Bill Walsh - Football's greatest mind, and the man who trained the two greatest quarterbacks to ever play the game, is dead at the age of 76.
If heaven has a football team, they're switching to a new kind of offense.
Walsh is one of my few real heros. Here's to ya, Bill.
This right here is why i love hockey. What other sport would let this go on? We get a bunch of testosterone-laden, over-muscles goons get out on a playing field, work into a competitive frenzy, they we act like they're suppose to just walk like it's nothing when some joker makes a cheap shot.
The modern NFL won't even let players celebrate great plays anymore.
Not so the NHL. They let 'em work it out the old-fashioned way.
The thing that's cool about this isn't just that they're all fighting. What's cool is that the refs only stop the fights when it looks like the guy on th e bottom is beaten. If the combatants work it out and break up, the refs just let 'em go.
Here come the playoffs.
You know i tell you, any time i'm feeling stressed, i need to go to a hockey game.
There's nothing that gets it out quite like screaming and yelling, seeing guys absolutely hammering each other into the boards, and then watching the rink repair guys scrape blood off the ice before the zamboni comes out.
Last night i watched the Sharks go 'round with the Minnesota Wild (who have a really stupid name and an ugly uniform, what are those, xmas badgers or something?) The game included the return of Sharks enforcer Scott "The Sheriff" Parker (Who my daughter thinks looks like me, so I'm pretty happy about that), and a whole lot of hitting.
I have to say - as much as I'm a life-long football fan, hockey is simply the best life sport i've ever seen. It just puts me in a good mood. Particularly when there's blood.
(Wrote this a couple days ago but could not post it due to some server trouble)
Mmm, i love me some hockey.
My first game of the season - solid success, close enough to be thrilling, but never close enough that i was worried. Final score, Sharks 2, Dallas 0. I love a good shutout. I love a good hockey game. I love it best when they fight.
And the Sharks are off to their best start ever, in the whole history of the franchise.
Damn, I wish I could get season tickets, and, you know, a cool jersey:
Hockey season is officially over. Forget the cup. The Sharks are out, thus no no hockey from here matters.
When's football season start?
*sigh*
Evidently, even Mount St. Helens is rooting for the Sharks to win the stanley cup.
http://www.katu.com/news/story.asp?ID=85601
If we win, stand back. That could be some party, man.
This is where a different geek-side (Geekseid?) shows. This is where I go all sports geek.
This weekend is the NFL draft. And I hate to admit how much I care. I've been known to watch at least part of the first round on teevee, and I always track progress throughout the draft weekend.
I care who my teams (49ers, raiders, pittsburgh) take, I care who my friends teams take (miami, philly). I care who gets taken by rival teams (seattle, st louis).
I care who gets taken first, who falls in the rankings. I care about the last minute trades to jockey for position.
My team, the 49ers, have made a lot of bone-head draft moves in the last few years. Jim Drukenmiller chosen over Jake the Snake Plummer stands out as a particularly stupid one, but I look at our number one and two drafts - Mike Rumph, Kwame Harris, Israel Ifeanyi, J.J. Stokes, Reggie McGrew, Justin Smiley - and I don't see a lotta spectatular talent. Our last year's top pick, the highly paid Alex Smith, has yet to prove out and actually do a damned thing and to my mind he's got expensive failure written all over him.
So the draft is, to me, both exciting and scary. I watch my team draft the way to watch a train wreck.
Then there's Hockey. The sharks are up 3-1 vs Nashville in the first round of the stanley cup playoffs. They played a hard, thrilling game thursday, a physical game that they won, but didn't dominate. They play in Nashville tomorrow (Sunday), and can put this to bed; or they can choke, and be back in San Jose next week. My boss has tickets to that next round, so I think he's hoping for a choke, but I'd like to see this series over. This sharks team has the players to think Stanley Cup, but they have to play a lotta good hockey between now and then to have that happen.
I'm thinking about taking the top off my jeep. But you know what that means, every year. It means more rain. So, you know, maybe not quite yet.
God, I love hockey.
I haven't been a hockey fan for a long time; i tried, back in '91 when the San Jose Sharks played their first couple seasons in the lovely Cow Palace in Daly City. But no one I knew particularly cared about hockey, and the team sort of sucked, and it's really hard to figure out hockey from watching it on teevee.
So while I always cared if the sharks were winning or losing, I just never got around to going to games.
That changed a couples seasons back. After years of trying to enjoy hockey games on teevee, my boss tossed me a couple tickets, given him by some sales droid from synopsys or cadence or mentor or some other CAD tools vendor. My boss has season tickets, so he didn't need these. So I went, on a thursday night, taking Olivia, then nine or ten, with me.
I didn't expect to last long. With a hyper-active nine-year-old who didn't know a thing about the game sitting next to me, I figured we'd do well lasting into the second period. I was wrong though. We lasted through three regulation periods, and two overtimes; and when it was over, Olivia, almost passing out with exhaustion, still didn't want the game to be over. She didn't care really what the score was or even if we were winning, she just loved being there, the noise, the action, the wicked checking and fights on the ice. And I felt the same way. I loved it.
That night made hockey fans of the both of us.
I haven't been to enough games since then - I tend to forget to buy tickets until the games I want to go to are sold out. I wish I could swing season tickets, but i don't currently have the disposable income for it. And while I watch a few games each year, hockey on teevee is still a shadow of hockey live.
Hockey's unique that way. I'm used to football, a game I know incredibly well. I know all the obscure rules and can often call plays from looking at formations. I've been a dedicated football fan since I was a kid. But no matter how much I loved going to football games back when I had my 49ers season tickets, the game is always better on teevee. It's clearer what's going on. The football experience is made for teevee, the pacing and structure of the game, it's like they designed it with teevee in mind.
Even baseball works better on teevee. Unless you have great seats, you miss the core drama of baseball. The battle between pitcher and batter. The physical tension. Two men standing there not doing anything waiting, waiting, poised for a blur of frantic action, waiting. You feel the very air between them pull tight. That's it, that's baseball, and you can't see it from the stands. So while baseball in a great park (like the Giants downtown-SF park, SBC park or pac bell park or whatever it's called now) is a great experience, the game itself makes more sense in teevee.
Not hockey. Hockey is different.
Maybe it's just the tiny puck. It's hard enough to follow this thing from the stands. But more; hockey is a game of intense, frantic, crazed action. It's a game where players move like fucking race cars, where the puck, the object of play, moves like a bullet, where bodies fly through the air and get pounded into the boards. The puck itself is dangerous, the audience sit behind protective glass and the players, most of them, are missing teeth.
But I think it's the sound. You just don't get it on teevee, no matter how good your system is. The scrape and crack and snick of blades on ice, the sticks clacking and whacking together, the sound of a two hundred pound player getting pounded into the side of the rink so hard you can feel your own ribs cracking. Hockey's a highly sonic game. The ice itself reflects sound in a way no softer playing surface can. You can feel a check, and when a goal is scored, the room simply roars. No other sporty I've seen live has the sound factor hockey has.
You also get little things that teevee never shows you, and this is common to most sports; when you're there you can see a play develop around the edges. Baseball outfielders coming in tight or backing up based on who's at bat and some other signals I don't know; football safeties and cornerbacks adjusting, dropping deep or crowding up to the line. The camera will pull in tight and show you pitcher or quarterback, and you miss the edges where, often a play is made.
But Hockey's different in that the plays are set up, not in ten, or fifteen, or twenty seconds, but in two or three seconds. A player intercepts the puck and suddenly every player on the ice, on both teams, are frantically adjusting, skating at blinding speed in different directions, and you're lost; where the fuck are they going, what's he waiting for. And then suddenly you see, and they're passing the puck and shooting on goal. And it's all just a blink. It's too fast and too subtle, by the time the cameras can catch it and the director can decide to show it, it's over and you just see the center shooting, and the goalie in his sumo-wrestler pads doing an impossible split to save a goal. You don't see what both teams did to set up. And they never show that stunn in re-plays, because it's just guys whizzing around.
I've seen enough hockey, finally, that I can track it on teevee. I watched my San Jose Sharks disassemble the Nashville Predators last night, first round in this year's Stanley Cup playoffs. The Sharks now lead the series 2-1. I watched this with Olivia, up past her bedtime, watching with me. The announcers mentioned that it's been seven hundred and eight days since the last time San Jose hosted a Stanley Cup playoff game, and I realized that Olivia and I were at that game, watching the Sharks lose that day, but not caring, because just being there made it wonderful.
I love this sport. I want to be at the games.
Well, as much as I tried to get myself writing yesterday, it wound up being mostly football and lethargy. But it was pretty good football, I forgot we're in mid NFL playoffs.
I have the advantage of not caring which teams win since my teams all sucked ass this year. So I'm choosing who to root for game by game.
My total for the weekend:
Broncos vs New England - didn't watch but I would have rooted for Denver cause I like Jake Plummer. The 49ers fucked up royally when they let him slip away in the draft a few years back, and it's finally showing.
Seahawks vs Redskins - easy, Seahawks all the way. They played a great game and I'm likin' them for the superbowl.
Pittsburgh vs Indy - you know, I like Payton Manning and I like Tony Dungy, but Indy ain't as great as people think, and Payton's not the second coming of Joe Montana. He's at the top of an incredibly weak league, and while he's certainly the best QB playing right now, he's very very beatable. I'm a Pittsburgh fan from way back, they're my third team, and they beat the Colts pretty completely (despite a forth quarter comeback by indy). First time I've ever seen Manning look desperate. If Bettis can just keep running like he did this weekend (and doesn't drop any more footballs), this team will be hard to stop.
Carolina vs Da Bears - who cares? I hate them both, but rooted for Da Bears because I hate Carolina more. Stupid cat teams.
So I'm likin' a Pittsburgh vs Seattle superbowl. Carolina looked good against the bears but honestly I don't think either team belonged in the playoffs that much, they're both uneven. Denver might take Pittsburgh down but the way Pittsburgh shut down Indy, it's hard to see them getting beaten right now.
And if I was a bettin' man I'd bet on a good superbowl with Pittsburgh on top.
Now, watch me be completely wrong, which is usually what happens.
So when the football was all over, I tried to do something, but lethargy won out. So I tried to write, but THE BLOCK got me. So I decided to edit.
I've moved all my stories over from SatinSlippers to my own auxiliary writing blog (at least the few things that were up in public, but the formatting got goofed up so I've tended to point links to SS. I finally fixed that (mostly) so all my writing links are to my local stuff.
SatinSlippers used to be a pretty dynamic site but it's wound down through neglect, so I figured I might as well host locally. My stories are still there for as long as it stays around, though.
I wound up doing minor editing, but if you find something fucked up in one of my stories, leave a comment and I'll make corrections. One of these days I need to go back and do a hard and thorough edit on all of it but I always find that difficult, I start to re-write and that just bogs me down. My hope, though, is that by editing, I start to think in writing terms again. I have a couple germ ideas for short stories but I can't seem to actually get my hands on a keyboard when the moments of inspiration strike.
