Tag: sports

A new soccer season has begun and I was talking to Ender after our practices yesterday. He happened to mention, in passing, that he’d gotten into another fight with his teammates towards the end of last season. This wasn’t anything new. Like me, he’s an outsider by nature, and although he gets along fine with his teammates most of the time, the fact that he only joined this team two years ago, was the youngest on the team last year, and is observably different than the others tends to make him an occasional target given the usual group dynamics.  Things are also a little more rough-and-tumble here in Europe because fighting in school is largely ignored by the teachers unless someone gets badly hurt.

His first season with the club, he had to beat up the son of the assistant coach, (who is a teammate of mine), which didn’t faze anyone, including the boy’s father, since the kid is a little fireball who can be set off by anything.  (Ironically, despite the fact that this boy and Ender dislike each other, they play very well on defense together, much better than any other two defenders or midfielders. The father and I both find this very amusing.)

That season Ender also had to deal with two other boys egging a third boy on to attack him, and sent the boy running away crying by smashing his cleats into the boy’s face after blocking his punch.  When I asked him why he hadn’t used any judo techniques, he shrugged and said that he had been holding his cleats in his right hand and it hadn’t occurred to him to drop them.  The two instigators tried lying to the coach and claimed Ender attacked all three of them, but the coach is no idiot, and to the third boy’s credit, when asked about the situation he told the truth and exposed the other two boys.

This year I noticed the star of last year’s team, X, who had always been fairly friendly to Ender, being just a little colder to him than usual at the field.  When I asked what was up, Ender explained that he had beaten up X and his friend towards the end of the second season. I was more than a little surprised to hear this, not so much because he was outnumbered, but because X is an exceptional athlete, is bigger and older than Ender, and is easily the strongest, fastest player on the field.  I mean, the boy could play with my veteran’s team and not only hold his own, but probably be one of the top five players on the field.  He’s also a year older than Ender, and this year has gone up to play on the team that is one level below the adult first team. Judo or no judo, X would have been the one player I would have expected to get the better of Ender in any physical encounter.

Ender explained that X’s best friend, L, was acting up and threw a kick at him, so he caught the foot and walked it forward, thereby putting L on the ground. Seeing his best friend go down, X jumped in, caught Ender from behind and threw him down by his shoulders.  However, while going down, Ender went to hook X’s leg and ended up catching his knee, he then rolled, came up, punched X in the face, then put him in a judo lock and told him to knock it off.  Thus ended the encounter, with no one seriously injured. But X’s pride as the undisputed alpha male of the team had been bruised, hence the uncharacteristic coldness. On the other hand, Ender rather bemusedly observed that all the other players have been strangely respectful this season.

I’m not entirely sure he has put two and two together yet. I’ll explain it to him one of these days.

As a father, I was naturally concerned about this, so I asked Ender if the punch he had thrown was a jab or if he had made the common mistake of leading with the rear hand. When he indicated the latter, I began to point out why that had been a risky move, as one always wants to open the opponent without risking the exposure intrinsic to a rear hand.  But when I asked him why he’d led with the rear despite having been repeatedly told not to do so, he explained that at the time, X was doubled over and clutching his knee, therefore he was already open, there was no risk using the rear hand, and Ender could deliver more force with it.

I haven’t really sparred with him yet or trained him anywhere nearly as much as I should have.  But somehow, I think he’s going to be just fine.

The perspicacious Bill Barnwell has worked out the QB Championship Belt dating back to Johnny Unitas in 1959.  It’s a great article, but I have to take serious exception to his choice to award 1976 to Ken Stabler over Fran Tarkenton.

Ken Stabler, Oakland Raiders

Reign: 1974
Stabler had been impressive taking over for Lamonica during the 1973
season, earning a Pro Bowl berth, but he was just a downfield force of
nature during the following season. He threw a league-best 26 touchdowns
while leading the Raiders to a 12-2 record, winning both first-team
All-Pro and MVP honors. He would have a dismal 1975 season, though,
throwing more interceptions (24) than touchdowns (16). That opened up a
spot for …

Fran Tarkenton, Minnesota Vikings

Reign: 1975
This is very reminiscent of the Tittle run from the late ’60s, when a
veteran player who was always very good saw everything coalesce into a
great stretch toward the very end of his career. Tarkenton won his first
MVP award and made his first All-Pro team this year at the age of 35.
He would be pretty good in 1976 before throwing a combined 35 touchdowns
over the final two seasons of his career.

Ken Stabler, Raiders

Reign: 1976-77
The perch once again belonged to Stabler, who completed an incredible
(for the time) 66.7 percent of his passes in 1976 while averaging 9.3
yards per attempt. Adjusting for the era, it’s one of the best seasons
in NFL history for a quarterback. The Raiders would win the Super Bowl
in 1976. Stabler was merely very good in 1977, but there was no superior
candidate to take the title away until 1978.

 Very well, let’s compare the 1976 seasons of Fran Tarkenton and Ken Stabler.

13     10-2-1     255     412     61.9     2961     17     8         Tarkenton
12     11-1-0     194     291     66.7     2737     27     17       Stabler

Now, remember, Tarkenton is already holding the belt at this point and you’ve got to KO the champ to take the belt. Stabler’s performance, while excellent in terms of his completion percentage and number of touchdowns thrown, simply isn’t enough to justify taking it away from the Viking quarterback.  Stabler played in one less game, threw more than 200 fewer yards, threw 30 percent fewer passes, threw more than twice as many interceptions, and had a TD/INT ratio of 1.6 compared to Tarkenton’s 2.1.  Which quarterback would you rather have had behind center?

In 1976, the Vikings scored 305 points.  The Raiders scored 351.  So Tarkenton was still leading the offense into the end zone, he just wasn’t necessarily throwing the ball in there for the final scores.  Both QBs scored one rushing touchdown, but Stabler lost four fumbles while Tarkenton lost two.  That means that Stabler turned the ball over 21 times compared to 10 times for Tarkenton, lowering Stabler’s TD/turnover ratio to 1.3.  This is hardly indicative of the best QB in the game, and it doesn’t merit taking the QB belt away from the Georgia Peach in what was more than a “pretty good” 1976 season.

The big difference I see is that Oakland had a better running game in 1976, averaging 4.1 yards per carry compared to 3.7 for the Vikings.  Stabler didn’t even throw for 6 of Oakland’s 33 touchdown passes, while despite their inferior running game, the Vikings scored more touchdowns on the ground, 18 to 14.  So, that tells us that Oakland preferred to throw in the red zone rather than anything about Stabler being a better passer.

If the Raiders don’t crush the Vikings in the Super Bowl that year, I don’t see any way that Barnwell credibly anoints Stabler the superior quarterback in 1976.  And even with the benefit of the Super Bowl victory, I think it is clear that Stabler’s performance that season was less significant and less remarkable than Tarkenton’s, especially when one takes Tarkenton’s advanced age and reduced mobility into account. So, I hope you will join me in emailing Mr. Barnwell to request that he rectify this historical injustice.

I have to confess, there is one group of people for whom I do harbor a pure and unmitigated hate. I mean, I wouldn’t necessarily want to live next to the mentally unstable or have dinner at a cannibal’s house, and while the only pagan religious ceremony I’ve attended was disappointingly tame, I am a little too well-read in history to be entirely at my ease among pagans.  One always finds oneself on edge against the possibility that they will castrate themselves without warning and cast their liberated testicles at your feet.

But I don’t mind any of them per se.  What I hate is golf spectators.  Peter King, though shaky on many subjects sporting and political, is surprisingly sound on the monsters:

Not a big golf watcher, truth be told. But I watched some over the
break, and I really need to figure one thing out: What is it with
screaming “GET IN THE HOOOOOLLLLE!!!!!” after every tee shot? It was
cute when Bill Murray did it, dweebs. It’s dweebish when you do it on
every tee shot. 

Dweebish?  The term hardly does them justice. When we lived in Ponte Vedra, we were about a decent tee drive from Sawgrass.  Although we were of the Church of Tennis – you have to pick one there when you arrive, Golf or Tennis, it’s the law – we did attend The Players Championship with a friend who worked for the PGA Tour.  It wasn’t a bad way to spend an afternoon, strolling around the course with a drink in your hand, even if you have zero interest in golf. 

But I have never seen a more perfectly annoying group of dorks in my life.  Over the course of the tournament, I gradually went from mild bemusement to moderate annoyance to full blown hatred for them.  As near as I could tell, they count coup by being the first to announce that the ball is going to go into the hole.  But, (and this is the challenge), it is deemed shameful to yell that the ball is going to go in if it does not, in fact, go into the hole.  I don’t know what the penalty is, but apparently it is severe.

You understand the dilemma.  If one waits until the ball is obviously going to go in the hole, someone else will beat one to it.  If one jumps the gun, one will look like an ass. Or, rather, even more of an ass than one already does, being the sort of gentleman who follows a grown man around as if he was the mama duck and one was one of her ducklings.

I suspect I may have witnessed the birth of the phenomenon Peter King describes with such fitting distaste.  One well-lubricated gentleman was loudly pondering the conundrum of when to announce the imminent falling of the ball into the hole as John Daley was preparing to make an approach shot  towards the green where we were standing when a brilliant thought struck him.

“I know, I know, I know,” he told his friend excitedly. “Once the ball gets onto the green, I’m going to yell, ‘get in the hole, Big John’!”

He was roundly congratulated for the perspicacity of his brainstorm, leading me to do some pondering of my own concerning the likelihood that the local home for differently abled adults had been given free tickets to the tournament.  I rejected that on the grounds that the Daley enthusiasts were sporting both Florida Casual and expensive watches, and contented myself with watching to see how the grand experiment would proceed.

The ball had no sooner bounced on the green when the innovator shouted, as promised, “Get in the hole, Big John!” He was clearly the first to raise his voice, as it was at least two seconds before a second shout was heard, declaring, with some degree of certainty, that the ball was indeed on a trajectory that would cause it to fall into the hole.  The ball did go into the hole, to general approval, and the gentleman who had been the first to raise his voice was enthusiastically congratulated by his friends, with considerable high-fiving and back-pounding.

I did not see the man who was robbed of his boldly declarative statement by this cunning maneuver, but I have no doubt that he and his friends stood in slack-jawed awe, wondering how they had been so cleverly bested.  Later that day, I heard the call resound from hole after hole.  “Get in the hole, Tiger!” “Get in the hole, Lefty!” “Get in the hole, Big John!”

Apparently, over time, they have dropped the name, seeing as how everyone understands to whom the ball belongs. Now, you can say that their pastime is harmless.  I won’t disagree. You can assert that they aren’t hurting anyone. I can’t argue with that. You can quite reasonably claim that it isn’t anyone’s business but theirs how and when they cheer. I will not dispute that.

And yet, my loathing for them still burns every bit as pure and as hot as it did on that first sunny Florida afternoon.

The Jets finally release Tim Tebow:

The Jets have released Tebow, the New York Post first reported and the team has officially announced. He will now pass through waivers, meaning every NFL team will have a chance to claim him.

Tebow was widely expected to be on the way out for months, and the only surprise is that the Jets waited until now to do it. The arrival of rookie quarterback Geno Smith in the second round of the NFL draft may have been what it took for the Jets to decide that there was simply no room for Tebow on the roster anymore.

Now the question is whether there’s any room for Tebow anywhere in the NFL.

I think he’s got to go to Canada to prove he can play quarterback. The entire New York interlude was a disaster for everyone involved, although it’s hardly fair to blame the self-implosion of Mark Sanchez on Tebow.

Despite his success in Denver, I just don’t see how he can be successful in the modern NFL. Tebow is a throwback to a time when accuracy wasn’t necessary to have success in the league. He’s basically a bigger, slower, less accurate Michael Vick, which isn’t exactly the ideal quarterback.

On the other hand, he might actually make some sense for the Vikings, since he throws a better deep ball than Christian Ponder and is perfectly capable of handing off the ball to AD.

Possibly the most boring draft ever, in terms of the glamor positions, but still of interest to real NFL fans. I’m pleased with the Vikings picks; three first-round talents at DT, CB, and WR fill the three positions we most needed in the absence of a real quarterback being available. 2013 would appear to be a rebuilding season for the Vikes, barring some serious and unanticipated improvement on the part of Christian Ponder.
Anyhow, this would be your open NFL Draft discussion. Not much else worth mentioning, except for the general lack of interest shown in Geno Smith and Manti Te’o.

One of the greats of NFL broadcasting has died at 82. Fortunately for those of us who enjoyed his voice, he lives on in Maddens, still calling games in that calm, unforgettable baritone.  I remember playing Madden 2001 after he’d retired, and shaking my head, being reminded how even in a video game, Pat Summerall was a better play-by-play man than anyone in the succeeding generation of commentators.