in 1999, money was not something that you “lost.” It was a mystical entity, self-generating, not part of the reality-based community — like love, hope or intelligent design. The money was out there, everywhere, like oil, and you never knew from under which rock it was going to gush out next. We certainly looked for it. Mike O’Donnell made a valiant bid to buy a search engine called Google when it was just two Stanford boys working out of some low-rent motel in Palo Alto, Calif. (If he had succeeded…) He and Talbot were working every angle they could think of. They met with an Internet mogul to propose a traffic-swapping deal to him. The mogul apparently did not like the offer, because he suddenly shouted, “I might as well put a gun in my fucking mouth!” Later in the same meeting, he offered to buy Salon.
Yes, business dealings could be a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty back then, in those glorious days when AOL could merge with mighty Time-Warner on equal terms, like a flea in a miniskirt humping a half-conscious blue whale. The truly weird year was 1999, before and after our IPO. We raised $25 million and immediately set about justifying the public’s faith in us by doing what every good dot-com did in those days: spending vast sums of money to “heighten brand visibility” or “increase market share” or “solidify our strategic position” or “acquire key assets” or whatever they called flapping your arms and calling it flying back then. Actually, we exercised great financial prudence compared to most of our dot-com peers, many of whom were doing things like spending a large chunk of their available assets on a single Super Bowl ad. (In 2000 eCompany Now, needing a really large venue to celebrate one of the worst names in the history of American business, held its launch party at San Francisco’s brand-new Pac Bell Park.) Still, two years later, when we were on life support, could barely meet payroll and would have sold our souls to the Satanic Shampoo Company for a lousy $250,000, that $25 mil looked different. Like everything in life, it got a lot more real when it was gone.
Our staff suddenly ballooned to an obscene size. All at once we were surrounded by marketing and biz-dev types, as well as so many new staffers in every department that it was impossible to keep up with them. All those high-powered rainmakers set to work drumming up money. And some of those jungle drums played a pretty weird tune.
As mentioned earlier, I was strictly forbidden for obvious reasons from having anything to do with the business end of Salon. However, I do remember one business meeting that I was inexplicably asked to attend, and which for me will always sum up the weird illusions and emperor’s-new-clothes desperation of those years. Present were several of the hotshot biz-dev and sales and strategic-planning types who had been recently hired. The agenda was to plan a major new campaign to sell products on our site. On the face of it, this was a ridiculous idea: We had insignificant traffic, an audience that only wanted to read our articles, weak technical infrastructure, no fulfillment capabilities, and we were planning to jump into a saturated market filled with cutthroat competitors whose entire business was to sell goods. Other than that, though, it was a brilliant idea. The truth is we were pushed to it by an inexorable logic: We couldn’t think of any other way to make money. The Web audience, as Slate discovered after its brave but premature attempt to charge, was not ready to pay for content, and advertising revenue wasn’t enough. So I sat there for two hours as a roomful of sharp Harvard MBA types discussed whether it would be better for us to sell knives or wine. It was like being a member of MoveOn.org sitting in a prewar meeting in Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Never has so much IQ and business acumen been expended on a total will-o’-the-wisp. It was like watching a bunch of medieval scholastics trying to prove that a circle was actually a square.
Another demented memory from the Gilded Age: After one of the super-glitzy Webby Awards one year, I was wandering drunkenly through City Hall holding the trophy we had won for being best “print/zine” (whatever that means) when I was suddenly set upon by two voracious-looking babes in low-cut dresses. Batting their eyes, they lasciviously asked — or as lasciviously as it possible to ask a question containing the words “pre-IPO” — what site I represented and if we were planning to go public. Then, pressing up against me, they exposed their firm young business cards, which revealed to my glazed eyes that they worked for a venture capital firm. These cruel harpies were trolling the Webbies for winners, wielding their coldblooded cleavage on hapless techie geeks who would be so dazzled that they would immediately sign over their billion-dollar algorithms for peanuts. Telling myself, “Yuho, get out of here!” I fled.
Then one morning it all came to an end. The NASDAQ crashed. The end of a Ponzi scheme is never pretty to behold. There was a mass slaughter of diseased dot-coms, whose remains were bulldozed into a mass grave. We hid beneath some corpses and slipped away when darkness fell. But the mad delirium was over. It wasn’t about getting rich anymore — it was about keeping away from that bulldozer. Our stock fell and fell and fell. One half-witted Salon staffer, who shall go unnamed except that his initials are G.K., had exercised a large number of now-worthless stock options, which he suddenly had to pay alternative minimum tax on — to the tune of $110,000. The Hegelian cunning of history turned out to be a hell of a lot more cunning than some of us had thought.
After the collapse, Salon began digging itself out. This was a long, painful process. Around about the seventh year, it became difficult to come up with anything whatsoever to say when friends, family and nosy strangers would ask, “So how’s Salon doing?” My mantra was, “We’re about to turn the corner.” This worked for five or six years, but then it began to exude a faint rotting smell, like a once-cheery Halloween pumpkin that has collapsed into a hideous blob, or a Scott McClellan press briefing. Toward the end when asked that question I simply smiled inanely, like Harpo Marx.
Over the next few years, digging out from the hole, we added key people who are still with us, notably A&E (originally news) editor Kerry Lauerman and sales V.P. Melissa Barron. We also acquired the pioneering online community the WELL. And we realized that our business model wasn’t working, that we had to take the plunge or die. So in April 2001 we launched Salon Premium, gambling that our readers would pay money to read Salon. There were several more near-death experiences, but the gamble paid off. Our subscriber base slowly rose; advertising began to come back. And our investors, principally our two largest, oldest and most loyal ones, John Warnock and Bill Hambrecht, kept the faith. No account of Salon would be complete without an acknowledgment of these two men, who have hung in there through good times and bad — actually, it was more through bad times and worse times — and never once tried to interfere with our editorial vision. A lot of people owe their livelihoods to them.
The world turned. Bush was elected. The Florida recount debacle was another turning point for us: We threw more reporting resources into covering that bizarre saga than any previous story, sending our talented Washington reporter Jake Tapper, and correspondents Anthony York and Alicia Montgomery, to Florida, where they stayed for weeks. Our readership grew, and we came of age as a news organization.
Sept. 11, and Bush’s response to it, was another signal event. As it became clear what sort of presidency we were dealing with, Salon was fired by a new editorial mission, one as old as Voltaire: to expose the infamy. Meanwhile, the media world was changing. Bloggers appeared, circling the mainstream media like Indians firing from ambush at redcoats marching in formation. The change of uniforms we have carried with us from Day One came in handy: We’re still redcoats on Monday and guerrillas on Tuesday.
And our own wheel of fortune kept spinning. Staffers had children, got divorced, got cancer, got married. (Two staffers married each other.) Founders like Andrew Ross and Mignon Khargie moved on. (We were able to lure Mignon back, to join art stalwart Bob Watts, who began as an intern in 1998.) Some of our most talented writers ended up at prestigious print publications: Carina Chocano (who wrote better about reality TV than anyone) went to the Los Angeles Times, and our brilliant media critic, James Poniewozik, went to Time. But others stepped in. A publication is like a sports team: The players come and go; the team keeps going.
After battling side by side with Talbot to keep Salon alive for seven years, Michael O’Donnell passed the baton to a new publisher, Betsy Hambrecht. And late last year, David Talbot stepped down as editor to write a book.
There must be a god that looks after upstarts and dreamers, because Talbot, though at the end so exhausted he had to be lashed to the wheel to keep him upright, lasted at the helm of his listing, shell-riddled pirate ship long enough to see Salon sail into safe waters. Joan Walsh, our longtime news editor and managing editor, took over the top job. In Joan and Betsy’s hands, the future of Salon has never looked brighter.
Join Salon
Special Salon Anniversary offer
Join Salon Premium today and get a subscription to Rolling Stone as well.
There remains only to say a word about our readers. Every editor, I suspect, has a mysterious and powerful relationship with his or her audience, one that’s impossible to articulate. This is truer online than in print, because we online editors get to talk to our readers more. It’s a little bit like a marriage, except that we’ve never met our mate. Sometimes there’s passion, sometimes there’s anger, sometimes there’s boredom. But most of all, there’s a kind of intuitive knowledge that is built up gradually over the years, a kind of shot-in-the-dark intimacy. At bottom, maybe it’s nothing more than the simplest of understandings, a kind of contract that is essential for any human communication. Our end of the bargain is to publish things we think you want to read; your end is to read them.
We hope we’ve lived up to our end of the bargain, at least most of the time. We know you have, because we wouldn’t be here today if you hadn’t.
In the end, the greatest thanks are due to you, our readers, not just for making it all possible, but for being the reason we wanted to push this Sisyphean rock up the hill in the first place. We’ve made it this far together — a decade’s journey! Maybe it’s just altitude sickness, but this time I think we really may be about to turn the corner. Here’s to making it over the top, and to going on.
Jesus versus the GOP
The man from Nazareth would have been appalled by the “Christian” Republican candidates
Find the Christian in this group (Credit: AP)
There has never been a more loudly Christian group of presidential candidates than this primary season’s GOP contenders. From the start, the campaign has been an exercise in Christian one-upmanship. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann set the standard for religious fervor, boasting of setting her alarm clock at 5 a.m. so she could read the Bible and issuing born-again testimonials like “I radically abandoned myself to Jesus Christ.” Herman Cain said that he was inspired to run for president by the parable of the talents in Matthew 25. Rick Perry released a video in which he intoned, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian … As president, I’ll end Obama’s war on religion and I’ll fight against liberal attacks on our religious heritage.”
Bachmann, Cain and Perry are no longer sharing their spiritual rectitude with a national audience, but the remaining candidates continue to flaunt their Christianity. Newt Gingrich, who has noisily proclaimed that his conversion to Catholicism saved his soul, repeated Perry’s charge, accusing President Obama of launching a “war on religion” by requiring that church-owned hospitals and universities provide insurance that covers birth control. “It’s a fundamental assault on the right of freedom of religion,” Gingrich said. “On the very first day I’m inaugurated I will sign an executive order repealing every Obama attack on religion.”
Gingrich has framed the election as a battle for America’s soul, warning that if Obama is not defeated, the United States is in danger of becoming a “secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists.” Such apocalyptic warnings, combined with statements like “I can’t imagine being comfortable with an atheist in the presidency,” insinuate that Obama is a fake Christian – a widespread belief among the religious right. (That’s actually a comparatively moderate view: The hardcore see him as the Antichrist.)
Rick Santorum went even further, essentially calling for America to become a theocracy. At the Thanksgiving Family Forum last year, Santorum said, “Our civil wars have to comport with the higher law … That’s why as long as abortion is ‘legal,’ according to the Supreme Court, we will never have rest, because that does not comport with God’s law … As long as there is discordance between the two there will be agitation.”
The Republican strategy — loudly proclaiming one’s Christian faith, while attacking Obama as an agent of secular evil, if not actually Satan himself – is right out of the Fox News playbook. As the voice of the American far right, the ultimate undeclared super-duper-GOP-PAC, Fox News has embraced the cracked “birther” movement and generally done everything within its latitudinous definition of “fair and balanced” to portray Obama as a fake-Christian, foreign-born, America-hating Muslim. (Fox’s “War on Christmas” rants appear with such clockwork regularity at Christmastime that I use them as reminders to open my Advent Calendar.)
The only GOP candidate who has not openly pursued this strategy is the front-runner, Mitt Romney. Romney has avoided the subject because as a Mormon, his own Christian credentials are suspect. But as the ultimate political panderer and opportunist, he would play the Christian card if he could. Like all the GOP candidates, Romney has tried to paint Obama as an alien Other, elite, mysterious, malevolent – in a word, slightly satanic. And also like them, Romney presents his free-market, anti-government ideology as more “American,” and by implication more “Christian,” than Obama’s.
As someone who has spent many happy hours studying Christian theology, from Origen to Hans Kung, as well as modern scholarship about Jesus, I supposed I should be pleased by this eruption of holy fervor among the Republican candidates for the highest office in the land. But there’s just one little problem.
Jesus would have been appalled by the whole pack of them.
We do not know very much about the historical Jesus. But everything we know indicates that the carpenter from Galilee would not have been pleased to learn that this pack of coldhearted, sanctimonious, wealth-exalting politicians were claiming to be his followers.
I’m not saying that Jesus would have been a Democrat. Anyone who pretends to find support for specific political policies or ideologies in the Bible is delusional. Scholars cannot agree if Jesus was a social revolutionary, a tortured mystic, or something altogether different. Even what Jesus himself believed about the most essential aspects of what was to become “Christianity’ – a religion founded not by him, but by his disciple Paul of Tarsus — is unclear. As leading biblical scholar Bart Ehrman noted in “Jesus, Interrupted,” some of the most important Christian doctrines, including the divinity of Christ, the Trinity and the concept of heaven and hell, were not held by Jesus himself: They were added later, when the church transformed itself into a new religion rather than a Jewish sect.
Ehrman told me that the authors of the four Gospels portray Jesus in such contradictory ways that there is no intellectually honest way to reconcile them. Mark, for example, depicts Jesus as doubting and despairing on the way to the cross, while Luke portrays him as calm. Ehrman argues that such contradictory accounts can only be reconciled by creating, in effect, a bogus “fifth Gospel” that does not exist.
But having said all that, we still have the evidence of the Bible itself. And one does not need to believe in the infallibility of that document to see that the Jesus who is depicted in it was implacably opposed to authoritarianism, warmongering, contempt for the poor, exaltation of wealth, conformity, and sanctimoniousness – in short, everything the contemporary Republican Party stands for.
In an ugly culmination of the successful, race-baiting “Southern strategy” that has essentially driven the GOP for decades, the Republican candidates have vied with each other to demonize poor people, especially if they’re black. That’s why Gingrich has repeatedly attacked Obama as the “food stamp president,” and why Mitt Romney went out of his way to say “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” contrasting his stance with that of the Democrats, of whom he disparagingly said, “We will hear from the Democrat Party (about) the plight of the poor.” (As Gail Collins wrote in a hilarious column, “It is interesting to hear a candidate directly attacking the opposition for being concerned about the destitute.”)
We have no idea what position Jesus would have taken on progressive taxation or whether he would have supported the Dodd-Frank Act. But we do know that Jesus, unlike Gingrich and Romney, was concerned about the poor. In fact, he made it clear that concern for the poor was an absolutely essential principle of his faith.
This is not surprising. For Jesus himself was completely destitute, and he insisted that his companions be as well. As they traveled around Palestine, they ate whatever they were given and slept in whatever house would take them. If no shelter was offered them they slept outdoors. As he told his 12 disciples in Luke 9:3, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staff, nor bag, nor bread, neither money, neither have two coats apiece. And whatever house ye enter into, there abide, and from there depart. And whoever will not receive you, when ye go out of that city, shake off the very dust from your feet for a testimony against them.”
Romney’s statement that he was “not concerned about the very poor” is telling. For Jesus explicitly stated that he was concerned not just about the poor, but about the poorest, the lowest and most despised members of society. Jesus’ famous saying in the Beatitudes in Luke 6:20 is usually translated as “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But as biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan noted in “The Essential Jesus,” “Greek has two different words for ‘poor’ (penes) and ‘destitute’ (ptochos), so it should be ‘blessed are the destitute.’” Crossan argues that Jesus’ mission was revolutionary precisely because he proclaimed, against all tradition, that the Kingdom to come was not just for the respectable poor – the “deserving poor,” in Republican parlance – but for the destitute.
Jesus again makes this explicit in Luke 9:48: “And said unto them, Whosoever shall receive this child in my name receiveth me: and whosoever shall receive me receiveth him that sent me: for he that is least among you all, the same shall be great.”
Jesus demanded that his followers help the neediest. In Matthew 19:21 he says:, “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” But Jesus went further, warning that the mere possession of wealth, and the overvaluation of worldly possessions, stands in the path of salvation. From Matthew 19:24: “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
But Jesus’ most explicit repudiation of the GOP’s ethos is found in Luke 16:19, in his famous story of Lazarus and the rich man.
There was a certain rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen, and fared sumptuously every day. And there was a certain beggar, named Lazarus, who was laid at his gate, full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table; moreover, the dogs came and licked his sores. And it came to pass that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom; the rich man also died and was buried. And in hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and seeth Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried and said, Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented. And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they who would pass from here to you cannot, neither can they pass to us, that would come from there.
The Republican candidates all claim to be devout Christians. But between the compassionate teachings of Jesus and their coldhearted, mean-spirited ideology, there is a great gulf.
Whether Gingrich and Romney’s callous attitude toward the least among us will hurt them with the 78 percent of Americans who claim to be Christians is uncertain. From the 1925 publication of “The Man Nobody Knows,” a bestseller that depicted Jesus as a successful businessman, there is a long tradition of smug, self-serving Christianity in this country, a Christianity easily compatible with the harshest and most uncharitable values and beliefs. But in their zeal to win over the most resentful, hate-filled members of their party, the Republican candidates run a greater risk. They are turning before our eyes into archetypal villains, bad guys out of our collective cultural memory bank.
And fittingly, the villain they are becoming is associated with Fox News’ favorite holiday, Christmas.
For some devout Americans, Christmas is a primarily religious occasion. But for most, it is a secular holiday, a time to make children happy, see friends, and eat and drink too much. However, it also carries, in its own modest way, a deeper meaning, even for those who are not religious at all. That meaning is imparted by our culture, but it taps into our desire to rise above ourselves. The bell-ringing Santas collecting for charity on street corners, the heartwarming movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” create a small but real sense that Christmas is, or should be, about regeneration, kindness, a new start — what St. Augustine called “The enchiridion of faith, love and hope.”
The most powerful expression of this humanistic and moral approach to Christmas is Charles Dickens’
“A Christmas Carol.” In the beginning of Dickens’ tale, the wealthy businessman Ebenezer Scrooge is approached by some fellow businessmen, collecting for charity.
Scrooge’s reply tolls like a great, black bell.
‘Are there no prisons?’
‘Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.’And the Union workhouses,’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’
‘Both very busy, sir.’
‘Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.”
… “I help to support the establishments I have mentioned — they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’
‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’
‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
It is one of the great indirect cries from the heart in all of literature.
“Are there no prisons?” may play well with the resentful Republican base. But Romney, or whoever runs against Obama, may discover that the American people are not going to vote for Scrooge.
Super Bowl: A tale of two catches
A taut, novelistic game turns in the space of three plays
New England Patriots wide receiver Wes Welker drops a pass during the second half of the NFL Super Bowl XLVI football game against the New York Giants, Sunday, Feb. 5, 2012, in Indianapolis. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum) (Credit: AP)
Super Bowl 46 was a tale of two catches – one made, one dropped – that took place within the space of three plays. The catch he dropped will haunt New England Patriots flanker Wes Welker to the end of his days. The one that New York Giants’ wide receiver Mario Manningham caught led to the Giants’ fourth Vince Lombardi Trophy, and will be almost too painful for Patriots’ fans to ever watch. Four years after Giants’ receiver David Tyree’s legendary ball-on-helmet grab led to the Giants’ scintillating victory in Super Bowl 42, the Patriots just got fatally struck by Eli Manning lightning. Again.
It was a taut game, this 21-17 affair, airless and strange and beautiful to watch for purists, a game that lacked surface melodrama but in which the outcome hung on every snap. A baseball-type football game. A novelistic game, inexorable and fatalistic, the football equivalent of Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth,” in which any change in the late narrative would have meant a different ending – Lily Bart not dying in despair, Tom Brady riding off into the sunset with four rings. But the fates – it felt like that, anyway, but it was just players making plays – decreed otherwise. Manningham’s gorgeous snag of Manning’s perfectly thrown 38-yard pass on the left sideline, with only a nanosecond to get his feet down and secure possession of the ball as he was slammed out of bounds, will go down as one of the most memorable catches in Super Bowl history, up there with Steeler Lynn Swann’s balletic leap in 1979 and John Taylor’s winning grab in the 49ers’ last-second victory over the Bengals. For Giants’ fans, it will forever be Catch 2.
This was one of the hardest Super Bowls to predict that I can remember (I called it for the Patriots in a close one, but with consummate lack of confidence in my pick) and the actual game revealed why. These two teams are equal in a very odd way. Odd, because for anyone who watched these two teams play at the end of the regular season and then in the playoffs – I admit I saw the Giants play more than the Patriots — it was obvious that the Giants were a more well-rounded team and, just as important, were peaking at the right time. They had a better defense on every level, especially in the secondary and on the defensive line, and their offense was hot, with Manning – an elite quarterback in every way, and now with the two rings to prove it – throwing to a devastating trio of wideouts. Their running game was just OK, but good enough to keep the defense honest. And the Giants were both battle-tested and on a roll, having faced what were almost elimination games since week 12 of the season.
Facing this explosive offense was a flawed Patriots’ defense, its Achilles’ heel its secondary. That should have tipped the odds to the Giants. As announcer Al Michaels pointed out, although the line favored the Pats, most fans around the country seemed to think the Giants would win.
But the Patriots had an X-factor: Tom Brady. Manning is a great quarterback, but Brady is on a different level – he’s one of the greatest of all time. And this killer was running The Machine – an offensive juggernaut featuring an unguardable flanker, first-rate wide receivers and – the trump card – two tight ends, Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez, who had just completed the greatest season two teammates ever had. Plus, there was the Patriot mystique — their three Super Bowl victories and their brilliant coach Bill Belichick. For me, that made the game a coin toss, maybe slightly tipping to the Pats. But they would be hanging on for dear life all game long and have to win on a last-minute drive.
That’s pretty much how it played out. If the Pats had had a healthy Gronkowski, they’d probably have won this game. But they didn’t. And when the chips were down, Brady and the Patriots couldn’t get the job done – and Manning and the Giants did. It wasn’t the Patriots’ last drive – that never had more than about a 10 percent chance of success, Brady needing to go 80 yards to score a touchdown with only 57 seconds left and one timeout, a situation close to Hail Mary land. It was on the drive before that Brady and Welker could have put the Giants away, and didn’t.
At the start of the game, it looked like the Giants could move the ball almost at will. The Giants received, New England deferring, and they immediately smashed the ball down the Patriots’ throats. They had crisply moved almost 50 yards and were in field goal range when Manning was sacked – a premonition of things to come for the Giants, whose inability to score when on the Patriots’ side of the field almost killed them. But a great punt by Steve Weatherford – who had a superb day, repeatedly pinning the Patriots’ deep – forced Brady to start from his own six-yard-line.
Then something extremely unusual happened. Under heavy pressure in his end zone, but not early pressure – meaning his receivers were well downfield – Brady threw it away deep down the middle. It was pretty obviously a throw-away, but the refs almost never call grounding on deep balls over the middle, because it’s usually vaguely plausible that the quarterback and his receiver are not on the same page. I think maybe I’ve seen it called once, if that. But the refs put their hands over their heads – safety. 2-0 Giants. It was the worst possible start for Brady. And when the Giants immediately marched down the field and scored, Victor Cruz gathering in a 2-yard pass from Manning, the Pats looked a little overmatched. The Giants had run 14 plays to the Patriots’ one. It felt like Brady had to generate at least a field goal on this drive to keep the 9-0 game from getting out of hand.
Brady went to work, a surgeon, methodically carving up the Giants, hitting the quicksilver Welker and wideout Deion Branch and mixing in some effective runs by BenJarvus Green-Ellis. A tipped pass by Giants’ defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul stopped the drive at the 11 but Stephen Gostowski kicked a 28-yard field goal to make it 9-3.
Turning point 1 of what would be a tense succession of turning points, climaxes and pivotal struggles. New England had weathered the storm and was trailing only by six, despite having been physically mauled and having made a crucial error on their very first offensive play. From here to the end of the game, every possession, every down, was critical.
When linebacker-size Giants’ running back Brandon Jacobs ripped off an 11-yard gain through the center of the Pats’ defensive line, Big Blue appeared to be on the verge of bludgeoning the Patriots into early submission, as analyst Chris Collinsworth pointed out. (Collinsworth was good, as usual, although his flat assertion that Giants’ wideout Mario Manningham was to blame for an incomplete sideline bomb because he ran too close to the sideline was dubious – Manningham could have been reacting to an off-target Manning pass.) But a key holding penalty snuffed out a promising drive, and the Giants had to punt.
The next series was when Brady demonstrated his mastery. Starting at his own 4-yard line, he mixed passes to Welker, Hernandez and Gronkowski, along with some potent runs by tough, undersize back Danny Woodhead, and moved the Patriots all the way down the field, culminating in a sweet TD pass to Woodhead, whose quick right-left juke on a route of the backfield left a Giants linebacker looking for his jock. At the end of the first half, disconcertingly, the Patriots had the lead, 10-9.
There was one ominous sign for the Pats. Their all-world tight end Rob Gronkowski, playing on a severe ankle sprain, was running like a tight end from 1960 – very, very slowly. Brady’s most potent weapon, the guy with the hands like oven mitts, was little more than a decoy. This was huge. Still, the Giants could have been excused for feeling like they might have made a fatal error in not putting away the Pats when they had the chance.
And when Brady opened the second half by moving his team 79 yards down the field, finishing with a 12-yard strike to Hernandez, the momentum had completely reversed. Now it was Brady who looked like he was going to score on every drive, and the Giants, trailing 17-9, who absolutely needed to score.
And Manning delivered, leading them to a field goal for 17-12.
The Giants had weathered the storm. They forced Brady and the Pats to punt. And when they stormed back down the field and kicked another field goal for 17-15, it was anyone’s game.
Brady made a rare mistake: flushed from the pocket, he underthrew a long interception intended for Gronkowski. But it was as good as a punt, and the Giants were stymied when defensive back Moore made a great, perfectly timed hit on Manningham, forcing the Giants to punt again.
The two teams had traded punches. Now came the key drive. New England got the ball back with 9:24 left on their own 8-yard line. If Brady could lead them to a touchdown, the Giants would be down two scores with not a lot of time. Mixing runs and passes, he moved them beautifully down the field, burning huge clock.
Then came the key play in the game – at least the one before Manningham’s heroics. There were less than five minutes left, secondand 11, ball on the Giants’ 44 yard line. Welker ran a 20-yardish pattern in the middle of the field, moving left to right. Brady threw it toward Welker’s right, meaning the everyman-size slot man had to leap slightly backward for the ball. It wasn’t an easy catch, but it’s one that’s almost automatic for Welker, who has some of the best hands in football. If he had caught it, deep in Giants’ territory and with the Giants having burned two timeouts, the game would probably be over. It would certainly be over if the Patriots could score a touchdown.
But he didn’t catch it. There was a shot of the Patriot players on the sideline screaming in disbelief after the ball went through Welker’s hands.
For the Patriots, it was 2008 all over again. Just before Tyree made his famous catch, Manning threw a sideline pattern that Patriots’ cornerback Asante Samuel timed perfectly. He leaped for the interception that would have ended the game – and the ball went through his fingers. Safety Rodney Harrison later said that Asante had the best hands of any defensive back in football, and when he didn’t make the catch, he knew this might not be the Patriots’ day. It felt exactly like that when Welker dropped the pass.
The Giants got the ball back at their own 12, 3:46 to go. And on the very first play, Manning threw an absolutely perfect pass to Manningham on a sideline go route. There were only inches to spare, but Manningham seized the ball out of midair, got possession instantly and got his feet down inbounds at midfield a fraction of a second before the free safety smashed him out of bounds. The 38-yard pass was the longest play of the game. Belichick was forced to challenge the ruling, which cost him a timeout that cost the Pats 45 seconds. That play was the backbreaker, but the Pats could still win if they could stop Manning and his playmakers. They couldn’t. Manning hit Hakeem Nicks, and the Giants quickly moved into field goal range and picked up a critical first down.
The Patriots, facing death by clock, allowed Ahmad Bradshaw to score. They got a break when Bradshaw failed to kneel down before crossing the goal line, but they were now facing extremely long odds with less than a minute left. Brady managed to move them to midfield, close enough to throw a Hail Mary on the last play of the game. Breathtakingly, Gronkowski almost gathered in the deflected pass – a fitting end to a great, well-played game between two evenly matched teams.
For the deserving, never-say-die Giants, their excellent coach Tom Coughlin and their cool quarterback Manning, who outplayed one of the game’s masters in the clutch and now owns one more ring than his more celebrated older brother, this victory moves them into elite company: the Giants are now tied with the Green Bay Packers with four Super Bowl wins, behind only Pittsburgh (six), San Francisco and Dallas (five each). For the Patriots, still stuck on three victories, it is the bitterest of defeats, not least because it is a déjà vu all over again. For fans, it was one of the better Super Bowls, one with its own unique, unrelenting, frustrating tension.
In cultural matters, i.e., the broadcast’s insanely expensive ads, a highly optimistic, genteely Dionysian and extremely sexualized view of reality prevailed. Viewers learned that Chevrolet Silverado trucks can make the Apocalypse go away, which is really cool! Also, if you buy one of those upgraded Fiat “Little Mice” whose tiny predecessors introduced thousands of postwar Italian men to impossible Kama Sutra positions, an outrageous babe will sexually torture you. Come to think of it, a similar babe, actually a whole bikini lineup of augmented babes, comes with every Kia. Also, the end of Prohibition was a really, really rockin’ national party, attended by the most clean-cut people in the most anodyne town imaginable, who at ad’s end are about to get shitfaced, but really politely and without any alteration of their consciousness.
Plus, the ads made it clear that all Americans must accept living “happily” in a David Foster Wallace dystopia in which everything, including the years, is sponsored. Detroit the city is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Chrysler. The automaker ran a deeply creepy “Motor City is firing again” ad that featured, among other sentimental and offensive inanities, an absurd attack on “partisans” waving generic signs. The whole weird spot, which never mentioned cars until the very end and seemed to go on forever, was narrated by Clint Eastwood, who should be profoundly ashamed. There was also a bizarre ad in which Budweiser and GE merged into a scary, mutually self-congratulating double-headed monstrosity for no apparent reason.
Enjoy tomorrow’s BudweiserTM Monday, everyone!
Small blunders kill Super Bowl dreams
For fans of the 49ers and Ravens, the road to the big game is paved with pain
Kyle Williams loses it
Just when it looked like the NFC and AFC championship games were going to last until the Super Bowl, two fatal blunders brought them to an abrupt close. The stunning conclusions to two of the most tense, evenly matched conference championship games in recent memory were a painful reminder that although football is a team game, one miscue by a single player can wipe out thousands of hours of collective blood, sweat and tears.
It will be a sad and lonely night for Baltimore Ravens’ kicker Billy Cundiff, whose shanked chip-shot 32-yarder gave the AFC championship to the New England Patriots. Kickers must have strong mental constitutions: in a sport where bonds between teammates are cemented in blood and pain, they are not always regarded as full-fledged comrades to begin with, and so when they screw up, it’s even harder for them to deal with. The mantra “short memory,” which defensive backs are constantly shouting at each other, applies in spades to kickers. Cundiff could use a tall glass of Milk of Amnesia.
It must have been an especially bitter defeat for the Ravens because they had played the Patriots to a standstill. In fact, they would have won the game had receiver Lee Evans been able to hold onto a pass in the end zone for another split-second, before New England backup defensive back Sterling Moore poked it out. On a night when Tom Brady had a subpar game – “I sucked pretty bad today,” he said – Baltimore had a golden opportunity to make it to the Super Bowl. The opportunity, for aging legends like Ray Lewis and Ed Reed, may never come again.
But the biggest goat horns belonged to San Francisco 49er return man Kyle Williams, who made not one but two critical mistakes that basically cost the 49ers the game. His first miscue took place midway through the fourth quarter, with the 49ers leading the New York Giants 14-10 and about to get the ball back. It was not only a game-changing play, it was one of the weirder instant replays I’ve ever seen.
As a Steve Weatherford punt landed in front of him and began bouncing toward him, Williams was torn between trying to field it, saving valuable yards of field position, and playing it safe by getting away from it. His indecision only lasted half a second, but it cost him and his team dearly. The ball ticked almost imperceptibly off his knee, and the Giants recovered it as he froze, desperately trying to look like he just happened to be walking by the bank when the vault exploded and a large wad of banknotes flew into his unwilling hands. The officiating crew on the field ruled that it was 49ers ball; the Giants challenged the call. The slow-motion replays were inconclusive, leading 49er fans like me to briefly hope that a saving cloud of epistemological murk had descended, a Nietzschean universe in which there were no facts, only interpretations. But then perspectivism was refuted: A regular-speed replay from a different angle clearly showed the ball touching his knee.
That was odd enough – normally the full-speed shots are more ambiguous, not less — but the really odd thing was Williams’ reaction. If he knew that the ball had touched him – which he may not have – did he really think he could get away with feigning innocence? The all-seeing eye of Sauron was going to find him out and shoot him down. His nothing-to-see-here, keep-moving reaction was understandable, but it somehow seemed like trying to hide under the bed when a drone has launched a missile at you.
That mishandled punt led to a Giants touchdown. And then, in overtime, Williams fumbled while returning another punt. The Giants recovered and kicked the winning field goal.
Williams’ 49er teammates all told him to keep his head up, that he hadn’t lost the game. Quarterback Alex Smith said that the real reason the 49ers lost was that they couldn’t convert on thirddown: They were an abysmal one for 13, and that one was a meaningless quasi-Hail Mary at the end of the first half that the Giants conceded. The solidarity Williams’ teammates showed was admirable, and in the great scheme of things they’re right that one player doesn’t lose a game. If the 49ers’ mediocre wide receivers had ever gotten open, if the 49ers’ coaches had stayed with what had been an effective rushing attack toward the end of the game instead of inexplicably deciding to pass on every down, if they had overcome their aversion to calling screens and swing passes, Williams’ boo-boos might not have mattered.
But those flaws are integral to the 49ers. All year long, they struggled to convert thirddowns and score in the red zone. Alex Smith has taken most of the blame for these failings, and he deserves some of it. But so do his receivers. And so do the 49er coaches, who have devised a highly creative running game but whose passing schemes are strikingly ineffective.
The 49ers lived all year on great defense – this year’s version is right up there with the great defenses in the glory years led by Ronnie Lott – and above all by not making mistakes. They tied an all-time NFL record for the lowest number of turnovers, with 10. But this means they have no margin for error. Until they put some electricity in their passing game, they have to play flawless football to beat a first-rate, well-rounded team like the Giants. And that isn’t going to happen every time.
I was bummed that Alex Smith’s redemption story did not have a Hollywood ending. Although he didn’t have a great game – the fact that his 97.6 quarterback rating was higher than Eli Manning’s 82.3 shows how little those ratings can mean – he played well enough this year to have convinced all but the most obdurate that he is not the 49ers’ problem.
Still, even taking into account how bad the 49ers’ receivers are compared to the Giants’ lethal trio of wideouts, the contrast between Manning and Smith in this game was striking.
Manning simply played at a higher level. Under heavy pressure in the second half, he managed to find open receivers time and again, whether on outlet patterns or downfield. His accuracy was remarkable for a game played in terrible weather. And even when he was being smashed to the ground, he kept his poise. No quarterback in the league is playing better than he is right now.
All four teams were remarkably closely matched; both games could have gone either way. But in the end the two best teams from each conference are going to the Super Bowl. And just as the matchup between the Giants and the 49ers became more intriguing after Alex Smith won last week’s legendary shoot-out with Drew Brees, so the matchup between the Patriots and the Giants has become a lot more interesting after the Patriots showed they could actually play defense against the Ravens. Defensive tackle Vince Wilfork had a monster game, and the Patriots’ secondary managed to hang in there against Anquan Boldin and Torrey Smith. Also, Brady is not going to lay an egg two games in a row.
It’s a case of the team with the mojo going against the team with the maestro. With considerable hesitation, I’m going with the maestro. Patriots 24, Giants 21.
A personal postmortem, now that my team has been eliminated. Defeat is bitter wormwood. I’d forgotten how bitter.
It has been many years since I’d really felt anything, good or bad, about the 49ers. The team sucked and I got used to being disappointed. The glory days felt like they took place in another lifetime – and in a way they did. I shut my expectations down. And my emotions.
Then this amazing season reawakened something. And when the 49ers pulled off that victory for the ages last week against the Saints, it all came back. I felt the delirious joy I, and the city, felt the first time, and every time, the 49ers won the Super Bowl. I remembered the shouts of joy echoing across rooftops on Nob Hill, and the old black man on the corner of Broadway and Columbus doing a funny little dance and saying to everyone who went by, “Who said Joe ain’t bad?” Like a woman who can only remember the joy of giving birth and has blocked out the excruciating pangs of labor, I conveniently forgot the agony of all the losses – Billy “White Shoes” Johnson’s last-second catch in Atlanta, the Don Beebe dagger, Roger Craig’s fumble against the Giants, the phantom pass-interference call against Eric Wright against the Redskins.
But when the 49ers walked off the field Sunday with their heads down, in front of a sad, silent crowd, 30 years’ worth of bad old memories came rushing back. As I drove through the empty streets, the city’s collective sorrow seemed almost tangible, like the weeping sky. It, and I, had gone from ecstasy to misery in one week. I wondered for a moment if it was worth it.
But I only wondered that for a moment. This had been a wondrous season, a gift. Yes, it ended in heartbreak. But I would rather feel heartbreak than nothing. In sports, as in life, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Occupy San Francisco gets down to business
After a brief hibernation, a refocused movement takes aim at corporate America
Warren Langley: from stock exchange chief to occupier
SAN FRANCISCO–Act II of the Occupy Wall Street movement, San Francisco version, kicked off on a rainy, blustery Friday in the heart of the city’s financial district. Targeting specific corporations like Wells Fargo and Bank of America and emphasizing real, tangible issues like home foreclosures, affordable health care and education as well as broader ones like the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, several hundred protesters – the exact number was impossible to estimate – fanned out across the city, snarling traffic, getting arrested, holding sidewalk teach-ins, and generally serving notice that after its brief winter hibernation, the Occupy movement was back and kicking.
Occupy’s first act, the Tent Phase, ended in early December, when city authorities raided its urban camp at Justin Herman Plaza near the Ferry Building. But even before the tents were removed, it had become clear that the movement needed both to develop new tactics and deepen its strategic vision.
“After the raid, when our attention was no longer focused on [the encampment], people turned back to their neighborhoods and their campuses,” said David Solnit, who is part of a direct action working group associated with Occupy SF. “We started Occupy Bernal Heights [a multi-ethnic, mixed-income neighborhood on the edge of the Mission District], and we had 65 people at the first meeting. We went door to door meeting folks facing foreclosures. We got meetings with mid-level people at Wells Fargo Bank.”
Solnit – who is the brother of San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit – said that OccupySF Housing, a housing-related spinoff of the movement, had held marches in four neighborhoods and succeeded in saving four homes from foreclosure.
“We’re more diversified now, but more powerful than when all our eggs were in one basket,” Solnit said. “Gene Sharp came up with 198 different methods of nonviolent action. Camping out is one tactic. We still have 197 more tactics to go through, and another 500 to create.”
At 6:20 a.m., in pitch darkness, with a miserable rain pelting down in front of the enormous 52-story monolith of 555 California, it seemed like a good idea for Occupy to come up with a new tactic immediately. The schedule on the Occupy Wall St. West web site had announced that there would be a wacky 6 a.m. protest against Goldman Sachs, featuring a squid fry (“bring your own frying pan”) and protesters dressed as squids. (The squid theme derived from Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s famous description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”) But no one seemed to be giving out fried calamari – not that anyone could have digested it at that ungodly hour — and there were only four protesters standing near the entrance. They were dwarfed by a phalanx of waiting police and TV journalists.
The last person you would expect to find standing in a bedraggled squid costume in front of a financial district skyscraper at six in the morning would be a 69-year-old retired psychology professor. But the Occupy movement is full of surprises. The human squid, Eleanor Levine, said, “I’m out here to bring attention to the irresponsible financial practices of Goldman Sachs. I also want to bring attention to the concept of corporate personhood [which was behind the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United]. Corporations are not people. This company played a role in bringing not just the country but the world to financial ruin. People have to face up to what Goldman Sachs has done. Their CEO made $28 million.” Asked if the dreadful weather had prevented more people from joining the protest, Levine said calmly, “Yes, the rain put a damper on the turnout, but more will come.” Her pink tentacles waving, she walked cheerfully off.
I approached a mustachioed man in a yellow poncho inscribed with the words “Money 4 Housing and Education, not 4 Banks and Corporations.” Alex Carlson, 34, was a paramedic who said the biggest reason he came out was to protest America’s lack of educational opportunities. “I couldn’t get into school just to get an EMI license. I had to beg a teacher to let me into his class. Nursing was my real goal, but there’s no money for nursing schools. It’s crazy because there’s a nursing shortage and there’s going to be a crisis of care when the bay boomers die off.”
Carlson said he had come out at the crack of dawn in the rain because he felt he had to.
“Like everyone else I’m just trying to carve out a little life for myself, but my knife is getting shorter and shorter,” he said. “I’m not a crazy activist person. I have a wife and a young son. Camping out isn’t an option for me. But I was able to come out today, so I did. And I’m proud.”
I walked down a block to a building housing Wells Fargo, where people protesting the bank’s role in the national foreclosure crisis had chained themselves in front of the entrances on all four sides. In one of the entrances, about eight people were squeezed in, their arms inside big yellow PVC pipes that were connected together. A policeman came up and politely informed them they were creating a public health risk and would be arrested if they didn’t leave. Dozens of police waited on the corner.
A woman with a bullhorn shouted slogans. A wildly energetic street band, three saxes, a trumpet, a big bass drum and a snare, played surreally cheerful Kurt Weill-like tunes, their vaguely Weimar sound oddly appropriate.
A fresh-faced young woman with glasses was sitting among the crowd in the entrance, with a sign that said “Give us our homes back.” I asked her why she was there. “My parents had their home in Southern California foreclosed,” she said. Her said her name was Sarah Lombardo and she was 28 years old. “They couldn’t make their payments because of medical costs. My mom had breast cancer and my dad had a stroke. They were told to leave in two weeks and our house was auctioned off. Now they’re living in an apartment, but their credit was destroyed so they had to pay three times the normal deposit.”
Lombardo said her mom was a purchasing agent and her dad was a factory worker. “I’m the first one in my family to go to college.” She said she came out because she wanted “to put a face to the statistics.” It was a face that looked like it belonged to the girl next door, or to your daughter.
She said that now that she had finished college, it made it possible for her to be arrested. “It’s for a good cause.”
I asked her if she had ever been arrested before. “No.” Was she afraid? “No, I’m not scared.”
Later, behind a cordon of police, I watched as protesters on the north side of the building were arrested, frisked and loaded into a paddy wagon. I rode off on my bike to cover some more actions. When I came back, Lombardo and the rest of the group of people in the doorway had been arrested.
Back up at 555 California, beyond the big turd-in-a-plaza artwork jokingly called the “banker’s heart,” I came upon an older man in a suit, carrying a sign that said “Give Us Our City Back.” I was intrigued: he was definitely not the usual Occupy protester. But when I asked him who he was, he turned out to be even more unusual than I could have expected. He was Warren Langley, the 69-year-old former head of the Pacific Stock Exchange.
What brought a man with his background out to protest?
“I was in the industry. I worked for an option trading firm that was sold to Goldman Sachs. So I played the game on the other side. But I have two grandkids and two daughters, and I became increasingly concerned that their future wouldn’t offer them the same opportunities that I had as a young man. The income inequities in our society are a huge problem.”
Langley said he first heard about the Occupy movement from his pal Ben Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. “He was scooping ice cream for them in New York. And he told me, ‘These are the real deal.’ So one day I was eating lunch at the Ferry Building, and I walked across the street to the camp and started talking to these young people. And they were the real deal. They’re folks who lost their jobs, or are just out of school and can’t get a job. I could bring my credibility to the movement, so I decided to get involved.”
Langley decried the deregulation of the financial industry, in particular the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act that eroded the wall between banks and investment houses and gave birth to the wild, insanely profitable speculation
that ultimately dealt the world’s economy a devastating blow. “They bet our money and then we paid off the bookmaker.”
I asked Langley what his former colleagues in high finance thought about the Occupy Movement.
“Well, there are some who say, ‘They’re a bunch of whiners and need to get a job.’ But those are the ones who haven’t actually talked to the people in the movement. There are others who are more open-minded. I know one guy, very wealthy, who told me, ‘What’s their plan? I’m ready to give them $250,000 if they have a plan.’ And I told him, ‘It’s not their job to give you a plan. They’re hurting.’ So whether it’s job opportunities, or better health care, or fairer taxes, we need through the political system to come up with a plan. It isn’t their job. He didn’t get it. But his kids, who are also very wealthy, were more sympathetic. It’s a generational thing.”
Langley went on to say that Occupy was sharpening its ideas. “It’s moving to get a more specific message across, from ‘We’re hurting’ to “This is what’s hurting us.’ He said he didn’t see the Occupy movement ever aligning with any political party. “Chuck Schumer does as much damage as John Boehner. In the end, it’s about occupying people’s minds, so people who aren’t down here will see that the system is not fair.
There was also a nurse-led protest across town against the big medical group California Pacific Medical Center, which RN Jane Sandoval said is shifting resources away from poorer patients. Another nurse, Eileen Prendiville, said CMPC is emblematic of America’s broken, for-profit health care system, even though it is nominally a non-profit.
If the new Occupy is meatier and more substantive, it still thrives on spectacle and encounters with authority– and the latter can be a double-edged sword. After one nasty encounter outside 555 California when a young guy who engaged in a scuffle with the cops when they rushed forward was arrested, quite a few people in the crowd began shouting “fuck you, pigs!”, “you slaves!”, “pigs go home!” and “your warrant is to serve your corporate masters” to the police, probably not winning any hearts and minds in the process. No one told them to can the Black Panther rhetoric. At the same time, in one of those weird juxtapositions that Occupy specializes in, across the street stood two gentle souls holding a big black banner that read, “Buddhist Peace and Justice League: May All Beings Be Happy and Secure.”
Based on Friday’s actions – which I only saw part of — Occupy’s new approach seems to have three components.
First, it has become more of a big-tent movement, welcoming outside groups like labor unions. Second, it is taking deliberate, loud, public aim at specific corporate targets, like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. Perhaps most important, as David Solnit pointed out, it is reinventing itself as a grass roots organization – reaching out to ordinary people who may not know much about the Occupy movement, but whose lives have been devastated by anonymous corporate decisions.
It’s an ambitious, multi-faceted reset, and there’s no way of knowing how effective it will be. Simply camping out and saying “We are the 99 percent” has the downside of being vague, but for that very reason it has an abstract, jarring purity. More specific, targeted protests are more substantive and show the movement is serious, but also make it more conventional. Still, as long as the movement attracts followers as committed, intelligent and impressive as the people I talked to, it will remain a force to be reckoned with. It seems certain to play a role in the national discourse not just during this election season, but for a long time.
Reviled no more
The end of Tebow! The resurrection of Alex Smith! And more amazing-yet-true tales from the NFL division playoffs
Character gaining
Like campaigning as a right-wing loon in Iowa or taking hallucinatory drugs in preparation for the Bar exam, playoff football is all about peaking at the right time. And after this weekend’s division-round games, all four of the remaining teams in the NFL playoffs can legitimately feel that they have the best shot at winning Super Bowl 46. (Not “XLVI”: I refuse to honor the NFL’s grandiose insistence on using Roman numerals to denote its championship game for the same reason that I refuse to call a small Starbucks coffee a “tall.”)
My team, the San Francisco 49ers, are channeling the ghosts of Joe Montana and Dwight Clark after coming back not once but twice in the last four minutes to beat the unstoppable New Orleans Saints in one of the most thrilling playoff games ever played. (Gloating and hubristic reminder: in my previous piece I called the 49ers to win 30-28. The final score: 49ers 36, Saints 32.)
The New England Patriots have the confident glow of an omnipotent serial killer with a medical degree after they surgically carved up the corpse of the 1958 Nebraska Cornhuskers, aka the Denver Broncos. The contrast between Tom Brady’s laser-like passes and Tim Tebow’s wishful heaves was excruciating, but there could be an upside to Tebow’s abysmal showing: It might switch Tebowmania from Christian triumphalism to Christian humility. (Slightly less gloating but still disturbingly hubristic reminder: I called it 31-17 for New England. The final score: Patriots 45, Broncos10.)
The Baltimore Ravens are feeling like the guy who went to Vegas with a $10 stake and came back with a million bucks after Houston Texans’ punt returner Jacoby Jones suffered the biggest brain-freeze since Jim Marshall’s wrong-way run in 1964, snatching clumsily at an erratically bouncing ball as two large, malevolent, and heavily muscled men approached him at full speed. Jones’ brain fart heard ‘round the world was the difference in the Nevermores’ triumph over the most balanced and dangerous team in the AFC. (Most gloating and hubristic reminder yet: I called it 24-14 Baltimore. The final score: Ravens 20, Texans 13.)
And the New York Giants can light up the most expensive Cohiba in the playoff humidor. Continuing their month-long hot streak, the boys in blue rolled up the defending champion Green Bay Packers as if they were an old, moth-eaten rug and placed them thoughtfully in cold storage for the winter. The Giants were helped by the fact that the Green Bay receivers appeared to mistake the football for an incoming hand grenade, but they would have whupped on the flat, stale and unprofitable Pack anyway. Besides, any team that cannot knock down a Hail Mary pass does not deserve to repeat as champions. (Spoiler alert: Do not read the next sentence unless you want this column’s shocking and dramatic ending, namely that I have no idea what I’m talking about, prematurely revealed. I called Packers 28-21. Final score: 37-20, Giants. Hey, that’s why they call it hubris!)
The NFC championship game looks more compelling than the AFC game. The Ravens-Patriots game is another one of those irresistible force vs. immovable object matchups that the NBA, I mean the NFL, is filled with this year, now that thanks to insanely great quarterback play, superb receivers and the best crop of tight ends in league history, playing D is no longer necessary to win. The Patriots’ defense is so bad that the Ravens have a chance, but Baltimore’s offense looked so constipated against Houston – although to be fair, Houston’s tough defense had a lot to do with that – and Brady and gang looked so sharp, that it is hard to imagine Baltimore going into Foxboro and coming away with a win.
No team in the league can match up with the Patriots’ tight ends, Gronkowski and Hernandez, and there’s no reason to think the Ravens can. To win, the Ravens are going to have to put a lot more pressure on Brady than they did on Houston rookie QB T.J. Yates — who would actually have played quite well if someone had told him that there is a position in football called “free safety.” Ferocious Baltimore linebacker Terrell Suggs, who was mostly invisible during the game, will have to materialize against the Patriots. The Ravens’ less-than-dynamic offense should be able to put up points against the feeble New England defense, but not enough.
Prediction: 24-17, Patriots.
The NFC championship game should be a classic. The Giants are on top of their game right now. They had a great defensive scheme against Green Bay; even though they didn’t generate much pressure from their defensive line, their coverage downfield was so good that Aaron Rodgers couldn’t get into one of his insane rhythms. In that way, the Giants resemble the 49ers, who make opposing teams earn every yard, although the 49ers have a better run defense and a slightly better defense overall.
On offense, the edge goes to the Giants, with Eli Manning playing like his big brother and the scary wide receiver trio of Manningham, Hicks and Cruz. By contrast, the 49ers are thin at wideouts. But as the Saints found out, blazingly-fast tight end Vernon Davis poses a severe matchup problem, and running back Frank Gore, even though he seems to be playing hurt, is a bigger threat than Ahmad Bradshaw or Brandon Jacobs. And although it may seem like a ridiculous thing to say after they gave up 462 yards to Drew Brees, the 49ers secondary is playing lights out.
Prediction: 24-20, 49ers.
Part of the reason I like the 49ers is their defense and their kicking game, and of course home-field advantage. But the real reason is Alex Smith.
I know, that’s weird, verging on commitable. Taking Smith over Manning? No one could seriously argue that Smith has achieved even a fraction of what Manning has. But Smith is an X-factor. He is poised to confound his doubters and shock the world. Like he just did.
Saturday’s game, which I attended, etched itself into 49ers lore for a whole bunch of reasons. There was the performance of the defense, holding the potent Saints at bay for those agonizingly long stretches when the 49ers offense struggled. There was Vernon Davis, weeping without shame in the arms of coach Jim Harbaugh after catching the winning pass, a strong man reduced by relief and gratitude and utter emotional exhaustion to his naked human essence, his dissolving face one of the most moving things I’ve ever seen in sports. But what made this game the stuff of legends was the performance of Alex Smith.
Smith has been reviled ever since he put on a 49er uniform. Virtually no one in the Bay Area, including the fans and the so-called “experts,” ever believed in him. The fans have come around some now, but the bandwagon is still not exactly crowded. I saw thousands of Montana and Willis and Young and Lott jerseys in the stadium Saturday. If there were any Alex Smith jerseys, I missed them. As for the rest of the country, fuggedaboutit. New York Post football writer Mark Cannizzaro’s appraisal of Smith (issued just before Smith and the 49ers beat the Giants this year) is typical: “Alex Smith cannot beat you…Here’s the reality about Smith: He is who he has always been since he came into the league as the 49ers’ first-round draft pick in 2005 — a mediocre quarterback.” My own friends derided me for standing up for the guy.
Finally given a real coach and a consistent system, Smith had a remarkable renaissance this year. And then, on Saturday, at the biggest moment in his career, with everything on the line, he came through – and he did it not once but twice. To hang in there for six years, working hard every day, tuning out the doubters, with no one except the guys in the locker room believing you can succeed, takes more than talent. It takes character.
When Smith threw that last perfect pass and Davis caught it just before Roman Harper leveled him just over the goal line, and he held on to the football and got to his feet, Candlestick Park went crazy. Amid all the shouting and screaming, I looked over to a young woman sitting to my left. She was weeping, her head bent, tears running down her face. At that moment I realized that she, like many of the fans in the stadium, like my 23-year-old son who called me up in breathless, disbelieving joy after the game, had not even been alive when Joe Montana and Dwight Clark launched the 49er dynasty 30 years ago.
For her, the memories I had of The Catch, of Young and Lott and Craig and all the rest of the great players and teams of the past, of five Super Bowls and years of happiness, were only legends, replays on TV. Alex Smith and Vernon Davis had given her a priceless gift: her own memories. I think that’s why she was crying. And whether the 49ers win next week or not, they can’t take that away from her.
Page 1 of 62 in Gary Kamiya
Currently In Salon
-
At the CPAC-Occupy beer summit
-
Our non-withdrawal from Afghanistan
-
“We don’t need someone to think”
-
How rough it’s gotten for Mitt
-
The Grammys’ most memorable moments
-
A passport to utopia
-
“The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog”: Not kids’ stuff
-
Ricky Gervais: My conscience never takes a day off
-
Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume
-
America’s failed promise of equal opportunity
