Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Austin Burning

The Yard circled the September 25, 2010 date on the calendar when our beloved football Bruins would visit the University of Texas. The Darrell K. Royal Memorial Stadium was on our bucket list for college football stadiums and Austin rocks. An informal Yard poll confirmed that none of us would ever want to live in Texas but if we have to, Austin would be the place. Austin has great food with rock & roll emoting from its taverns on 6th street and a “keep it weird” attitude that is as cool as it is scary. Weird rednecks slurping Bud Tall Boys while pin balling down the sidewalk pulling a St. Bernard with long horn balloons attached to its dome is a photo op best taken from a distance.

The football game was a placeholder for the weekend. It was more about the good times than the gutting that the Bruins were expected to receive before, after and during the coin toss. The outcome had been forecasted and the only decisions were dinner reservations. Extensive preparation had been made at the Yard to insulate our fragile psyche from another 1-3 start of the football season. It sounded like a good idea to go to Kansas State and it was fun. We thought a win was possible but a loss was not a lost season. BCS Bowls games are not one of the annual football objectives in Westwood. The Stanford game was a miserable loss. The entire team, coaching staff, and fan base had a monumental meltdown that night in the 35-0 thrashing. The Houston win was a surprise actually any win is a surprise!
This past weekend, with the Eyes of Texas serenading the stadium, their beloved Longhorn steer Bevo in his corral, and the victory cannon ready to roar, the Longhorns welcomed the Bruins for their tune up game before the Red River Shootout with Oklahoma this weekend. Austin was a better draw for Bruin travel than Manhattan, KS even though the chance of a victory was higher in the Little Apple. The 91 degrees of wet Austin heat ensconced at 80% humidity was slow torture. The lack of stadium beer was inhuman under such conditions. The play on the field made the post-game California Pinot Noir all the sweeter.

The upset has been well heralded across the land and still is played on Sports Center nightly. The Yard received congratulatory calls from associates all week complimenting us on being in attendance. Not sure what our attendance had to do with the outcome but we were gracious and accepting. As the pundits at ESPN dissect the Oklahoma Texas game, the UCLA game is always the first thing mentioned. It has been a good week because the Bruins rarely are mentioned on ESPN and never in a positive light.

The Pac-10 is better this year, much better. UCLA had not been part of that discussion prior to 5:15 PM CST last Saturday. We are not sure they are now but we will take the upset. It was not just that Texas lost to a 15 point underdog from the West Coast. They lost to the team picked to and who may still finish 8th in the conference. They lost by 22 points at home with their only touchdown coming in the waning minutes of this lost Texan afternoon to said team. That was a Texan meltdown that took some of the sting out of our aforementioned Stanford experience.

Longhorn fan can take solace. UCLA might have exposed their weaknesses to the nation and Mack Brown is a good enough coach to learn from that. Longhorn fan should thank UCLA. The Bruins have been there for Texas for over thirteen years helping show Longhorn nation the way and the light. In 1997, while the Longhorn’s rich history was muddling through John Mackovic’s tenure as head coach, the golden era of UCLA intersected. Gunslinger Cade McNown was riding success he would never see again. The same could be said for UCLA head football coach Bob Toledo. UCLA was in the BCS mix before the BCS had fully evolved. Major Applewhite was the starting QB for Texas that day. McNown threw for five 1st half touchdowns on the way to a 66-3 UCLA victory. It was the last time UCLA played in Austin and still remains the worst home loss in UT history. The moral to the story is that loss led the way to Mackovic being fired and current Texas coaching legend Mack Brown being hired. Without UCLA’s bitch slapping that Saturday in 1997 Mack 1 might not have been sacked for Mack 2. Y’all are welcome.

UCLA’s upset victory has also helped compartmentalize the disaster at the Ravine. Baseball season was quietly boxed up and stuffed in the attic a few weeks back. The only thing left to discuss is Jamie and Frank’s trial and the need for another starting pitcher in 2011. Joe is gone and we withhold judgment on Don Mattingly until he loses his first game. Oh wait! He did that this year with that second trip to the mound against the hated ones. We will still withhold judgment on Donnie until then. We would suggest he lose the soul patch. We let Phil grow that little facial triangle under his lip for a few seasons but he was piling up championships. The Dodger manager has no such mulligan.

The Phillies are our new team. They look ready to return to their 3rd straight World Series and they have the pitching to beat down all comers. They should win their second title in three years in the coming weeks. The Cincinnati Reds are a great story and to clinch their post season berth with a walk off home run is great karma. They do not have the pitching to beat all comers and they are just happy to make the playoffs. It will be a short stay. Ditto Rangers.

We root for the Devil Rays to beat the Evil Empire in the Bronx. They might have the pitching but they do not have the support. The Devil Rays are in first place in arguably the best division in baseball. Monday night only 12,421 people in Tampa could find nothing better to do than go to their game against the Orioles. The Dodgers have been out of the pennant race since early August and still draw 35,000 per night. The Rays gave away 20,000 tickets for Tuesday night’s game so the cell phones would not echo through the stadium and disrupt play.

The Yankees are stumbling to the finish line and besides Sabathia and possibly Petite, they look beatable and the Rays have been beating them. Yard memory does not recall the Yankees winners of 25 titles breaking out the champagne for winning the wild card as they did Tuesday night in Toronto…bad karma.

Back Stretch: When Secretariat and Affirmed were retired to stud after their glory years at the track had ended, it was what champion stallions do. It was a great gig and they prospered in their procreation. This week it was announced that filly Rachael Alexandra would be retired to the spawning ranch. She was the 2009 Horse of the Year. Apparently, Curlin is going to come a calling to mate with her and produce a progeny to win the Triple Crown from the DNA of these two Preakness winners. We are not sure why but that sounded sort of creepy for Rache. What if she does not like Curlin, does she still have to put out? What if he is a player like Secretariat was and is working the rest of the stable while she is with child? What if she just wants a simple life in the burbs?

Monday, September 6, 2010

The Apple and the Corn.

The Yard party bus rolled through Manhattan, Kansas this past weekend. It was a day for camaraderie, beer, new friends, beer, brats, beer, college coeds and all of the other theme elements that make college football more important than the minutia of wins and losses. As a lifelong UCLA football fan, getting bogged down in the wins and losses is just not good for the soul or the liver. There were many memorable moments but unfortunately none of them occurred on the football field during the 4th quarter on Saturday. Sometimes you have to look for the silver lining and coach Neuheisel will. On this afternoon, most of the silver lining was framing purple.

Kansas State was not just superior on the field on Saturday. They were superior in the parking lot before, during and after the game as well. Apparently, Wildcat fans are legally required to wear purple as are their children. Out of the 51,059 fans at the game 56,192 were in purple and only 683 were in some sort of blue although some might have been Wildcat fans that were colorblind. KSU fans were passionately gracious and my Bear Wear was stared at like a Petri dish but never abused. Wearing Blue and Gold south of Jefferson in LA can be punishable with flying saliva, beer, misguided epithets, and general fear and loathing.

It did help that I was with a dozen K-State alumni at a tailgate. My entre to the hoedown was Tim, the only K-State Alumni I knew before Saturday. TD had only been back to Manhattan once since graduating in 1977 so I had been back almost as much as he had. We hit the Hen House or something before the two hour drive to the Little Apple. We loaded up with a six pack of beer and a bag of potato chips to ensure the tailgating good times would roll.

We circled up with the Wildcat Faithful at K-State II Gerling’s house for the commute. We first needed to make a pilgrimage to his Kansas City Chief’s shrine in his man cave. There were photos, autographs and memorabilia from the era of the Chiefs. Otis, Lenny, and Emmitt were defined by their first names and their exploits. I remembered all of them and will always remember, “Look at Otis, look at Otis.”

Mr. and Mrs. Corny arrived to provide the pace car for the road to Manhattan. Corny set the early pace by barking one out during our initial introduction. It would have been perfect if he had asked to pull his finger rather than shake his hand during the flatulence but we had just met. I knew I could hang with this guy. Mrs. Corny must have a pilot’s license to go with her KS driver’s license because we condensed the two hour drive into about 90 minutes while following their Wildcat logoed Yukon.

Fortunately, our tailgate hosts were better prepared than TD and me. We had just met Randy and Kitty when Randy said we could have some of his beers. Tim and I polished off our six pack two hours before kickoff so we appreciated and required his generosity. “Some” seemed like it would be more than one but not sure Randy knew it was another 12-pack. It was a loaves and fishes experience for Tim and me.

Tim went all in and got us General Admission tickets that did not include an actual seat just the hope of one. Always be suspicious of football tickets without pictures on them. These tickets looked like Tim made them at home but we got in anyways although we had to fight off a couple of old ladies for the handicap seats. The greatest thing about the game was that K-State is gracious enough to re-scan your ticket on your way out at halftime. So your ticket gets reloaded, so that we could as well. We returned to the Wildcat logoed world that the Corny’s had erected behind their Yukon to relax in the glow of the Bruin’s 10-7 lead. I graciously accepted all compliments for the modest performance of my alma mater.

Wildcat nation is as fair weather as the Bruins and few were going back for the second half. The Rose Bowl has no such reloading policy. Bruin fans are forced to face the second half without the necessary emollients. Corny had thrown in the towel with the insurmountable three point deficit that KSU faced against the potent Bruin attack. I could have shared some recent history with him to dispute that notion but he offered me his 35 yard line recharged tickets. It was a nice upgrade at no cost to me plus two more of Randy’s beers. I lauded the Cornster on his prudent decision as I scooped the tickets up off his 48 quart Wildcat cooler. Suddenly, another woman aggressively jumped in and offered me her 50 yard line seats that were in the shade. I already had Randy’s two beers in hand with a beer to be named later so I went with that deal. Corny was none too happy at the slight but a 24 point Wildcat second half painted with Crown Royal in the parking lot can be a forgiving half for any fan. It was a long walk back to Cornyville after the game.

UCLA needs to be scheduling teams with three words in their name that begin with North and end with State to open the season. Fill in any state or city in the middle and it should be a W unless you are KU and you lose to North Dakota State 6-3. Editor’s note: Would not have paid attention to that score except the Jayhawks are to the Wildcats as the Giants are to the Yard. It was a blessed day in the Wildcat Heartland.

Coach Rick, it is never a good thing to be driving the team bus down Bill Snyder highway to play your season opener at The Bill Snyder Family Stadium when Bill Snyder is still coaching there. When the Bruins came through the tunnel, there are ninety-seven year old Bill Snyder and his purple nation lying in wait. Coach Snyder might look 97 but he out coached young Ricky Saturday. The Snyder Family Stadium is one of the toughest stadiums to play in the Big 12. KSU has won 43% of the 1,115 football games that have been played in school history dating back to 1896. Coaching legend Bill Snyder has won 147 of the 229 games that he has coached as part of that history. You do the math on where K-State would be without his coaching largess.

UCLA is a work in progress as they have been for most of this century. The Yard tour bus is going to Austin next at the end of the month. Jo at the Yard and I will be flying without the safety net that Wildcat nation provided this past weekend. I might need to get Jo a UT shirt or something so we can go undercover. The Longhorns are far less forgiving than the “Manhappening” Wildcats. The Bruins could be 0-3 by then with their rugged opening schedule. Stanford and Houston are coming into the Rose Bowl in the next two weekends and when is the basketball home opener again?

The high note of the weekend was not being at home on Saturday night and watching Johnny Broxton give up another game winning home run to the Giants. Broxton is done as a Dodger. He has lost whatever it was he had at some point in his career. Matt Stairs took most of it in the 2008 NLCS but the Broxton mystique has left the Ravine. He has joined the ranks of Terry Forster and Tom Niedenfuer as another fat hillbilly Dodger closer who had moments to shine before he became moonshine and got lit up.

College football is a sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.
- Elbert Hubbard

Thursday, September 2, 2010

The Fall of the Entitled.

The summer has belonged to baseball since the Yard’s first sports inhalation. Baseball is rich with tradition, history and heroes and a comfort place for the Yard. It is the Campbell Soup and grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen of those summers. Football was the torture that was the Los Angeles Rams. The Lakers of that era were a distress that was never fully diagnosed. Apparently, soccer was not even founded at the time. The Dodgers delivered and were the kings of our summers. We played their game, we followed their lead, we read about it and we breathed it throughout our summers and hopefully into the fall.

In 2010, Dodger baseball has morphed into the Days of our Lives with all of the tawdry story lines and phony characters. The Dodgers are struggling for relevance in the hunt for the playoffs. The Giants are relevant for the first time in years. The Padres and Phillies are the new Yard favorites. The McCourt’s are the black hole that is collapsing the Dodgers into the swirling vortex of their false sense of entitlement that will burst in the next two weeks. Los Angeles has bigger problems than the McCourt’s but they are a local issue that threatens the vestiges of our summer traditions. They do not deserve such control and we do not deserve them.

The Yard has painful experience with California divorce law. When two angry combatants start swinging for the fences with their well paid attorneys, only the attorneys score. We never thought Frank and Jamie were part of this city. Frank McCourt claiming that he is the sole owner of the Dodgers shows how little he understands about California. Frank is claiming that he has no money to Jamie’s attorneys but is claiming to the fans he has plenty of money to make the team competitive. In Los Angeles Superior Courts, Frank McCourt would have a better chance attempting to get acquitted of a double homicide than trying to claim the Dodgers are his sole property.

As the postseason approaches, the best stories in baseball are the Reds and the Padres. The Giants would be a good story if we did not hate them but we do. Cincinnati Red Johnny Votto, whoever he is and wherever he came from, is having a Triple Crown season. We are pulling for him to make it happen. It would be the first Triple Crown in baseball since Boston’s Carl Yastremski in 1967. Frank Robinson did it in 1966 for Orioles. Yard youth figured it happened every year since it happened the first two years we followed baseball.

The Padres were picked last in the NL west and in early September they have the best record in all of the NL. The pitching staff is for real and Bud Black is the manager of the year. Baseball is starting to take notice even if the locals are still not attending many of the games at Petco. If the Dodgers were having that kind of year, four million people would be already through the gates but the Padres have struggled to find 1.2 million to come to that fun stadium to watch that interesting team.

Commissioner Bud Selig got a statue in Milwaukee last week. We hope pigeons christen it appropriately. Bud has taken a lot of credit for cleaning up a steroid issue he benefitted from and helped create. He is saluted for creating a salary structure that makes money for teams that will never win a title including his Brewers. The Yankees print money with his blessing and pass it to the Pirates who have not had a winning season in two decades, were out the pennant race by Memorial Day and made $29 million last year mostly from the money the Yanks sent them. Bud makes $20 million a year as the worst commissioner in professional sports. He took a job no one wanted because he owned a team no one watched. He feels he is entitled to his millions. We hope the pigeons christen him as well.

College football is coming sooner this year because the Dodgers suck and USC is on probation. UCLA is not much better than they have been but we like Ricky the Nue’s moxie. He is more fun than Karl the Dull but the results are unfortunately similar. UCLA still has to find the QB they have not had since Cade McNown rose up out of nowhere to gun sling the Bruins to four straight over USC. Who knew that would be his and our finest hours of the past decade?

The radio promoting the Lane Kiffin era are hilarious. Young Lane has an era? He spent 18 months coaching the Raiders and one season in Tennessee. Were those eras? We do hope Lane Kiffin can last as long as Larry Smith or Paul Hackett. He does seem to possess the same misguided bravado that plagued their USC tenure’s and lead the Trojans to their decades long struggles of the late 80’s and 90’s. The NCAA did not lead USC down this path, their arrogance did. Reggie might have been taking money but so were others. Reggie was the one that got caught.

Pat Haden is not going to be around that long at USC. He makes too much money and has too much going on outside of USC to stay very long. He is loyal and came to the rescue to clean up the mess Pete Carroll left behind and Mike Garrett mishandled. He will announce he is looking for a successor right before he replaces Lane Kiffin with Steve Sarkissian in the next few years.

Wilted Roses and Cheap Wine

These days of wilted roses and cheap wine, our leaders and their spouses should pay attention to the perception that is our reality. Vacation travel to Spain in this time and space is unlikely. First Lady Michelle Obama took her daughter, her friends and their daughters aboard Air Force II to Spain this week on holiday. They needed to get away from all the pain and suffering that their Barack had bought us. Perception beats reality to the finish line in our minds most days.

The Yard does not begrudge Duchess Michelle for her trip to Spain on Air Force II with her friends, the Secret Service and the $100,000 per day overhead it costs to stay at her $6500 day resort. We do wonder if the Obama’s made that trip previously when Barack was the junior Senator from Illinois. Apparently, her dear friend’s father passed away and she could not attend the funeral so she needed to take them on a Presidential jet to a foreign destination to make things right.

The Yard might have suggested that Michele and her Posse visit New Orleans. It is a place that her spouse pledged would be returned to its natural glory in the aftermath of the BP disaster. Michelle and her ladies in waiting could have spent money in America stimulating one of our most troubled economies rather than pissing away a million in Euros for paella and Lladro. What a great statement for the bayou to have photo ops with the Obamettes eating oysters and crawfish while hanging at the beach in the Gulf. Apparently, she seems to know that this is their last BBQ and the Obama’s can visit New Orleans on a junior senator’s budget any time they please. They may not pass this way again and 2011 is not going to be a forgiving campaign season. They better count the White House Silverware before the electoral votes are tallied.

The Yard went to Chicago while Michelle was in Spain. Domestic travel seemed prudent and affordable. We are cognizant of the perception of our constituents. It was a post graduation bonding tour with the first daughter of the Yard. Baseball is in our DNA and Wrigley is part of that double helix. The Cubs are not. The Cubbies lost 18-1 that night. Losing by seventeen runs might seem like quite a few runs to lose by but it seemed so much worse. The Brewers methodically took 26 hits to grind out those eighteen runs. The Cubs lost more than one game that night. They should have at least been penalized or voted off the island. Milwaukee only had four extra base hits. There were twenty-two singles, three doubles, one home run, four walks, two Cub errors that scored the eighteen runs while leaving 33 runners on base that could have scored. Chicago could not overcome the Brewers’ two touchdowns, two point conversions and the safety. It took over 100 years to get to this point and it could have been so much uglier. We had a great time and Cub fans are awesome.

As the vacation season unfolds, baseball persists. The trading deadline, bobble head nights and pennant races emerge. Basketball is fighting for mindshare but this is baseball season. The Dodger divorce tour passed on Cliff Lee while the bankrupt Texas Rangers got the deal done. Former Cub Ted Lilly was an acquisition to quiet the fan unrest. Lilly is also a former Dodger and he has done well since coming home. The Yard saw Blake DeWitt in a Cub jersey in the aftermath and he will be missed. It was a brazen McCourt foot race of perception. Reality wins this one.

The Cubbies limped into San Francisco to play the hated ones this week. The Giants won game one and with Timmy “The Freak” Lincecum pitching game two, it seems like September. The Freak gets spanked by the weak. He gets bombed for four runs in the first by a team that has not scored four runs in the first inning all year against anyone. Reality loses a close match to the perception.

The Trojan family still perceives that the athletic department cannot really be responsible for what shenanigans the Bush family conducted in San Diego. The reality is that there were only a few players USC had to keep an eye on and Reggie and his shady stepfather should have been at the top of any list. The second string outside linebacker is not getting an illicit vintage Impala and showing up for press conferences in diamond earrings. The reality is there were probably a lot more feces that the NCAA did not uncover in the Trojan Punchbowl. The Yard just wishes that they also had limited the number of times USC can play the fight song during the course of a game. We would give them five scholarships back if the USC band could only play the fight song twice each game for the next three years.

Preseason: Is the game to recognize the NFL Hall of Fame Class each year the worst game each season? Cincinnati versus Dallas the second Sunday in August was highly rated. It was a miserable sporting event and the Hall of Fame Game is the worst game every year.