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."
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.
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.
