John Riordan: 2022 was a year in which the bad guys won - mostly
UNFAIR: Deshaun Watson of the Cleveland Browns. Pic: Jason Miller/Getty Images
I was trying to decide whether a column looking back at 2022's US sporting landscape would spin positively or negatively.
Or, I wondered, should I steer clear and look ahead to an exciting 2023 and hope with the rest of us that surely next year has to be better than the worldwide horror of the one we're getting rid of on Saturday?
The laptop was open and mostly empty in front of me during my flight back to New York. All too briefly, there was a forlorn hope that something effective would shake out in any direction. The few scraps of notes laid out in a sparsely populated page had the villains winning most of the top prizes.
The battery was running low and my patience with the singing drunk behind me even lower. It was a hopeless case and I would return to the weighty topic of how to sum up my 2022 when I was on solid ground.
The increasingly belligerent Irish lad told all whoâd listen where he was from and he was living in New York over 10 years. It got increasingly awkward as he sang the wrong lyrics louder and louder and when he started drumming on my seat and the flight attendant asked him to stop bothering me, I knew I was in a bit of bother.
He laid waste to any hopes of a productive journey so I shut the laptop down and decided to watch the rest of the three hours to New York count down, committed to being true to the realities of 2022 when I would eventually get to writing.
He wasn't happy that I had ran to the staff to complain (I truly hadn't) and he urged me to be a man and say it to his face. Those of you who know me will probably be shocked I didn't take the bait but he mentioned the IRA that many times, I decided to stare straight ahead in the ultimately futile hope he'd calm down.
He turned his attention to the English passenger next to him and you can guess where it went from there. The harassment intensified to the point that the persecuted Brit asked to be switched seats. The upshot was that the lad went through a cycle of praising the IRA, apologising profusely to the beleaguered staff, they in turn killing him with kindness and soft drinks before he ended up in tears in the galley as the flight attendants morphed into underpaid therapists.
When they were out of earshot and his tears ran dry, he reverted back to veiled threats of me and the English guy who'd been safely moved back to row 14. Thereâd be ten lads waiting for us at JFK.
The staff were right to be compassionate; how else do you combat a lack of reason in a crowded tube in the sky? But as they bade him a fond and forgiving farewell at the gate and he happily stumbled off the plane with a whiskey hangover, I couldn't help but wonder why it is that the bad guys keep on winning.
Before this air rage episode, the theme of this column had been skewing towards an homage of the begrudgingly admiring title of Jeff Pearlman's New York Mets 1986 World Series winning chronicle, The Bad Guys Won. My neighbour's thirsty yearning for victimhood simply confirmed the lens Iâd choose for today.
The subtitle of Pearlman's thoroughly entertaining book gives you a good sense of what to expect when reading about a team that shone so briefly: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball with Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team to Ever Put on a New York Uniform and Maybe the Best.
The Mets were fun villains and although their partying proclivities would fall foul of 2022 standards of respect for others, it was mostly just championship levels of letting off steam with near term gains and long term pains.
Our 2022 villains in the US and around the world, the warmongering fascists, the mass shooting racists, the democracy crippling conspiracists, the union busting billionaires, the anti-immigrant sociopaths, they're a dark and unjust force weighing us down.
They push us towards the pantomime villains of sport who yield the best drama. The bad guys that win in stadiums and arenas madden us and frustrate us but it's all a necessary part of a constantly churning spectacle, mostly safe and mostly healthy.
In June, the Golden State Warriors adapted a decidedly villainous path to NBA Finals victory over the Boston Celtics, imposing their will with heightened trash talk that synced perfectly with their undeniable talents. Draymond Green threw his weight around to such an extent that he dragged his most valuable team mates with him, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson engaging in shithouse tactics that ground down the Celtics.
Just over a month later, basketball lost a good guy in the passing at 88 of Bill Russell, the civil rights icon who drove the Celtics to 11 titles in the 50s and 60s and also became the first Black head coach in a major American sports league.
In November, the Houston Astros won the World Series as a universally despised outfit still trying to shake off the shadow of an industrial scale cheating scandal they visited on baseball five years previously. They were too good for the Philadelphia Phillies and they won the title fair and square but that didnât make it any easier for the rest of the nation.
And this was a year that baseball lost a good guy in Vin Scully, the beloved commentator of the LA Dodgers all the way back to their iconic Brooklyn days in the 1950s. At 94 and having retired pretty recently after a 67-year career, this was no tragedy but it produced warm memories that stood starkly opposite to the clinical kingpins of the modern game.
Itâs unfair that Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson got his NFL career back in the most lucrative way possible after a sexual abuse scandal that engulfed dozens of victims. And it was so sad that a good guy like Pittsburgh Steeler Franco Harris passed away just the other week, days before his team could celebrate the 50th anniversary of his âImmaculate Receptionâ, one of the NFLâs most iconic moments.
The LIV Golf guys won and Serena retired without one more US Open to send her on her way. The big spending LA Rams clinched the Super Bowl just a month after the very unlikeable Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger received a heroâs send-off for his long awaited retirement.
You canât win them all and a couple of hours after I landed safely back to Brooklyn, having narrowly avoided the wrath of my fellow passenger, I remembered my two personal sporting highlights of the year and decided they were worthy of ending this reflection on a high note.
Iâll start with the funnier, more recent one first: Iâd snagged a courtside ticket through a friend for a Brooklyn Nets game against the Celtics at the start of this month. Seeing the stars of the NBA that close is a pure thrill and the likes of Kevin Durant, Jason Taytum and Jaylen Brown put on a show.
Also out there was Kyrie Irvine to whom Iâd devoted a few column inches in 2022, decrying his anti-semetic, anti-science, faux-intellectual rants that had earned him missed game time and peak NBA villain status. Of all the players to come crashing towards me in a failed attempt to keep a ball inbound, here was the bould Irvine staring deep into my soul, warning without words that whatever happened next, he was trying to prevent it. He grabbed my knee, dropped some sweat on us and pushed off to resume play. We were delighted.
Never meet your anti-heroes because you might end up being impressed. And you can meet a hero like Katie Taylor and be impressed beyond belief. I'll be forever grateful to this newspaper for making it possible for me to be there at Madison Square Garden in April. What a week that was.
Surrounded by mostly guys at the press conference in the early hours of the Sunday that followed the barely believable ten-rounder, promoters, trainers, reporters, all of us marvelled at this woman who had broken the mould in such a historic way.
Iâll never forget the blood that dripped from a gash at the side of her head, her beaming smile stretching out the wounds on her battered face. A good one won and we got to be there to witness justice.
@JohnWRiordan
