Megan Rapinoe, Buddy Ryan, and The Problem with Names

Political Incorrectness Alert:  Somewhere in this brief entry, I refer to a lesbian as "ballsy." If this offends anyone, I am ecstatic. My goal in life is to offend as many people as possible in the time I have left.



I had a tough decision to make. While I don't know squat about soccer, I was looking at a very rare contextual betting opportunity. After the group segment of the World Cup, the U.S. Women's soccer team had been hyped as "maybe the best ever." Yet the 2-1 win versus Spain in the knockout round had been remarkably shaky, aided by a very questionable penalty call. My instinct was to at least consider France to win versus the Americans. A name, however, was creating a problem for me. The name was attached to a face, and the face was everywhere. Megan Rapinoe owned both.

Megan Rapinoe had been quoted in an interview as saying that, if the American women won the title, she was "not going to the fucking White House." Rapinoe had also been on board with Colin Kaepernick regarding the whole "Star Spangled Banner" issue. For the last couple of weeks, Rapinoe's face and comments had been on every sports website and in every newspaper. She had been hard to miss. I'm usually quite good at ignoring media noise and hyperbole, but I suspect that I'm hard-wired to notice ballsy, semi-lavender-haired lesbians who use my kind of language. When President Trump tweeted this and that in response to her, Rapinoe calmly repeated herself and stood her public ground.

All of that was a big problem for me. I'm supposed to be making bloodless decisions based on value, numbers, and an instinctive understanding of how media exposures affect odds. Rapinoe, however, had been ubiquitous. I probably would have been okay if she had not added the "fucking," but language like that is ultra-endearing when directed at an iconic bully.

By the way, before I'm castigated for being a "Trump-hater," please understand that I agree, more or less, with maybe half of the president's top dozen policy priorities. I just happen to think that the president of the United States should not conduct himself as if he were auditioning for the main villain role in a new Bruce Willis Die Hard movie. I estimate that I've offended 99% of all readers by now, which (as I mentioned earlier) is my goal. But I digress.

My issue with Rapinoe was that her public coverage had affected my ability to make an objective gambling decision. This brings me to Buddy Ryan, the famous architect of the '85 Bears defense and later head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and Arizona Cardinals.

Buddy Ryan had a wonderful habit of referring to most players by their numbers rather than their names. He was especially prone to this during training camps, before rosters were set. I think this was a very useful, practical idea. Whether Ryan was making coldly objective talent evaluations or not, referring to players by numbers certainly suggested just that.

The difficulty, after Ryan became a head coach, was that the veteran players he knew well ceased to be numbers. He hung on to them a couple of beats longer than was wise, and this quickly corroded his rosters. They had become faces, stories, people with links to him. He lost his talent-appraising objectivity. His players had become names.

I examined the France/U.S. match again. France's value was depressed due to their recent successes against the Americans. More importantly, I couldn't get Rapinoe's face and the phrase "fucking White House," which always provokes a hint of a smile, out of my mind. Sometimes one must acknowledge that one's thought processes are messed up. I recognized that my objectivity was lacking, so I passed on betting the match.

Next Tuesday is another match. I'll have to wait and see if I can flush Rapinoe's public persona from my gambling mind. Perhaps by then, I'll be able to make a proper fucking analysis. Or not.


Bob Dietz -- June 28, 2019