CHRIS PICKS! DIVISIONAL ROUNDS AND DALLAS COWBOYS

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by Chris Corbellini

Divisional Picks: America’s Team … and some other teams that play this weekend

(SITTING HERE ON A FRIDAY NIGHT, TRYING TO ENCAPSULATE A LIFELONG SPORTS OBSESSION)

(SITTING HERE)

(SITTING HERE)

(ABANDONED A LEDE WHERE I SAY MY NAME AND ADD I AM AN ADDICT — OF A SPORTS TEAM)

(OK, I’LL USE THE GOODFELLAS OPEN)

(YOU CAN’T GO WRONG WITH THE GOODFELLAS OPEN)

(ALRIGHT, HERE GOES)

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy.

Given my upbringing in suburban New York, and the stone-cold fact that I’ve never lived within 1,500 miles of Dallas, this makes as much sense as a platypus dry-humping a volleyball. That’s quite a visual for you, I’m sure — and almost as bizarre as a kid wearing a Herschel Walker jersey down the hallways of a Big Blue Central School District. Yes, I follow and have a rooting interest in the rest of the iconic NYC sports teams – Rangers, Knicks, Yankees, St. John’s in March – and yet in pro football, where I’ve spent most of my career, I bleed Dallas Cowboy.

If I made a list of things worth living for, Amari Cooper’s sublime double moves would be on there, side by side with steaks at Peter Luger’s, the view from Diamond Head, St. Mark’s Square in the moonlight, and the Heather Thomas poster from the 1980s.  Just today, I walked through Grand Central Station and mused how it’d be great to see the Cowboys Star dead-center on the main floor, replacing the info booth. Again, my blood type is Cowboys-positive. I’ve had it checked.*

And it’s not like I’m hiding vodka in the broom closet here. My hometown and college friends know my allegiance lies with a Texas team, so whenever the franchise takes a hit (T.O. crying about Romo, the ‘07 divisional playoff, the Dez non-catch in Green Bay), I’ll inevitably get a text from someone I haven’t heard from in awhile, or receive a smarmy-as-f-ck Facebook post. Which is certainly fair, because I can be the smarmiest of all if the Cowboys beat the Giants – which, by the way, happened twice this season. And that’s a shame, Giants fans. Truly. Be careful now … you’re getting failure all over my floor before I have visitors over for the playoffs.

And yet, even had I grown up a Dallas hater, I’d still have to concede that the Cowboys have been a big part of my career, perhaps more so than any other franchise, in any sport. To wit:

-In May of 2004, during my final NFL Films job interview, the shop’s coordinating producer asked me what I thought of the Dallas Cowboys draft. Here was my first test of football knowledge, and certainly not the last over the years that followed. I told him it all hinges on the development of their second rounder, Notre Dame running back Julius Jones. It didn’t work out that way (Jones had just one 1,000-yard season), but I got the job regardless.

-For seven seasons I worked on the HBO series “Inside the NFL,” led by legendary producer Bob Ryan, who produced the Cowboys highlight films in the 1970s and actually nicknamed them “America’s Team.” Bob also reviewed my spec screenplay that was part of an application care package I sent to Films (I taped that script, a resume, and a photo of my undefeated Pop Warner team atop a picnic cooler with cold beers inside, and then FedEx’d it to their offices) — and I later discovered he awarded me a B+. The grade was circled in red with an exclamation point on the script’s front page. Considering his standards, I consider that a personal triumph.

Middle linebacker Lee Roy Jordan: If that name doesn’t scream “COWBOY!”, what does?

-I was a segment producer for the Cowboys Hard Knocks season in ‘08, and my storyline was about an undrafted, undersized and lion-hearted receiver named Danny Amendola. As one former ex-player told me later: “You put that guy on the f-cking map. He should be paying you.”

-I did several NFL international spots in one five-minute burst with a young Pro Bowl QB named Tony Romo, and thought as I walked away “That dude’s gonna be a TV star someday.”

-I produced a Peyton Manning feature for the NFL Network with Michael Irvin as my talent. The former Cowboys great did a terrific job — willing to do as many takes as necessary to get it right.

-Last year I produced my first NBC Sports piece with one of my favorite NFL writers, Peter King, on Dallas tight end Jason Witten.

-A few weeks later, right after Thanksgiving, I returned to Dallas to direct a piece on Roger Staubach – fitting because he’s the one who started the entire Corbellini Cowboy Fan Club. Staubach is my father’s favorite football player, following his career at Navy and then with the Cowboys after his military service, and when I mentioned that to the former Dallas great after our interview, he then asked if we were related to a “Bill Corbellini,” who was a close business associate of his in the area. Staubach and his son both remarked the name was so unique we had to be related somehow (the real estate titan also asked me about undeveloped property near the Javits Center; the man is still hustling).

Tom Landry: Sharp-dressed man

Sports heroes often let you down when you first meet them, but my first and final impression of Staubach was he had a stately quality to him – a quiet, as he sat at his corner office and went through the tasks of his day. I’ve called my father just twice in 20 years after a meet-up with a pro athlete: post-Staubach, and post-Muhammad Ali. That’s the list.  We’re Cowboys fans. You have to be one to understand.

You get older, and you get lost in your day-to-day, and you feel the burden of life being a little unsatisfying like anklets made of stone, and so you must find the joys where you can. Not doing so is wildly irresponsible of you. And a big Dallas Cowboys game still lights me up.

And BTW, I like the Cowboys to beat the Rams in LA this weekend.

(LONG SIGH)

I can’t help myself.

If you still don’t get why, go dry-hump a platypus.

OK, here we have the divisional playoffs. The best NFL weekend of the year. As usual, I have William Hill odds listed, with the home team in caps.

CHIEFS (-5.5) beat the Colts

The Chiefs can’t stop an opponent’s run game — an oddity for a team in the second round of the playoffs — and they’re up against a very good runner-receiver this weekend in Marlon Mack. Mack has become a poor man’s Edgerrin James for the Colts — more than capable of pounding the Chiefs defense senseless. If this game is close Mack could be the difference-maker, with his 10-12 touches in the fourth quarter serving as punches to the kidneys of the Chiefs defense.

Right, right, but this game won’t be close. Both Sammy Watkins and Tyreek Hill feast on zone defenses – and the Colts play zone more than any other team in the NFL. Watkins, admittedly, is questionable due to injury, but how do you not play in this one at Arrowhead?

Cowboys (+7) beat the LA RAMS

Moving on.

Chargers (+4) beat the PATRIOTS

The Chargers defense definitely checked out late in the Ravens wild-card game, allowing rookie QB Lamar Jackson to throw a pair of fourth-quarter TD passes to Michael Crabtree. That can’t happen again against the Belichick-Brady Patriots. And besides the occasional defensive lapse, the Bolt’s weakness is stopping pass-catching running backs (Hello, James White), but that can be game-planned around. Plus, like I mentioned here last week, the Chargers have a rally cry to get behind: Get Philip Rivers a Ring.

Rivers hasn’t forgotten his playoff losses to the Patriots back in his 20s, and I think he’ll really grip it and rip it from his opening offensive series. Never underestimate an elite QB who’s been given a second chance late in his career. The Chiefs and maybe even the Colts would be a greater challenge athletically than the Pats, but New England in New England is the mental hurdle Rivers needs to leap over to ready himself for the Super Bowl. I think it happens.

Eagles (+8) beat the SAINTS

I know. I know. New Orleans absolutely smoked Philly during the regular season. But the Eagles have all the momentum here after that black-and-blue, double-doink victory in Chicago, and the Saints are so much weaker defensively than the Bears. New Orleans ranks 30th in the NFL against an opponent’s No. 1 receiver, 31st against the No. 2 wideout, and 29th against pass-catching running backs (stats courtesy Pro Football Focus). Nick Foles has been locking onto Alshon Jeffery, the team’s No. 1, ever since last year’s Super Bowl run, so this go-around he’ll be a decoy and it’ll be Darren Sproles’ time to shine, with Nelson Agholor also getting involved.

Last week: 2-1-1
Playoffs: 2-1-1

Total: 26-38-1

*(Editor’s Note:  I’m a little older than C.C., but we grew up in suburban New Jersey and same. For me, it was Roger Staubach. I got a Dallas Cowboys helmet for Christmas when I was six and it was like the rapture. Wrote Tom Landry a letter and got a reply.

At age nine Santa gave us an early Christmas present: four tickets to Cowboys at Jets, Shea Stadium on December 21. America’s Team vs. Joe Namath. We sat in upper deck seats in Flushing, huddled under blankets we’d brought, and froze our tushes off for three quarters  before our dad said, “Let’s go. Gotta beat the traffic.”

One week later I was in my bedroom, bawling my eyes out because the Cowboys were about to lose to the Vikings in the playoffs. The rest of my family did not abandon the TV set, and then I heard a loud roar from the den, and that’s how I missed the Immaculate Reception. That season, 1975, the year the Steelers beat Dallas in the best Super Bowl yet up to that moment, was Peak Cowboys Obsession for me.

When, at age 28, I saw Texas Stadium for the first time, I was vastly disappointed. A local who had witnessed this type of letdown from other visitors over the decades tried to explain it to me: It’s not a football stadium, it’s a TV studio. It was designed as such.)

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 2 Comments

by John Walters

 

Starting Five

Lost And Found

“Ohhhhhhhhh, I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I’m still alive/Yeah, I-I-I-I-I-I’m still alive” The 13 year-old Wisconsin teen, Jayme Closs, who’d been missing since the mid-October evening when her parents were murdered in their home, is found, ALIVE and well as can be suspected, in a remote northwestern Wisconsin town.

Late yesterday afternoon, Closs walked out of the woods near the town of Gordon, about 70 miles north of where she’d been abducted on October 15, and approached a woman walking her dog. She asked for help. The woman immediately knew who she was and they ran to the nearest home. When the lady at the house, Kristin Kasinskas, opened the door, she said “it was like seeing a ghost.”

They phoned 911 and within 10 minutes the suspect was abducted. At the moment all that is known about him is that he is 21 years old.

UPDATED: This is the loser who abducted Closs and killed her parents. He doesn’t look like someone who illegally crossed the border from Mexico.

2. Lord Wall-demort

Did someone erect a wall around Ted Cruz’s shaving kit?

In a potential maneuver that could only be described as wildly popular among his MAGA base, President Trump is considering diverting funds that are slated for disaster relief in Puerto Rican (brown people) and California (libs!) in order to construct his southern border wall.

We’re anti-wall, but we almost want to see it constructed just so MAGA land can learn that the drug situation won’t change one bit because of it. The wall’s chief function would be to keep a few walk-thrus who would probably wind up working as the best domestic servant, landscaper or back-of-the-house kitchen help you’ve ever had, from getting through.


You can keep out a few people who are risking everything for a better life with a wall. You can’t keep out the future.

3. Spurs 154, Thunder 147 (2 OT)

In case you missed it…the 301 points are the most in an NBA game since December of 2006, when the Suns beat the Nets in double OT, 164-157…LaMarcus Aldridge scored a career-high 56 points without attempting a single three-pointer. That’s the first 50-point game without a three since Shaq did it in 2000…the Spurs made their first 14 threes and finished 16-19 from beyond the arc, setting an NBA record for proficiency (minimum 15 attempts) in a game at 84.2%…Russell Westbrook had an insane triple double (24-24-13) but it wasn’t enough…Aldridge finished 16-16 from the free throw line while teammate Marco Belinelli was 5-5 from beyond the arc (the Spurs just refuse to play without an off-guard of Italian descent, don’t they? Will Sir Charles start proclaiming, “Be-li-NEL-li!?”

–Elsewhere: UCLA overcame a 9-point deficit in the final minute in Eugene and Bill Walton was calling the game (we switched away when the Ducks were up 65-50 with about five minutes left). Can ESPN simply air that final minute on a continuous loop today?

4. Buster And Friends

Root is one of the five best character actors of the past 15 years or so, no?

A day later and we are still marveling over Buster Scruggs‘ six tales of the Old West, served up Coen Brothers style. We’ve decided to rank our top 10 favorite characters from the film:

–Bank Teller (Stephen Root) in “Near Algodones”

–Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) in “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”

–Artist (Harry Melling) in “Meal Ticket”

–Mr. Knapp (Bill Heck) in “The Gal Who Got Rattled)

Buster (Nelson) may be the most charming character on film this year

–Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill) in “The Mortal Remains”

–Prospector (Tom Waits) in “All Gold Canyon”

–Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines) in “The Gal Who Got Rattled”

–The Canyon (Telluride Valley) in “All Gold Canyon”

–Alice Longabough (Zoe Kazan) in “The Gal Who Got Rattled”

–Trapper (Chelcie Ross) in “The Mortal Remains”

Mr. Arthur (Hines) epitomized the laconic, get-‘er-done frontiersman

You’ll notice we left out almost all of the famous actors attached to the project: Liam Neeson, James Franco, Tyne Daly, even Brendan Gleeson. All good, but it was almost better not having much prior recognition of them.

Ranking the vignettes (and this is not an easy task): The Gal Who Got Rattled, Buster Scruggs, The Mortal Remains, All Gold Canyon, Meal Ticket, Near Algodones.

An unofficial 11th-best character, by the way? The jargon. If you are a lover of language (and we certainly qualify), the script here is gold. “My cognomens” or “pardon my apothegm” or “I’m comin’, Mr. Pocket!” I don’t know if Oscar will ignore this film, even though it’s the Coen Brothers, because it’s mostly on Netflix and it’s six separate pieces, but I’d give it Best Screenplay (and Best Score, as well).

5. Yakt-y Yak

Go pull up your Google. We’ll wait. Now type in “Yakt, Montana.” There it is, see, right along the Kootenay River in the northern part of the state. Now scroll up and to the right and you’ll find “Yaak, Montana.” See the Yaak River Tavern?

So far, so good. Now scroll up and to your left, over the border into Canada, in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, and you find Yahk, B.C.

Yakt, Yaak, Yahk.

Obviously, you’d recognize this as Yakt and not Yahk or Yaak

So we’re announcing the First Annual Medium Happy Field Trip (TBD) on which we travel to the trio of Yakt/Yaak/Yahk and get the what-for on this. Bring your passport.

Or you can kick back in Yahk.

Music 101

Bust A Move

This 1990 tune by Young MC won a Grammy for Best Original Rap performance and remained in the Top 40 for 20 weeks. Sure, the rhymes are rather pre-pubescent (She’s dressed in yellow/She says hello/Come sit next to me you fine fellow)  but you keep listening, no? An undeniable classic in the early years of hip-hop.

Remote Patrol

Young Mr. Lincoln

8 p.m. TCM

Young Winston

10 p.m. TCM

I’d argue the singular greatest men, in terms of what they did to advance the highest ideals of freedom and liberty, of their respective centuries. Lincoln here is played by a young Henry Fonda, in a breakout role. Churchill is portrayed by Simon Ward, and if you don’t already know his story as a young man, by the time he was 30 Churchill had fought in Cuba, India, northern Africa and South Africa. He also succesfully escaped from a POW camp in South Africa. For years I’d advocated that someone should make a film about his early years. Turns out Sir Richard Attenborough already had in 1972. My bad.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 5 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right


Unless you’re an obsessive college football/Jalen Hurts/astronomy fan, this tweet may be a little too abstruse. We laughed.

Starting Five

1. All In The Family*

*The judges will also accept “Mobster’s Ball”

It was twenty years ago today…A cold January Sunday evening in New York. We decided to give this new HBO show a try, although we thought the name sounded a little weak. One hour later, we were hooked. This Tony Soprano fella, he wasn’t like any other mobster we’d seen. He wasn’t dapper. He wasn’t particularly well-spoken. He reminded us of the Italian-American dads we’d grown up with in our Middletown, N.J., neighborhood, dads like Carmine Valardi and Sal DeMarco.

Tony was vulnerable. But on a dime he could turn vicious. The show. One moment it was heartless, the next, hilarious. It cared about food.

The next day, a Monday, I told some of my SI friends about it. No one else had seen it. Within three to four weeks all of us, whenever something did not go our way, would be saying, “What? No (bleeping’) ziti?”

Was The Sopranos the best TV show of all time? I don’t know about that. It was the most ground-breaking show, however, since All In The Family. It opened the door for all the great dramas and series (most of them on HBO or AMC or Netflix) to follow: Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men (created by a writing alum of the show), True Detective, The Americans, Game Of Thrones, The West Wing, Friday Night Lights, Deadwood. Maybe it killed network TV (I’m not the only one to say this; it’s not that original a thought). It definitely made TV cooler than the movies.

As for the finale, whatever creator David Chase was trying to do with it (and he’s not telling), the unintentional error of it is how much air that scene has sucked up relative to the other 85 1/2 episodes that preceded it. The NYT writer suggested to him that if anything the scene was hopeful. “There is some hope in it,” Chase replied. “Don’t Stop Believin is the name of the song, for Christ’s sake. I mean, what else can you say?”

Final scene. About 12 to 15 Sunday nights after the series premiere. Three of us are sitting in The Emerald Inn (the old location on Columbus) and in walks the hulking, ursine presence of James Gandolfini. He’s got a bag of recently purchased books from the Barnes & Noble two blocks down. He sits by himself and orders a beer. The three of us watch in awe but we know: don’t bother the famous people. So we leave him alone. About 5 minutes pass and yes, some other bro has to ruin it and approach him to tell him how much he loves the show. Gandolfini shoots him a pained smile and thanks him. Takes a quick sip of beer, gathers his things, and exits. He looked miserable. And that was at the end of Season 1.

2. Premature Exasperation

Remember, he doesn’t have temper tantrums

Whether or not President Trump stormed or Stormied out of the Situation Room yesterday during a bipartisan meeting regarding the government shutdown and border security, he did leave it prematurely. The Dem leaders asked him if he would end the shutdown, now in its third week, while they negotiated, and he said no because “then you won’t give me what I want.”

So when the Chuck & Nancy Show said they would not relent on the wall, he waved his palms in the air and said, “Bye bye” (I mean, you can easily picture this, no?) and walked out. Pelosi afterward, expounding on the disconnect between the president and the 800,000 government employees not being paid, on the White House lawn: “He thinks maybe they can just ask their father for more money.”

Sick burn, Nance. Sick burn.

3. Kliff Notes

Lots of stuff to unravel here: Kliff Kingsbury was interviewing with the New York Jets and Arizona Cardinals last week while still with USC…Kliff said he’d pick Kyler Murray No. 1 overall, which was wild because the Cards have the No. 1 pick and Murray, the ninth overall pick in last June’s MLB draft, just made himself available for the NFL draft…Kliff is dating Fox sideline reporter Holly Sonders, who has filed for divorce from Eric Kuselias (who’s well, kind of a capital D D-bag himself)…Kliff is 39 years old and four of his six seasons at Texas Tech were losing seasons (his best, 8-5, was his initial season) despite having two first-round QB picks play for him (Baker Mayfield and Pat Mahomes, who may be the NFL’ ROY and MVP, respectively, this season)…Is he a better QB coach/OC than HC? We’ll see.

4. Isn’t It Ironic?

We thought this was funny and curious. Perhaps you will, too. In yesterday’s Bubble Screen for The Athletic I noted that on Tuesday, ESPN host Rece Davis mentioned on a couple of occasions that Levi’s Stadium, which opened in July of 2014, has been the site of a Grateful Dead show but that he never mentioned its signature moment, below. Explicitly, verbatim, this is what we wrote: “The B.S. wonders…if you noticed that while Rece Davis mentioned multiple times that the Grateful Dead had played at Levi’s Stadium, he never referenced the venue’s signature moment: Colin Kaepernick taking a knee (If you had “Coldplay performing with Beyoncé,” move three spaces back).”

We weren’t admonishing Davis, although a few readers suggested that we were implying as much. We were honestly wondering why.

Let’s delve further: First of all, the Grateful Dead minus Jerry Garcia is hardly the Grateful Dead. Second, be opposed or in favor or Kaepernick’s gesture if you like, but it is by far the most-discussed moment in that stadium’s brief history. Why wouldn’t ESPN even mention it? My guess is for the same reason readers came at me in the comments for even mentioning it.

But here’s where it really gets funny. The fact that the Grateful Dead doesn’t bother readers in 2019 but Colin Kaepernick does demonstrates how counter-culture eventually becomes culture. Fifty years ago the Dead were seen as every bit as dangerous to mainstream, Flyover America as Kaep is now. If you didn’t already know, the Dead got their start as the house band for Ken Kesey’s infamous and legendary acid test, which were at the vanguard of the hippie/psychedelic movement. They were the soundtrack to the “long-haired, freaky people.”

A must-read for any fan of American history or culture in the 20th century

If you don’t already know about the acid tests (read Tom Wolfe’s outstanding The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), these were all-night and beyond dance parties where a giant drum of Kool-Aid was placed somewhere and LSD was dropped into it. This is literally where the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid” originated.

So there’s the irony. You have a segment of the population drinking the Kool-Aid, defending Trump’s misrepresentation of Kaepernick’s gesture, defending ESPN’s right to be inoffensive as opposed to transparent, thinking of the Grateful Dead as more sacrosanct to Git ‘Er Done America than Kaepernick. And yet the Dead were FAR MORE counterculture than Kaep and it is they who helped make “drinking the Kool-Aid” a part of the lexicon.

Gotta love reality. You could never make this stuff up.

5. Slim Fast

So we’re still reading that book (Hank & Jim, by Scott Eyman) and we are reminded how humbling it is to read: The more you learn, the more you realize how much you never knew. And you may say, ‘But, Jdubs, all you’re learning about is celebrity lives and dirty laundry.’ And? We think our friends Mike & Katie would agree that there is nothing more worthy of being learned about.

Anyway, yesterday we came across, Mary Raye Gross, who would later be known as Nancy “Slim” Keith, who is purported to be the Original California Girl. Blonde and blue-eyed, Slim was born in Salinas, Calif., in 1917. At age 16 she traveled to Death Valley where, at the Furnace Creek Inn, she met movie star William Powell (of the Thin Man series). Powell introduced her to William Randolph Hearst and from there it was on.

Clark Gable pursued her. So did Ernest Hemingway. She was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar by age 22 and befriended another young model, whom she would introduce to her by-then husband Howard Hawks (famous film maker: Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To Have and Have Not, etc.). That model was Lauren Bacall.

Slim, Jim

Kieth/Hawks would never go into the movies, but she would amass husbands (she left Hawks for agent/producer Leland Hayward, who then left her for Pamela Churchill, who then left him for Averill Harriman…and the beat goes on), but she became legendary as a socialite of the Hollywood and 5th Avenue scene. Truman Capote would later lampoon her in an unfinished novel of his and when she got word of it, she never spoke to him again.

One line, casually thrown out by Eyman in his book, made us chuckle. He wrote that Slim was “prone to sarcasm and adultery.”

Music 101

Arnold Layne

This was the beginning for one of the most successful rock groups of all time. The single, released on March 10, 1967, did not exactly catapult Pink Floyd to stardom, but there was a lot more than songs about transvestites who steal women’s mannequins to come.

Remote Patrol

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs

Netflix

Six Western vignettes courtesy of the Coen Brothers, and well worth your time. In the first two death is a punchline, but then it gets a little more serious. We were overwhelmed by the scenery and particularly in the fourth vignette, above (that’s Tom Waits, by the way), it is stunningly obvious to us what a better planet this is without us than with us. Don’t @ me. Do you think the Coen brothers were perhaps maybe trying to imply the same thing? Wait until you watch it before you reply. This is flat-out outstanding stuff, and the fifth vignette could easily have been extrapolated into a feature-length film.

 

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | 4 Comments

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right


He has friends? No one allows me to hand down sentences, but if I could I’d leave Don Jr. alone and unarmed in a large pen with one animal from every species that he’s killed. That would be fun. And I’d honestly love to see that.

Starting Five

Dabo’s No Dumbo

“S-E-C!”, meet “A-C-C!”

Clemson 44, Alabama 16, and it was really only close for the first 25 minutes. Takeaways:

–Clemson and its folksy, self-effacing coach Dabo Swinney have shrewdly positioned themselves as the Kinder, Gentler Bama (though, who isn’t?). And while you weren’t looking, the revolution already occurred. In the past four years, the Tigers have the same exact record (55-4) and the same number of national championships (2) as the Crimson Tide.

–True freshman quarterback Trevor Lawrence (a.k.a. Sunshine, Fabio, Spicoli, Avatar and Young Roger Waters) validated Dabo’s September faith in him (and by acting when he did, Dabo also saved Kelly Bryant a season of eligibility, so good on everyone) and has a chance to be the closest thing to John Elway we’ve seen since John Elway. Fellow true freshman Justyn Ross (12 catches, 3 TDs, all on home run balls and 301 yards receiving in two playoff games) is miraculous. We’re looking at a Heisman and Biletnikoff Award winner, respectively, here.


–That fake field goal!?! Gah! Nick, what were you thinking? Sure, the score was 31-16 in the second half and Bama likely would have lost anyway, but that had no chance. I mean, when Chris Fowler is calling it out before the snap…Take the points (and we know the kicker was iffy, but you gotta try). That or give Tua a shot. About that…

–Before kickoff Todd McShay said that Tua and Lawrence were both future No. 1 overall draft picks. Maybe simply to save face he’d maintain that even today, but would any GM really take Tua number one overall after that wretched performance (including the early pick six where he threw between his two receivers?). Don’t think so.

Ross goes full Michelangelo on this grab

–Is this a “Tide-al” shift game, a la Bama pantsing indomitable Miami in the 1993 Sugar Bowl but in reverse? Is the Saban era beginning to wane? We’ll see. The Tide do bring in the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class, but ol’ Saint Nick (not jolly) will be 68 and he’s gone through a slew of coordinators in recent years.

–I have more on ESPN’s coverage, etc., but it’s in The Bubble Screen in The Athletic. So why not subscribe, read the story, put in a comment like “The only reason I subscribe to this rag is because JW writes for it…occasionally,” and make my day? I mean, if you’ve been reading this drivel here free for six-plus years, maybe good karma (Or guilt? Guilt work just as well for me) will persuade you to part with $3.99 per month in support? And don’t say, “I’d rather give that money to you, JW,” because we both know you won’t. So that’s today’s screed. Am I buggin’ ya? Edge, play the blues…

2. Wall-To-Wall-For-Wall Coverage

The good news? Donald Trump did not declare a “national emergency?” The bad news? Stephen Miller is still a hackneyed writer and he was playing all of his old material.

If you missed President Trump’s 9-minute barrage of “We Need a Wall Physical Barrier,” which was covered on all three major networks (but thankfully, not TCM), think of it as “Man With Iron Will Wants Steel Wall.” We’re not going to fact-check it here; you can read  that here.


As for Chuck and Nancy’s Democratic response, we can’t beat Charles Pierce’s observation.

Our solution? Let’s build a Wonderwall. Maybe (maybe), it’s gonna be the one that saves me (saves me).

3. Sears Is No Longer Where America Shops


When we were kids growing up in Middletown, N.J., the Sears on Highway 35 was THE department store. It’s where you’d buy the family TV, or a coat or a lawnmower. My sister reminded me how we’d use the carpet displays like slides.

Anyway, Sears, which opened in 1886, is most likely going out of business very soon. There’s a hedge fund and a last-minute bid and some business muckety-muck, but the end is near. Sears was an anchor store at American malls for generations. Its demise is a metaphor for malls in general.

4. Parks and Wreck

Want to be even more depressed about how evil the Trump administration is when it comes to protecting our beautiful natural wonders, our national parks? Here’s Outside with a report on how the shutdown is doing serious damage to them (visitors are still flocking to them and POOPING in them as toilets overflow while workers are furloughed) and asking why the parks remain open (because no one in the White House cares about anything besides money and power).

Oh, and already seven people have died in national parks since the shutdown began. Seven. In two weeks! Maybe we ought to build a wall around our national parks?

5. Jimmy Thing

We’ve always admired Jimmy Stewart as an actor, an American and just an overall decent fellow. Now we’re reading Hank & Jim, by Scott Eyman, which profiles his 50-year friendship with Henry Fonda, and we admire him even more.

The Jimmy Stewart you see in The Philadelphia Story and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is a recent Hollywood arrival, a bachelor, who has a fascination with planes and flying and earns his pilot’s license in his spare time. The Stewart you see in It’s A Wonderful Life is a seasoned World War II veteran, a B-24 pilot who flew roughly 20 missions into Europe from England.

Moreover, the Army Air Corps had made Stewart an instructor and wanted to keep him as such doing work in Idaho. They understood a dead Jimmy Stewart might be bad for national morale. But Stewart insisted on flying missions and at last Uncle Sam relented.

When you read the sections of Eyman’s book that relate to this period of his life, you see a Jimmy Stewart who, well, behaves exactly as you might expect a Jimmy Stewart-like character to behave in a film. His crew loved him and he was both humble and heroic. Once he volunteered for a Christmas eve mission. Another time German strafing fire literally went through his seat and between his legs before exiting the ceiling of the cockpit. Stewart even flew a pre-dawn mission over Normandy on D-Day.

The next time you watch It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), take a moment to consider all the things Stewart had just experienced before making that film. And that he was George Bailey, sure, but he was even more his war hero brother.

Music 101

Blister In The Sun

Few bands achieved greater cult status in the Eighties without their fans having no idea what they looked like or who their lead singer was (Gordon Gano) than Violent Femmes. The Milwaukee-based band hit it big in 1983 with their eponymous debut album, released when Gano, the trio’s principal songwriter, was just three years out of high school.

Remote Patrol

A Face In The Crowd

11 p.m. TCM

“They’re mine! I own ’em! They think like I do, but they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em.” Sound familiar? Andy Griffith stars as a megalomaniacal entertainer whose charismatic facade wins him as many converts as fans. Based loosely on Wil Rogers,  whose son would later admit dad’s folksy charm was largely a facade, this 1957 Elia Kazan film also unknowingly presaged at least one future American leader.

IT’S ALL HAPPENING!

by John Walters | Leave a comment

by John Walters

Tweet Me Right

Starting Five

1. Double Doink!*

*The judges will reluctantly accept “Grizzly End”

You may choose to remember it as Nick Foles finding Golden Tate on 4th-and-goal from the 2 against the NFL’s best defense. History will likely remember it as Cody Parkey‘s game-winning 43-yard field goal attempt doinking off the left upright, ricocheting off the cross bar and falling harmlessly into the end zone. “A double-doink,” as ESPN’s Cris Collinsworth called it.

Eagles 16, Bears 15 in the last and most suspenseful playoff contest of the weekend.


Yes, Parkey split the uprights moments before as the Eagles called time out just before the ball was snapped. Yes, Philly’s Treyvon Hester got a finger tip on the ball, perhaps altering its trajectory just enough. Ye, Parkey inconceivably hit kicks off the uprights four times in ONE GAME earlier this season.

We’ll remember, as much as the Parkey Plunk, a masterful 2nd down catch and yards-after-catch by Eagle tight end Dallas Goedert just past midfield on the final drive that went for 10 yards. It felt like the play that gave the Eagle a jolt. Collinsworth said, “Remember this play.”

We did. He was correct.

2. “We Are The Champions”

At the Golden Globes, Bohemian Rhapsody stuns everyone, including its own producer, by topping A Star Is Born for Best Drama (Yo, it’s got “Bohemian” in the title and the voters are the Hollywood Foreign Press Association; what did you expect?). Also, Rami Malek over Bradley Cooper in an upset. On a positive note, Cooper did not soil his pants at the ceremony and he did not go home and hang himself; we don’t think.

Other moments from the evening…

–Andy Samberg’s intro of the first presenters: “He discovered Ali and she discovered him in a garage…please welcome Bradley Cooper and Lady GaGa.”

She was a shoo-in to win this one.

—Carol Burnett noting that she was so glad we had this time together, and acknowledging sadly that a show like hers, with that monstrous budget (and 30 million viewers a week) would never happen today.

–An older viewer asking “Is that a man or a woman?” How many households across America does this happen in during awards show season?

—Christian Bale, who won Best Supporting for portraying Dick Cheney in Vice: “Thank you to Satan for giving me the inspiration to play this role.”


–Seeing Roma win Best Foreign Picture and Best Director and wondering how many more countless Americans this film will put to sleep (beautiful to look at, but boring).

–Seeing the smile on Chris Pine’s face as Jeff Bridges gave his Cecil B. DeMille Award speech and wondering if they had taken hits from the same bong.

–Watching Michael Douglas give Glenn Close a congratulatory smooch (there’s a film called The Wife??? Really?) and instantly thinking rabbits may be in peril.

–Wondering how shocked and disappointed the gang from A Star Is Born must be this morning. Honestly, it’s fantastic right up until she sings THAT SONG on stage. The second half loses its footing. I refer to it as the “2018 South Florida Bulls.”

(One more thought on ASIB: The trailer’s really all you need. It’s better than the film, in fact.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1TEme1doRA

–The jokes by Andy Samberg that were so clever that they flew over most everyone’s head. The joke about the Black Panthers and Oakland during the otherwise flat monologue and then the intro for Steve Carell which was a bait-and-switch on the hackneyed idea of connecting title of an actor’s films to introduce him. You were led to believe it was Jack Nicholson (“You don’t have to be an easy rider or fly over a cuckoo’s nest to see this actor is as good as it gets…ladies and gentlemen, Steve Carell”). We appreciated the effort, Andy.

3. Coppin: A Plea

You may have heard that Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies finally, after 126 consecutive regular season wins dating back to November of 2014, lost. This was at Baylor last Thursday evening (it was the Huskies’ first regular-season loss without overtime in 209 games dating back to February 2013, also to Baylor).

But that’s not the only spectacular news involving losing, streaks, and college basketball right now. At Coppin State, an HBCU in Baltimore, neither the men’s (0-15) or women’s (0-13) hoops teams have won a game this season. Check that, the men won on Saturday, breaking a both programs-losing streak that had dated back to last February.

The men’s squad, now 1-15, took down Savannah State, 73-67.

The UConn women bounced back at Houston on Saturday, 81-61, but this team is no leviathan. The Huskies only have one player taller than 6’3″ All-American Katie Lou Samuelson, who lives outside the arc anyway, and that’s a 6’4″ frosh not seeing much PT. In their last four games, the Huskies have only won by 10, 9, and 20 and they lost by 11.

4. Will Fields Find Grass Greener in Columbus?

Follow along if you wish: Jacob Eason was the No. 1 rated Pro-style high school quarterback in the nation in 2016, and he signed with Georgia. But then he got injured in the Dawgs’ opener and lost his job to Jacob Fromm, who had been the No. 3 rate Pro-style prep QB in the country in 2017. Fromm led the Bulldogs to within a couple plays of the national championship, and so Eason transferred back home to U-Dub.

That opened the door for Justin Fields, the No. 1 rated Dual Threat-style QB in the nation in 2018 to matriculate at Georgia this past season. But Fields could not beat out Fromm, either, and so now he has opted to transfer to Ohio State, where Tate Martell, the No. 2 rated Dual Threat QB from 2017, has sat patiently or impatiently for two seasons.

One of these alpha dudes, Fields or Martell, is not going to win the job in Columbus. And Martell has a two-year head start there in terms of knowing the culture and the plays and well, everything.

Meanwhile, Ryan Day is stepping into this job as of last week and if you ask us he’s dancing with danger. Martell is white, Fields is black (we assume that Dwayne Haskins, the starter this year, is leaving; he’d likely be the first QB taken in the NFL draft). Martial has been the understudy; Fields is the interloper. Like it or not, these factors could lead to a divided locker room.

But maybe Day has seen enough of Martell to know that he’s not in love with him. That at the very least he’d love to see if Fields can push him to be better. At the most, if Fields can push him out. If Day were truly committed to Martell, you think he might dissuade Fields from relocating to Ohio’s state capital.

Either way, the Buckeyes aren’t exactly pushing themselves next season: the OOC is Florida Atlantic, Cincinnati (good this season, I know) and Miami of Ohio, all at the ‘shoe.

5. The Life Aquatic

Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier): We just did not sea him in the role

Remember the story line in Entourage where Vincent Chase landed the lead in Aquaman, but then a power outage on the opening weekend threatened to submerge the film in bad press (due to low box office)? Fortunately that make-believe Aquaman rebounded, allowing Vinny to pursue passion projects Queens Boulevard and Medellin (which did tank)…

The actual Aquaman film came out three weeks back, starring another former HBO actor (Jason Momoa, who portrayed Khal Drago in Game Of Thrones) and it’s tearing up the box office. Aquaman has done $940 billion globally, which is just ridiculous. The people want superheroes. Don’t ask me why.

Reserves

There’s nothing cooler than nature (although Mahershala Ali comes close)

and…

 Music 101

Woman, Woman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzH-CT8y6c8

In 1968 Gary Puckett and the Union Gap had two singles climb to the top 3 in the Billboard charts: This and “Young Girl.” We’d say someone in the band had issues but they were actually recording material that someone else had written. This song, their first hit, actually went to No. 1 in Canada.

If you want to win a wager with friends, tell them you’ll give them $20 if they can name the   famous Sixties recording artist who was born in Hibbing, Minnesota. They’ll say Bob Dylan, who was actually born in Duluth but raised in Hibbing. Puckett was born in Hibbing, but his family soon moved to Yakima, Wash.

Remote Patrol

College Football National Championship Game

Alabama vs. Clemson

8 p.m. ESPN

Will number four be a bore? The Tide and Tigers are meeting in the playoff for the fourth time in the past four seasons–between them they will have won 11 of the 12 games played in the playoffs since late 2015—and Levi’s Stadium promises to be wet and perhaps not quite close to full. Have you ever worn soggy Levi’s? Then you know.

The Duelin’ Dabos are an underdog in this matchup for a fourth straight time. We like the Tide tonight.