Category: Sports

College pigskin week 2 – not a “great day for the Irish”

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Do you remember the wrestling “jobbers”? They were guys whose job was to make the headliners look good. Back in the day, the televised wrestling matches served no purpose other than to develop and market story lines for the live events. In the TV matches, no headliners clashed. The heroes du jour would defeat some poor jobbers in short order with “scientific” moves, and then the main villains would abuse other lackluster jobbers with trash talk and dirty tricks, while boiling over with braggadocio about how they would do the same to our heroes in the live events.

The same jobbers came out every week to get slaughtered. Among the notorious perpetual losers were such luminaries as The Duke of Dorchester, Iron Mike Sharpe, the Brooklyn Brawler, Barry Horowitz, and Leaping Lanny Poffo, who happened to be the son of one wrestling legend, Angelo Poffo, and the brother of another, The Macho Man. The first three I listed usually lost to heroes, while Poffo and Horowitz normally squared off against heels. Four of those guys were at least trying to be colorful, with the nicknames and all. Iron Mike Sharpe even billed himself as “Canada’s Greatest Athlete.” (Sorry, Gretzky!) As for the fifth guy, I don’t know what the deal was with Barry Horowitz. He could have been “Bart Howitzer” or “the Florida Flash,” but no-o-o-o-o. He just remained plain old Barry Horowitz. That’s not a moniker likely to strike fear into your heart, unless he’s auditing your tax returns.

Anyway, discarding my light racism and moving on to the real topic of this post, college football also has its jobbers, uninspiring programs that manage to make big bucks by traveling to the homecoming games of powerhouse teams, fully expecting to lose by 40 or more. You recognize some of the names: Bethune-Cookman, UAB, Austin Peay, Lindenwood, Arkansas Pine Bluff, Southern Utah, Albany, Akron, Charleston Southern, Gardner-Webb, Western Kentucky, Western Michigan, Western Carolina … basically any team that starts with “Western.”

As a general matter of honor, there are two conventions that apply to jobber games: (1) the big teams usually only schedule these teams in the first three weeks of the season, before conference play begins; (2) the big teams shouldn’t run up the score any higher than 70, preferably even less. Sometimes the jobbers are so weak that the big teams go over 70 unintentionally, even when they play all of their reserves, because their fourth-stringers keep scoring. That happened last week, when Ole Miss squeaked by mighty Furman 76-0. Ole Miss tried to tamp it down. They called rushing plays for eight different guys and tossed passes to ten different receivers. By the end of the game they were calling plays for members of the marching band. I think the chubby tuba guy even rushed for a first down.

Unlike the wrestling jobbers, one of the patsy teams occasionally receives the smile of Lady Fortune and wins a game against a power team. There was one this year. Lowly NIU defeated #5 Notre Dame on the Irish home field in South Bend. That was the first win in history for a Mid-American Conference team against an AP top-five team, following 51 consecutive losses. If you saw that coming, you could have been a rich man. NIU was a 28.5-point underdog, and paid off 25-1 on a bet to win outright. The point spread was high enough that 2/3 of the bettors took NIU and the points, so the bookies took a heavy beating on those bets. It has not been reported how much action was on NIU to win outright, but probably not much, unless Nostradamus is still alive and follows American college football.

In a semi-important game:

#3 Texas easily defeated #10 Michigan, in a battle of the newly aligned super conferences, and they did that on Michigan’s home field. It was 31-6 before Michigan scored a meaningless late TD, but it wasn’t as one-sided as it sounds. Texas did outplay the Wolverines, but the score got so lopsided because of Michigan turnovers. That means the new SEC, which now has 16 teams (eight are nationally ranked), defeated the new Big Ten, which now has 18 teams (six are nationally ranked).

USC, which is now in the Big Ten, had already defeated LSU, so the two mega-conferences are now 1-1 in head-to-head games.

College football scoreboard.

Bryson DeChambeau and Former President Trump try to break 50

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This is part of a series that Bryson produces in which he and a two-man scramble partner try to break 50 from the red tees.

Trump and Bryson didn’t succeed, but they came as close as you can get, shooting exactly 50 – 22 under par. Whatever you think about Trump, you can’t deny that the man can play golf. I have not seen anyone else his age play that well. He looks ancient, he’s way overweight, and there are moments when he barely seems able to catch his breath, but he comes to life and does the job when he has a club in his hands.

Bryson has amazing power. At one point, he drives a short par four with a five wood, getting the ball 27 feet from the cup. And that was into a breeze.

Aaron Judge – fastest to 300 home runs in MLB history!

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By a mile.

He made it in 955 games, breaking the old record by a mere 132 games!

That doesn’t mean he is on pace to break any all-time records. He was the fastest to 300 in “games played,” but is nowhere near the youngest man to do it. He’s 32 years old. Eleven guys reached 300 before they turned 30. When A-Rod was Judge’s age, he had already hit more than 500 homers, and got up to 539 homers before he turned 33!

Most homers before turning 33 (remaining homers in parens)

A-Rod 539 (157)
Foxx 500 (34)
Pujols 475 (228)
Griffey 468 (162)
Mantle 454 (82)
Sosa 450 (159)
Mathews 445 (67)
Aaron 442 (313)

In guessing Judge’s final total based on those models, you can exclude Mathews, Mantle and Foxx from your calculations because they were heavy boozers (and Mantle had injury issues). The other five averaged 204 in their post-32 careers, so take that number and add another 30 or 40 because Judge still has another 2/3 of a year before he turns 33. That makes him a favorite to reach 500, an even bet for 550, and a long shot for 600.

I don’t mean to diminish Judge’s achievement or his abilities. He’s the best hitter in the game now. He’s leading the majors in both slugging (where nobody is even close) and on-base percentage (where the only guy close to him is his own red-hot teammate, Juan Soto).

R.I.P. Kevin Sullivan

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‘Rasslin’ has produced many memorable heels, like Roddy Piper, who became so popular that fans applauded them. Although they never really turned “good,” they did get to fight on the side of justice in some story lines.

Kevin Sullivan wasn’t that kind of baddie. Once he turned heel in the 1980s, he was dark and twisted, face-painted, and bad to the bone. He would film ominous promos in the desert or in a swamp, he would lean into evil iconography like skulls and snakes and fire, and he would use gibberish to call on bizarre supernatural entities.

My favorite Kevin Sullivan story line was when Kevin needed to reach deep into his occult powers to defeat some difficult opponents. He went to the beach, muttered some incantations, and before our very eyes he conjured a new partner, The Purple Haze, who arose in the Atlantic Ocean from the very depths of hell (or the dark side of the moon … or something).

Of course this “demon” looked just like Sullivan’s usual partner, “Maniac” Mark Lewin, but that was probably just a coincidence.

Despite all the resources of the dark arts at his beck and call, and despite conjuring an all-powerful immortal demon as his partner, Kevin still got his ass kicked regularly by the Road Warriors.

Just goes to show that Satan isn’t what he used to be.

There is an excellent and very thorough obit here.

A crap ton of hilarious Bobby Heenan quotes

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The new ‘rasslers may be bigger stars and better actors, and the sport is now filled with beautiful women, but nobody has come along to replace Heenan, Ventura and Piper for pure dark humor.

Many lines from “The Brain.”

Some samples:

Gorilla : (Referring to a wrestler’s pet parrot) “Those birds can live to be twenty-five or thirty years old”
Brain : “Not in my house. If he was in my house he’d be in a shake ‘n’ bake bag; do you like your parrots original or extra crispy?”

Brain: “The two things that scare me most about wrestling fans is that they’re allowed to vote and allowed to reproduce.”

Gorilla: “Paul Bearer always has that eerie smell of fromaldehyde”
Brain: “I thought that was your cologne”

Brain To Bob Uecker: “You received 7,000 votes to get into the Hall Of Fame. You’d have gotten a lot more, but you ran out of stamps.”

Ross: “Back in Oklahoma, Bobby, we called a match like this a slobberknocker.”
Brain: “I thought that’s what they called the waitress at the Tip Top cafe in Downtown Tulsa.”

Brain: “Now remember this, when a man sticks his hand out to you, you shake it. Then kick him really hard when he’s not looking.”

Jim Ross: “You want to take the easy way out in everything in your life?”
Brain: “You gotta take the easy way out, this is life! Remember, a friend in need is a pest.”

Brain: “I’d love to see a midget battle royale, throw your man over the bottom rope”

Brain: (Regarding William “The Refrigerator” Perry) “The last time I saw ‘The Refrigerator’ move like that was when they opened the buffet line!”

A great baseball bar bet. Which Latino ballplayer had the highest batting average?

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You can ask about a single year or a career. It doesn’t matter. It’s the same guy either way, and nobody will get it right. People will guess Rod Carew, Albert Pujols, Roberto Clemente, Manny Ramirez, Edgar Martinez …

It’s none of them.

The answer is Ted Williams. Mr. Ballgame hated to discuss his roots and always changed the subject when the topic arose. His mother was a Mexican-American from El Paso. Both of his maternal grandparents were born in Valle de Allende, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Of course, Latinos consider him an Anglo. MLB considers him an Anglo. Williams identified as an Anglo and seemed to be ashamed of his mother’s world.

But, as the gamblers say, the cards speak for themselves.

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A little more Ted Williams trivia:

* His birth name was “Teddy.” He hated it and legally changed it to Theodore.

* When Williams played for his high school team, he was a pitcher.

* But in his senior year of high school, he played AAA baseball (then called AA) in the Pacific Coast League. The stadium was near his home. His family would not let him go on road trips until he graduated.

* Williams’ famous .406 season was actually .413 using today’s scoring rules. Run-scoring flyballs were counted as an at-bat from 1931 to 1953 (excluding 1939 for some reason which escapes me), thereby reducing one’s batting average. Williams hit eight of them in 1941. The rule was changed for the 1954 season, and stayed that way for all subsequent years, so those flies are no longer penalized as an at-bat. There’s an even odder twist to the sac fly story, although it does not affect Williams. Before the 1954 season, they really couldn’t decide what to do with this rule so they kept tinkering with it, as evidenced by the 1939 anomaly mentioned above. The real oddball period was from 1927 to 1930 when no at-bat was charged on any fly ball where the runner advanced – to any base, not just home plate. As you know if you are a fan, they had some huge averages in those years, especially 1930, when the major league average was .292. Batting averages dropped 15 points in 1931, when all fly ball outs counted as at-bats.