When I saw the headline “The Saddest Christmas Card Ever” I thought it was going to be something like, “Daddy is wishing you a Merry Christmas from Heaven,” but it turns out to be slightly less maudlin than that. Although, yes, it is still a little sad.

by Dan Shanoff

Twenty years ago this month, the fat envelope arrived at my house, alerting me that I had been accepted early to Northwestern University. I was bound for Evanston.

Tonight, I will sit as close to court-side as possible, as Northwestern’s basketball team comes to Madison Square Garden to play St. Francis of Brooklyn.

For most of the rest of New York — let alone the rest of the country — the game is an afterthought. For me, it is a chance to watch my alma mater in the Mecca, during a season in which the Wildcats will try to earn their first-ever invitation to the NCAA Tournament.

The provenance of sports fandom tends to exist in fairly neat boxes, with the two most prominent being Geography (allegiance based on where you grew up or perhaps an adopted town from later in life) and Biology (a form of DNA — like baldness or those hips — a living inheritance from your parents).

But then there are those rooting interests that spring from nothing so much as serendipity, although we don’t like to think of it like that — that your Oregon tattoo could have been Oberlin.

And so my evening at the Garden is a moment to consider one prominent root of a sports fan’s rooting interest: What if that admissions envelope had come back not thick but the dreaded “thin” — a rejection?

Would I have ended up at, say, Michigan, actively rooting against Northwestern — lamenting the moment in 1995 when the Rose Bowl-bound Wildcats shocked UM in Ann Arbor’s “Big House?” In reality, it is one of my greatest memories as a sports fan.

I can only imagine the path for today’s Oklahoma die-hard who, by the vagaries of the college selection process, ended up at Oklahoma State, hating the Sooners. Or the would-be Gator who ends up a Gainesville-loathing ‘Nole. Or the true-blue UNC fan who “reached” their way into Duke, now waving a foam finger in the face of Tar Heel fans who might have been classmates.

Or maybe I would have ended up at some small liberal arts college in the Northeast, without any affiliation to high-end college sports that defines so many of our experiences as fans. For those who went to a college with big-time athletics, try to picture life since then — Saturdays in the fall or the way you perennially spend March in a bracket-induced fever — without it.

These are entirely reasonable alternate universes, where a lifetime of fan allegiance is dictated by the serendipity of the weather the day of a campus tour (say, Maryland vs. Syracuse), by the bit of test anxiety that cost you those extra 30 points on the SATs (say, Cal vs. Stanford), by the fatigued college counselor who said “Yale? Hmm, have you thought about UConn?”

Because, snobby academic credentialing aside, that UConn fan is now reveling in an unexpectedly spectacular season from the men’s hoops team — not to mention the unprecedented dominance by the women’s team. Alums: Wear with pride that garish sweatshirt with the Husky printed on it. But consider the scenario where you end up an Eli instead, and you realize how mortal your “die-hard” affiliation really is.

This isn’t like growing up in a city and finding your rooting interest regionally or having your parent pass on their fan allegiance to you, something close to biologically. This is a combination of serendipity, your GPA as a 16-year-old and the cogency of your answer to an application essay question or two — perhaps where your parents or older siblings went to college, thrown in for good measure. No condition in sports fandom is as awkwardly constructed. (As if the college admissions process could get any more pressure-packed, without decades of sports allegiance also on the line.)

Ironically, a year ago, I took my then-3-year-old kid to his first-ever college basketball game, at our neighborhood college… St. Francis. He now sports the team shirts and says hi to the coaches in the local diner.

I know who he will be cheering for at the Garden tonight. Despite daddy’s prompts, he couldn’t care less about Northwestern. Oh, well: Maybe when it comes time to apply to college.

Dan Shanoff is the founder of Quickish, launching early next year. He previously wrote here about being a terrible goalie.

Photo by bradleypjohnson, from Flickr.

“Josh: These people are at war over stuff that will never mean anything to the casuals.
Sara: Welcome to the internet.”
 — Digging through the Hollywood magic that is The Black List. (And yes, good news! Eric Bana is allegedly “in talks” to star as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.)

The Ten Most Expensive Domain Names Ever Purchased, According To The Times of India, With Musical Accompaniment

10) Vodka.com : $3 million, 2006.

9) Toys.com : $5.1 million, 2009

8) Casino.com : $5.5 million, 2003

7) Israel.com : $5.88 million, 2008

6) Beer.com : $7 million, 2004

5) Diamond.com: $7.5 million, 2006

4) Business.com: $7.5 million, 1999

3) Porn.com : $9.5 million, 2007

2) Fund.com : $9.9. million, 2008

1) Sex.com : $13 million, 2010

We weren’t able to blow it up, but at least the moon — that crap-ass satellite that wastes valuable space in the sky and brings irritability and outright craziness everywhere it goes (THAT’S RIGHT, MOON, I AM CALLING YOU OUT! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT? OH, JUST SIT THERE SILENTLY IN THE COSMOS LIKE THE BIG DUMB HUNK OF ROCK THAT YOU ARE? I THOUGHT SO. FUCK YOU, MOON!) — will experience a lunar eclipse tonight, so for a very short period of time (at approximately 2:41 a.m., they say) we can pretend that it doesn’t exist. It is absolutely worth setting your alarm so that you can get out of bed, look at the sky and have the brief, wonderful sensation of moonlessness. EAT MY ASS, MOON.

In the passing convulsions of partisan government, it’s easy for our corporate lieges to depict themselves as victims. There’s always some legislative push, or Congressional leader, to bedeck with alarmist rhetoric about the “tax-and-spend” set in Washington — even as these same clever professional victims harness the supine Congress to tamp down the estate tax, extend regressive tax cuts and ensure that the regulatory state keeps weighing the financial industry’s various roulette wheels in the house’s favor.

But behind the all the public inveighing over the wild-eyed excesses of our Jacobin Congress and (more laughably still) an “anti-business” White House, our business chieftains are, true to management form, pursuing a longer-term agenda to secure their federal interests on a far more permanent footing. There is, after all, a third branch of our federal government, and as the New York Times’ Adam Liptak notes, the U.S. Supreme Court has been far more obliging in delivering pro-business verdicts under the current leadership than at any other point in its modern history.

And while the business community can use its lobbying clout to handily retool whatever reform initiatives Congress erratically puts forward, the high court is where much of the real action is for the corporate set. It’s the lead forum for the bids to limit tort claims and class action suits, the rollback of environmental regulations, the generous recastings of antitrust, labor and intellectual property law, all in the interests of the people who own the greatest percentage of the American dream and who also pay the highest hourly fees. Oh, and let’s not forget campaign finance law, recently rolled back to giddy 19th-century robber-baron form, vastly simplifying and streamlining the business world’s bankrolling of all our representative bodies at once.

And as Liptak observes, the obsequious performance of the Roberts court before the bar of business is wonder to behold. A study conducted by the Times in conjunction with researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago found that of the 1,450 business-related cases the Court has decided since 1953, the present court possesses an outsize share. Over its five-term tenure, the Roberts Court has also decided a higher proportion of the cases on its business docket in business’s favor — 61 percent, versus 46 percent from the still quite right-leaning Rehnquist Court, and 42 percent overall since 1953.

One handy measure of this shift is the frenetic litigating getting done over at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The group’s legal team, the National Chamber Litigation Center, recently enjoyed an impressive run of 13 victories in the last batch of 16 business rulings handed down by Team Roberts. That’s heartening news indeed for the companies who sit on the Litigation Center’s board, including Lockheed Martin, GlaxoSmithKline, Verizon, Viacom and Ford. But as Carter G. Phillips, a commercial litigator who often represents the Chamber in high-court proceedings, these winning streaks are, well, just business as usual. As he wrote on the occasion of the group’s 30th anniversary in 2007:

I know from personal experience that the chamber’s support carries significant weight with the justices. Except for the solicitor general representing the United States, no single entity has more influence on what cases the Supreme Court decides and how it decides them than the National Chamber Litigation Center.

The liberal Center for Constitutional Accountability has toted up the numbers on the Chamber’s recent record, finding that the group prevails in 68 percent of the cases heard by the Roberts court, compared to a 56 percent success rate over the last 11 years of the Rehnquist Court. But of course the Chamber Litigation Center’s executive vice president, Robin S. Conrad, is well versed in presenting the wishlist of the market’s lords as the very fabric of our natural order, so she offers a more serenely impartial estimate of the group’s recent run of pleasing high-court outcomes.

Why have we been successful? […] I’d like to think it’s because of the quality of the arguments and the briefs we present to the court. The court is looking for reliable voices to confirm its decisions, and I’d like to think it’s looking to the chamber because it tells a straight story, and we try not to be shrill or ideological. The chamber has earned a reputation for being a credible voice of business.”

But such self-enamored assessments overlook a key factor: The most accomplished arguments in the world won’t gain much headway without a sympathetic auditor, and in John G. Roberts the owning and executive classes have a Chief Justice so attuned to fulfilling their every whim they may as well go ahead and call him Jeeves. During its short tenure, five lucky voters on the Roberts Court have stricken a 97-year-old central doctrine of antitrust enforcement and erected barriers to equal-pay litigation in the workplace so that Congress drafted new legislation to uphold legal remedies for workers victimized by gender discrimination. As the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin has reported, that track record prompted Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, who votes in the court’s moderate minority, to remark “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” And that was before the bit of egregious corporate errand-running known as Citizen’s United.

This boardroom-first outlook on legal affairs is entirely in keeping with Roberts’ career in private legal practice. “Shortly before Roberts became a judge,” Toobin writes, “he successfully argued in the Supreme Court that a woman who suffered from carpal-tunnel syndrome could not win a recovery from her employer, Toyota, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Likewise, Roberts won a Supreme Court ruling that the family of a woman who died in a fire could not use the federal wrongful-death statute to sue the city of Tarrant, Alabama. In a rare loss in his thirty-nine arguments before the Court, Roberts failed to persuade the Justices to uphold a sixty-four-million-dollar fine against the United Mine Workers, which was imposed by a Virginia court after a strike.”

Roberts’s best-known case before the high court was Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, where he successfully argued that an environmental advocacy group had no legal standing to challenge a Reagan White House decision to place 180 million acres of federal wilderness land on sale to mining interests. The Wildlife Federation’s complaint should be thrown out, Roberts argued, because it “was in no way distinct from the interest any citizen could claim, coming in the courthouse and saying, ‘I’m interested in this subject.’”

That dismissive reference to the policy hobby horses favored by “any citizen” makes for edifying reading — particularly coming as it does out of the mouth of a rock-ribbed anti-government Reaganite, here making an inapposite, robust case for the unmolested sovereignty of the executive bureaucracy. But laid alongside the expansive protections afforded to the speech of our corporate polity in the court’s campaign finance ruling, the logic of Roberts’s Lujan argument at least looks consistent, if not sensible. It points out what the Court has long held, ever since it first began tussling with the awkward questions of social equality back in the nineteenth century: Some citizens are more equal before the law than others.

Chris Lehmann has a book.

Dogs met by author Jon Cotner and his girlfriend Claire Hamilton on a recent walking tour of Los Angeles include: 2 beagles, 3 boxers, 7 chihuahuas, 1 collie, 5 pit bulls, 1 rottweiler, 4 terrier mixes, and 2 other kinds of mixes.

Discuss: The Problem With the World Today is That There Are No Famous Animals

We are a nation of takers. Unapologetic receivers, we understand only the politics of evasion and of punishment. Flaunting, prancing and dodging until brought to judgment, once penned we seek forgiveness, plead ignorance and claim irresponsibility. And, more often than not, it works.

Ours is an addiction to innocence corrupted. We are so surprised — shocked — at our tainted heroes. But why? We worship and forgive Tiger Woods and LeBron James and Brett Favre. Because they are winners, and because we wish we could take as much as they do. Too much is never enough for us. We need more. We’ve earned more. We deserve more. There is no end of more.

Our children learn from our unquestioning acceptance of things we should not have. Because the takers of things are too often the winners of things, too. What lesson will you teach: that playing by rules leads to winning or that winning leads to more? Perhaps there was once an allegiance to the right way, but the skeptic says it’s been lost. The cynic says it died.

Our institutions do not help reinforce our better instincts. They, instead, expend all their energies policing offenders while taking, taking, taking. Thus, we get the comic farce of public chastisement of our Charlie Rangels by peers whose coffers overflow with the promises and influences only money can buy. We watch the tsk-tsk and wagging finger of corporate sponsors so appalled by the behavior of their fallen spokespeople they can only just barely continue that morbidly lucrative sponsorship. We watch our pro sports test for, suspend for and fine for the very things they are well aware create their financial largesse to begin with. And we marvel at the NCAA’s enforcement of its rules in ways that defy even our best legalistic logic, all while printing money on the backs of its unpaid workforce.

Of course, once a year, we revert course. At holiday time, we bestow on those around us the things they deserve and want, too. And the NCAA, for one, won’t be outdone by any fat man in a red suit this year.

On Saturday, undefeated Kansas got to unwrap a future pro at midseason and add it to a team strong at every other position. The addition of the nation’s top recruit, Josh Selby, puts KU into embarrassment of riches territory. Cripes, all the kid did in his debut was pour in 21 points on five made threes in 27 minutes, including nailing the game-winner with under 30 seconds left. This isn’t just some stiff coming in to help change the light bulbs no one else can reach. Selby is NBA good. And now that he’s paid his NCAA-mandated penance (and $5700), he is home free.

His crime? Taking. In this case, accepting what the NCAA terms “improper benefits” from Robert Bay Frazier, a longtime family associate who also just happens to be Carmelo Anthony’s business manager (Selby, like Anthony and Frazier, is from Baltimore). Selby never denied having a relationship with Frazier, and never really thought he did anything wrong. Given the giving and getting environment surrounding AAU and prep basketball, it’s probable that the only thing Selby did that lots of other kids don’t do was get caught. Selby just happened to be a big deal. Everyone notices a big deal. But of course, even if other folks do it, it was technically rule breaking. But he’s available now, and Bill Self won’t hesitate to use him. There are no unquestioning takers bigger than college basketball coaches.

But if Self will gladly accept his new scoring option off the bench, Mississippi State coach Rick Stansbury is left almost without choice in regards to his midseason NCAA present. The Bulldogs have none of the depth and firepower of the Jayhawks, so newly eligible Renardo Sidney — after much struggle finally presented to the Bulldogs — is a Godsend.

Mississippi State barely skated by in anticipation of the release from NCAA purgatory of the heralded Sidney, one of 2009’s biggest recruits. State managed seven wins without him, but its two losses were very ugly ones to Florida Atlantic and East Tennessee State. And an RPI 10 spots below IUPUI explains a lot about those seven wins. Having lost its All-SEC center to graduation, MSU desperately needs scoring and an interior presence. Having waited on Sidney for over a year now, ever since the NCAA’s investigation into benefits his family received began last fall , State will have to lean heavily on the skilled, enigmatic forward.

Sidney’s family was the taker here. In a story as representative of the entanglement between shoe companies, AAU basketball and NCAA eligibility as you’re likely to ever see, the Sidneys were a cauldron of questionable ethics. After a contentious process, the NCAA eventually passed judgment, forcing the family to repay $11,800 in benefits deemed illicitly received. With all that punishment behind him, Sidney can begin to show if he was worth all the trouble and hubbub. Coming out of high school, he was considered on par with the elitest of the elite big men in his class, including DeMarcus Cousins and Derrick Favors, who now both play for pay legally.

So far, Sidney — long rumored to be an undisciplined talent — is overweight and rusty after so much time off. He showed that in a made-for-Sidney exhibition game against NAIA school Belhaven and again on Saturday in his real debut, a State spanking at the hands of Virginia Tech. Still, the arrival of Sidney and the imminent January return of last year’s starting point guard Dee Bost boost Mississippi State’s chances in the SEC tenfold.

The Bost situation is a whole different story, this one also heavy with NCAA goofiness. Bost apparently wasn’t paying close enough attention last summer and neglected to withdraw his name from the NBA draft eligibility pool by the well-publicized deadline. This resulted a lot of facepalming and head-shaking and more than a few words on the whole thing. Yet somewhat surprisingly, Bost’s application for reinstatement — effectively a desire for the NCAA to ignore what Bost had done — was granted. Thus, Bost is allowed to return after an NCAA penalty of games. The kid took his chance at the NBA, changed his mind, and the NCAA got taken.

Three big NCAA cases involving good players with three outcomes that, at least in practice, benefit the schools and allow the players a second chance, albeit with punishments attached. Sidney and Selby’s cases seem pretty clear cut. Both got money, or their families did, and were rightfully smacked for it. But both paid their penalties, sat time for transgressions past and are now allowed to continue their professional basketball auditions. Bost was apparently rewarded for being an idiot, since he technically should have been permanently ineligible. Kids make mistakes. And some of them get a pass.

‘Permanently Ineligible’ is what the NCAA deemed Enes Kanter, in what is the only major NCAA case involving a likely future pro left unresolved. Eager Kentucky fans and staff are asking themselves what, beyond the convoluted framework of international basketball, makes the case of their would-be Turkish starting center so different.

Selby, for one, isn’t really that sure how:

“I do feel that I am lucky because when I saw what happened with the Kanter situation, I wondered if they (the NCAA) would do the same thing with me,” Selby said in an interview. “But God does things for a reason and I am just thankful that God gave me the opportunity to play a game in college.”

So it’s God’s fault? That won’t come as a surprise to forever-paranoid Kentucky fans. We’ve been pretty sure the Man Upstairs has had it out for us for some time. How else to explain Billy Gillispie?

At Kentucky, taking is as much a part of the game as anywhere. At its worst, this resulted in a near-shutdown of the whole shebang in the late 1980s, a black mark the program and its fans still live with to this day. More recently, the taking has been more in the “for granted” department. Winning is never guaranteed, and yet it’s considered the default scenario for the Wildcats. And not just winning, but winning everything. Every game. Every recruit. Every news cycle. Everything.

Which is why Kentucky’s Big Blue Nation of fans continues to await a positive result from the NCAA on its appeal of the initial ruling for Kanter despite all evidence. But it does seem on the face of it a double standard. Without rehashing it long form, Kanter was rejected by the NCAA for receiving “benefits above and beyond expenses” while playing sparingly as a junior player for a Turkish pro team. His parents claim it was always Kanter’s intention to play college basketball and that they never took money beyond living expenses. But the European system works very differently than the US system. There, teams openly sign and pay players in their teens and amateur status is really nothing anyone cares about. Here, we do all the taking secretly, look the other way at corporate gifting and then clean up any messes with weirdly selective enforcement later. In the aftermath of the NCAA’s odd Cam Newton ruling, the Kentucky family and the Kanter family are hopeful for a reversal. They’d gladly take a future NBA center right now.

It’s not like any of this is really a surprise. Kentucky knew that Kanter’s eligibility was going to be in question. The school can’t really be that flabbergasted that it finds itself without the future pro on the court this December. Still, given how clear it is that what the Wildcats really only lack is the interior muscle Kanter would immediately bring to be a Final Four threat this season, you can hardly blame them for lobbying as hard as they can for the NCAA folks to send some of that holiday giving they sent to Lawrence and Starkville down Lexington way.

With no malice toward any of them, what Sidney and Selby did was pretty blatantly against the rules. And, as kids who have navigated the high school and AAU circuit for years, it’s not like either could pretend they were unaware of the rules as they stood, nor can their families. And Kanter’s family claims they did what they thought they were supposed to do, but did they not take as well? That they are held to a different standard because of the difference in the Euro and American basketball eligibility systems is immaterial. Maybe that’s just the way it is going to be. Maybe American players are held to an easier standard of selective punishment for gifts received.

Of course, unquestioned getting is what paved the way for the long, protracted and legalistic cases of Sidney, Bost, Selby and Kanter (a nice sounding law firm if ever there was one) in the first place. It’s the culture of taking that led to these young men’s predicaments. Had any of them decided to eschew the handouts being offered them, they’d have been playing from Day 1. Obviously, this sort of hard line ignores familial finances, hardships endured and the like. But we are not playing cultural relativism here.

There is taking and there is not taking, and each of these guys, or their families, took when offered. That it’s something most of the rest of us continue to do every day doesn’t make it right. It just makes it typical. It would be nice if there were lessons learned from each of these player’s situations. But if the Rangels, Tigers and Favres of the world are any illustration, there won’t be. Because we’re all too busy taking, and forgiving, to notice.

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.

Photo by KCouliau, from Flickr.

Once again, to the Sun: Is this Britain’s fattest robin?