I just wanted to make sure that somebody made the caveman joke.
{Not an endorsement. Seriously, really not.}
And yes, Johnny. I am trying to say that I think shaving and maybe a haircut would be a better look for you.
Get off of my lawn!
Apparently ESPN correspondent Tony Kornheiser is moonlighting as the Fashion Police based on the recent barrage of insults he hurled at ESPN’s Hannah Storm’s attire. I’ll give him points for also trying to embrace his inner literati for including some Dennis Miller-style stingers like calling her a “Holden Caufield Fantasy”. Ah….now say something witty about Moe Green. Reference heavy insults are always classy.
For some unknown reason, a female sports anchor’s attire was more important than her skill or professionalism. His remark that “she looks like she has a sausage casing wrapping around her upper body” was just one example of the bizarre insults he hurled out of nowhere at his peer. They seem like something that a woman who has proven her merits shouldn’t have to accept – yet there she sits, in that skirt he so disapproved of, accepting his apology for his ridiculous cave man behavior.
Apparently he’s issued an apology, gotten suspended and tried to explain/defend himself on his radio show. “He’s a sarcastic guy” he says. AH. You have sarcasm at your disposal, so it’s okay to say whatever you like no matter how hurtful or rude? I wasn’t aware you had SARCASM man, I’m sorry. Here I am getting my little feminist feelings hurt.
But while we’re at it – I’m a rather SARCASTIC girl who writes on a sports blog (when I’m not being all barefoot and pregnant). And you know what I notice?
I notice that you are wearing a tie that has browns which don’t properly complement your jacket. The yellow looks like police tape yellow – which I think is a questionable choice given your skin tone. You have a receding hairline which makes me think that you either can’t afford Rogaine or you lack the cajones to accept your fate and be cool enough to be bald.
And OH MY GOD why is your nose so big? Seriously, ESPN pays well, I’d expect. Can you not get that reduced with just a wee bit of rhinoplasty? Your left ear appears to be longer than your right ear which lends a disconcerting assymmetry to your face. In fact, it weirds me out.
I’m just a sports blogger. I’m a sarcastic girl. I don’t mean any harm.
Oh, and I bet this guy goes through more sunglasses than Moe Green.
Please add five points to my score for the Moe Green reference.
Two things about this post before I get into it:
1) Yes, I know. What Super Bowl? The Olympics are starting today. Live in the now! And
2) It probably says something about me that this is the second post in so many weeks that I have written about someone in the NFL using some form of the F word. It’s a good word and applicable to many situations. What’s not to like?
Nonetheless, this is a pretty funny story that I know is helping me to chuckle through this weekend’s forecast (shocker: snow).
During a post-win interview with New Orleans radio station WWL, a reporter asked Saints’ offensive lineman Carl Nicks how he felt about defeating the Indianapolis Colts and adding the first ever Lombardi trophy to the Saints’ mantle.
Nicks was, understandably, ebullient and apparently not paying too careful attention to what was coming out of his mouth and whether or not it was kosher.
I haven’t heard anything about Nicks receiving any punishment for his blunder as it was pretty extraordinary circumstances. But I hope he does go to Disneyland and I hope he has a perfectly G-rated good time.
A guest post from psu. His blog is Tea Leaves:
Of course by “football” I mean American football and by “sport” I mostly mean “American sport.” I certainly do not mean “rest of the world” football, which Americans call soccer. If your favorite sport is soccer than we can just agree now that you will hate me and I will feel sorry for you.
With the Super Bowl once again upon us I have been ruminating about why football in general, and the NFL in particular, is clearly the best sport in the country. I thought I stole this idea from Chuck Klosterman, who wrote an excellent essay about football in his recent book Eating the Dinosaur. It turns out that his essay did not say what I thought it did, but it did tickle me to ruminate about this subject for a while.
So why, exactly, is football better? There are many reasons, and only some of them have to do with the game itself.
This, I think, is the most important reason the NFL dominates. The almost slavishly constrained structure of the NFL season is perfect for the modern life style. Who really has time to watch 82 or 160 or however many games are in the hockey season games per year? Nobody, that’s who. Well, the nuttiest of the fans will make the time, but the football season allows you to maintain a genuine interest while not requiring that you allocate a fifth of your waking hours to following your favorite team. Instead, you have to remember one simple rule: be at home at 1:00 p.m. or 4:00 p.m. on Sunday (with the occasional exceptions for Monday and Thursday) and you are all set.
Really nutty fans can also buy a special TV package that let’s them watch every game every week. In what other league would you even watch every game that happens on a given day? In the NFL it’s not really that hard, if you have most of your weekend free and a few Tivos.
Goon Squad Sarah and Mean Joe Green agree that football is better than your favorite sport.
Speaking of Tivo, football is made for Tivo. Have you ever noticed how the play clock is 40 seconds? Have you ever noticed that your Tivo can skip ahead by exactly 30 seconds? This means that if you have the next hour of the game buffered in your Tivo you can skip from play to play to play with a great deal of precision and not have to listen to the idiot announcers fill time. You can’t do this with any other sport.
An underrated aspect of the “one game per week” structure of the football season is the fact that it has allowed the NFL to construct the perfect structure for its news cycle. The only news in the NFL that the NFL doesn’t tightly control is what happens on Sundays when they play the games. Everything else is an endless stream of canned analysis, preview and opinion pieces about either the game that just happened or the games that are about to happen. For even the casual fan, this stream of content is hard to resist and very addictive. The only evidence you need of this is to watch the NFL Network for an hour. If you have any interest in football at all, you’ll be completely mesmerized. The entire time you can’t turn away, the rational, weaker part of your brain will tell you that what you are consuming is mindless drivel almost completely devoid of fact or meaning. Unfortunately, the rest of your brain will refuse to turn it off. It’s the most brilliant consumer television move since The Real World.
Given the regimented structure of the football season, it’s not surprising that the game itself is also highly ordered. The contest lurches forward in intervals of forty seconds. The offense and defense line up, a lot of complicated maneuvering happens, then there is an explosion of chaos and violence. After that, the whole thing resets and repeats itself.
This “turn-based” structure, if you will, leads to a the popularity of a particular point of view about how the good teams win. When good teams win, a huge amount of credit tends to be given to the head coach, who is called a brilliant tactician, a keen evaluator of talent, and a savvy manager of the players. People will say he (or his quarterback) knows how to “manage the game,” as if the important part was the setup. This leads to a view of the players as something akin to automatons, required by their programmed nature to “do their job” and execute the grand “schemes” and “adjustments” of the huge intellects in charge.
As a Patriots fan, this view is especially poignant since over the last ten years the franchise has been put up as the model for this sort of team – a lot of “interchangeable parts” with a few superstars all controlled directly from the giant brain of Belichick. All of this would be great except that it really hasn’t worked that way since 2005. The course of the team since then is a stark illustration that you can’t control the game and the dividing line between shutting up the Dolphins forever and becoming second banana to Peyton Manning can be as stupid as some guy catching the ball against his helmet.
The NFL doesn’t care about this. The NFL likes to perpetuate the myth of the coach because doing so will make you, the fan, think that if only the coaching staff could hear what you are shouting from your couch, the game would be going a lot better. This is a great fantasy, and is yet another way the NFL hooks its fans. But don’t be fooled. The game is played by players, not little robots. And how those guys feel and what they make themselves do on any given day is ultimately more important than all the scheming and adjusting the giant brains can do. Remember: helmet catch.
I was going to write a bit here about how Fantasy Football is clearly the only fantasy sport worth subjecting yourself to. But then I remembered that I hate fantasy football, so I think I’ll give it up. That said, the weekly structure of the league is what makes this true. Gives you time to indulge in your coaching fantasies (see above) and adjust your team a lot.
I bet gambling on football is more fun for the same reason. But I wouldn’t know anything about that.
Football also makes for the best video games. The reason is simple and familiar: you can actually play an entire season in a reasonable amount of time. You can even play two seasons before your 40 hours with the game are up. But there is no one on earth who has time to actually play 162 video baseball games in a season mode. The brilliance of the 17-game season comes through again.
And so we come full circle back to the Super Bowl, clearly the biggest single day in American Sports. The Super Bowl is more interesting than the other championship contests because all of the other professional sports leagues use a series to decide rounds in the playoffs. The NFL uses single elimination, which is obviously superior.
For example, last year the Celtics were in the NBA playoffs. And if you wanted to follow them you had to realize that the entire first round of the NBA playoffs took more than a month to play out. There were a total of 16 teams in two conferences playing eight series all of which could go seven games. This is a potential 56 basketball games just to get into the second round.
This happens in the NFL in two days. Then there is a whole week to crank up the analysis and hype machine. This is even more effective in the playoffs because the fans are even more invested. If you work hard at it, you can even convince yourself that (say) a weak Patriots team with no defense to speak of is actually a favorite to beat whoever it was that completely destroyed them. Oh, sorry.
Again, the NFL takes advantage of the fact that they play relatively few actual games to crank up the hype machine between rounds. This culiminates in a two-week feeding frenzy around the two teams that play in the Super Bowl every year. By the time the game is played, it is impossible for anyone not to have found out what is going on. There is even a hype machine around the advertising for this single football game. All bases: covered.
On the other hand, the NFL made an uncharacteristic mistake this year. They decided to put the Pro Bowl in the off week between the conference championships and the Super Bowl. This is a remarkably stupid move. Not only does no one give a shit about the Pro Bowl, the game also interrupts the hype pipeline for the more important game. Instead of gripping 24/7 analysis of which quarterback’s grandmother might have the psychological edge on game day, the talking heads have to spend time talking about the Pro Bowl.
I’m not sure who made this decision, but it strikes me as strange and unwise. Maybe its a harbinger of more failures to come. Like how the Patriots stopped being able to play pass defense in crunch time, thus ensuring that their next Super Bowl is probably a long ways off. I saw something about this on the NFL Network. I thought that analysis was very insightful.
psu grew up in Massachusetts and is a long-suffering fan of the Red Sox and the Patriots. He relocated to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Mellon University, and after a roundabout journey, eventually settled there. He now carefully skirts the line between being interested in the Steelers and being a sports bigamist. The 2000s have been good to him, with teams he likes winning a total of eight championships in the last ten years.
Photos by Sarah, Goon Squad Sarah, from the Draft Day Suit photo pool. Submit yours here.
The second-most-notable female athlete of 2009 according to the Associated Press was the first female to win one of the most celebrated contests in her sport and has a perfect record, winning all 14 of her major competitions.
She is also the youngest woman to receive the honor, and at five years of age has accomplished all that she ever will in her sport and so has gone off to retirement.
Isn’t she pretty?
Right. She’s a horse.
Zenyatta, the first female horse to win the Breeder’s Cup championship, came in second on the yearly list of 2009’s most accomplished female athletes.
Did I also mention that she. is. a. horse?
First place winner? Tennis star Serena Williams, who made headlines herself this year on the court not just for fantastic tennis but for saying she was going to kill a line judge. 7th place? Another horse, Rachel Alexandra, who won the Preakness Stakes. The list is curiously not available in its entirety online, but other athletes who are not horses on the list include tennis player Kim Clijsters in third, Lindsey Vonn, who won her second consecutive title in Alpine skiing’s World Cup, in fourth place and Diana Taurasi, the WNBA’s MVP in fifth.
Look, I don’t know what’s going on over there at the Associated Press. I don’t know when an animal, who is trained and ridden by a male jockey to meet the challenge of being the fastest competitor in a race, became a true contender for a ranking like this.
And I like animals, enough to be concerned about the treatment of horses in racing situations, which is another post entirely (along with a post about how Serena Williams threatening to kill a line judge did not disqualify her from the AP honor either.) In fact, I like some animals better than many humans. That does not mean, however, that I believe animals should be rated on the same scale with people in terms of accomplishments generally reserved for, again, people.
How does Clijsters feel about coming in just behind Zenyatta? How do you compete with a person who’s not a person?
Some message boards are delighting in making jokes about Serena’s appearance and other references to women as horses, to which I can only say “nice, really nice.” One comment bemoaned the possibility of “feminists” getting upset because two horses took the place of two accomplished female athletes on a list of the best female athletes of the year.
This is in many glaring ways missing the point. Identified as feminist or not, it’s quite possible to find the inclusion of horses on this list odd if you consider that every other person on this list since it has been made has been, in fact, a person. And really, if it’s feminist to say that there is some commentary inherent in the inclusion of two animals on a list of the ten best female anything in a field where women are historically underrepresented and under-covered by the very media that made this list?
So be it.
And I’m even willing to take it a step beyond and say that no male racehorse – not Seabiscuit, not Secretariat, not Seattle Slew, not Spectacular Bid nor any other horse starting with an S that will help you win at Scattergories – has ever placed on the companion list of top ten male athletes, although Secretariat was ranked 81st on the AP’s list of top athletes of the 20th century.
Mind you, Zenyatta’s jockey, Mike Smith, describes her in distinctly anthropomorphic terms:
What she’s done on the racetrack has proven how special she is. I’ve never been on something like this. It just doesn’t seem real. Whatever is in front of her, she seems to pass and do it with incredible ease, and in doing it, she has this personality…I think the fans appreciate the show she puts on. She’s so dramatic. She seems to give everyone a head start. She’s always come from last. And she’s been unbeaten coming from last. Do you know how hard that is passing every horse without getting stopped? She overcomes everything and does it with such grace and ease that it’s incredible.
And this all may be true, but she doesn’t do it without a lot of help from him. In fact, without him, she couldn’t do it at all.
Zenyatta is retired in California and as such could not be reached for comment.
Photo credit: Delmarscene.com
Ed. note: Zenyatta resides in California, not Kentucky, as previously stated. We regret the error.
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