Nike: Write the Future

It scares me a little to imagine how much this cost. Nike’s three-minute opus features about a dozen of the biggest names in the game, including a few who won’t be playing in South Africa (Brazil’s Ronaldinho, seen here doing his trademark samba over the ball, failed to make his team’s final squad of 23, because Brazil is just so good that they cut players other countries would kill to have. Also, Ivory Coast’s Didier Drogba, the guy in orange at the beginning, has a broken arm and might not play). My favorite section is about 45 seconds in, when England’s Wayne Rooney sees the outcome of one play, if he makes a tackle or if he fails, and there’s a brief clip of American superstars (the closest thing we have to superstars!) Landon Donovan and Tim Howard laughing at him. Then, of course, he plays table tennis with Federer, which is hilarious. And I really enjoy the concept of Ronaldo: The Movie, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Basically, this commercial makes me want to watch soccer. And buy Nikes. Mission accomplished!

ETA: Seth Stevenson over at Slate points out that the commercial was directed by clever Mexican auteur Alejandro González Iñárritu (hat tip to Friend of the ‘Faux Ali). Seth also spotlights another of my favorite moments in the spot and uses a particular bit of British football slang I love: “Later, Cristiano Ronaldo fantasizes that a successful World Cup will land him an appearance on The Simpsons (he nutmegs Homer, who exclaims, “Ronal-d’oh!”) and make him the subject of a blockbuster bio-pic starring Gael García Bernal.”

U2: “City of Blinding Light”

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that one of my day jobs is working for the company that holds the exclusive broadcast rights to the tournament in the U.S. But I have absolutely nothing to do with the broadcast division, or the people who make the ads for World Cup coverage. So when I say that I LOVE THIS SERIES OF ADS, know that I’m not being a shill for the Mouse. I really do love the set of spots ESPN has done for the World Cup featuring some of U2′s greatest music. This World Cup was basically packaged for Bono to weep over as soon as South Africa got the bid; it brings together two of his favorite things: football and AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHFRICA. This spot is pretty old, as you can see; all the footage is from Germany ’06 and, again, a lot of those players won’t be in this World Cup, notably beautiful German captain Michael Ballack, who you can see three seconds in and who, like effing ALL OF CHELSEA FC, is hurt. (If you’re interested in U.S. games, keep an eye out for our superlative midfielder Clint Dempsey, wearing #8 and seen at 11 seconds.) There’s just something glorious about the scope of the World Cup, the emotion of the players, and that great, great song that has had me tearing up at the gym whenever I’ve seen it over the past three months. Yeah. I’m a sap. I blame it on that adorable baby near the end with “SA” written on its head.

US Soccer: Over There

I saw this spot for the first time on Saturday during the national team’s final warmup game against Australia. (We won! Sorry, Socceroos.) And it felt kind of weird. “Over There,” as I’ve just learned, was written during the First World War and again became popular during WW2, and it just has kind of a weird, militaristic overtone to me. Especially if you look at the verses, which the spot doesn’t use. Given the United States’ unpleasant recent history of global, um, stomping on people, I don’t think that’s exactly the message we want to send. Except that as a soccer-playing nation, we have been historically incapable of stomping on anyone for about 60 years. If you want to ignore the vague cultural imperialism and just look at our very fine national team, that’s okay. We have a hot team this year.

U2: “Magnificent”

If you don’t care for U2′s particular brand of bombast, you may want to stop reading here, because anti-Bono-ites will find this one really obnoxious. But I love it, for a couple of reasons. First is that the rhythm line for “Magnificent” is the best U2 has written since…oh, I don’t know. “Mysterious Ways,” maybe? That bass groove is just incredible. Second is the political aspect. When people talk about the World Cup, they don’t even pretend that it’s apolitical, like some folks still like to do with the Olympics. The World Cup is a political statement, much like the Beijing Summer Games were a political statement, and this World Cup is probably the most politically significant tournament since I don’t even know when. Mexico ’86? Germany ’74? I don’t know enough about soccer intersecting with world history to evaluate all 18 previous Finals, but this World Cup, the first ever held in Africa, is certainly the most important of my lifetime. The people of South Africa fought their way through a lot of shit to get this tournament, and if today’s reception for the Bafana Bafana is any indication, they are effing psyched. South Africa was banned from world competition by FIFA from 1976 until 1992 because the country’s constitution prohibited racially mixed teams. So within the lifetimes of the players on the field and most of the spectators, they weren’t allowed even to compete in this tournament, and now they’re hosting it. That’s a big thing.

U2: “Where the Streets Have No Name”

I like how ESPN is pretending U2 didn’t record anything between 1986 and 2004. Achtung Baby just doesn’t scream World Cup, does it? They had to reach all the way back to the pseudo-religious mysticism of The Joshua Tree to do this most delicate and potentially crass, if treated poorly, subject justice. And I think they succeeded, although your mileage may vary. The fact that the political ruling class of South Africa today was largely imprisoned barely 20 years ago is incredible and inspiring, and lends more credence to the whole “more than game” idea. Expect a whole lot of choked-up people on Friday morning when Mandela, the closest thing the planet has to a living saint right now, (hopefully) makes a brief appearance before the opening match.

Adidas: Star Wars cantina

This commercial is just fucking weird. What does Star Wars have to do with the World Cup? I have no idea. But it does involve my favorite Gallagher and David Beckham, who will be sorely missed on the pitch in South Africa (Becks blew his Achilles tendon in February, ending his hopes to be the first Englishman to play in four World Cups, but he’s there for the tournament. He was in the stands at USA vs. Australia Saturday, scouting and looking quite fantastic), as well as Jay Baruchel? What? Canadians don’t play soccer. And Snoop Dogg! See, I told you it was weird.

So that’s it. More World Cup selling than you can sneer at. Play starts Friday morning; match schedule is here. The final is Sunday, July 11. I think it’s going to be awesome.

I have not fallen out of love with the Olympics; no, I still go to bed every night during this fortnight murmuring “Citius, altius, fortius,” I’m still obsessively monitoring the Excel spreadsheet that features my Olympic pool (I’m currently in seventh place with six points, thanks, Shani Davis), and I’m still planning on, you know, watching the rest of the Games. But I would like to beat NBC with flaming sticks. For a couple of reasons.

First, the tape delay. Look, I know that NBC paid a shitload of money for the exclusive broadcast rights and wants to air as much of the Games as possible in primetime, because primetime commercials cost more and that’s how they make the fancy money. I work in media; I get it. But for the LOVE OF SHAUN WHITE. NBC was able to sweet-talk the Chinese into scheduling every single one of Michael Phelps’s finals in primetime, that is, at like 9:30 in the morning Beijing time. I understand that several Olympic sports, namely, the skiing, are dependent on daylight, and therefore can’t be held at 10 p.m. when it’s conducive to East Coast television schedules. But there are a number of sports that are competed indoors, namely, the massive ratings draw that is figure skating, and both snowboard halfpipe and freestyle moguls can be done at night, under lights. Not to be all EST-centric about it, but would it EFFING KILL YOU to schedule those at like 5 o’clock West Coast time and air them live? On both coasts? Because here’s the thing: I don’t like finding out who wins nine hours before I watch the race! It’s anticlimactic! It makes still-miked Lindsey Vonn sobbing happily into her husband’s chest somewhat less poignant for me! You know what I like? Suspense! Maybe if NBC put the tiniest bit of effort into preserving some of the element of surprise, we wouldn’t be all, “What, that? I heard about that five hours ago!”

Second: The Interwebs. So NBC has insisted on tape-delaying various events, including snowboard cross, skiing events, and all the short track events that don’t involve Apolo Ohno, which are relegated to the late night block with Mary Carillo and her dead eyes (more on that later). BUT. They still have live results on nbcolympics.com, so if you wander over there during the day to, say, check on how your pet luger is doing, you’ll see a great big animated graphic trumpeting Seth Wescott’s surprise repeat gold. When you had planned on watching that race after you finished your work.

I’m just confused about why NBC can’t manage to stick to one or the other. Either you’re going to tape-delay the events, and make us wait to watch them, OR you’re going to tell us who won as soon as they happen. WHY ARE YOU DOING BOTH?! It’s infuriating. Almost as infuriating as the fact that there’s nothing on the television for me to watch at work other than CURLING. SERIOUSLY. Today, there was nothing on except curling on USA until 3 p.m., when NBC started showing tape-delayed cross-country skiing. While the ladies’ downhill was happening, as Pat Kiernan’s Twitter told me. Pat, interestingly, is actually attending the Olympics with his family. And he’s a more efficient news source when he’s on vacation than NBC is while doing their effing jobs. DUDE, NBC. Stop sucking.

Third, the insane features. I know it’s a hoary cliché with, like, cobwebs on it at this point to talk about how NBC’s features are maudlin, overblown, and ridiculous. But I think they’re even worse this year. Don’t get me wrong; I love anything that reminds me that Evgeni Plushenko is a Bedazzled Darth Vader. But in Beijing, we had NBA players wandering around the Great Wall of China, and that, at least, was kind of interesting, because Dwight Howard looks funny next to befuddled Chinese tour guides. In Vancouver, which from all accounts is a completely lovely city full of delightful people, good food, and high-qualify drugs, we have MARY GODDAMN CARILLO asking some poor Yukoner when he first met a polar bear. DURING LIVE SPORTS, Mary “I do love tennis” Carillo and her dead eyes are interrogating innocent Canadians about their wildlife! WHAT THE FUCK, NBC.

This is not to say there aren’t good things. NBC finally took Dick Button out of the figure skating commentators’ booth (although they retained underminery Sandra Bezic and excitable gnome Scott Hamilton), and they’ve hired some reasonably intelligent people to call sports they specialize in, like Jonny Moseley, who did a respectable job with moguls, and Dan Jansen, who barely looks like he’s aged since his Visa commercial. And have I mentioned how I enjoy Brian Williams? I do. And I like how the Today Show folks are calling their satellite studio “Studio 1-Eh.”

Oh! But one other thing? What the HELL is up with all the fucking Dreamworks promos? It’s not just that the creators of How to Train Your Dragon bought like forty-seven-thousand ad spots during these Games, NO. They actually paid to have the commentators kick to the ad with drivel like, “Well, if you thought that ski jumping was great, wait till you see what our friends at Dreamworks have dreamed up! They think they know how Vikings might have ski jumped!” And then there are some antiseptic animations that make Shrek look like Akira and it SUCKS.

I’m too tired and tipsy (happy birthday, Kyle) to look up whether NBC has already bought the exclusive rights to the London Games. I seriously effing hope they haven’t. I don’t remember much about how the networks covered the Games pre-NBC hegemony, but SOMEONE has got to give Dick Ebersol a fucking wakeup call. Because if they’re this inept when the Games are happening three hours before us, how viciously crappy is it going to be when they’re five hours ahead?

This does not mean I am not excited about the figure skating tomorrow night. It means I want to smack some sense into Dicks Ebersol and Button, because they are RUINING THIS FOR EVERYONE. Also, I am not too dignified to say that I kind of want to see Lindsey Vonn’s gnarly shin bruise. And I want to know what cheese can do for you. Fuck, that is some air Shaun White is grabbing, yeah?

All right, all right, all right.

So when we pick up in season 4, Coach is heading off to survey the situation at East Dillon. The situation is: Shit pie with crap sauce. The field is basically Oklahoma in 1931. The locker room is covered in graffiti and, we assume, the equipment is sub-par. And the Lions? They wear red. Coach’s coloring is just not made for red.

So he sets about assembling a team. Landry, it turns out, has been reassigned to East Dillon, and he haz a sad. I’m not sure why, since his lady and his only friend, other than Kastor, his friend who plays in Crucifictorious who got beat up by Bobby Reyes back in season 1, have graduated. So Landry, as Matt later astutely reasons, will be a Lion, and the Lions are so crap he might be a starting Lion.

Tami is still the principal of West Dillon, and has to deal with the irate parents of her now former students who have been randomly reassigned to East Dillon, which, since we saw how Tami was struggling to buy either toilet paper or chalk for West Dillon last year, we have to assume is even more tragically underfunded and understaffed. I mean, when a Texas high school can’t afford to resod the football field, do you think their history books include the Vietnam War? Me neither. Mid-episode, Julie announces she’s decided to go to East Dillon. Because she is not the same girl who was reading Moby-Dick in the pilot. Baby Grace has hair!

Matt. Oh, Matt. Matt has decided not to go to Chicago for art school in order to stay in Dillon and take care of Grandma Saracen, like the upstanding, self-sacrificing man he is. This means he’s delivering pizzas, including to Dillon’s revolting, spoiled crapbag of a QB, J.D. McCoy, who’s made it his mission to hit on Julie. Which makes Matt hulk out at a Panther party where, sadly, no one gets thrown in the pool. Grandma Saracen, we learn, is deteriorating more and thinks that Matt is still on the team and Coach is still Coach. I kind of think it might not be so bad to live in Grandma’s dreamland. And I can’t explain how Louanne Stephens, who plays Grandma, is just so incredibly heartbreaking every single time she’s on the screen.

J.D. has become a complete fucking asshole, by the way. Remember last year, when he was all drinking milk and being corrupted by Tim and that little redheaded girl? Yeah, now he’s drunk at house parties (ah, sophomores) and hitting on Julie and just generally becoming a walking Axe Body Spray ad. He’s as horrible as his dad is. I kind of think Peter Berg & Co. need to back off on how incredibly awful J.D. is, because even the villains on this show, like Buddy Garrity in season 1, have some complexity, and right now the McCoy men do not. They might as well be wearing black cowboy hats and twirling their mustaches while tying Julie Taylor to railroad tracks.

Tim has gone to college for, like, a day, and decided that he’s just not the collegiate type, as you see above. So he throws all his books out of his truck window on the highway and moves back in with Billy and knocked-up Mindy, who are none too pleased to have drunken layabout Tim back at home. Um, I’m going to have a room free in December. We’ve seen he can handle himself in New York. Tim Riggins, you are more than welcome to move in here. But he doesn’t. Instead, he meets bartender Alicia Witt, and bangs her, as you do, and the producers give us a splendid little split-second shot of Taylor Kitsch and all of his abdominal muscles in his tighty-blackies, and then Tim meets Alicia Witt’s—teenage daughter? Alicia Witt is old enough to be cast as the mother of a teenager? Jesus jellybeans. The teenage daughter bears an unsettling resemblance to Tyra, and Ricca and I think that Riggins is going to go for another mother-daughter matched set this season. Which seems kind of icky for some reason.

So: Coach’s team. Is awful. He has a bunch of kids whose only exposure to football is Madden and who can’t do that running-through-tires thing to save their lives. And he has one juvenile delinquent who, spoiler alert, is going to become Our New Smash. As the cops tell Coach when they bring him, Vince, over for his second chance on the football field, he can run really fast, and he’s gorgeous, so you know he’s not a one-off guest star. (The actor’s name is Michael B. Jordan. I think he’s going places.) After Coach boots the unmotivated, blinged-out, disrespectful half of the squad with one of his Rousing Locker Room Speeches, the East Dillon Lions take the field Friday night…and get the living shit kicked out of them. Like, broken teeth, high ankle sprains, bleeding-from-the-mouth shit kicked out of them. I was getting some unpleasant flashbacks to The Jason Street Incident during the unholy beatdown they were getting from, I think, South King. They get so beat up in the 45-0 first half that Coach forfeits the rest of the game, and I cry.

So that’s where season 4 kicks off. With pain, and separation, and broken dreams. We’re back, kids.

U Sprots brings you ALL KINDS of sprots.

So I have a lot of spare time this week, and I’ve caught up on the Tifaux backlog, and I’ve napped, and now of course I’m awake in the middle of the night. So, six months later (hey! Today is my half birthday) I decided to catch up with the U Sprots, as I’m calling it now. I started with the speed skating world championships from Hamar, Norway, and now I’m watching the Fédération Internationale du Ski Alpine World Championships from Val d’Isere, France, which happened last weekend and was really icy and scary. Tomorrow: World Cup Luge, bobsledding, a little cycling, and more skiing and skating. There’s something really pleasant about having random sports you don’t know much about on in the background; there’s a volume of unfamiliar terminology and names that sort of melts into white noise (much like CNBC, but with less shouting), plus the literal whiteness of the picture on the screen. And sometimes it gets terrifying very quickly, like when Ted Ligety literally fell down the hill on Sunday.

Also, like everyone else, U Sprots is having trouble selling advertising. I saw the requisite ad for Monster Ballads, but this has to be by far my favorite random-ass commercial:

I’d say, on the whole, NBC got it right. Or NBC stars, I should say. Their ads were funny–and not in that weird way that Starbursts ads THINK they’re funny when they’re really not (see also: the “grease monkey” commercial). And they managed to be funny without really talking about how the fabric of our society is unraveling around us. Take, for instance, the MacGruber ad Jesse already mentioned:

Two more of my favorites, starring Alec Baldwin and Conan O’Brien, after the jump:

Also, Bruce Springsteen will be there, and the game is being held in the Raymond James Stadium of Tampa, which features a pirate ship at one end. So there’s really something for everyone.