I can’t go on
Computers are useless, Pablo Picasso tells us, because they can only give us answers. Ron MacLean offers a complicated and beautiful analogy to augment Picasso’s greater than/less than equation about technology and humans’s capacity for curiosity and ingenuity. Don Cherry, he says, our computer.

Never more articulate than when expressing the inexpressible, Cherry’s shining moment on Sunday night came when he retorted loudly (to his colleague MacLean): What do you want me say? And again, seconds later: What do you want me to say? Maybe he knows the answers are useless, but it’s kind of poetic nonetheless. (Poetic indeed because Cherry’s unnameable discontent on Sunday night had some genesis in a failed bid to open his Coach’s Corner segment with a Prince tribute. He didn’t want to cause any sorrow, any pain. He had just wanted to do a little “Purple Rain”. I’m sure he meant “Raspberry Beret”, which is the very element of Cherry’s wardrobe to prompt MacLean’s eventual Picasso allusion.)

There is something blunderful about Cherry’s style of commentary (meaning to succeed because of failure, not despite it). But compare this to the ecstatic tones of soccer commentator Ray Hudson. Soccer sensation Lionel Messi was profiled recently in the New York Times by Jere Longman, and a lot of ink was given to the relationship between Messi and Hudson. Hudson’s is such an eloquent enthusiasm, in fact, that it’s prompted Robert Lalasz (editor of a soccer blog called Must Read Soccer) to keep an open portfolio of poems he has composed purely from the found text of Hudson’s superlative descriptions of in-game soccer action. The Times reprinted some of the poems Lalasz has produced from Hudson’s characterizations of Lionel Messi, and truly Hudson comes across as Whitmanesque. While singing Messi’s body electric, Hudson calls him the genius of football. So skillful that it is as if he is covered with eyes.

And if Hudson’s comments on Messi are like reading Leaves of Grass, then Cherry’s breakdown of NHL game tape is sometimes like a deleted scene from Waiting for Godot. I see the good in both.

I’ll go on
It was Samuel Beckett who famously declared, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” But turning our attention to a different kind of Endgame, let’s consider Gerald Ford saying about the Watergate saga, “It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.” With that, he pardoned Nixon. But has Lance Armstrong painted himself into a corner the likes of which will be even more impossible to get himself out of than Watergate? Is that even possible?

As Lance holds strongly to his denial of any illegal drug use, and lashes out at his every accuser, it does seem like we’re finally hurtling towards an inevitable conclusion. That former teammate after former teammate after former teammate is coming out say that they were doping and so was Lance probably means exactly what it says. Armstrong enthusiast Michael Specter comes to nearly this conclusion on the New Yorker’s blog. He wonders out loud if the memories of Nixon being conjured these days by Lance are enough to persuade him to give up on his long time cycling hero.

But not quite they aren’t. Specter is holding out for a final scene, a curtain call. At the end of this drama, I’m not really sure what choices are left in terms of a big reveal. If Lance is guilty to the same degree as the prominent teammates and competitors he’s bested, the question is, who will be left to write this story’s ending, as Ford did for Nixon?

After all of his denials, if Lance is found guilty of drug use maybe the only suitable end would be for the next cycling great to issue him a pardon. Maybe in this way the crimes of a sport can stay tethered to their moment in time and not haunt the future of the sport. Maybe the next home run king can pardon Barry Bonds. Jose Bautista, I’m looking at you.