The Sports Curmudgeon

Last year, I did a Topical Rant on the Super Bowl Commercials and it got as much “reader commentary” as anything else. So, why not go back to the well one more time. The thesis goes something like this:

Companies will spend over $2M for a 30-second spot.

Companies will spend up to $10M making the ads.

Therefore, they damned well better be good for that price.

And – best of all – they have to replace some of the lame, boring and annoying ads that are on TV at the moment.

Let’s start with the fundamentals. CBS is charging advertisers $2.3M for a single spot during the game. And the ad slots are sold so don’t there is no need to feel sorry for the folks at CBS. A lot of noise has been made about CBS refusing to air a political ad that opposes President Bush’s policies and actions. I have received at least a half dozen requests to sign an electronic petition to whomever demanding that these ads be shown. I have refused to join in this petition/protest for a completely apolitical reason:

I watch the Super Bowl to watch a football game. I know I am in the minority here and I know that many of the games are real stinkers; but that is what I am there to do.

So when CBS goes to commercial – as they will do a maddening number of times – I merely want them to show the ads and then get back to the game. I do NOT want to be thinking about the profound meaning of what I just saw; I want to be thinking about whether or not the defense ought to blitz on the next snap.

I don’t want to see an ad that is anti-Bush Administration nor do I want to see an ad that hypes the wonderful things that the Bush Administration has been doing for the American people. This is an election year; all that stuff will be sorted out in November.

Another ad that CBS refused to take was one from those wacky folks at PETA who wanted to run an ad to inform us that eating meat makes you impotent. I refuse to get into a debate with PETA folks because they always seem to bring a knife to a gunfight. But if there were any sinister/mercenary motivation going on at CBS, they would have taken that ad from PETA and run it early in the first quarter. Why?

Because then they could have raised the price for three of their other paying sponsors for setting up their products. The Super Bowl will be brought to you this year by Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. PETA sets the table by saying that meat eaters suffer from impotence and these guys come along and tell you how to eat meat and still - - well, you know.

Let’s assume that each of these three magical pill products places only one ad during the game. That means that $6.9M will be spent on things to mollify erectile dysfunction. That’s a significant jump-start to the economy over the inability ability to jump-start - - if you get my drift here.

Who will win this war of the erectile dysfunction aids? That is harder to pick than the outcome of the game but here is a possible indicator. Here are anagrams for the products:

Levitra: “Evil Art” or “I Travel” or “Rev Tail”

Viagra: “Via Rag” or “Rig Ava”

Cialis: “Silica”

None of them are particularly good so this methodology won’t help to pick the winner here. You make the call

I certainly hope that the erectile dysfunction companies have new ad agencies because their ads are getting tiresome and predictable. Have you noticed in all the Viagra ads that after the guy goes and sees his doctor and gets his Viagra prescription, everyone asks him if he got a haircut? They definitely need a fresh approach here and that does not mean that the guy goes to the doctor and then goes to a gathering of people and everyone asks him if he just got his shoes shined. And they need to avoid any imagery that involves setting up a tent in the backyard… Levitra has to come up with something other than the guy in the backyard tossing the football through the tire. Even Sigmund Freud is fed up with that one – and in case you had not heard the news, Freud is still dead.

One ad that is running now needs to be stopped immediately. I don’t care if it does damage to the First Amendment, this needs to be outlawed and the creators put behind bars. Dulcolax stool softener shows an animation of a woman lounging on a sofa and the voice-over informs us that everything in life should be soft and comfortable. That is simply more information that I need to know about this product and that is an annoying play on imagery. I hope that the person who thought that one up is force fed Dulcolax for a week.

Just last night, I saw an ad for the first time for a drug that deals with symptoms of depression. I am not a person who suffers from this condition so I did not pay attention to the name of the product, but I heard the voice-over tell me that some possible side effects are blah-blah-blah anorexia and constipation. Somehow, I don’t think that you would have to deal with both anorexia and constipation at the same time. There is this thing called the Law of Conservation of Matter…Get this off the air.

There is an ad for a watch where the voice-over says, “Nothing says more about you than your wristwatch.” Are you kidding me? In the Viagra commercials, these folks fixate on the guy’s hair not his watch. Get on an elevator with someone who just chowed down at Taco Bell and you may stare at your watch wondering why it is taking so long to get to your floor, but you won’t notice the other person’s watch.

Here is a commercial that needs to have the plug pulled. I won’t describe it; I’ll just answer it:

“No, I don’t know how to use e-bay…”

I am also tired of seeing the kid build a soapbox racer that looks like a Hummer and win the race by going off the road. Hummers make sense if you are in the military and are in a war zone or on maneuvers; Hummers make no sense on the Interstates. Sorry LeBron.

Tell the truth, wouldn’t you love to see a commercial with Jennifer Lopez talking to some of her friends when that damned duck walks up and squawks, “AFLAC”? There are lots of ways to go from there. PETA isn’t going to like any of them.

The Miller Beer commercials where people fall like dominoes is interesting just to watch how they organized the folks and choreographed that act. But the premise delivers a not so good message. All these folks are lined up in banks and on buses and in office buildings – presumably doing something productive during a workday – while the “enlightened Miller Beer drinkers” are bellying up to a bar in mid-day. You can make your own decisions is one possible message. The other is that if you drink Miller Beer you could well wind up out of work and spending your days with a foot on the rail at a bar. I don’t think that is a message that Miller wants to convey.

I have enjoyed the Labatts Blue ads with the guy in the bear suit; I hope they make a new round of them. The one where he makes a beer dispenser out of what was supposed to be a bookcase is good; the one where he gives his date a giant “Pez-machine” that spits out beer cans is hysterical.

The NFL Players Association has several commercial ventures going under the umbrella of Players Inc. If they develop some products one of these days, they could use the Super Bowl to introduce them to the public and I’m sure the networks would cut them a little slack on the price since they are the ones who make the game possible in the most basis sense. Here are a couple of ideas I’ll toss out just for fun – and to prove that I never studied marketing in college:

Players Inc jock itch powder: Call it “Down in the Red Zone’

Players Inc erectile dysfunction pill: Call it “Encroachment”.

Finally, I mentioned a PETA ad earlier on. I suspect that the reason these folks protest the wearing of fur far more vehemently than they protest the wearing of leather is that drenching a stick-figure super-model with red paint is not very dangerous but doing the same thing to a bikers’ convention in Sturgis South Dakota is potentially hazardous to the health of the demonstrator. Do that to a bunch of guys riding their vintage Harleys and the protesters might wish that they were lab animals being treated humanely in the laboratories…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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Usually, being a curmudgeon is easy. All you have to do is to give in to the basic cynical instincts within yourself and write down want comes to mind. The sporting world – and society in general – provides lots of material to play off. Usually, this is not a difficult gig.

This one is a lot more difficult because – let me say this from the outset and I’ll repeat it several times herein – I don’t believe this is going to happen. But if I am going to maintain any curmudgeon credentials as the Doyen of Darkness, I have to take a shot at this one too. Danny Boy Snyder did the absolute right thing in getting Joe Gibbs back to coach the Redskins; I do not foresee perennial mediocrity or failure for the team with Gibbs at the helm. But in the euphoric field of dreams that has captivated the Washington area for the last week, might there be any doomsday scenarios? Yes there are – remote possibilities as they might be. And interestingly, the potential costs in light of a doomsday scenario could be very large for Danny Boy Snyder.

Remember, I don’t think this is going to happen, but just suppose that next season is not a playoff year for the Redskins. Maybe the pampered players on this team don’t “get it” quickly enough; maybe there is insufficient talent at the positions that Joe Gibbs needs on a team to make it very successful; maybe there is a wave of injuries that no team could overcome. But suppose there is another variety of “failure” next year – the kind that leads to head knocking between the coaching staff and the front office. That part of the scenario could happen. Now comes the dire part. Suppose that Danny Boy acts as the arbiter of this potential contretemps and sides with the front office or inserts himself back directly in the football operations of the team – or worst of all pisses Joe Gibbs off sufficiently that it becomes widely known in the Washington area.

In that situation, Danny Boy Snyder will need – at the very minimum – to hire a food taster. People living in other parts of the country – or the world – do not understand the level of esteem in which Joe Gibbs is held in this area. I know that there have been no Presidents or Senators or Mayors that have enjoyed anything near his icon status in the Washington area for the last 35 years. In fact, it’s not even close. Perhaps you would have to go back to the end of W.W. II and the arrival of General Douglas MacArthur in Washington to match the fervor of the town and to present the folks here with an equivalent hero/icon.

So, the important thing for Danny Boy and his henchmen to realize is that the people in this town will not take kindly to anyone or anything that is perceived – rightly or wrongly – to thwart Joe Gibbs’ quest for excellence. The fans here were on the down slope and picking up speed in their dislike for Danny Boy and his front office. He had milked profits out of the fans by pulling a legal raid on their wallets; he had tried to bring in a latter day “over-the-hill-gang” by signing lots of high priced former All-Pros; he had brought in the tough TV analyst/coach and put him in charge; he had gotten the hottest college coach in the land; he had meddled in the player selections and the player relations. Most of all, he had teams that had lost more games then they won and teams that just did not give it their all on the field.

How much had the support for Danny Boy’s Redskins slipped? Certainly not enough to make them a money-losing venture; but consider that in a town that is monomaniacal about its pro football team these things all happened in the past year or so:

When a Skins game was on FOX, the local CBS affiliate chose to televise a Ravens game as its game of the day – opposite the Redskins game. That had not happened here in Washington in the time I’ve lived here.

Columnists in the Washington Post – sometimes mistaken as an adjunct of the Redskins’ PR Department – were writing that this particular Ravens’ game was the most interesting sports event in the area that weekend.

Fans sued Danny Boy successfully over his attempts to prevent people from using a free parking area near the stadium and walking to the stadium. He got the local politicians to get the police to block the walkway citing a “safety concern” and that happened in a less than “open process”.

The club seats at FedEx Field had never been sold out and this year there were significantly more empty “yellow seats”.

The number of “Cowboys fans” and “Eagles fans” at Fed Ex when those teams came here was huge. For the final game with the Eagles, it seemed as if 40% of the crowd was cheering for the Eagles and as if 25% of the crowd was dressed in green.

So, my hypothesis is that Danny Boy has brought in the franchise savior and did a really smart thing in getting him here at this time. Now, Danny Boy has to morph into a character he has yet to show anyone that he is capable of being. He has to be the supporting actor; he has to be the facilitator; he has to be the sous chef; he has to be the underboss. Because if he “bigfoots” any of his bad decisions on Joe Gibbs, this town will not tolerate it. And make no mistake about it, Danny Boy has not shown any ability at all to do any of his “bigfooting” in the background and making it look as if he had no hand in the matter.

What might be the consequences to Danny Boy if he is such an assclown that he drives Joe Gibbs out of town in disgust?

[Aside: Joe Gibbs seems to be far too much of a class-act to leave town and say that Danny Boy is the sole reason that he is leaving town and that the only justice in the world would be for Danny Boy to be nibbled to death by ducks. But imagine the situation where he stops just short of that!]

I was only joking about hiring a food-taster above – because Danny Boy has probably already had to do that. But if Joe Gibbs becomes the anvil on which his hammer lands, Danny Boy might be looking at:

A fan revolt where season tickets are no longer possessions prized so much that they are contentious items in divorce proceedings.

Small protests seeking boycotts of Redskins’ paraphernalia purchases at the myriad Redskins Stores in every mall in the area.

Top-flight coaches and administrators in the league may decide that even with the inflated salaries he offers, he’s not worth working for.

And that word can spread around to players’ agents too. For comparison purposes, see: Bidwell, William.

This move has come at an important time. The Redskins have been bad since Joe Gibbs left town eleven years ago and the fans are more than restless. Fed Ex Field is relatively new, but it is hardly a “destination stadium”. Of all the “newer stadiums” around the league, Fed Ex is at or close to the bottom of the barrel. I doubt that Danny Boy will be happy to see The Vet imploded because as long as The Vet is there, he does not have to bother dealing with the massive upgrades that Fed Ex Field will need in the next 5-10 years. And the money for such expenditures would probably have to come from ticket price increases, which are programmed in for 2007 – when the current seat licenses expire. Some tickets will double in price then - - but not if the team had been allowed to continue to stink out the joint.

Joe Gibbs can make the Redskins into a playoff team quickly if he is allowed to bring in the players that he needs in order to make his “system” work. He can’t make it work if he has players going around his back to Danny Boy to plead their case to the owner for something that Joe Gibbs thinks is an obstacle to winning. He can’t choose to make some cuts just before the season starts only to have Vinnie Cerrato decide that something else needs to be done to the roster and to have Vinnie take that dispute to Danny Boy for adjudication. He can’t be handed a player or two and told to make it work with that player – as was Marty Schottenheimer with then QB, Jeff George.

Former Redskins’ tight end and local sports radio yakker, Rick “Doc” Walker tried to heap praise on the hiring of Joe Gibbs, but showed that he too may have a dark side to his personality. Said Walker right after the announcement, “They finally found a navigator for the Titanic.”

Memo to “Doc”:

The Titanic didn’t even finish its “first season”.

It killed a lot of folks and is still at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

And unfortunately for all of humankind, Celine Dion’s direct ancestors were not on board…

I am confident that Danny Boy is intelligent enough to understand all of this and to have come to an intellectual conclusion that this is how he needs to run his organization from this point forward. He is not a stupid man by any stretch of the imagination. I am pretty confident that Danny Boy is strong in his resolve to resist the temptation that he will surely feel to “get in there” and to “make things happen” as he has – singularly unsuccessfully – in the past.

If he does not resist those temptations, he risks having the football fans of Washington march on his house during a night of the full moon with torches lit and pitchforks in hand. And that is what I – as the Doyen of Darkness – can foresee as a remote possibility about 3 years in the future. Like I said, this one isn’t easy to go on the dark side with because it isn’t likely to happen; usually, a walk on the dark side is a piece of cake.

The local sycophants – er, Washington Post columnists – are busy urging Danny Boy to find some other toy to play with and to let St. Joe run the team and return glory to the franchise. I’m not urging him to do that; I’m warning him that he better damned well do that.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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We have begun a new year. All is new and all is optimistic. At the end of 2003, you probably read a dozen or so of the obligatory columns on New Year’s resolutions that need to be made by teams or players or possibly the ideal Christmas presents that could be delivered to teams or players. How nice. I’m looking at this from the curmudgeonly perspective and see that in this New Year there are a whole lot of things that need to be stopped. Would that we could issue a “cease and desist” order to most of these things. But just to assure that looking at the world through rose colored glasses does not become epidemic in its proportions, let me suggest that we call a halt to all of the following things.

Let’s stop focusing a TV camera on any idiots in the stands at a football game who are holding up any cutouts of the letter “D” and a “picket fence”. It was imaginative two decades ago; now it has gone way beyond trite; it is annoying, stupid, redundant and offensive. Can we make it a felony for any TV producer to put that nonsense on the air? Write your Congressman about this. Surely your Congressman would love an excuse to hold another set of irrelevant hearings…

Let’s stop with the commercials for sportsbooks that use one-trick-pony celebrities whose time has long passed. Michael Buffer should never again be allowed to say, “Let’s get ready to gammmmble.” Andrew Dice Clay’s act was stupid and irrelevant when it was “hot” for about six weeks; now we get to hear him tell us that we need to bet with the book that “keeps the Dice-man rollin’ “. That itself would send me to another sportsbook - - were I in the market to find one.

Let’s stop with the commercials for sports tout services that tell you that Joe Flabeetz has an 82% winning record against the spread over the past 5 years and that he has critical inside information that will let you know for sure what the outcome of tonight’s game is. Look. If Joe Flabeetz actually had that information, the last thing he would do is to tell you or me or anyone else until after he had about $100K down on the game in small amounts at various sportsbooks so that none of his collections would be large enough to trigger a report to the IRS. If he is actually right 82% of the time, he would already be rich and would be so busy doing what he really enjoys doing that he would not have time to answer your calls.

Let’s stop allowing sportscasters to use certain phrases that have become annoying clichés. Among them are “five-tool player” [wrench, hammer, screwdriver, jigsaw and router?], “innings eater” [that sounds vaguely scandalous], “working the phones” [unless it refers to a Verizon technician] and “at the end of the day” [guess what, that makes it night!].

Let’s stop the misuse of English words that writers and announcers use to make themselves sound literate when their misuse only shows that they are ignoramuses. I’ve told you before about the rampant misuse of the word “unique” when it is modified by an adjective or adverb. Something is either unique or it is not; it is never “sort of unique”. I’ve told you about the people who do not know the difference between “imply” and “infer”. It seems as if they still have not learned. But the latest fad is to use the word “decimate” with regard to injuries to a football team. Sounds very erudite but when you know what the word means, it just shows that the speaker/writer has his head up his butt. The word comes from the Latin word “decem” which means “ten” and decimate means to “select by lot and kill every tenth man of”. Forget that football teams suffer injuries and not deaths; the numbers are all wrong. A team that had its starting line-up decimated would have lost 2.2 players to injury. Big deal; just about every team in the NFL loses 2 starters to injury in a season. Decimation is not a synonym for “lots of”.

Let’s put a stop to the enforced silence at golf and tennis matches. Silence is important when someone is doing something very important that simultaneously requires intense concentration and care. Brain surgery is such an activity; we do not want heckling or distractions or “crowd noise” as Dr. Finefingers is probing around a cranial cavity with sharp metal objects; even lobotomies are not to be done with egg beaters. But tennis and golf have no importance in the grand scheme of things. These prima donnas have no more “right” to silence as part of their participation in these games than I do to yell at them to miss the damned putt. And we can start this movement by severely beating up on golf announcers who whisper their commentaries. How polite of them. I think they whisper them mainly to make it difficult for us to hear how inane their exchanges are:

Announcer #1: What do you think he’s going to do with this shot?

Announcer #2: I think he’s going to try to hit the ball into the cup, don’t you?

Memo to Golf Announcers: These guys – and ladies too – are merely trying to hit a ball into a hole in the ground. They are not trying to resolve any of the great problems that confront mankind. It’s a freaking game!!

Let’s put a stop to annoying euphemisms just for the sake of political correctness. Why is it proper to refer to someone as a “person of color” or an “African American” and not so proper to refer to a woman as a “breasted American”? The next thing you know we are going to refer to the serial fathers in the NBA as “people of ardor”. Give me a break!

Let’s put an end to athletes repeatedly coming out of retirement for comebacks. Why did this become something interesting? I guess Sugar Ray Leonard started all of this with his multiple comebacks; he came back more times than sauerkraut.

Let’s put an end to fantasy baseball/football columns on the Internet and in newspapers/magazines. Let’s try to look at this analytically. The entire object of fantasy leagues is to demonstrate the innate superiority of one “owner” over all of the others. It is a vehicle that nominally demonstrates the untapped ability of this frustrated geek to run a sports franchise better than other frustrated geeks in his area. So, please tell me why any of these frustrated geeks need to read the written opinions of some other frustrated geek about what running back is likely to be a good pick-up in the seventh week of the season? The whole point of the fantasy league is to demonstrate that you know more than other people so why do you need advice? Particularly, why do you need advice from some other geek who probably owns teams in some other league? Doesn’t taking his advice acknowledge that you are not the omniscient owner you purport to be? [Do you get the idea that I don’t like to participate in fantasy leagues? Good, then I’ve been clear.]

Let’s put an end to stupid sporting activities that purport to be events. We need no more Slam Dunk Contests, Three Point Shooting Competitions, Home Run Derbies, Pro Bowl Games, Hockey Skills Competitions and any events that have any relation to any sport associated with the word “Extreme”.

Let’s put an end to any more reporting on events that are merely repetitions of reporting on previous events that are the same damned thing. Do you need any more information to know that:

OJ has not yet found the real killers?

Strange things happen at the Neverland Ranch?

Danny Boy Snyder spends lots of money on the wrong players and coaches?

Dennis Rodman would not be an ideal next-door neighbor?

Finally, let’s put an end to movie sequels that drag out a “movie property” to a point where it is ludicrous. How many more Rocky movies do you want to see? Do you care about Rudy – The MBA Years? The sequel – and prequel – fad is already over the top. Here is what I expect to see one of these days:

Star Wars XII: The Reign of Queen Leia and King Chewbacca (PG-13)

Star Wars XI: The Princess and the Wookie (XXX) They don’t call him “Chewy” for nothing…

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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