perfidy

I hope those two fans who blocked the catch make it out of Wrigley Field alive. Helpfully, the network kept putting their picture up on the screen.

The NFL announced today the candidates for the 2004 class of the NFL Hall of Fame. As a proud-yet-ashamed-yet-fiercely-proud Ohioan, I'm appalled.
Lets' review.

Up once again for nomination are three "contributors" to the game of football who should make any right-thinking Ohioan (pron: "o-heeszhian") gag. They are:

• Art Modell. A filthy little toad of a man who once held a city hostage and broke the heart of millions, for the sake of moving to Baltimore. Baltimore!
• Art Rooney, Jr. Moneybags for the hated, hateful Pittsburgh Steelers. The Steelers make me conflicted, because my wife's from Pittsburgh, my favorite city in the USA is Pittsburgh, and Pittsburgh has better sandwiches. So, for making me feel conflicted, Art Rooney: you're a dick.
• Ed DeBartolo, Jr. Why, do you ask, would a good Ohio boy have a hate on for the owner of the 49ers? Why, indeed? Well, I don't know, but I've been told, that Ed DeBartolo, Jr. and his father are mobsters, and I do know they are all tied up in real estate in Northeastern Ohio. It's where they're from. They've really made a mess of things up there. It's a little-known fact that Northeast Ohio is mob central. It's what brought Jim Traficant to power, and brought him down.

And finally, Satan Himself has been offered a seat at the Big Table.

• QB: John Elway. Ol' horseface. I hate him. I hate him so much. I hate him with lead pipe fury and a righteousness that burns like a million suns. Why? The Drive. Fucker.

I'm hoping for the Cubs to play the Sox in the series. A more angst-ridden, hopeless confrontation could not be imagined. The only question is, which team does one cheer for? I think I shall wish for the Cubs to win, so that Pejman will link us, and to pay back Johno for the OSU cracks.

While the Cubs fans have seemingly adjusted to defeat after almost a hundred years, the Sox fans stubbornly cling to the idea that they can win, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They make Jesuitical contortions coming up with bizarre theories for their haplessness - "It's a curse," or "Buckner was a Yankee double agent" or whatever. I think it will be more interesting to watch Red Sox fans suffer.

Go Cubs!

The Browns are 1 and 3 after losing to the Bungles.

It's so nice to be back on familiar territory. I'm a Browns fan and a Red Sox fan, primarily (with minors in Steelers and Pirates/Indians) so I KNOW how incredibly reassuring, in fact psychically necessary, perpetual disappointment can be.

Pittsburgh Steelers FB Jerome Bettis is a class-A gentleman.

Check out what he said when asked what he felt about being benched to start the season (via Balloon Juice):

"I was surprised," Bettis said, shortly after Coach Bill Cowher announced Amos Zereoue would open the season as the Steelers' starting halfback. "I wasn't mad, but I was disappointed. As a competitor, all you want is for it to be a decision on the field and it wasn't a decision on the field." Citing a "gut feeling," Cowher revealed his decision yesterday at a news conference as training camp concluded at St. Vincent College in Latrobe. It's the first time Bettis was benched to start a season with the Steelers. . . ."He just said it was a decision he came to," Bettis said. "I've been on the better side of most of Coach Cowher's gut decisions and this is the first time it has not gone in my favor. I can deal with it, having been on the better side of most of them."

Hats off to that! No grandstanding, no pouting, just acceptance that Amos Zereoue looks like lightning in the preseason. I wonder if he's come to terms with the fact that he's lost a couple steps?

As a Cleveland Browns fan, I should by rights gibber, spit, and hurl feces at the very mention of the hated Steelers, but Jerome Bettis has always been a class act, a great competitor, and a terrifying running back. I hope he gets to play in the coming season and can rack up enough yards to tie Jim Brown in the record books. Tie. Not beat. I couldn't handle that.

Hopefully Bettis will handle the end of his career in Pittsburgh better than Rod Woodson did. Both are/were beloved in that town, and Woodson did nothing to make his leaving the city easy to take. Jerk.

[update] To be fair, I should point out my particular situation.

First, I married a Pittsburgh gal and vastly prefer the Steel City over Cleveland as a place to spend time. In fact, when the Browns and Steelers are NOT playing each other, I can even root for the Steelers to win a game. Bill Cowher is the perfect coach for that city.

Second, as far as I'm concerned, the Steelers are merely ancestral rivals rather than sworn enemies. My football enemies are two: the Broncos, especially Horse-Face (John Elway to the rest of the country), and of course Art Modell. My formative years were spent watching Elway and the Broncos steal playoff after playoff from the Browns, and the images of the Fumble and the Drive are tattoed somewhere deep in my reptile brain forever, right down next to the bits that keep me breathing and my heart beating. As for Art... let's just say it's a good thing he doesn't go back to Cleveland much.

...well, that's not exactly true.

Congratulations to the Saugus, MA little league team, who have made it to the US Championship game in the Little League World Series.

Despite the perhaps-deserved long-view theorizing and cranky little-league bashing that one hears, it's awesome, just awesome, to see a bunch of kids from up the road play so well under so much pressure. The crying, joyous parents is just icing on the cake.

Good luck, kids. (I'd like to say,) If you win the series, dinner's on me at Kowloon out on Route 1*, (but I can't.)

*Disclaimer. If you win the series, dinner is NOT on me, but I'll sure be happy for you.

Now this is a worthwhile waste of time, if such a thing can be said to exist! Meet the Oracle of Baseball, companion to the more well known Oracle of Bacon. It's like Six Degrees of Babe Ruth.

I'm feeling pretty clever, because I found seven-step relationship between Texas 3B Hank Blalock, and dead ball era OF Dummy Hoy (incidentially, the only deaf-mute to play professional ball). For well-known players, I've apparently done pretty well. Go me! 

• Hank Blalock played with Rob Bell for the 2002 Texas Rangers
• Rob Bell played with Jose Rijo for the 2001 Cincinnati Reds
• Jose Rijo played with Tommy John for the 1985 Oakland Athletics
• Tommy John played with Early Wynn for the 1963 Cleveland Indians
• Early Wynn played with Cecil Travis for the 1947 Washington Senators
• Cecil Travis played with Nick Altrock for the 1933 Washington Senators
• Nick Altrock played with Dummy Hoy for the 1898 Louisville Colonels

I see via fark that the Chicago Bears are now going to call themselves, wherever possible, "Bears football presented by Bank One". 

No, I'm not kidding. Really, I'm not. 

You can call me old-fashioned, hypocritical, or conservative if you like, but the DAY the Cleveland Browns change their name to Browns football presented by Goodyear, I drive seven hundred miles to Ohio with a tire iron, a roll of duct tape, and a car with a three-body-big trunk to take care of some business. 

I have no problem with corporate sponsorship per se-- it's as big a part of modern sport as growth hormone, endorsement contracts, and drug convictions. But of all the stupid... cynical.... *sputter* ... They sold their name?? 
 

Over at ESPN, Brian Murphy has observed that the unthinkable could happen: Roger Clemens could win his 300th game at Fenway. From the Murphy's mouth:

Holy looting mob, that will be an unforgettable experience.I was at the '99 ALCS Game 3 when Clemens got rocked at Fenway, knocked out in the second inning as the Red Sox destroyed their former hero turned Benedict Arnold. What a day. The Sox fans were maniacal, foaming at the mouth in their desire to take out the Rocket. . . .[A]fter that game, the fans turned into something straight off the pages of "Frankenstein." Missing only torches, they actually tore down the banner commemorating Clemens' 20-strikeout day in '86.

I remember that day. I was driving from Washington to Baltimore to see the future Goodwife Two-Cents, and with every humiliating pitch of those first two innings, I drove faster and faster, beating my fist in ecstasy against the roof of the car like it was being mouthy and needed a fresh one. That was one of the best things I've ever heard on the radio, made all the better because, since it wasn't the teevee, I could imagine for myself the humiliation clouding those piggy little eyes of his, the saddlebags of flopsweat coming through the pinstripes, the cotton holding back his Boomer-like gut like Size-00 support hose on Divine as his shoulder slump in abject defeat. In my head, it was AWESOME. And I hadn't even realized my true calling as a Sox fan at the time and was still attached to the Cleveland Indians, the team of my hometown.

Returning to Johno's previous question about what to do about student athletes, I'd say it is a problem. It's a problem for student athletes in Division 1 in that athletics does take a lot of time away from academic study. It makes studying and completing assignments much more difficult. The seasons are long, especially for basketball, and it consumes a lot of a student's year. So what are the options? Well, obviously, seasons could be shorter. Of course, universities might carp about this because tournament play and bowl games are advertising opportunities and money-makers. But they can still have their post-regular season play, just limit the amount of time it takes. If that means fewer games have to played during the NCAA tournament, so be it. It might also help to return to more geographically restricted divisions. That would reduce time on the road for college athletes.

The other problem occurs with economically disadvantaged athletes. Universities kind of pull a bait and switch, in my opinion, with some athletes. Universities offer a free ride on tuition in exchange for participation in sports. Well, that's good for disadvantaged athletes who might not have otherwise have the opportunity for higher education. But when they're broke, they are tempted to take gifts that the NCAA does not permit. In some cases it might well be greed. But a friend of mine recently mentioned a story about one college athlete, who came from a very poor family, and didn't even own a jacket. A booster apparently bought the kid a jacket, the NCAA said that was not permitted, and I don't remember if the kid had to leave the team, lost his scholarship, or anything like that. But for the kid to even get in trouble because someone bought him a jacket so that he wouldn't be so cold outside is screwy.

So, disadvantaged student athletes with scholarships get free tuition, but free tuition doesn't cover everything. Maybe it wouldn't be such a bad idea to grant disadvantaged student athletes stipends, if circumstances justified it. But that might be unfair to disadvantaged students on other scholarships without stipends. That problem might not have a solution. But at the very least, the NCAA could reduce the length of seasons and the amount of geographic travel to give student athletes more time to be students.

The Boston Globe reports that "[a] study released Monday showed that 10 of the schools in this week's round of 16 have failed to graduate even half of their players in recent years."

I'd like to open up discussion about the role of college atheletics in education. Obviously, top-shelf college atheletes are not really "amateurs" by any stretch of the imagination, no matter what the NCAA might claim. I've seen it argued recently (sorry-- no link!) that student atheletes should get credit for their participation in sports, as the time devoted to atheletics takes the place of academics in their education-- this would then make them true 'student atheletes'. I've also seen it argued that NCAA schools should be able to pay their players to compensate for the time that sports monopolizes from their schedule. Many argue that student atheletes deserve extra consideration because winning teams bring loads of money into universities. What do you lot think? Or do you not care?