FOXBORO, Massachusetts. Five times the New England Patriots had made it to the AFC Championship Game, and five times they had won. Until Sunday night.
Belichick and Pioli
"It was a tough loss, but we've got to move on," said Scott Pioli, the Patriots' VP of Player Personnel regarding the Indianapolis Colts' 38-34 come-from-behind win over the three-time Super Bowl champions.
Pioli says he and Bill Belichick, the Patriots' notoriously detail-oriented head coach, will be reviewing their depth chart over the next few weeks in an effort to improve the team, and that they won't stop at the sidelines. "We intend to take a hard look at some of our fans, many of whom have done a great job with their game-day fetishes over the years, but who may have lost a little of their mojo."
"36-42 cover, shoot--ready? Break!"
In Weymouth, Massachusetts, for example, Brian Shaw has carried the Pats' (as they are referred to affectionately around here) for years with a superstitious routine that involves the same underwear he wore in 1985 when the team "Squished the Fish", defeating the Miami Dolphins 31-14 to advance to Super Bowl XX against the Chicago Bears. "I've gone from a 36 to a 42 waist in the past two decades," says Shaw, "so the boxers were getting kind of small." "Frankly, Brian has lost a step," said linebacker Tully Banta-Cain, "and you can't play one-on-one defense against Marvin Harrison with a guy whose underwear is too tight for him."
The Barnacle
In nearby Hull, Massachusetts, a seaside community where locals gather at The Barnacle on Sundays to watch the Patriots on five TV screens, regular Howie Slater has traditionally "held it in" the entire second half in the belief that the football gods look with favor on his sacrifice. "You look back to the Snow Bowl game against Oakland in 2002, where we got the call on the 'tuck rule'," Slater says. "I stayed right on my barstool waiting for the replay and the challenge, and I'd been drinking pitchers of Miller Lite all freakin' day," he recalls. "Ever since, I don't move the whole second half even if I have to pee down my leg."
"I've heard of wet tee-shirt night, but never wet pants leg."
Pioli says there will be a number of interesting free agent fans on the market in the offseason, including Floyd Turnbull, a Broncos' season-ticket holder who refuses to bathe for the entire weekend during football season unless Denver has a bye week.
Shanahan: "Either get that guy out of the stadium, or get me some Glade Air Freshener!"
"Mike Shanahan has owned the Patriots for the past two seasons, and adding Turnbull could be a difference maker for New England," said ESPN pro football nerd John Clayton. "It's a move that would be welcomed be Broncos fans, who like to give Turnbull a mile-wide berth at Mile High."
FOXBORO, Massachusetts. New England Patriots wide receiver Reche Caldwell was cleared to play in this week's game against the Miami Dolphins after taking a vicious hit to the head last Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Caldwell: "You don't know jack about Bloomsbury, man!"
"He's fully recovered," said Dr. Harry Wernick who examined Caldwell at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital yesterday. Wernick led a "dream team" of neurologists and other physicians who administered a battery of tests to Caldwell.
Dr. Harry Wernick and his "dream team" colleagues.
"We started out in the traditional way, asking Reche who was president, who's the vice president and so on," said Wernick. "He named the entire Bush cabinet, the current justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the original members of the Shirelles and all of Elvis's number one records. Then he named the principal dancers of the American Ballet Theatre for the past thirty years in inverse order of height starting with Mikhail Baryshnikov."
The Shirelles
Caldwell's remarkable mental feats did not surprise fellow Patriot Rodney Harrison, who is also known for his hard tackling. "Sometimes a hit like that can clear your head," Harrison said. "I came up to him to make sure he was all right and he said 'Harrison, William Henry--Old Tippecanoe--right?' I said no, I'm Rodney--your teammate. He says 'I know--I'm just messin' with ya.'" The ninth President of the United States, William Henry Harrison died after just thirty days in office, but was picked up on waivers by the San Diego Chargers.
President William Henry Harrison
Bengals' safety Kevin Kaesviharn made the hit that brought Caldwell down, but he was the one left shaking his head. "He bet me I couldn't name five members of the Bloomsbury Group. I rattled off Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey pretty quick, then I was stuck. He starts in with Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and David Garnett. I had to get back to the huddle but he just kept goin' with Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard Woolf."
Virginia Woolf
The Bloomsbury Group began as an informal social assembly of Cambridge University graduates in the late 19th century who mingled at events held by the Apostles secret society. After the merger of the NFL into the AFL in 1969, the group became known as the Kansas City Chiefs.
Baseball fans opened their newspapers this morning to learn that a federal indictment of Barry Bonds on charges of perjury or tax evasion or both is imminent. Bonds' attorneys will fight until his last dollar is gone, mucking up the sports pages with legal jargon and spoiling the innocence of T-ballers across the nation.
"Daddy," little Timmy asks. "What's a plea bargain?"
And all the while, the guilty go free. You know who I'm talking about. The team that, for forty-three years, has disgraced major league baseball by donning clothes that no self-respecting professional athlete should wear, even behind closed doors.
I am referring to the Oakland A's, and their green, gold and white uniforms.
Oakland was famously described by expatriate poet Gertrude Stein with the put-down "There's no there there." After a cup of coffee in the major leagues of literature, Stein has been sent back to the minors, but her aesthetic judgment is still solid, at least when it comes to the A's uniforms. There's no there there, only a why, or maybe a whatthehell.
For the record, the A's have been around for 105 years, and have worn the green and gold for less than half of that period. In 1963, Charles O. Finley, the owner of the then-Kansas City Athletics, decided to change the team's colors to Kelly Green, Fort Knox (or Finley) Gold and Wedding Gown White. Four years later, he went further, replacing the standard black polish on the team's cleats with white. That color combo remains in effect today, making the A's look like a bowling team that took a wrong turn on their way back to the bar and wandered out into the bright light of day.
Finley was responsible for other dubious innovations, all adopted in an effort to boost attendance for a losing team in a small market. He installed a mechanical rabbit named "Harvey" (after the imaginary rabbit in the Jimmy Stewart movie of the same name) behind home plate to deliver new balls to the ump. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of major league stadiums that currently feature the rabbit-o-matic ball service--if you're a one-armed man.
He put goats beyond the outfield fence in left field at Kansas City's Memorial Stadium to eat the grass. He adopted a live mule--"Charlie-O"--as a mascot, and once brought it into the press room to annoy reporters after it had recently been fed. In order to keep FoxSports.com free of inappropriate content, I will leave the rest of this incident to your imaginations.
Finley eventually moved the team to Oakland and turned it around, producing three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974. He sold the team in 1981, but his legacy of lunacy lives on in those green and gold uniforms. The team's mascot appears on the sleeves of their jerseys as a green elephant, thereby obscuring a part of baseball history.
The Athletics' original mascot--a white elephant--is pictured above. The team acquired that nickname when John McGraw remarked that John Shibe and Connie Mack "had a White Elephant on their hands" when they bought the Philadelphia Athletics with the intention of competing against the Phillies, their cross-town rivals in the National League. A white elephant, for those unfamiliar with a slang term that has fallen into disuse, refers to an item that once acquired is hard to get rid of. (Tag sales were often referred to as "white elephant" sales by shoppers from generations past.)
Finley's color scheme violates aesthetic principles that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. As Aristotle noted in his Poetics, "It is essential when choosing the clothing to be worn by a group of athletes that one not make them appear as if they are a slow-pitch softball team. Also, no vertical-striped socks like the AFL Denver Broncos."
So consider this a call to re-examine baseball's priorities. Performance-enhancing drugs may represent the ugly side of a baseball player's will to win, but at least you can't see them when you turn on your TV. The A's uniforms have got to go.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. #### Vermeil has been coach of the year at every level of football from Pop Warner to the pros. He's got nothing left to prove.
That may explain why the man who won a Super Bowl with the Rams in 1999 is looking to try something different now that he's retired from the Chiefs, and will take a position with Lifetime Television for Women writing sob-story screenplays.
"Football has been great to me, but it's time to follow my dream," Vermeil said with a lump in his throat at a press conference here today. The emotional California native has worn his emotions on his sleeve throughout his career, often bursting into tears when his defense forces a turnover, or a kick coverage team pins an opponent inside its twenty-yard line.
"Our kids and our grandkids are grown, so this team became my kids," Vermeil said as he fought back sniffles. Quarterback Trent Green came up to complain that Tony Gonzalez wasn't sharing the Legos, and Vermeil warned the tight end to play nice or he'd tell team owner Lamar Hunt to trade him to Buffalo.
Lifetime TV is 50% owned by The Walt Disney Company and targets female audiences with "disease-of-the-week" films, real-life accounts of husbands who forget their wives' birthdays, and other domestic tragedies.
Vermeil, the oldest coach in the NFL until his retirement at 69, holds the state record for the longest distance driven by a senior citizen with a turn signal on according to the Missouri Highway Patrol. Vermeil traveled the length of Interstate 70 from St. Louis to Kansas City, a distance of 250 miles, with his right blinker flashing when he took over as head coach of the Chiefs in 2001.
"I came out of the clover-leaf at St. Charles and just completely forgot about it!"
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
