Sunday 25 October 2009

any given sunday

If you have come here for the ongoing and inspiring new kitchen photo-essay, fear not. It will return tomorrow. But here is the second edition of my all new experimental NFL column.

Yo Sushis. Before we get onto why I am considering benching Ronnie Brown, what I think about Malcolm Gladwell, dogfighting, helmets and rugby, and what I am doing to defeat my various deadly enemies, let me tell you about my sitting arrangements. I am on one of those rubber balls. It's ok, but I tested out a kneely chair last week, and that seemed as if it might be better. I sat on it for 45 minutes in the shop. The people in the shop didn't look too pleased, but they sell chairs for £500, so they have to pretend not to mind. This is the one I am probably going to get:


It's a lot of money, so I checked online. I'm sorry, real world shopkeepers, but this is the real world. Some guy on gumtree was selling a £350 model that was also very comfortable for £50. It was tatty. I phoned him up and asked if it was for real, and literally made by Hag, and was one of these? Yup, he said. Sticker and everything, although, he reiterated, tatty. 'Full-working order?' I pressed. Absolutely, he assured me.

I was very insistent because the guy was in Mottingham. This is not a misprint of a place near Meicester that you have to get to on a train from Ping's Pross in Kondon. It is literally a place in far south London. Who knew? I didn't, but for a saving of £300 I was prepared to travel. I made it clear that I was public transporting from north London. No problem, he said. I travelled hopefully and then arrived, and it turns out that it is true about travelling hopefully and arriving, because the gadget that raises and lowers the seat was broken, and my nemesis pretended he didn't know, but he obviously did. I told him that I knew he knew, and we parted. If someone ever asks you to go to Mottingham, don't go in case it's this guy.

Dogfighting and Helmets
A couple of weeks ago, the New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article comparing dogfighting and American football. The hook for this is that the Atlanta Falcons' former superstar quarterback Michael Vick was jailed for his part in a horrible dogfighting ring a couple of years ago. It's abhorrent because the dogs are raised to do something everyone knows will lead to them being mutilated and killed, and they do it willingly because they are conditioned to please us.

Gladwell described how NFL-players - like boxers - are incredibly prone to Alzheimer's-like mental problems caused by repetitive sub-concussive head-trauma caused by clashings of helmeted heads.



Now we know this, are we colluding in a brutal spectacle that we know will lead to the brain-damage of a ridiculous percentage of the participants? Yes, the players want to, but the dogs 'want' to. But of course the players are not dogs. It's complicated. I don't have conclusions, but I have thoughts:

If you grow up in England playing rugby, you joke about how soft Americans are playing sport covered in tons of padding. This is stupid, it transpires, like most of what we think when we're young. The padding allows the huge hits. I am reminded of something I once read about bare-knuckle boxing: it was bloody and looked brutal, but no one died.



If you are hitting someone with your bare fists, you don't hit their head. It's like hitting a rock, you break your fingers and you lose. Gloves look like protection for the head, but they are protection for the hands, and opened boxing up to head trauma, which doesn't look as bad as the claret, but it kills you.

Rugby players are less susceptible to brain damage because they don't clash heads so often, because they'd get knocked out. What would happen if you played American football without helmets? I am absolutely not advocating this, I love American football, and this would obviously change the game radically, but if the game becomes medically untenable, nothing should be off the table, and removing people's helmets to protect their heads is counter-intuitive but might be worth at least a test.

Department of Great Rhetoric
As previously stated, one of my main reasons for loving American football is the quality of the writing and broadcasting that surrounds it. There is a level of earning-its-effects rhetoric, humour, deftness and self-awareness that you just don't get very often in talking about sport in Europe. There's some good stuff, obviously, and maybe if I was in America just picking the plums like the Guardian's gossip column, and not being deluged with all the daily nonsense, I would think differently. We have nothing even faintly as articulate on telly as NFL Total Access, though. The NFL preview programmes before today's game have been excruciating.

I posted this beautiful thing about 1960s racism earlier in the week, but I am absolutely posting it again. It's one of my all-time favourite things of any kind.


This one is funnier, and it again features Bill Curry, who I can't get enough of. 'This guy's not a regular human being. If we don't irritate him, he might not kill any of us this week' is a great moment, but my favourite bit is about the storm sweeping across a Kansas farmhouse.



What My Nemeses are Doing

Mike Tanier still has the job I want writing a matchup column at the NYT. Here are some of this week's highlights for the non-NFL aware:
Forcing the Rams to play the rested, healthy, post-bye Colts is like asking the wounded gazelle to wait in a narrow canyon until the cheetah catches its breath.

California native Mark Sanchez reacted to a windy autumn day as if he expected to see Emperor penguins huddled on the sidelines

This is an important game for Bengals running back Cedric Benson, who wants revenge against the team that cut him just because he was ineffective, unreliable and mired in controversy.

Josh Cribbs led the Browns in rushing last week. He also threw two passes (one was intercepted), scored one touchdown, set up the other by forcing the Steelers to squib kick in the second half, and returned a punt 26 yards. He’s the only player on the team with two touchdowns, and his hard work on special teams led directly to the Browns’ only win when he helped pin the Bills inside the 5-yard line on several punts. Cribbs’s salary is roughly an eighth of what Brady Quinn makes to stand on the sideline looking like the singer for a My Chemical Romance cover band, but the Browns refuse to renegotiate Cribbs’s contract or trade him to a new team. Think about that the next time you feel underappreciated by your boss.


One of my other Nemeses is Gregg Easterbrook, who writes Tuesday Morning Quarterback for CBS. He is my Nemesis because he gets to write at length about the NFl while doing long sections on how many planets there are, Mayan prophecies and how the Large Hadron Collider is being interfered with by particles from the future, which is a good thing because there is a small chance that the Large Hadron Collider, if it works, will create a black hole and that will be that.


Do you remember this film? I do. It seemed, at the time, to be a serious competitor for Star Wars. As it turned out, not so much. I have just been to the imdb trivia page associated with The Black Hole, and learnt:
Robert Forster was slightly hurt on the head during the storm in the greenhouse.
That really is trivial. Better is:
Dr. Reinhardt's dying words, "more light," were supposedly Johann Wolfgang Goethe's final words as well.


The London Pigeonsharks

At Football Outsiders, there is talk of some of the practicalities behind moving an NFL team to London, which gets discussed every year when the NFL says things to please the local British media. Yes, they should replace the Bills, IF it happens, and I don't think its really likely, so long as we don't have to take Trent Edwards. What would they be called? I like Bobbies, assuming this is a joke. Otherwise, birds and cats are the most popular mascots in the NFL. Pigeons? I like Crows, but it's not as good as Ravens, and that's already taken. I like wolves, but I don't see many around here. The London Foxes has a ring to it. Wait, I know, I know! The London Least Weasels.



The least weasel is incredibly fierce. Wikipedia says also that they are highly solitary and even mating does not occur without a fight. I know that feeling. If we don't go for least weasels, maybe mythological creatures. Or fish! Why didn't I think of fish! The London Tuna. The London Sharks. The London Eels. The London Cod. I'll stop now.

(They will, if it ever happens, be called the Bulldogs, and there is nothing that can be done about it.)

Fantasy Dilemmas

Because I am new to fantasy and the NFL, I spend too long looking at matchup trackers and ranking lists. Nothing between humans is more than 3 to 1, said Damon Runyon, though he didn't spend much time watching the 2009 Rams, and on any given Sunday even a wide receiving corps of the Giants' Steve Smith, Greg Jennings and Vincent Jackson (ok, he did ok) can leave you in the lurch. This week, I am debating whether to replace Jennings and Smith with Welker and Colston (yes, yes, it is a ridiculously shallow league, there are only five of us, but we're learning, and next year...).

I am also considering starting LT. In fact, I am going to. Then it is Cedric Benson or Ronnie Brown. Ronnie has been a saviour to me all season long. So it will probably be him.

I presume I will not be able to write at this length every week. Just be warned. Or grateful, according to choice.

(I know I have still not written about Ryan Leaf. I have to talk to my friend who's a primary school teacher first.)

1 comment:

xtb said...

if you applied the no helmet idea to baseball, supporting the chicago cubs would still be the most painful, unrewarding team to support. i am considering switching to nfl. at least i might get a little sports action