Sports - The Knees Are The First To Go
Because most of us are just too stupid to know when to hang it up.
Winter Olympics, NASCAR, and Red Wings: the Perfect Valentine's Day
This weekend my wife and I are enjoying a Perfect Storm of Really Cool Stuff.
On Friday the 2010 Winter Olympics* kicked off in Vancouver, British Columbia. There was a terrific Opening Ceremony highlighted by some teams marching in with hundreds of happy skiers and skaters waving at the crowd, while other teams were made up of a single athlete carrying a flag and followed by fifteen old bald government guys.
Ernie
I moved to Southeast Michigan on a blind date in the Spring of 1975. When I arrived I was a White Sox fan, mostly because I had spent my formative high school years within easy obscenity-shouting distance of Chicago. Back in those days, probably the best thing about our pathetic Sox was a broadcaster named Harry Caray, who was known for saying "Holy Cow!" Harry used this as a fairly transparent substitute for shouting obscenities .
As that first summer unfolded, two amazing things happened more or less reshaped my life. First, Nan and I decided that the blind date was going well enough to get married, which is bound to make a summer stick in your mind, just about any way you cut it.
Second, I discovered the Detroit Tigers and a baseball play-by-play man named Ernie Harwell.
No Requiem For The Red Wings
The Detroit Red Wings did not win the Stanley Cup this year. Yikes! Our Wings are the most magnificent sports franchise since Ogg's Cave Clubbers dominated the old Neanderthal Leagues and won twenty-one straight Pleistocene Cups. How could they possibly have lost?
For those of you who do not live in Michigan, or for those of you who do live in Michigan and who are not Detroit Red Wings fanatics (we know who both of you are and where you live...) I should give you a little background.
In ice hockey, the highest achievement possible is winning the Stanley Cup. This is a trophy named after a nineteenth century British Governor of Canada, Lord Stanley of Preston, Earl of Derby and Count of Crosschecking. After watching an impressive hockey contest back in 1893, Lord Stanley apparently figured that the players must be pretty darned proud of their accomplishments, and really thirsty, so he bought them a big silver cup to carve their names on and drink Molson out of.
The best hockey teams in North America have been doing that ever since.
35 Years of Tigers
A couple of weeks ago my family made our first trip to Comerica Park to see a Detroit Tigers game. I have to admit that while we're all long-time Tiger fans, I have not been in a big hurry to go down there - and only partly because I resent having to apply for a home equity loan to pay for a couple of plastic cups full of lukewarm beer.
My biggest issue with Comerica Park is that I really loved the old Tiger Stadium, a place where you could save a few dollars and buy "obstructed view" seats. This meant sitting directly behind a steel I-beam support, so pretty much all you would see of the game was that beam and the hot dog vendor.
Even so, there was always a lot of noise in that old park, the hot dogs
were pretty good, and on your way in and out you got to feast your eyes
on the greenest green you'll find anywhere in the world - Tiger Stadium
grass.
After the Super Bowl
Well, it's over. The Pittsburgh Steelers are dumping champagne over each others' Super Bowl XLIII Champion caps and thanking their Lord and Savior for standing by them and guiding every savage hit on an opponent from the very beginning of this long, tough NFL season. Meanwhile, the Arizona Cardinals are quietly waxing philosophical and consoling each other with a cold beer - probably not Steel City.
So what have we really accomplished here today?
For one thing, as a game-watching nation we wolfed down something like 1.2 billion chicken wings and 15 thousand tons of chips, along with enough ranch dressing, salsa, onion dip and guacamole to turn the grand canyon into a scenic condiment bowl. Some statistician with a lot of time on his hands has actually calculated that the amount of Orville Redenbacher we chowed would make a popcorn string long enough to stretch more than 5.5 laps around the world.
And we washed it all down with 52 million cases of beer.
