Monthly Archives: September 2012

IT’S ALL HAPPENING! SEPT. 5

by John Walters | Leave a comment

Starting Five


1. Your Fantasy draft should be completed by now  NFL season opens tonight with the Dallas Cowboys visiting the Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

2. Oh, Bama! Crimson Tide supplant USC atop the AP poll (and Ray Ratto votes Texas State 16th after the Bobcats beat Houston).

3. Runner’s World debunks GOP vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s claim that he once ran a “two-hour and fifty-something” marathon. Actual time: 4:01.25. Jim Ryun remains America’s greatest running Ryan/Ryun, with Ryan Hall second.

4. “TANKEES?” Not your best headline, New York Post, but certainly not your worst.

5. Yet another NFC South city hosts a major political convention.

Ratto-touille! Ray votes Texas State 16th, leaves Michigan off his ballot. Take that, centrists!

The Bench


Tyler Hamilton appears on “Today” and tells Matt Lauer, “I’ve lied to your face many times in the past.” And he wasn’t even running for office then. Hamilton recently alleged that Lance Armstrong gave him PEDs and has a book coming out, “The Secret Race.”

Memo to Florida offensive coordinator Brent Pease: It’s UF, not F.U.

Vowel check in the American League: O’s rip Toronto, 12-0, to climb into a first-place tie with the Tankees, while the A’s lose for the first time in 10 games.

Gunman kills one as Pauline Marois, first female premier of Quebec, delivers speech.

Hoping Bill Hubbell has more to say on this in “Day of Yore”, but today is the 40th anniversary of  the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Here’s Jim McKay’s unforgettable report.

From two nights ago, but Lionel Richie tore it up singing the Top Ten list on Letterman.

Will Muschamp has yet to announce it, but we strongly suspect that he will use Jeff Driskel in the first quarter and Erin DiMeglio in the second quarter at Texas A&M.

The European Union thinks Greece should work a six-day week. Good luck with that, EU.

By the way, quite the unusual upcoming weekend for Florida’s FBS schools: Miami travels to Manhattan, Kans., South Florida is off to Reno, Central Florida flies to Columbus, and the Gators venture to College Station. Florida has not traveled outside SEC territory for a road game in the regular season since 1991 (when the Gators were waxed at Syracuse). Technically, they will be in SEC environs on Saturday, since A&M is now an SEC member, but you understand what we mean. Florida State? The Seminoles will be home against Savannah State.

Thunderstorm rips roof off historic Needles theater. Our thoughts (and prayers, of course) are with Snoopy’s brother, Spike, a resident of the town.

No word yet on Spike’s condition

Saying you ran a sub-3 hour marathon is like answering “300” when asked what you bench, when in reality your max is 155.

The last six paragraphs of Matt Taibbi’s cover story on Mitt Romney and Bain Capital in Rolling Stone are an interesting take on the coming schism in American life. You, of course, may disagree. Taibbi hunts down Wall Street corruption with the same fervor as Darren McGavin once did chasing monsters as Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

George Michael resumes his tour in Vienna nine months after nearly dying there and donates 1,000 tickets to medical staff “who saved my life.” This is a man who first appeared on our TV screens wearing a “Choose Life” T-shirt, after all.

This piece is nearly two months old, but it’s the most recent post we’ve seen on the whereabouts of Darron Thomas, who should be the quarterback of a top five college football team right now. And to think that Tate Forcier, had he just remained at San Jose State, might have been able to engineer an upset of Stanford last Saturday.

If the Toussaint Fitz, wear it. Michigan RB speaks publicly about his arrest, suspension.

Canadian Football League update: Our man Anthony Calvillo, who turned 40 two weeks ago, leads the CFL in passing yards with 2,978.

Anchor Steam

Sarah French, Boston, ABC affiliate WHDH.

Market Size: 7

Married or Pet? Neither, we think.

Speaking, French

Sarah is a former Miss Missouri and a proud member, as her bio says, of Cherokee Nation (which is almost entirely unlike Red Sox Nation except for that Jacoby Ellbsury Navajo deal… this would provide Mr. Ellsbury a French connection, no?). This chair may be the only one that is too big for her.

 

 

Day of Yore

by bhubbell | Leave a comment

It was September 4, 1781 that the city of Los Angeles was founded by 44 Spanish settlers. By September 15th of that year, half of the women in the Spanish settlement had gotten boob jobs and all but one of them had slept with Antonio Banderas’ great great great grandfather, who was the lead in most of the settlement’s plays, but had talked about wanting to direct. By October 1st, five of the original 44 had second homes in Palm Springs to help them unwind and get away from the madness. By Halloween half of the Spanish settlers had moved back to their small towns because Los Angeles was “just too fake.”

It was 55 years ago today that the Ford Motor Company released the Edsel. There have been much bigger flops (many from the city above), but the Edsel has pretty much held them all off and remains the standard bearer for bad ideas. As these things go, the cars are now collector’s items and some mint condition models are worth over $100,000.

What isn’t a flop at all is Google, which was founded 14 years ago today. You’ve already used google 10 times today. Google brings you almost all the information in this post. (Except the part about the older Banderas, I got that from a guy I know who’s brother’s buddy is one of the door guys at Chateau Marmont.) Google was a pretty good idea by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who met at Stanford and are now both worth around 17 billion.

“Beth” was released by KISS on this day in 1976. Written years earlier by drummer Peter Criss, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were against putting the song on the album “Destroyer”, but the group’s manager insisted. The very un-KISS like song was of course their top climbing single ever, making it all the way to #7 on the Billboard charts.

The Oakland A’s won their 20th consecutive game on this day in 2002. As seen in the movie, “Moneyball“, the A’s blew a 10 run lead before Scott Hatteberg won the game with a walkoff homer in the bottom of the 9th. No word on any “Moneyball 2: Moneyballer” yet, but the current club looks like it’s on it’s way to the playoffs with an even more nondescript roster than the 2002 team. I’m thinking John Cusack for Bob Melvin and Chris Hemsworth for Josh Reddick.

        

Beyonce turns 31 years old today and her hubby was part of the coolest thing that happened this weekend.

– Bill Hubbell

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IT’S ALL HAPPENING! SEPT. 4

by John Walters | 1 Comment

Starting Five

1. Kelly Ripa’s long and agonizing search for a co-host ends with the addition of Michael Strahan (New York City now has two — count ’em, two — popular gap-toothed hosts).

2. The Atlanta Braves win the 18th consecutive start made by Kris Medlen, or as ESPN’s Mike Greenberg calls him “Stephen Strasburg without the attention.”

3. Michael Clarke Duncan, R.I.P.

4. A battle of southern Technical Institutes ended in overtime with Virginia’s properly measuring the azimuth for a game-winning field goal against Georgia’s.

5. Florida State defensive end Brandon Jenkins, who led the Seminoles in sacks the past two seasons and is the only starting DE on the team not from Germany, will miss the rest of the season after a teammate stepped on his left foot. Officially, it’s called a Lisfranc injury.

Duncan in “The Green Mile”

Reserves

Serena Williams scored a double-bagel win (6-0, 6-0) at the U.S. Open over Andrea Hlavackova of the Czech Republic in 57 minutes.

Mark Abrahamian, lead guitarist of Jefferson Airplane Jefferson Starship Starship collapsed after a concert in Norfolk, Neb., and died. He was 46. Abrahamian had once said that he heard Van Halen’s “Eruption” when he was in seventh grade and that it changed his life. “I went home and didn’t leave my room until the ninth grade,” Abrahamian had said.

What caused the Arab Spring? Would you believe hunger? Get ready for another year of revolution somewhere.

The player who kicked the game-tying and game-winning field goals for Virginia Tech, Cody Journell, was arrested last December for felony breaking and entering (Sean McDonough may have mentioned this once or twice). The crime allegedly involved an air gun, two Hokie basketball players, a drug transaction gone wrong, and a pizza box. Somewhere Allen Pinkett is saying, “Now THAT is what I’m talkin’ ’bout!”

The Red Sox have lost seven straight, all on the West coast. They haven’t done much better on the East coast. Is it too soon to name Giovanni Ribisi Dustin Pedroia player-manager?

The most respected figure in Boston’s clubhouse

“I used to love to go camping…” Vince Gilligan’s montage trump card on Breaking Bad has always been “Crystal Blue Persuasion”, a 1969 tune written by Tommy James and the Shondells. You may know them better for tunes they wrote that were later covered in the Eighties by Tiffany and Billy Idol.  Gilligan, the show’s creator, did not waste his ace as he used it to show the expansion of Walter White’s meth biz as it went international (Are we shallow because the scene reminded us of a similar montage from the 1982 film Night Shift? [No, you’re shallow for other reasons]). James, by the way, said the title of the song came to him not because of drugs but via the Book of Revelations. And you can believe him, because crystal meth was not really around back in 1969.

Robinson Cano may be the New York Yankees’ most talented player, but Derek Jeter is its most valuable. Why? Cano failed to reach an eighth-inning grounder that bled in the game-winning run in Tampa (actually, St. Petersburg, but who cares?) in Monday’s 4-3 loss. Cano might’ve at least stopped the worm-burner, and prevented the winning run from scoring, had he dived. Disbelieve if you want, but there’s no way that ball skids past Jeter. The Yankees have played sub-.500 ball since the All-Star break.

So that movie Holes was real?

 

How did Notre Dame not think of this first? Clemson ends football practice by baptizing wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins in a cooling tub. If he played defensive back, it would’ve been a baptism by fire, no? Two observations: 1. Hopkins is not wearing his helmet, as you can see, so he will have to sit out the next sacrament and 2. Call us when someone is circumcised after practice.

IPTAY meets I PRAY

“We buit this city! We built this city on rocccck and roll!” Honestly, as awful as that song is, it’s still better than “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” If you want to listen to a solid Jefferson Starship tune from the Eighties, try this. (and, no, the lead singer is NOT the coke dealer from Boogie Nights).

In the October “Vanity Fair” there is a cover story that peeks behind the curtain of Scientology (how many such pieces have been written now?) and discusses how actress Nazanin Boniadi was auditioned to be a certain superstar’s girlfriend.

You had me at “Theta Perceptics”

 Top Five College Football Games This Saturday

1.  Air Force at Michigan — The Falcons rushed for an NCAA-best 484 yards last weekend. If the Wolverines still have Alabama on their minds, there may be trouble in the Big House. Keep an eye on AFA’s Cody Getz, all five-foot-seven of him.

2. Florida at Texas A&M — Yes, we’ve beaten this drum in other forums (repeatedly), but this trip to College Station will represent the Gators’ longest trek for an in-season game since 1991, when Syracuse spanked them in the Carrier Dome, 38-21. Welcome to the SEC, Aggies? More like welcome to the Union, Florida.

3. Nebraska at UCLA — The Bruins looked terrific in Jim Mora’s debut at Rice, but that was Rice. This is Corn. Husker QB Taylor Martinez is a SoCal native.

4. Georgia at Missouri — Mike Slive let his two new teams dip a toe in by giving both of them a home game for their first SEC matchup. The Show Me’s won their opener by 52, but that is meaningless. Keep your eyes on Dawg frosh RB Todd Gurley, who rushed for 100 yards on just eight carries last week. Not a Gurley man.

5. Miami at Kansas State — The Canes have a prodigy at RB of their own, Duke Johnson, while KSU QB Collin Klein (“Prairie Tebow”) gets some much-deserved face time on your tube.

When the hurley burley’s done/Will Todd Gurley’s team have won?

IT’S ALL HAPPENING: LABOR DAY WEAKENED EDITION

by John Walters | Leave a comment

Starting Five

1. Walter White coolly orders the executions of nine would-be snitches (“It had to be done”), but may have made a critical error by not stocking his bathroom with copies of Maxim or Sports Illustrated.

2. South Africa’s double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorious, alias “The Blade Runner”, earns silver in the 200 in the Paralympic Games (Who beat him???)

3. Two fans die in falls in separate incidents, at Houston’s Reliant Stadium during an NFL preseason game and at the Georgia Dome during the Tennessee-North Carolina State game.

4. The Oakland Athletics win their ninth straight and now have an identical record (76-57) to the (say it the way Costanza did when he first landed the job) NEW YORK YANKEES! (“Get! Out!”).

5. Alabama waxes Michigan, 41-14, in a showdown of AP preseason Top 10 teams. Both the Tide (7th) and Wolverines (1st) are also in the top 10 all-times in wins among Division I programs.

Pistorious finishes second in the Paralympics 200

 

The Bench

This is funny. Pistorius, a.k.a. Forrest Stump, complained about the unfair advantage gold medalist Alan Oliveira of Brazil had after losing to Oliveira in the 200. Now the blade’s on the other, um…

The Rev. Sun Myung Moon has died at the age of 92. Soleil Moon Frye, the Connecticut Sun, Star Jones and the Jetsons’ dog, Astro, still live.

Andy Roddick does not have to retire just yet (and trudge home to a place that has nothing to offer him except trunks full of cash and Brooklyn Decker).

The Crimson Tide are more like a rogue wave at this stage and their victory at Cowboys Stadium was the stuff of an indomitable force, but we do want to point out that they last played a non-conference regular season game west of the Mississippi at an opponent’s stadium in 2003 (at Hawaii) and have only played four such games this century. Bama’s record in those contests: 1-3 (losses at Hawaii, Oklahoma and UCLA).

Chipper Jones blasts a two-out, three-run homer against Jonathan Papelbon and the Phillies to cap a five-run ninth-inning rally. Braves win, 8-7. Even ex-BoSox had a cruddy weekend (Boston has lost six straight).

He’s a man! He’s 40!

Oklahoma State 84, Savannah State 0. If you had the Cowboys minus 67.5, YOU WIN! Even T. Boone Pickens was not pleased. “I just think we can do better,” says the Cowboys’ maestro of munificence. “Notre Dame’s already booked but I’d just as soon play Notre Dame. Everybody wants to play Notre Dame.” (For the record, Tulsa beat the Irish in 2010 and Oklahoma hosts them in November).

U.S. Open: John Isner loses to Philipp Kohlschreiber in five sets in a match that ended locally at 2:47 a.m.

In nautical news, Russell Crowe got lost kayaking off the north shore of Long Island. It would’ve been perfect if Paul Bettany were with him.

Because it has the words “Labor Day” in the first stanza and because it is one of our three favorite Jimmy Buffett songs, here’s “Come Monday.”

Ohio State’s Devin Smith made a pretty one-handed touchdown catch in the first half versus Miami of Ohio, and a local broadcaster roared that it was “the catch of the year!” It wasn’t even 2 p.m. on the opening Saturday of the season.

Happy 69th birthday to Montana Wildhack  (a.k.a. Valerie Perrine).

New York Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey is first in all of baseball in Won-Loss record (17-4) despite playing for the Mess. In the Senior Circuit Dickey, 37, is first in WHIP, second in E.R.A. and third in strikeouts. Is the knuckleballer/author  the frontrunner for the N.L. Cy Young Award?

e.R.A. Dickey. Some of us sentimental fools wouldn’t mind seeing him win the Cy Young Award.

S-E-C! The younger brothers of NFL quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Philip Rivers took snaps this weekend. Jordan Rodgers is the starting QB at Vanderbilt, which lost to South Carolina, while Stephen Rivers took a few backup snaps for LSU.

Singles news: Maria Sharapova needed three sets to slip past Nadia Petrova and into the U.S. Open quarterfinals and she has called off her engagement to Sasha Vujacic. “I was waiting for someone to ask me that question directly,” Sharapova said when queried about the status of her relationship. Oh, what’s that? You want to see a photo of Maria Sharapova? Oh, okay.

 

And, finally, Happy Labor Day to the 91.7% of you who can truly celebrate it.

 

COLLEGE FOOTBALL: WEEK 1

by John Walters | 1 Comment

Starting Five


1. “They call Alabama the Crimson Tide/Call me MGo Blue…” On an opening weekend with a surfeit of glorified exhibitions, everyone won by Alabama playing Michigan…except perhaps the Wolverines.

2. Oklahoma State drowns an entire litter of puppies, hopes no one paid too close attention.

3. USC wins its first game off probation, Penn State loses its first game on probation.

4. A hurricane hits the Gulf coast, causing the postponement of a game in…Corvallis, Ore. Butterfly Effect?

5. Notre Dame’s all-time record on foreign soil improves to 3-0 (or, depending upon your opinion of Mississippi, to 3-1).

The Sideline

If you could select a single play to embody the SEC’s dominance of the Big Ten since Florida beat Ohio State for the national championship in 2006, wouldn’t Alabama DB Dee Milliner’s shove of Michigan’s Ray Roundtree out of bounds (unflagged!), subsequent interception and then pummeling of Denard Robinson be it?

Dee Milliner of the Tide

Four schools in the AP preseason Top 25 (No. 7 Florida State, No. 10 Arkansas, No. 19 Oklahoma State and No. 22 Kansas State) played Football Championship Series (FCS) foes and won by a combined score of 253-26. Missouri, an SEC team that is just outside the Top 25, rocked FCS opponent Southeast Louisiana 62-10.

It isn’t that these victims were out of their league, it’s that….well, that’s exactly what it was. FCS schools literally do not play in the same division of their FBS hosts who pummeled them and then handed them a check. Let’s see, you take physical advantage of someone who is not in a financial position to deny your offer and afterward you hand them a check. Is there a word for such an arrangement?

The cover of next week’s Savannah State-Florida State game program?

College football has manifold problems, but some of them are fixable. This is one such issue. Either prohbit wins versus FCS schools from counting toward bowl eligibility or, as voters, use your vote to punish schools for scheduling such games. Florida State is about to play its second consecutive game versus an FCS foe, Savannah Guthrie State, this weekend (the same team that came within 84 points of shocking Oklahoma State this past Saturday). That’s one-sixth of its schedule against opponents that have as much of an opportunity of winning the BCS national championship as Rancho Santa Margarita High School, and even less of a chance than RSMHS of beating the ‘noles.

Seminole fans will rightly point out that their team played Oklahoma last season and plays Florida out-of-conference annually. We applaud that. You don’t have to fight Muhammad Ali every time you step into the ring. But you should at least touch gloves with an opponent that has a puncher’s chance.

***

USC wide receiver Marquise Lee caught 10 passes for 197 yards and one touchdown (on the Trojans’ first play from scrimmage, a 75-yarder that was mostly YAC) in the 49-10 win against Hawaii. The sophomore from Gardena, Calif., suddenly has USC SID Tim Tessalone wondering if he must stage dueling Heisman campaigns. A few thoughts:

1. Did you know that Lee was not considered the best wide receiver on his own Junipero Serra High School team? Lee was a four-star, while George Farmer earned five stars from Scout.com.

2. Lee was considered more valuable at another position. “Lee is a much more natural defensive back than receiver,” wrote Scout.

3. Hawaii coach Norm Chow was a college assistant coach for 39 seasons, a few of them spent at USC. So Chow finally becomes a head coach and his first in-game decision is to defer after winning the coin toss and put the ball in the hands of Matt Barkley?

Marquise de Sod?

The hardest hit we saw anyone take this weekend was the blindside hit a Boise State female cheerleader took when a Bronco player ran into her out of bounds. Fortunately, her helmet did not come off so she was permitted to cheer the next play.

 Quotable

“You get paid for certain things, but I don’t know if at the end of the day, some things are worth the payments you get.” –Savannah State coach Steve Davenport after his team surrendered 84 points to and accepted $385,000 from Oklahoma State

The weekend’s most impressive SEC team that did not play for the national championship last January? Our vote goes to Tennessee. Quarterback Tyler Bray was 27 of 41 for 333 yards, two TDs, zero picks, in the Vols’ 35-21 defeat of N.C. State, while the defense intercepted Mike Glennon four times.

Air Force continued to redefine the term misnomer as it rushed for 484 yards versus Idaho State.  Cody Getz, the Falcons’ five-foot-seven senior running back, had 218 yards on 17 carries for a 12.8 yards-per-carry average.

Few get Getz in the open field

More FBS-FCS MacBeth Memorial (“Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”) scores: North Carolina 62, Elon 0. Arizona State 63, NAU 6. Missouri 62, SE Louisiana 10. New Mexico 66, Southern 21. Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Cal returned home to Memorial Stadium after a one-year hiatus due to a $321 million renovation, but Nevada beat the Golden Bears, 31-24. The Wolf Pack won in Berkeley for just the second time in 25 visits, the last victory coming in 1903.

Are you an AP voter? Great. You’re not going to even glance at the preseason poll to help you inform your decision on this week’s vote, are you? You realize the preseason vote is simply a guesstimate based on absolutely no relevant empirical information. The only relevant empirical information occurred this weekend. So, yeah, it’s okay to put UCLA or Notre Dame in the Top 15 if you think the Bruins or Irish were that impressive. It’s just Week 1. You don’t have to marry this ballot, just buy it drinks and hold open doors for it.

The spread for Savannah State at Oklahoma State was 67.5 (the .5 was a nice touch, no?). Cowboys still covered by two touchdowns and a field goal.

Top Ten*

1. Alabama

2. USC

3. LSU

4. Oregon

5. Best Virginia

6. Clemson

7. Michigan State

8. Ohio State

9. Tennessee

10. Georgia

 

*You must play an FBS opponent to be eligible for this poll.