Football, Euro politics, it’s all Greek to me

By Wayne Dawkins

George Papandreou of Greece must understand Alabama’s “roll Tide” ethos because the prime minister apparently pulled a trick play out of the Crimson Tide playbook.

Greece, buried in debt and clinging to a lavish welfare state culture, is teetering on bankruptcy and its financial woes could weaken the entire European Union and give the sputtering American economy a new fever.

European economic powers, led by Germany and France last month, brokered a loan to bail out the Greeks. The loan came with tough love: Greece would have to cut entitlements and raise taxes. Fine it seemed. But this week Papandreou announced that he was putting the loan proposal to Greek citizens for a referendum in January 2012.

Heads of state Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy of Germany and France were livid with rage. You better take the bailout Papandreou, they essentially said, or your country is on its own, which is a journey to oblivion.

In football terms, Greece was facing a fourth down and very long.

Its quarterback Papandreou resorted to the flea flicker: His referendum move was a trick play to get the political left in his country to cave and soften to the Euro Union’s terms. An analysis Thursday on American Public Media “Marketplace” broke down the move.

Papandreou mirrored Bama coach Bear Bryant: In the early 1970s, the legendary coach realized he had to desegregate his team in order to remain dominant, but he could not frankly tell the alumni that it was time to recruit blacks. So Bryant resorted to a trick play. He called fellow coach and friend John McKay of the University of Southern California and offered to play McKay’s integrated team – at his house in Tuscaloosa.

When USC’s Trojans ran onto the field, some fans wondered out loud if all-white Alabama was about to play HBCU Tuskegee Institute.

No, these were the big, bad Trojans and they flattened the Tide. Without prompting, Bama alumni began saying, it must be time to recruit those fast, tough black boys for the team.

On Saturday the fact that many of the star Alabama-LSU players are black is no accident. Crafty moves four decades ago made racial diversity possible for the anticipated game of the century between No. 1 and 2-ranked teams.

As for Greece, Papandreou’s moves this week appeared erratic, but on further review, he may be crafty as a fox. He must have peeked at Bear Bryant’s playbook in order to mastermind a potentially slick political score.  

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1149825/index.htm     Southern progress

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/10/24/pm-how-greeces-debt-crisis-would-affect-the-us/           Marketplace, APM