Another Rivalry Game

From the second round of league play last year against Wasco:



Alex Gonzalez played a great game, hitting all five of his three point attempts, including this one to ice the game and inspire a rare break in Wiebe's game face.

Music- "Your Hand in Mine," Explosions in the Sky

Football Notes

The SSL this year is composed of two perfect triangles of parity with a wide gap between them. Taft, Tehachapi and Wasco all have one loss and one win against each other and have handled the bottom three of BCHS, Shafter, and Arvin easily. Each team in the bottom triangle is also 1 and 1 against the other two. On Friday, the top three play the bottom three and are 30+ point favorites in each game.

Not that anyone in Shafter cares about SSL placing at this point, but the novelty of Shafter's situation is interesting. If Shafter beats Wasco on Friday, they will likely find themselves dropping (sort of) in the SSL standings from a tie for second into third place.

Wasco has not won an SSL title in football since 1961. Shafter has the next longest drought in the league, sharing the top spot with Taft and Tehachapi in 2000.

Worthy of Pause

Google, for better or worse, tells me how you came here. Having been through one Wasco Week on this blog, I know that people all over the country and all over the world will search phrases like "Wasco Shafter rivalry" this week and spend some time with the past. Perhaps your nephew is playing in the game, or the smells of browning grass and fallen sycamore leaves took you back to your playing days. Perhaps you swung the Tiger or tossed a General onto the bonfire. You've sung the songs. You've heard the nervous clatter of cleats on concrete, the snare drum ricocheting around the parking lot. It has happened already and it is, I think, a remarkable thing, worthy of pause.

Update: Reading this again with some sleep (yes, you really can sleep when you're dead), I thought "pause for what?" I guess what I was trying to get at while hardly able to bring myself to come out with it, is that Shafter people can be grateful for Wasco because the rivalry is a good thing. It connects scattered people to home and football to life. As horrifying as the thought of being a Wasconian is, they are lucky compared to those with no rooting interest at all. Win or lose, for all of us the game matters.

Question for the Exchange Rally

The Shafter-Wasco rivalry, some might say, is about the narcissism of small differences. Shafter and Wasco are 7 miles apart and might seem indistinguishable to an outsider. This is why highly specific, verifiable insults that don't also implicate your own side are so important. For example: Wasco's city government is reckless, a fact highlighted by the Securities and Exchange Commission forbidding the city from issuing more debt in the late 1990s. I also like to bring up the witness of great anthropologist Walter Goldschmidt, who spent some time observing Wasco in the 1940s and concluded that, as a rule, collective efforts of Wasconians end in failure.

People from Wasco counter that they have a better auditorium. It is a nice auditorium, but it only serves to remind how bad the gymnasium is. Moreover, taken together, these two buildings illustrate how disordered Wasco's priorities are.

All of this is provides background for the big question that looms over the exchange rally - Will Wasco refer to the Medina Affair? Pitched in a certain way, a skit highlighting Rene Medina transferring from Shafter to Wasco has the makings of a potent insult. It is no secret that Wasco has often been stung by people living between Shafter and Wasco opting to go to high school in Shafter. Here is a case of, not just any student, but one of the best athletes in his class, shifting allegiance from Shafter to Wasco. The problem with that way of telling the story, however, is that it undermines the official version, which is a story of Medina sacrificing for the good of his family and explicitly not deciding based on his school or sport preferences. That is the story that got the CIF off of Wasco's back.

Obviously a skit would have zero effect on Medina's status with the CIF and it wouldn't make the official story untrue. It would just be a contradiction. For a town that, for years, held up a sign before visitors, that read "Wasco: A Nice Place to Live," contradiction is nothing new.

Gerald is Okay

It was touch and go for a while, but Gerald Rodriguez seems to be on the road to recovery. He was in a brutal car accident a few months back. I saw in the Shafter Press that he was able to serve as an honorary captain at a football game a few weeks ago. He will have an honorary spot on the basketball roster, but is not expected to play.

This is Interesting

Taft beat Shafter 42-7 at their place. Sadly, this wasn't unexpected. Shafter scored on a pass from Ricardo Castro to basketballer Jakob Velasquez.

More surprising was Wasco beating Tehachapi 27-21 and in dramatic fashion. "Wasco's Rene Medina stripped a Tehachapi runner and went 97 yards the other way for the game-winning touchdown in the fourth quarter, giving the Tigers a share of the league lead with Tehachapi and Taft."

This is the first time Wasco has beaten Tehachapi since an 0-2 game in 1995, snapping a 13 game streak of Wasco losses. This has also elevated l'affaire Medina to a whole new level. Medina won the game and saved Wasco's shot at a share of the SSL title. It also raises the stakes of the Wasco-Shafter game.

The Foolishness of Winners

Here are two blog posts from different sports, but about the same thing - "fundamental attribution error." So I learned from Don Nikkel's post about the 1965-66 season -

In social psychology there is a concept called the “fundamental attribution error” that I’m tempted to apply to the Generals’ 65-66 season. That concept points out that when we explain other people’s shortcomings we attribute it to their personal qualities; while when we explain our own shortcomings we attribute it to our circumstances. When my neighbor doesn’t mow his lawn it’s because he’s lazy; when I don’t mow mine it’s because I’m busy.

Joe Posnaski notes that Yankees talk about how their character and teamwork won the World Series, when it is clear to everyone else that they won because they can buy the best players. "And then, if you are a not a Yankees fan, you will want to throw up."

Matthew Yglesias thinks Bill Simmons is fooling himself by believing that growing up a Celtics fan in the era of Larry Legend gives him special insights on the game. Simmons reasons that great players understand the game best, so watching them should give their fans superior understanding. At this point Yglesias could have simply pointed to Yankee fans and moved on, but he gives us a bit more:

You sentimentalize teams you root for, and if you root for a team that’s really good—the Celtics or the Lakers or the Yankees—you wind up sentimentalizing success. And since the point of a sports competition is to win the games, sentimentalizing success gets people extremely confused. Thus we wind up hearing an awful lot in the book about “character” and how you need good character guys to win. If you’re a Celtics fan, this probably makes a lot of emotional (sense). The Spurs succeeded in the 2000s because of their great character guys. They were good people. Which means that the Celtics won all those championships because they were such good people.

Truly learning the game, Ygelsias says, requires being able to watch great teams without the distortion of identifying with them too closely.

Otherwise, you get too hung up on the idea that the ‘86 Celtics were better than the ‘96 Bulls (something that all and only people from Boston seem to think) and start twisting your whole worldview around to accommodate that conclusion.

True Bivouac junkies will know that I would like nothing more than to insert a comment about BCHS and the Sindex here, but I just can't bring myself to do it. They have been losing in football lately so I guess there's not as much sport in it.

A less sympathetic, smart-alecky reader might claim that I am guilty of the fundamental attribution error myself, especially with respect to Wasco. "Was it not you, General Shafter, who said in this space not one month ago that 'the deep flaws in the collective character of Wasco' threatened to undermine their football program? You regularly treat Wasco's losses as an expression of deficient moral character, but you don't apply the same standard to Shafter."

Based on the rudeness of this comment, I must assume that such a reader would be from Wasco and, being from Wasco, in no position to question the moral consistency of anyone.