Jumping at the Chance

When we’re interviewing for new staff, we’re often talking to people who are currently working at a publishing company, and we’ll often ask why they’re looking to move to an agency. The most common response is a variation of: “I realized that I want to work on the books I like, and at the publishing company, I’m having to work on books the publisher can publish.”

And for me, I don’t think that’s ever been truer than in our work on Gil Griffin’s JUMPING AT THE CHANCE, a wonderful fish-out-of-water story about fish swimming very very far from America’s coastal waters.

Twenty years ago, I was like many Americans.  Australian Rules Football was this weird thing you heard about, mostly as a strange joke about the strange things you’ll find watching TV in the middle of the night.  Then, in 1999, I went to Australia for the first time, and I went to see this strange thing for myself.

Well, let’s just say I was mesmerized.  I sat in the Melbourne Cricket Ground and watched a Kangaroos game, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

It was, yes, a little bit strange, but it was strange in the way of some wonderful Baskin Robbins flavor, taking a chunk of this sport and a ribbon of that sport and a base of a third, and then it all comes together and it tastes wonderful. It was kind of like soccer, because people couldn't throw the ball but rather had to dribble, pass like a volleyball dig, or kick, which is kind of being like three sports act once. It was kind of like US football with big goalposts to kick through. It was kind of like a clean-skated game of hockey because it was free-flowing and free-form.  I could hardly pick up every little quirk of the rules, but the basics emerged easily enough, even from well up in the stands with no native guide.

And like a Baskin Robbins flavor you really like, and which goes away at the end of the month, I was eager for some future opportunity to taste footy.  When I got that opportunity on my second trip to Australia in 2010, it was just as enjoyable to go to the MCG and take in a footy game.

Subsequent to my 2010 trip to Australia, I discovered you could still find the occasional footy game on ESPN 2 (and now on Fox Sports networks)  As I got to watch more and learn more about the game and the teams and the history…  Soon enough I’m DVRing whatever game is on my cable package, watching all of them, hanging out at The Australian at 1am on a September Saturday to watch the Grand Final, as the AFL’s Super Bowl is known.

Twenty years ago, it was this strange thing, and now it and tennis are my two favorite sports.

Stranger than Australian Rules Football is the fact that Brandon Sanderson’s Tor editor, Moshe Feder, is also an AFL fan, a bigger one, one for longer, much more passionate than I, and one day, two-and-a-half years ago, knowing of my kindred interest in AFL, he sent me a link to this wonderful article by Gil Griffin on US NCAA basketball players looking to make their way into the AFL.

And after I read the article, I knew this needed to be a book.  I had no idea where or how I would sell such a book, because major publishers in the US prefer to buy books about baseball and football, golf and tennis, and other sports better known in the US.  But that wasn’t going to stop me.  Because I’m an agent, and I get to work with the books I want to work with.

So I reached out to Gil Griffin. He was game to give it a try. We worked up a full proposal, and we sent it out to all the sports publishers in the US, and of course, we came up snake eyes. But as Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, we also reached out to our friends at the Zeno Agency in London. Maybe a British publisher that better knew the Australian markets would end up buying the book.  And that didn’t happen.

But John Wordsworth, who had just come over to the Zeno Agency from working at the British publishing house Headline, somehow knew the right person who knew somebody, hooked up the proposal with Nero Publishing in Australia, and by some magical process I still can’t quite believe happened, this passion project that I was never sure would find a home managed to find a pretty much perfect one.  In Australia, the book came out at just the right time in 2016, with a couple players featured in JUMPING AT THE CHANCE making their marks in the AFL.

And this year, JABberwocky is delighted to bring you the first US publication of JUMPING AT THE CHANCE, updated from last year’s Australian edition.

I am pleased as punch.  I’m still not sure what success it’s destined for in the US.  But it’s a great story that has only gotten better since I first came across it in 2015. Players from a country that knows virtually nothing about the AFL are making an impact on footy in Australia, not conjecture or hypothetically but by taking marks and kicking goals and scoring points.

And deep in my heart, I am sure that the right person is going to stumble across JUMPING AT THE CHANCE on the right day and realize what a great story this is. It’s a story we’ve seen five or fifteen times in the movies that I never, ever tire of, the story about the baseball pitchers from India pitching in the show, the story about the kids from a poor school beating the kids from the rich school, the story about the coach from another planet having the winning team with students nothing like himself.  Oh, sure, it’s set against the background of Australian Rules Football, but if Adam McKay can find a way to make complicated financial stuff understandable in “The Big Short,” we can make a movie where people understand enough about the AFL to revel in the triumphs of Jason Holmes and Mason Cox as some of the first players to emerge from the AFL’s American Experiment.  And when that happens, I’ll be happy not just because more people will buy JUMPING AT THE CHANCE, but because I’ll have succesfully shared my love and passion for footy with the world at large.

C’mon, Mate! Take the first step with me. Click on over and check out Gil Griffin’s JUMPING AT THE CHANCE.  Here's an Amazon buy link, which has just gone live, and more to come as the metadata spreads.

The Sporting Scene

So as we all gear up for the excitement of this evening's Bowl Selection Special...

No, the BCS isn't fair, it's rigged against schools that are out of the major BCS conferences, and having a college football playoff will not save the system. As I posted at the start of the year, college football fans and pundits will still argue over which 8 teams make the playoff, because there's no way the supporters of the #9 team won't think it's really #6. And there's no guarantee the best team will win every game, some player will get injured in practice or be suspended for violating team rules. Let's just settle for the idea that college football will never, should never, have a truly declared "champion" and the world will survive. The other scenario that works for me is that college football can institute a playoff the same year that my mother declares which of her children is her one and true favorite.

Also on the tube today is the final of the 2010 Davis Cup. Tennis purists in the US deeply bemoan the fact that this championship doesn't get more love and attention from Americans. It's so big in the rest of the world, why not here? If they'll just change the calendar! That will make it relevant.

But here's the problem with Davis Cup. The final match of the year that will determine if the Cup is won by Serbia or France --

-- oops, that's kind of the actual real problem any conversation has to start with, is that chauvinists in the US don't so much care about sporting events that are being won by Serbians or Frenchmen, or are as likely to be expatriate Serbs who care, but not if it's won by an American --

but we'll leave that whole issue aside because even chauvinist Americans recognize greatness and at least to some extent the half-serious casual American tennis fan will care about Wimbledon or the US Open even if an American isn't involved so long as the player is an acknowledged top player in the game like Federer or Nadal, the problem with Davis Cup is that this year's championship match is being contested by Viktor Troicki, a Serbian whose current world rank is #30, and the 23rd ranked Frenchman Michael Llodra. Now, I don't want to belittle the accomplishments of being ranked in the top 30 in tennis. That make you a pretty darned good tennis player. But at the same time, as deep as men's tennis can be there's still a pretty big gap between being the top 5, the top 10, and the top 30. There's a reason why the year-end champion's tournament for the ATP men's tour ended up being contested by Nadal and Federer, which is that the top players in the world are actually better and kind of significantly so than the rest of them. They don't win every week (please see note on "best team not guaranteed to win college football playoff" above) but they win way more often than not for a reason.

And how many people are going to get jazzed up over a sporting competition that ends up being determined by players or teams that are determinedly off of the top level? We can argue if the best teams make the Stanley Cup finals or the World Series, but to a greater or lesser degree the regular season does weed out the worst teams from making the playoffs, even in hockey you don't make the cut by being below the 50th percentile. A better team may lose to an inferior team in any given round of playoffs, but the odds of the lesser team winning multiple rounds define why we call those "Cinderella stories" that have interest on their own. None of these sporting championships we really care about consistently end up coming down to the tennis equivalent of #23 vs #30.

Sorry, Patrick McEnroe and Jim Courier and John McEnroe, but you're never going to go very far advocating American enthusiasm for Davis Cup when it means people have to be up at 10AM EST on a Sunday morning to watch #23 vs #30. Or even worse, at 7AM on a Saturday morning when the final match ends up being in the doubles. It doesn't even matter that people have to adjust to watching a scoreboard on the TV set that says "Srb-Fra" instead of Troicki-Llodra because we have to uphold the idea that it's two countries playing instead of two tennis players.

Game 8 of the World Series

So a few weeks ago I posted an ode to Australian Rules Football, which you can enjoy here.

I've now been introduced to one of the, um, odder customs in the sport.

I happened on, rather by accident, the wonderful news that ESPN Classic was doing live coverage of this year's Grand Final. Among the participants, the St. Kilda Saints, whom I'd seen in person win a controversial upset victory during the first round of the playoff series three weeks ago. Well, great game. The Saints fell behind pretty badly in the second quarter, but slowly and steadily made their way back in the second half, and then they go ahead by a goal late in the 4th quarter, fall behind by one point, get that one point back, and we end regulation time dead even at 68-68.

Well, imagine if it's game 7 of the World Series, the game is tied 4-4 at the end of 9 innings, and Bud Selig comes on the field to say it's such a great game that we're going to come back tomorrow and play another one.

You don't have to imagine it, because that's the current rule in the AFL. Finish the grand final tied, and everyone gets to come back next week to do the whole thing over again. I don't quite know whether to laugh or cry, stay up past 3AM for the grand finale of the Grand Final, and I get to do it all over again in a week.

The good news is that all of you now reading this blog post have several days to find out which part of the ESPN empire will broadcast the do-over, and you can all experience the joys of watching AFL.

But really, this is kind of way way weird.

footy!

Footy is the nickname for Australian Rules Football. It's played on a very extremely large oval pitch, with goals at each end. The central goal is worth six points, and is surrounded by a subsidiary goal on each side which is worth one point. The ball is advanced with a combination of throwing, kicking and running. You kick the ball, the ball is caught cleanly, you establish a mark at the site of the catch and can have free kick from the spot of the mark. Throw and catch the ball you can keep moving the ball but without the benefit of the mark. You can also run up to seven generous steps with the ball in some of these cases, kind of like seven steps and then a few more so you don't have to stop too suddenly.  Lots of times the ball isn't caught cleanly or a couple people can go for it, and then you can get some nice violent competition for possession. 

I've now seen footy twice, first time during Aussiecon 3 in 1999, and with much eager anticipation this week during my Aussiecon 4. With two matches under my belt, starting to get more understanding of the game, and why I like watching it so much. 

First and foremost, I like it because I have to watch it. I watch lots of TV where the TV is background noise but for episodic TV want to watch only those shows that I have to actually watch because the quality of the writing and acting demands attention. 

Baseball has so much down time, if you rigorously keep score you can fill it with lots of housekeeping for the scorecard, but so much downtime. US football is way more downtime than game. Tennis changeovers and between points. The endless fouling at the end of a basketball half. US soccer aka football in much of world is non-stop action but with very little happening unless you're a true fan who will watch all those subtleties.

Footy has lots of free-flowing wide-ranging action with an actual scoring outcome. You don't need to be a soccer snoot to find a purpose to it, and while the clock is running there are things happening.  You get your money's worth watching what is on the field, you don't need cheerleaders and sausage contests and loud music. 

It's a violent sport, but it's not just about the violence. My first game 11 years ago had been a damp day, and the second half this year was damp. But the first half not. Which made it easier to hold on to the ball, which limited the opportunity for people to go fighting for the ball. With rain starting to fall in the second half, and a damp ball and damp grass, the game had an entirely different complexion.  You can't be great at footy without having skill both for the clean flowing game of the first half and the more scrummy conditions of the second. 

I also like the pageantry of the game. Some of it maybe because footy is exotic to me and the NFL not, so to an Australian the raised arms of a touchdown would be as much a touch of pageantry as the cocked arms and waved flags of a footy goal. But look at the way the footy refs carry the ball back out to midfield after a goal.  There's nothing like that in the NFL.

The field is large enough to become a three ring circus during halftime with various youth groups playing or scrimmaging on the hallowed Melbourne Cricket Grounds.

For all its appeal to me, Australian Rules Football is regional even within Australia.  Most of the teams are based in Melbourne and surrounding.  I was watching the Geelong Cats, favored and from another coy near to Melbourne, against the St. Kilda Saints from an area in South Melbourne. The first quarter was fairly well contested, but the Saints totally dominated play in the 2nd and built a huge lead. In the second half, the Cats clawed their way back, and then seemed to go ahead with a minute left only to have disallowed for a push-in-back infraction allowing the Saints to run out the clock and hold on for an upset win.  The papers the next day said the infraction was doubtful but had little sympathy, pointing out that Geelong had kicked miserably in the homestretch gaining only one six-pointer out of eight attempts. 

And BTW, there were no bag checks and pat downs to enter the stadium. Beyond the entry gate there was one table and two bored-looking guys doing what seemed to be a voluntary bag check. In the US, we're all certain to die a gruesome and horrible death if people don't prove their cell phones are actually cell phones on the way into Yankee Stadium, or if we bring in empty plastic water bottles over emptiable ones.               

An Onion a Day

On the lighter side from some other recent posts...

we've all heard of the dreaded pulled hamstring and other pulled muscles, and now The Onion has its laugh-out-loud take on this subject. I wish I'd thought of this one, and I don't think you'll read another article about sports injury in the same way ever again.