Archive for September 5th, 2006
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
We are officially less than a month before the start of the NFL season, so it’s probably time to start previewing the monster. The key to the NFL’s success — other than fantasy football and gambling, of course — is the rabid nature of its fans. That is to say: You don’t see a lot of people painting their faces for their favorite golfer.
We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, even a TV guy or two, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, why My Team Is Better Than Your Team. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever. We will be running two a day until the beginning of the NFL season.
Right now: the Kansas City Chiefs. Your author is Rany Jazayerli.
Rany Jazayerli is a senior writer for Baseball Prospectus as well as a dermatologist working in private practice in St. Charles, Illinois. He’s also a proud alumnus of the Arabian-American Little League. (Seriously.) His words are after the jump.
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Want to know why the Chiefs can win the Super Bowl this year? Easy: They won it last year.
Unfortunately, they won it for the Steelers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
To get a true sense of the angst that Chiefs fans endure, you must go back to January 7, 1996, the most painful sports day of my life. After 20 years of wandering the desert, the Chiefs emerged in 1990 as one of the better teams in the NFL, averaging more than 10 wins a season from 1990 to 1994 and reaching the AFC Championship game in 1993. But the 1995 team was our best yet — an NFL-best 13-3 record behind a defense that allowed barely 15 points a game. A Super Bowl was just two wins — at Arrowhead, where the Chiefs had not lost all year — away.
And then came the Lin Elliott game. In the annals of NFL history, has any kicker done a more thorough job of single-handedly derailing his team’s championship hopes? Say what you will about Mike Vanderjagt, but there was plenty of blame to go around the Colts’ locker room last January. Scott Norwood? Please. Any kicker can miss a 49-yarder.
Elliott missed a 35-yarder. And a 39-yarder. And a 43-yarder, on the final meaningful play of the game, giving the Colts — the 9-7 Colts — a 10-7 win. This game remains the biggest playoff upset of the last 15 years; only the Vikings’ loss to the Falcons in the 1998-99 NFC Championship Game comes close.
And thus began an uncanny stretch of what-ifs and could-have-beens for the Chiefs, a stretch which shows no sign of ending.
Two years later, the Chiefs once again went 13-3, and this time their kicker was the reliable Pete Stoyanovich, who drilled a 54-yarder as time expired to beat the Broncos in Week 12, which proved the difference between home-field advantage throughout the playoffs (for the Chiefs) and a wild-card berth (for the Broncos). When Denver came to town after waxing Jacksonville in the first round, Stoyanovich got his chance late in a scoreless first half and nailed a 34-yarder.
Except Greg Manusky got called for a phantom holding penalty — it has been nine years, and I still haven’t found it on replays — so Stoyanovich had to try again from 44 yards. This time what he nailed was the left upright.
Stoyanovich would kick a field goal in the third quarter, but only after Tony Gonzalez scored a touchdown that was nullified when the side judge ruled his elbow landed out of bounds before both feet touched down. Replays showed he was in bounds, and he was clearly pushed by the defender to boot. The next season — at least in part because of the legacy of this play — the NFL voted to bring back instant replay.
So in the final minutes, instead of being tied at 14 or even down 14-13, the Chiefs were down 14-10 and had to reach the end zone. They moved the ball to the Broncos’ 20 before a last-gasp fourth down toss fell incomplete. For the second time in three years, the Chiefs lost a home playoff game after going 8-0 at home during the season. The only thing that could make the situation worse was if the Broncos would go on to win the Super Bowl. Which they did.
This was the Chiefs’ version of the Bucky Dent game, only if Bucky had hit the ball a foot foul and the umpires gave him the benefit of the doubt.
The loss to the Broncos heralded the onset of a dark era for the Chiefs, six years of coaching changes and player arrests and the death of Derrick Thomas, but no playoff appearances. The Chiefs should have made the playoffs in 1999, when a Seahawks loss to the Jets meant that the Chiefs needed only to beat the Raiders in their final game — at home, where they had beat Oakland 11 straight times — to win the division. The game was tied 38-38 when Stoyanovich lined up for a game-winning 45-yarder on the last play of regulation. Wide right. Kickoff specialist Jon Baker then sent the overtime kickoff out of bounds — his third OOB of the day. The Raiders won three plays later.
Three weeks later, Thomas would be paralyzed in a car accident (dying two weeks later from a pulmonary embolism). He was driving to the airport to see the Rams play in the NFC Championship game - a trip he could not have taken had the Chiefs still been playing.
The blue period finally lifted in 2003, as the Chiefs stormed out to a 9-0 start, Priest Holmes set the all-time rushing touchdown record with 27, and the Chiefs once again finished 13-3. Once again, they had a bye in the first-round and home-field advantage in their first playoff game. Once again, they had gone undefeated at home all season. Once again, they lost.
It’s hard to blame bad luck for losing when your defense doesn’t make a single stop the entire game, but what is forgotten about this game is that the Colts’ defense was just as bad; neither team punted all day. The Colts won 38-31 because the Chiefs failed to score on only two possessions:
1) Holmes, who had fumbled once all year, lost the ball at the end of a 48-yard run early in the third quarter;
2) Tony Gonzalez’s touchdown reception in the first quarter was called back by “a suspect offensive interference call” — the Associated Press’s words, not mine.
Just for fun, after Gonzalez’s nullified TD, the Chiefs called on Morton Anderson, one of the most prolific field goal kickers in NFL history, to hit one from 31 yards out. He shanked it.
You may be sensing a trend here.
Which brings us to last season. The prime beneficiaries of the Lin Elliott game were not the Colts, but the Steelers, who instead of traveling to Arrowhead for the AFC Championship game, played the 9-7 Colts at home. They still came within a Jim Harbaugh prayer on the game’s final play of losing, but held on for their first Super Bowl berth since 1979.
The Steelers once again needed help from the Chiefs last season, this time just to reach the playoffs. I’m going to guess (You want proof? Do I look like Aaron Schatz?) that no previous Super Bowl team — winner or loser — had failed to control their own destiny with just three games left in the season. Going into Week 15, the Steelers and Chiefs were both 8-5, and the Chiefs held the tiebreaker for the final playoff spot. The Chiefs coughed up their postseason berth against the Giants that week, but ask any Chiefs fan and they’ll tell you their playoff dreams officially died the week before, against the Cowboys, in a game as gut-wrenching as any of those playoff games.
Never mind the fact that with the Chiefs on the Cowboys’ nine-yard line while leading late in the first half, ex-Chief Scott Fujita sacked-and-stripped Trent Green, with the Cowboys taking the recovery all the way the Chiefs’ 15-yard line — a 14-point turnaround after they punched it in. Never mind that Terry Glenn scored two touchdowns in the game, one on a 71-yard flea-flicker, one on an end-around that was the first rushing touchdown of his 10-year career.
No, what elevated this game into the hierarchy of Stomach Punch games for Chiefs fans was what happened in the game’s final minute. After the Cowboys scored the apparent winning touchdown with just 22 seconds left, Green heroically moved the ball 48 yards in two plays to set up a game-tying field goal for Lawrence Tynes from 41 yards out.
Wide right. But you already knew that. And we all knew, at that moment, that our Chiefs would miss the playoffs by a single game.
(In fairness to Tynes, the fault for the missed field goal lies with a bad snap from long snapper Ed Perry. Perry was playing only because Pro Bowler Kendall Gammon, who had played in 218 consecutive games — a streak longer than Brett Favre’s at the time — had his leg broken four weeks earlier.)
To their credit, once the door opened for Pittsburgh to move ahead in the wild-card race, they stormed through on their way to the championship. But, as in 1995, the Steelers owe their Super Bowl berth to a team they never faced.
This year we’re getting an early start on our heartbreak. GM Carl Peterson finally nabbed his white whale, Ty Law, this offseason. But just as we began to wonder if hey, maybe this is finally our year, All-World left tackle Willie Roaf decided to retire on the eve of training camp.
Even without Roaf, the Chiefs still have more than enough talent to make a Super Bowl run this year. It’s just a matter of which team they’ll help get there.
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
We are officially less than a month before the start of the NFL season, so it’s probably time to start previewing the monster. The key to the NFL’s success — other than fantasy football and gambling, of course — is the rabid nature of its fans. That is to say: You don’t see a lot of people painting their faces for their favorite golfer.
We asked a gaggle of writers, from the Web, from print, from books, even a TV guy or two, to tell us, in as many or as little words as they need, why My Team Is Better Than Your Team. This is not meant to be factual, or dispassionate, or even logical: We just asked them to riff on why they love their team so much, or what their team means to them, or whatever. We will be running two a day until the beginning of the NFL season.
Right now: the Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona Cardinals. Your author is Will Leitch.
Will Leitch is the editor of Deadspin. His words are after the jump.
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Before I get started here, I’d like to ask you a legitimate question: Do you know any Arizona Cardinals fans?
I wonder whether you do. I don’t personally know any other Arizona Cardinals fans, and I am an Arizona Cardinals fan. Whenever I head to a bar to watch Sunday football, I never see anybody else in a Buzzsaw jersey. I don’t receive emails from fellow Buzzsaw fans encouraging me to keep the faith. I’m not sure there are any. They have to be out there, right? I can’t be the only one.
So, if you’re out there, please let me know, because I never have anyone to talk about the Buzzsaw with. Part of the job description of “sports fan” is to bitch about my team with like-minded sorts, but in this case (as with many), there just might not be anyone like-minded. We’re like the dodo, but, you know, dumber.
Anyway. You’re probably wondering why I like the Buzzsaw.
A friend of mine (not James Frey, if you’re wondering) told me recently how difficult his life as a Cleveland Browns fan was. He said the usual things fans talk about when complaining about their teams; they don’t care enough about their fans, they don’t have a concrete plan in place and (of course the most important) they’d never made it to a Super Bowl. (As fans, we have all kinds of different whines and empty threats about our team, but it ultimately just comes down to winning, like everything does.) My friend went on for a while about this, because that’s what he does.
I told him I had little sympathy for him. In my warped universe, if he were any kind of real fan, he would have celebrated his first Super Bowl win three years ago … and he’d have a helluva lot better chance at making the playoffs this year too.
A confession: I am an fan of The Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona Cardinals. I did not grow up in Arizona — I’ve never actually been to Arizona — my last name is not Bidwell and I do not just really like pain. I grew up in Southern Illinois, about two hours from St. Louis, and the Big Red was my team. I loved Neil Lomax and Stump Mitchell and Roy Green and even Pat Tilley. I remember when they lost to Dallas 21-16 in the last game of the 1987 season, costing them a chance at the playoffs for the first non-strike season since I was born.
I remember it because it was the last game they ever played as the St. Louis Cardinals; they packed and moved to Arizona that summer, where they could alienate a whole other generation and region of loyalists. (I’ve always wondered if they would have stayed had they won that game.) Fans in St. Louis, to my surprise, rebelled against the team immediately; owner Bill Bidwell remains the least popular sports figure in the normally forgiving city, nearly 20 years later.
But not to me. I loved the Buzzsaw, and I didn’t see any reason to stop. In today’s NFL, being a fan is a year-round job; at the end of the season, you’ve got your free agency period and then the draft and then your salary cap cut date and next thing you know, it’s training camp. Because of Bidwell’s “betrayal” - which of course any owner in the sport would do if it were profitable for them - suddenly everyone abandoned the team. But how?
That is to say: When, exactly, was I supposed to switch loyalties? Was there one day that I cared about Vai Sikahema, and another when I was supposed to just stop? I read some piece of information about the Buzzsaw every day of the year. I know the 53-man roster, I know the draft picks, I know the coaching staff, I know the name of the guy who plays the mascot. It’s a full-time job, rooting for a football team … so how am I just supposed to say, “All right, yesterday I cared about these players, but now I care about these“? I couldn’t do that if I wanted to. If you can just switch in an offseason, all we have left is chaos; no one is actually a fan of their team. Not really.
And as for “abandoning” a city … please. On the whole, NFL teams and their fans live in the same city about, oh, 27 days a year. A team and its fans have as much in common as your hand and that vending machine. It’s all sentiment.
So the only true sentiment is picking your team, and sticking with it. Sure, I wish I might have picked a better team, but that has nothing to do with team movement. True fans stay around, no matter what; people from Houston should root for the Titans, people from Charlotte should root for the Hornets and people from Minnesota should root for the Dallas Stars. Otherwise, you’re the one who’s disloyal.
So I looked and my friend and just shook my head. I didn’t want to hear it; if he were a real fan, he’d have had his Super Bowl. Six years ago, over the New York Giants. Trent Dilfer was the MVP. You can look it up.
(Oh, for those who keep asking: There’s no real reason I refer to the team as The Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona Cardinals. They were 4-12 a few years ago, and, in a mocking email to some friends, I referred to the terror opponents face when they run into The Buzzsaw That Is The Arizona Cardinals. I continue to call them this, and the only reason I can think of is Tourette’s.)
(Ah, you’re asking about this year’s team. Warner’s gonna stay healthy all year, James will run for 1,800 yards, Leonard Pope will make the Pro Bowl … and they’ll go 9-7 and miss the playoffs. You know what? That’ll be fine.)
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
So Kobe was planning to be over in Japan for the gold medal game, and apparently Spain v Greece just wasn’t enough to keep him interested.
Instead, the #24-to-be went ahead with his other plans, ie winning Asian friends and influencing Asian people (and Asian Mickey Mice).
We have no idea if we’re going to hell or not for making fun of kids from other countries, so we’ll just stop doing that immediately.
Ooops.
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
The best reason for seemingly archaic magazines like Sports Illustrated to exist is to humanize our athletes, to take them off the stat pages and bring them to life through real, vivid prose. (That, these days, runs about 1,100 words.) We can think of no other example than this week’s profile of Steelers nutjob Joey Porter.
The public perception of Porter is one of, oh, mental instability, but through SI abbreviated prose, we can see him for who he actually is, in everyday life. Take, for example, his wedding day.
“He showed up late for their wedding in 1999. According to Porter, his best man was being cited for parking illegally on an east Bakersfield street, and the groom-to-be bristled when the officers called for a search of Ross’s tricked-out Chevy Impala. One cop ordered Porter to cross the street and keep quiet; predictably, he refused.
“Typical Bakersfield cops, doing what they do — harassing and intimidating,” Porter says. “They threw me in handcuffs for asking questions and left me in the back of the police car in 110° heat with the engine turned off. I’d pissed them off so much, they drove me all the way downtown and then let me go. We were so damn mad, we all went back to my house and started drinking.” When he finally arrived at his wedding, he says, “we were drunk and almost three hours late. My wife probably thought I wasn’t coming.”
It is in this way that Porter reveals that he is, ultimately, not so different than you or us. Clearly.
Joey Porter Will Scorn A Bitch [Mr. Irrelevant]
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
It was a bit of good news, and a bit of bad news when DEEP boss Shigeru Saeki spoke to the fight media.
Saeki spoke to the press today at DEEP Official Gym Impact in Okubo, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo at the announcement of DEEP’s 26th Impact card, addressing a variety of topics. First, Saeki spoke on PRIDE’s Bushido card on August 26th, saying, “It was a great event. The fights were great.” However, Saeki noted with a bitter smile that the only Japanese fighters on the main card who lost, were DEEP champions Nobuhiro Obiya and Ryo Chonan.
“For Obiya, it was probably a good experience. As for Chonan, it was poor adjustment,” commented Saeki. The head of DEEP continued, “For now, we’re considering a rematch.” Saeki told the press further that Chonan would meet Ryuta Sakurai in his first defense of the DEEP middleweight championship at DEEP 27th Impact on December 20th at Korakuen Hall in Tokyo.
Chonan captured the 83 kilogram title from Sakurai at DEEP’s 23rd Impact fifth anniversary card on February 5th, winning on a doctor’s stoppage at just 1:57 of the first round. In the opening moments of the bout, Chonan broke Sakurai’s nose with a barrage of uppercuts in the clinch. Sakurai’s nose became a veritable faucet, pouring blood all over both fighters, prompting the doctor to halt the bout. After the anti-climactic conclusion, the new champion Chonan grabbed the microphone and said, “I got the belt, but I’m not a real champion. Let’s fight again!”
Moreover, Saeki said that after a rematch with Sakurai, Chonan may move down to the 76 kilogram division. “His weight isn’t normally that heavy, so moving down to 76 kilograms, I think that he could be at the top level in the world,” said Saeki.
Questioned about Chonan’s further participation in PRIDE’s Bushido series, which does not have a 76 kilogram class, Saeki told reporters, “Bushido is on the back burner right now. He may want to start from square one, and return fresh. He said before he’d like to try out the 76 kilogram class; because he just lost in rough fashion he’s upset. But when he settles, I’ll talk with him about it.”
Saeki also dropped a bombshell on the press, revealing that spent four days in the hospital last week, undergoing a battery of tests on his kidneys. “I may have to begin kidney dialysis,” said Saeki. “If that happens,” Saeki continued, “DEEP will end. I stop.”
While the sincerity of Saeki’s claims to DEEP’s possible termination is unknown, Saeki stressed to the media to report the news of his health. The test results and diagnosis for Saeki will be revealed next week.
DEEP’s robust president has been chided by the press and his contemporaries for his physique and health in the past, most notably last year, when after being announced as Dream Stage Entertainment’s Public Relations Officer, PRIDE General Director Nobuhiko Takada stated in reference to Saeki’s new position, “My worry is that he is only going to get fetter, and develop diabetes.”
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
You know, it’s a sad day when a broadcaster can’t let loose a couple of “fucks” on the air without getting suspended for it.
Twins broadcaster Burt Blyleven, who is always doing something with a microphone he shouldn’t be, has been suspended two games by the Twins for, as the AP story puts it, “uttering words after slipping up during Sunday’s segment, which he thought was being taped rather than broadcast live. The words are on the Federal Communications Commission’s list of words that can’t be broadcast between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.” That’s an extremely long way of saying what the vulgarian that is Aaron Gleeman quotes as “”We gotta do this fucking thing over again, I just fucked it up.”
We don’t have any video of this yet, but honestly, we don’t see what the big deal is. If you fuck up a fucking thing, you have to do the fucking thing over again. What’s the problem?
Blyleven’s Bawdy On-Air Talk Earns 2-Game Timeout [Chicago Tribune]
Notes From The Weekend [AaronGleeman.com]
(UPDATE: Here’s the clip.)
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
Notes from a day in baseball:
• 1. Failure To Launch. In our opinion, nothing in baseball beats the Mighty MJD’s minor league potato-throwing story from Sunday. While not as awesome, the majors has its own version of the airborn spud; the Philadelphia Phillies. It’s getting dangerously close to the point where we can say “Phillies” and “playoffs” in the same sentence, as Chase Utley and — who else? — Ryan Howard both homered to lead the Sillies to a 3-2 win over Houston in 10 innings on Monday. Three things we love about this game: 1. Utley’s home run came with two outs in the 10th to win it; 2. Howard hit his 53rd homer (that’s four HRs in two days), meaning that he is utterly unconcious and could do anything, including lifting a school bus; 3. We now have someone named Charlton Jimerson to keep track of (he hit a pinch-hit homer in his first major league at-bat for the Astros). Oh, and Roger Clemens left with a strained right groin. The Phillies ended a 12-game losing streak to Houston that dated to May 18, 2003, which seems hard to believe, so we’re disregarding that.
• 2. Doh! If Ramon Ortiz hadn’t decided to have a career day on Monday — or, like, got lost on the way to work — the Cardinals would be celebrating a win right now. But Ortiz came within three outs of pitching the majors’ first no-hitter this season, and also hit his first career homer in DC’s 4-1 win over the Birds.
• 3. Bless Me Father, For I Have Dinged. Rookie Josh Barfield got his first career game-winning homer as the Padres beat the Rockies 7-5, maintaining a 1 1/2 game lead over the Phillies in the wild-card race.
• 4. The Sweet Whiff Of Success. The Yankees had struck out 10 times and trailed 5-1 going into the eighth, but then scored 10 runs in the eighth to beat — you guessed it immediately — the Royals, 12-5.
• 5. Those Surging, Rampaging Giants. Well, that’s one way of protecting your NL home run record. Barry Bonds’ game-tying homer in the eighth (No. 730) helped San Francisco to a 5-4 win over the Reds, as Ken Griffey Jr. injured himself trying to catch the ball, snagging his cleats in the center field padding and coming up limping.
Continue Reading September 5th, 2006
While looking at all the pictures of Spain welcoming home their gold medal winning World Championship team, we came to the realization we don’t really care about international basketball all that much.
We can’t imagine such a celebration taking place here in the US if our guys had won - does anyone even think such a thing would take place?
Beside the fact it would’ve felt like more of a relief if they’d brought home gold, the fact is thus - we care about the NBA, and not much else. Is it unpatriotic? Is it a Gen-X/Y thing?
To round it back to our initial point - who cares what it is? Anyway, one organization we tend to think is right along with us on this is the Memphis Grizzlies, who now have to deal with a Pau!-less existence for three months, thanks to his broken foot sustained in the WCOB.
Griz owner Michael Heisley gets diplomatic.
“I don’t know what you can do. It does no good to rant and rave about it,” Heisley said, adding that he still is disappointed. “It’s part of the breaks of the game. I’m sure Jerry and Mike are bitterly disappointed. Pau is extremely important to our team as he is to Spain. It’s just a terrible break.
“Injury is what everybody is concerned about with players signed to huge contracts and guys playing in international tournaments,” Heisley said. “Lebron James or Carmelo Anthony or Dwyane Wade could have gotten injured also. You have to take a hard look at it if you’re the owner because you’re taking all the risks.”
Allow us to translate that for you.
What he’s saying there is “Fuck! I’m really upset and distraught at this time!”
Granted, this is a man who owns a professional sports team, so how bad can his life be? If the worst thing he has to do all day is pout about his broken Spaniard, that ain’t all that bad.
Hell, he could be spending his time making movies with Alf and cereal boxes, right? (Just to clarify for the mal-intelligenced among you, that’s not actual footage from Who Shot Mamba?. We can use made-up words like that with you mal-intelligenced types, because you’ll just assume it’s real. Neat, huh?)
Don’t forget - you can get your “PAU!” shirts now at the YAYsports! Store of Purchasable Merchandise.
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