Tuesday, December 17, 2013

An announcer who knows what matters

I'm taking a few days off from work, which is why I was looking for something to watch yesterday afternoon and came across ice dancing on Universal Sports Network.

It was the Grand Prix final from Fukuoka, Japan, and while it wouldn't necessarily have been my first choice, it was on, I can find ice dancing entertaining and Tanith Belbin was one of the announcers. I didn't actually see her on camera, but it was nice to know she was there.

So anyway, when the Canadian team of Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir came out to skate, the announcer (no idea who it was, like Ben Agosto, he was the dude with Tanith Belbin and if they said his name, I missed it) made sure the viewing audience knew that Virtue and Moir had never, ever won a Grand Prix final.

In fact, he so wanted us to know that Virtue and Moir had never won this very important competition, he said it at least twice.

That would be Virtue and Moir ... the 2010 Olympic champions. Trying to build a storyline for the event you're broadcasting aside, that would be like obsessing that Sarah Hughes' resume is lacking because she never won a senior U.S. or world title.



As it turns out, Virtue and Moir have still never won a Grand Prix final. The American team of Meryl Davis and Charlie White did. (Interestingly, the introduction on YouTube to the video below also notes that Davis and White have five Grand Prix final wins, and Virtue and Moir have none.)


I sure hope Virtue and Moir can recover from the crushing disappointment as they try to defend their Olympic championship.

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Tuesday, November 26, 2013

A-curling we will go

Ready to rock

"Are there a lot of curling-related deaths?"

This was not an altogether frivolous question, although it was a mostly sarcastic one, given that in my hand I was holding a waiver (!) in which I was to acknowledge, by my signature, that I was aware of the potential for serious injury or death while curling.

After the woman handling the paperwork reassured me that curling-related deaths are uncommon -- and that if I dropped a curling stone on my head, I was doing it wrong -- I signed the sheet allowing me to take part in the local curling club's introductory class last week.

My buddy Pizz and I sort of goaded each other into going, me by originally posting the notice for the class on my Facebook page, and him by saying he wanted to go if I did. Our friend Woody was originally going to go with us, but he couldn't make it.

I, like most of the 40-plus people in the class, was drawn to curling because of the Olympics, where every four years I watch it incessantly, becoming an "expert" just in time for the gold-medal match, whereupon I forget most of it. Not only does the game itself make for oddly compelling television, I would argue that there's another secret to its appeal ...

... You watch it and think, "I could do that." 

 But could we? That's what we were there to find out.

After an explanation of how the game was played, which was supposed to be accompanied by a video but the TV was missing, we headed out onto the ice to learn the basics of pushing out of the hacks, sweeping and manipulating the stones to get the desired curl.

The good news as we got ready to start our two-end mini-game was that I seemed to be getting the hang of it. I was able to push straight out of the hack without injuring myself, and it looked like I had the hang of curling the stone. (I was somewhat familiar with the concept, having been a bowler.)

Then we started playing. On my first shot, I set my sights on the target, went through each of the steps very carefully ... and then pushed the stone left. It wasn't a horrible shot, though, safely inside the house, and for a long time it looked like it would hold up for a point for our team until our opponents put one in the center.

So that left us losing 1-0 going into the second end, and I put my second shot right down the middle ... but too short for it to count. I must confess ... I'm not real hung up on being macho, but I felt like a wimp. I hoped to get a chance to redeem myself.

I did. Our opponents were in position to score another point to clinch the match when I was chosen to take the last shot. My job was simple ... put my stone closer to the center of the house or knock the other team's unguarded stone out of the house while leaving mine in. It was a chance to be a hero for my team, or as much of one as creating a 1-1 tie would create.

And I pushed it left ... again. Way left. Left like one of my golf shots into the woods left. Left like the only chance the shot had was if someone tilted the Earth's axis like a desperate pinball player.

Before I describe what happened next, let me remind you that everyone was having a great time ... laughing, joking, hanging out, high-fiving and fist-bumping each other, sweeping with more enthusiasm than effect and yelling like the skips on TV mostly just so we could yell like the skips on TV.

And oh yeah ... none of us had ever played this game before.

So what did I do?

I cursed. Multiple times. And not the breezy "Ahhh, (expletive), that really sucked" kind of way, but the one you say and the way you say it when you're really angry. In that moment, the worst part of my competitive nature, the one that I'm not proud to say I've been told can be a little scary, came out.

All because I cost my team a game that I had never played before.

I can't help it. It's who I am.

Fortunately, it subsided fairly quickly. Pizz and I talked about the Merseyside Derby the next day (he's an Everton fan and I root for Liverpool, but neither of us were to gain bragging rights this time), I sent a text to Mrs. Last Honest at her convention to St. Louis that I made it through the evening with no injuries worse than banging my kneecap on the ice and I drove home.

Would I do it again? Sure I would. I'm no threat for the 2018 Olympics, but it was fun.


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Sunday, November 17, 2013

Confessions of a soccer "tourist"

I saw an article on the Guardian website about a growing concern that the atmosphere at Premier League games has become a bit ... blah.
"For big games and on heady European nights, the atmosphere at most grounds can still make the spine tingle. At others, such as Stoke City's Britannia Stadium, it crackles no matter the opposition. But elsewhere there is a definite feeling that something is being gradually lost from the matchday experience."
Even though it's something I do mostly with extreme trepidation, I started reading the comments. The views expressed were mostly along the lines high ticket prices keeping the "real" fans out, players making so much money there's no connection to the fans anymore (I, like one of the commenters, wondered how Andre Wisdom could afford the Porsche he marooned in the mud) and all-seater stadiums meaning fans can't get together and make noise.

There was also the complaint that there are just too many damn foreigners in the game, because even I know that if there's something wrong with English soccer, blame the foreigners.

I'm no expert on the Premier League or fan behavior in England, but if I had to guess, I would say the ticket prices have a lot to do with the problem. But the comment that got my attention was this one.
"The last time I went to a live game there seemed to be more tourists than fans. People spent most of the game talking or videoing with their phones and posting the "experiance"(sic) to Facebook. Dull as dishwater."
You mean tourists like ... me?



I will confess that Fulham-Stoke would not have been my first choice for a game while I was on vacation, but Liverpool wasn't at home and the Fulham game was the game Mrs. Last Honest and I could get tickets to, and we spent a lot of time online trying to find the best deal on tickets we could.

And even though I bought a hat, I was not full of vim and vigor for the home team. Sure, I hoped they would win, but I wasn't going to scream and yell over it.

Here's the thing, though. I fully admit to being a guy who was at the game just because I wanted the experience of being at a Premier League game. That's my excuse, but what about the rest of the fans at Craven Cottage, given that the Stoke fans in attendance seemed to be far more into the proceedings than they were?

Were they not cheering because Fulham has an owner who was born in Pakistan and now lives in America and a Dutch manager? Were they angered into silence because the players were making too much money? Were they thinking, "I'd scream and holler, but look at all those foreigners out on the pitch"?

Or was it because Fulham is a bad team and the game looked for all the world like it was going to end in a goalless draw where neither keeper had much to do until Darren Bent scored for Fulham? (Granted, he is an Englishman, and people did cheer when he scored.)

Even though, as I said before, I do think high ticket prices are probably limiting crowds to people less likely to make a lot of noise, that's a generalization and there's probably no one real answer.

But I think I can say with some certainty that the "tourists" are, at worst, a tiny part of the problem.



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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Stop, ESPN, just stop

I love college basketball.

I love how, even though there are obviously teams favored to win the championship, anyone has a chance to make it to the NCAA Tournament and once there, anyone theoretically has a chance to win. It's better than college football, where the SEC is basically one national semifinal and everyone else is playing for one spot in the championship game. (I also don't have all that much faith in the four-team playoff, as I'm sure within a year that the cry will be for two, three or perhaps all four teams to be from the SEC.)

I wish I had the time and stamina to watch all of ESPN's Tip-Off Marathon, continuing as I write with Virginia Commonwealth against Virginia.

So why am I getting so ticked off?

The centerpiece of the marathon is the Champions Classic doubleheader in Chicago that starts with Kentucky-Michigan State and wraps up with Duke-Kansas. (Given Mrs. Last Honest's sympathies, however, we may wind up watching Florida-Wisconsin, which isn't too shabby, either.)

For the past few days, ESPN's promotion has been grating on me, in that they continually referred to the Duke-Kansas game not as a contest between the Blue Devils and Jayhawks, but between star freshmen Jabari Parker of Duke and Andrew Wiggins of Kansas.

I still haven't gotten an answer from The Worldwide Leader, but that's not even what has really gotten my goat.

This is.
I don't know ... how about that four legendary, really good teams with four of the best coaches in the country are playing at a neutral site on Nov. 12 when many of your best teams are content to challenge themselves by playing home games against No-Chance State? There are obviously countless things that could (and likely will) happen between now and then, but it would be no surprise to see these same four teams in Arlington next April.

For God's sake, NBA teams have barely started tanking to get one of those prize draft picks next year, so can we let the players that they're desperately trying to get play a little for the teams they're actually playing for now?

Hey ESPN, if you're so fixated on next year's draft, you might miss some pretty good basketball between now and then.



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Friday, November 1, 2013

The Red Sox won the World Series, and as you can imagine, I'm not pleased

So, you may ask, how does a lifelong Yankees fan who lives 15 miles from Boston handle the Red Sox winning the World Series?

Not all that well.

I didn't watch one single second of the World Series live, including pregame and postgame shows. If something happened that I wanted to see, I'd find it online the next day, but I cannot watch the Red Sox in the World Series. I just can't.

But there's still the Twitter machine, and I must confess, when I knew what was going to happen in Game 6 (aka ... as soon as the Red Sox took the lead), I pretty much spent the whole night whining and railing about whatever I could. (In case you're wondering, I will never let go of the Ortiz thing until the media start treating him like everyone else linked to performance-enhancing drugs, which means I'll hold onto it until I die.)





Beyond ranting and raving, I settled into a strategy of hunkering down and waiting for it all to be over. I didn't watch the news and wouldn't have read any of the next day's Boston Globe had my wife not alerted me to a couple non-sports things I'd want to look at.

That covered me at home, but what about work? I had already noted some disturbing tendencies.

So of course, one of the guys who works for me walked in Thursday, gave a high-five to a co-worker and said, "We're all part of Red Sox Nation, so I can say we won." I asked him if I could be thrown in prison for being a political dissident ... and he didn't say no.

This worries me.

My plan was basically to let people do what they were going to do, but if they left me out of it, I'd be content to listen to my headphones all day. Strangely, however, there wasn't a lot of talk about it. People chatted with each other when they first got there, and then went to work.

It was kind of strange, actually.

After I left yesterday, it was easy to resume Operation Ignore, but as the euphoria started to lessen just a tiny bit, I felt safe flipping through parts of the newspaper and very tentatively putting on the news to see what silliness they were up to. (Seriously, Boston TV news has gone straight down the crapper the past few years.)

And the parade is tomorrow, so I'm thinking that the worst should soon be over.

But just in case, this match between Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat can cover me for almost an hour.





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Thursday, October 24, 2013

How far can the NFL go in London?

Last of what eventually did wind up being three in my series about going to England. You can see the first one here and the second one here.

 There was an NFL game while I was in London. The Vikings beat the Steelers. Mrs. Last Honest and I are pretty sure we saw Wembley Stadium during the game on our way back from Liverpool.

But had it not been for all the Steelers jerseys we saw in London in the days before the game (there were also Vikings jerseys, but black and gold appeared to outnumber purple about 10-1 based on what we saw), we might not have known the game was even going on.

Perhaps that was a function of not reading a ton of newspapers or watching a lot of TV during that time, and the TV in our hotel didn't even have sports channels (the only soccer game I saw was the Champions League match between Manchester City and Bayern Munich ... in German), but coming from a place where preseason games get endless intense coverage, it didn't seem like there was a lot of hype for the game, even though it did pull in more than 83,000 fans.

We weren't exactly on the outskirts of town, either. We were a short train ride from, and spent a lot of time walking through, both Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square, and the only signs we saw of the game were a couple banners one night.

Jacksonville and San Francisco are in London this weekend, and, as an example, the sports page on The Guardian's website as of this writing (Oct. 24 at just after 3 p.m., or 8 p.m. London time) has one NFL story, about the Dallas Cowboys playing in London next year as one of three NFL games in Wembley. The U.S. sport site is, as might be expected, dominated by the World Series, with the two NFL stories on the main page being the announcement of next year's games and how horrible Florida's NFL teams are.

Yet there is talk about an NFL franchise in London, or even a Super Bowl, to which I say, "Fat chance," for various reasons.

1. Getting beyond the inroads already made -- Even the SI piece linked above states that the fan base is not quite there for an NFL team.
"The 'core fan base' in the U.K. is now more than 2 million, according to Chris Parsons, the NFL's senior vice president of international.
That's more than double the figure when the league first brought regular-season games to Wembley in 2007, but still not high enough for a franchise here to be sustainable.
'We've doubled our fan base in the last 3 1-2 to four years," Parsons said. "I'd like to see that at least double again in the next three or four years. That would put us among the top five sports in the U.K. in terms of core fan base.'"
Four million fans sounds like a lot, but if that's over the entire United Kingdom, is it enough to fill a stadium the size of Wembley eight times a year? It will be interesting to see what the attendance figures are as the NFL adds games. Before anyone talks about ramping up to a full schedule, let's see what happens when it's not a once-a-year thing.

Not to mention that a full-scale commitment to the NFL in London -- most likely with an expansion team or a terrible NFL team like the Jaguars (whose owner, Shahid Khan, also owns the Fulham soccer team) -- would require taking on soccer, a sport that may be even more entrenched in the English landscape than the NFL is here. Granted, the lack of anything similar to Major League Baseball, the NBA or NHL in England (more on that later) may give the NFL a vacuum to slip into, but would being a likely distant No. 2 be enough?

2. Playing logistics -- This Kyle Baker blog post pretty much spells out the logistical problems of having an NFL team in London, namely that it's a long way from every other team. I made the flight from Logan to Heathrow, which presumably would be the flight involved for any New England-London game, and while the planes any NFL team would take are certainly much nicer than the very nice British Airways plane I flew, it's still a haul, and I didn't have to play a football game after landing.

And that's the shortest flight.

To make London work, you would almost have to put two teams there, like the Dodgers and Giants did when they moved, so any road team playing there would at least have two games before flying back, but that would still require setting up shop in London for more than a week and finding practice facilities and arranging the schedules so that one London team was always home while the other was on the road and that they played the same opponents (and each other), etc. etc.

It would be really hard. Let's put it that way.

3. Getting people to watch -- When you live in the eastern United States, you don't realize the time implications of traveling east unless you actually go to a city like London, which is five hours ahead.

If I lived in London, the only baseball games I would be able to watch, presumably online if my computer magically allowed me to do that, would be games that start at 1 p.m. in whatever U.S. time zone the game is being played (or the 4 p.m. Fox game on Saturdays), as that would be anywhere from 6 to 9 p.m. London time. American night games, which make up the majority of the schedule? Forget it. Even on the nights I'm inspired to stay awake, a midnight start in London (7 p.m. in the eastern United States), might get you an inning or two.

And the playoffs and World Series? Americans can't stay up to watch. What do you think Brits do?

I would imagine the time difference is a major reason why it would be tough for an American sport to fully catch on in England, although the NFL, with its 1 and 4 p.m. start times on Sundays, would have the best chance. However, I don't think NBC would appreciate "Sunday Night Football" airing at 1 a.m. in London, and it would be nearly impossible to have a Sunday night or Monday night ESPN game in London, no matter how good the team is, because it wouldn't fit a prime-time schedule.

And that brings us to the Super Bowl. As the video in this post notes, London would be an awesome place to hold a Super Bowl. Having been to both New Orleans and London in recent years, London may not be quite as much fun for the Super Bowl traveling circus, especially given the weather in late January or early February, but it wouldn't be far behind.

Except the game would have to start after 11 p.m. local time (which players, fans and media at the game would just love, I say sarcastically) or early afternoon Eastern time in the United States (say goodbye millions upon millions in ad revenue).

In the video linked above, Don Banks of Sports Illustrated suggests playing the Pro Bowl in London before the Super Bowl, which actually would likely serve two purposes if the NFL tried it -- killing the Pro Bowl once and for all and killing the NFL in London.






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Saturday, October 12, 2013

Bob Uecker should have gone to see Fulham play Stoke



Second of what will probably be three parts about vacationing in England. You can see the first one here.

We showed our tickets to the usher, and he told us to walk down the steps ...

When Mrs. Last Honest and I were looking for tickets to an English Premier League game during our vacation to London, my first choice, Liverpool, was on the road, and there weren't a ton of games in the city.

The best bet was the game between Fulham and Stoke at Craven Cottage, and after much exploring on the Fulham website, we found seats that were relatively inexpensive in the mixed zone, available to home, away and neutral fans.

... so we walked down the steps, all the way to the front row, right behind the goal.

Yes, we were in the front row. When I posted pictures on Facebook after the game, my buddy Pizz asked who I killed to get the seats, and to be honest, I was shocked to see where we were sitting. The only thing I can think of is that they weren't as expensive either because they were in the mixed fan area or the seats behind the net aren't considered very desirable.

Me, I thought they were awesome.

Being able to see plays develop right in front of me? I had no complaints.



Since we got to the game early, we saw a lot of the Stoke warmup right in front of us. During one of the drills, Stoke goalkeeper Asmir Begovic tipped a ball over the bar, whereupon it bounced off a seat about six rows behind me and then right toward me. I was holding my phone in one hand, so I tried to grab the ball with the other. I'm lucky I still have a hand ... even after a tip and bouncing off a seat, that ball had some heat on it! 

That was a small clue as to the speed of the game. Even so-so to poor teams like Fulham (whose manager, Martin Jol, has been rumored to be in line for the sack, meaning the Martin Jol Memorial Death Watch is once again being applied to ... Martin Jol) and Stoke have players that can start and break up play almost faster than you can see up close. (Except Peter Crouch, who I don't think can move out of his own way.)

After a while, when I was filming corner kicks, I didn't even try to follow the ball in from the corner because I couldn't keep up.

Fear not, Martin. We're here to save you!
One thing we didn't see in front of us was a goal. A Stoke player kicked the ball into the net at one point, but it was obvious that the play was offside, so no one moved anyway. However, this still disappointed the Stoke fans in our midst, who seemed to outnumber the Fulham fans, or were at least louder, particularly the ones in the official away fans section in the upper corner, who when they weren't singing "When the Saints Go Marching In" were chanting various sometimes-profane unintelligibles.

Of course, the fans had to entertain themselves beyond the action on the pitch because, as Mrs. Last Honest noticed, there isn't a lot of extraneous stuff going on. Fulham has a mascot, but there are no cheerleaders, no games on the scoreboard, no organ music. They actually rely on people to watch the game. What a concept!

So we didn't get a goal on our end, and for most of the game, we were afraid we wouldn't see a goal, and the possibly only Premier League game I ever saw would end in a scoreless draw. Fortunately, Darren Bent tallied for Fulham, and even though it was clear on the other end of the pitch, we were able to see the play develop and the goal go in. 

Yay, a goal! Maybe Martin gets to keep his job for a couple more weeks!
After the game, we were filing out when some random guy asked the most-obvious question anyone probably heard all day.

"Are you Americans?"

I can't imagine how he figured that out, but I confirmed that yes, we were from America. He then started chatting us up in an accent that I fingernails-hanging-on-a-cliff understood about how he and his brother were lifelong Stoke fans and that English football is better than the American version.

Then he disappeared into the crowd, replaced in our conversation by another guy, clearly American, who said, "But at least in America they let you drink through all four quarters, none of this stopping 15 minutes after halftime BS."

So there you go.

My new best friends are in that group somewhere.







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Learning at Liverpool


First of a series (probably three) about my recent trip to England.

 "No major American team would stand for this."

The "this" that Mrs. Last Honest was referring to was the home-team locker room at Anfield, which we visited on what was our only trip outside London proper so we could see where my favorite soccer team played. (It was about a three-hour train ride each way, causing my wife to joke that she wished I was a Chelsea fan, given that we could see Stamford Bridge from our hotel room. After all, I originally became a Liverpool fan because I liked Fernando Torres, and he's with Chelsea now.)

Especially after having seen the kind of palatial clubhouses and locker rooms that major North American teams are used to -- including hearing about Derek Jeter having a vacant locker next to his at the old Yankee Stadium to hold his fan mail, which our guide said was a "physical impossibility" for him to answer -- the locker room at Anfield looked like a nice high school locker room.

There was a bench around the wall with the players' jerseys hanging by position (no lockers), a couple of training tables and ... that was about it.

Eighteen league titles, five European cups, home of England's captain, and this is the locker room.
And oh yeah, the fans were allowed in. There were no ropes to stand behind as we gawked. We could walk around, sit on the benches, touch the uniforms, take pictures. (By the way, I don't know the people in the photo; it was just the best chance I got to shoot the whole room.)

The man, Steven Gerrard



I'm hoping for lots of goals from these two ...



... and for him to keep the ball out of the goal.
The behind-the scenes aspects to Anfield -- the locker rooms, the manager's interview area (which we learned partly consists of the famed Boot Room and is a kitchen away from the television cameras), the pictures of Liverpool legends -- were actually among the highlights of the tour for me.

What you can't see (because it's behind me) is the kitchen.

King Kenny

Not that seeing one of the most famous soccer stadiums in all the world was a bad thing.


And hearing this was obviously pretty cool.


We were also sure to pay proper respect to Hillsborough.

They told us to take all the pictures we wanted, as long as no one was leaving something at the memorial.
Aside from what we actually saw on the tour, there were two things I found particularly striking.

Not to brag, but generally when I go on a tour, I know as much or more about where we are than most of the other people, including knowing all but one of the retired numbers on a trip to Dodger Stadium a few years back. But because I'm a fairly new fan, I don't know a lot of the history, although at least I had the good sense not to do what Mrs. Last Honest did, which was to give Manchester United for an answer when our tour guide asked what other teams had won five European Cups.

It was also pretty funny to see the picture of Robbie Fowler, given that he had kind of stepped in it a couple days before. (I actually saw him make the comment live, and cringed when he said it. I also have no problem with him being forced to apologize, given that fighting "like girls" was intended to be a high insult.)

I also realized that this might be my only shot at ever seeing Anfield. I've been on several tours -- the old Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, Air Canada Centre, Rogers Centre, the Charlotte and Daytona speedways, Chase Field -- and it's not inconceivable to think I could actually see games there if I ever went back, and in the case of the old Yankee Stadium, I have.

However, even though Mrs. Last Honest is plotting to get back to England (the vacation as a whole was amazing), I have no idea if I'll ever be there again.

So this may have been a once-in-a-lifetime thing. And that's what made it even more special.

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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Pro hockey comes back to one of my old homes

Looks good, doesn't it? Wish I could be there.

I saw this from my friend KB the other day.

Her excitement was over the announcement from the Utica Comets, the new American Hockey League affiliate of the Vancouver Canucks, about their upcoming Fan Fest. I'd be excited about Howe and the Hansons, and I'll give KB a pass on Night Ranger, since we're both about that age where that sort of thing might be exciting.

I went to college in Utica, which is where I met KB, and went to several events in the Utica Memorial Auditorium, including our graduation. There was the night when a friend and I went to one of the interminable three-hour "Monday Night Raw" tapings that WWE used to have in those days, and my time in college coincided with the last few years of the Utica Devils AHL team before they left to become the Albany River Rats.

Anyone who ever saw an event in the Aud can pick the "Slapshot" scene filmed there right away. (By the way, Roger Kahn's excellent "Good Enough to Dream" was set in Utica, and read a whole lot differently after I went there than it did beforehand.)



After the Devils left, a few pro hockey teams tried to give it ago, the first of which was the Utica Bulldogs of the United Hockey League ... where at one of their games I would have tripped over Gordie Howe if I had gotten any closer to him, but didn't know until it was too late.

Howe was on a tour of minor league cities, I believe to mark some kind of anniversary, and his son Marty was the coach of the Bulldogs, so Utica was one of his stops. My roommate and I went to the game, and between periods, he signed autographs in a corner of the arena, but as you might imagine, the line was quite long, so we skipped it.

At some point later on, we were walking through the concourse when a group of about four or five guys in suits breezed past us. No big deal, except that we didn't realize until they were past us that the guy in the middle of the suits was ... Gordie Howe himself.

To be honest, I don't know what we would have done if we figured it out beforehand, and I'd say the odds were good that the other guys in the suits would have kept us from doing too much, but it's still a fun story about being a goof.

The Bulldogs begat the Blizzard, who begat the Mohawk Valley Prowlers, but none of them lasted, and the Utica College hockey team has been left to satisfy the local hockey fans ever since, and given that they have led Division III teams in attendance the last seven years, the community has taken to the Pioneers.

Given the way it ended for pro hockey in Utica, I was stunned to read that Vancouver was putting its AHL team there. I'm not sure why they would want to put their top affiliate nearly all the way across the continent, but I'm just happy they did, if only so I can be perhaps the only person in the world to say that two of my favorite places, Vancouver and Utica, have joined forces.

I hope it works out for both the Comets and the Pioneers.



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Friday, September 13, 2013

Mascots and morons (with some stuff about certain Red Sox fans)

So ... a Boston Red Sox fan named Trevor James Martin allegedly attacked Raymond the Tampa Bay Rays mascot the other night. You'll be shocked to hear that at least some people are claiming he was intoxicated.

(Side note -- What is the appeal of alcohol? It doesn't taste good, costs more than other drinks and has a weird way of making you do stupid things and feeling like crap the next morning ... even if you don't remember the stupid things you did while you were drunk the night before. But I digress ...)

Now, most civilized human beings would think it's a bad thing to choke another person, and beyond that, it's certainly bad form to try to choke a mascot at a sporting event, but you'll be happy to know that while what Martin allegedly did is wrong ... the person who previously played Raymond was mean to Red Sox fans!
"(Previous Raymond Kelly) Frank is known in the mascot industry for being antagonistic, and during the years she played Raymond, it was the prime of Red Sox Nation, when the fans treated Tropicana Field like a home game.
 'It was 60 percent Boston fans,” she said, adding they would treat Tampa like the minor leagues and get 'vacation drunk. 'So I would do anything I could to annoy the hell out of them.' ...
... Frank is known for 'an acerbic, smart-butt attitude to her characters,' said David Raymond, who played the original Phillie Phanatic for 17 years and now designs mascot brands and trains performers. 'She’s not working there anymore in part because of the in-your-face personality she developed.'”
Yes, Ms. Frank apparently has a history. According to the article, she was fired as the Tampa Bay Lightning mascot after she attacked a Bruins fan with a Taser ... I mean Silly String. Sorry, it was Silly String. (She claims he was being drunk and obnoxious.)

There are a couple of points I'd like to make here. First of all, I understand that mascots can perhaps being annoying at times -- I, for one, am not a fan of the Stanford Tree, and my boy Poopsie was apparently traumatized by the Phillie Phanatic (yeah, Dave Raymond ... you) -- but if your temper operates on such a hair trigger that you feel the need to hit one, perhaps you need to engage in some self-reflection.

As for my other point, there's that whole thing Frank mentioned about Red Sox fans being drunk and obnoxious during the days when "taking over" someone's ballpark was something that they bragged about like they're the only fans ever to have done such a thing. (The Yankees say hi.)

Well, Frank had a little more to say about that.
"Frank played Raymond from 2004 to 2008, during the Sox glory years, and antagonizing Boston fans was the most thrilling thing to do behind the fur, and also the most dangerous. After the Sox won the World Series in 2004, she said, Boston fans invading the Trop became 'less knowledgeable, more obnoxious,' and some of the drunkest she’s ever seen. Raymond went at them, she said, but approached it like scaring someone in a haunted house -- quickly, before they threw a punch, because many people think it’s OK to punch a mascot."
Apparently, there's a lot of self-reflection required. Who knew?

As someone who lives among Red Sox fans, some of whom I'm pretty sure honestly believe I have a mental disorder for being a Yankees fan, I can tell you that they don't realize how badly they blew it in 2004. The sports world was their oyster. They won their first World Series in 86 years, vanquishing their ancient rivals in dramatic, historic fashion along the way, something that traumatized me the way the Phanatic traumatized Poopsie.

And so what did they do? Well, a lot of them went from zero to obnoxious in less time that it takes to chant the "Je" in "Jeter sucks," something which, by the way, even though I've heard it for years, I've never heard anyone admit to. "Oh no, I don't approve of that sort of thing," they say. "I respect Jeter!"

If I may over-generalize for a moment, I'd say the worst offenders are the bandwagon jumpers, the ones I call "lifelong fans since 2004" and others call "pink hats," which is probably sexist because pink hats implies women and believe me, the ranks of newbie, uninformed Red Sox fans include lots of guys. They're the ones for whom 2004 was not the joyful, satisfying culmination of a journey, but a coronation proving their awesomeness, and it has only gotten worse since then.

In short, the most obnoxious among Red Sox fans ... like a guy who would allegedly get stupid drunk and attack a mascot ... are what they believe Yankees fans are like.

Just don't say that out loud.







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Sunday, September 8, 2013

The NFL can apparently even change the holidays

When I saw this, I got a little nervous.

If today is Christmas, I thought, where is my family? Where is the tree? Where are the presents, and what did I even ask for? Why can't I remember seeing my in-laws last night, and where did we go? What happened when Mrs. Last Honest and I went to England, and where are the photos and videos I took? How was Thanksgiving?

On the other hand, the Christmas-morning weather, especially for Massachusetts, was all kinds of awesome.

Then I realized, silly me, that the "Christmas" being referred to was not actually Dec. 25, but rather the first Sunday of the NFL season. I even managed to figure that out without putting on all 9,000 pregame shows that were on today. I swear, every sports network other than MLB Network, NBA TV and the NHL Network has one, and that's coming, I'm sure.

The national mania surrounding the NFL has fascinated me for several years now. How has a sport grown so much in popularity that it dominates the landscape not just during its season, but 12 months out of the year, to the point where the first Sunday of its schedule is cited as on par with the biggest holiday of the year?

There are probably a lot of factors, but the one that strikes me is that the NFL, over the course of the last 50-plus years, if you want to consider the start date to be when Pete Rozelle was named commissioner in 1960 (or, if you're so inclined, the 1958 NFL Championship game), has built to this point where it has convinced the sporting public, with a lot of help from the media, that everything it does is very important.



Between the draft, free agency, various mini-camps, actual training camps and exhibition games between seasons, there is NFL-related activity pretty much all year, and all of it is treated as vital, and therefore worthy of attention, even above sports whose actual seasons, and in some cases playoffs, are happening at the same time.

Another part of the narrative is that the NFL is very hard, and therefore requires intense preparation and maximum effort at all times all year, in a way not unlike the president has to approach the job. It's to the point where a beloved teammate and team leader being cut is only worth noting briefly, lest it take away any focus on the job at hand.
"When a veteran gets cut, we may discuss it privately amongst ourselves, but there’s no ceremony, no coach’s acknowledgement of the missing man. I never saw Mike collect his things from his locker, and I didn’t get to shake his hand. The next morning, it’s as if no one had ever occupied the locker that once read No. 26. In meetings, the agenda is the same as it was the day before: Win today. And somebody who’s no longer in the room isn’t a part of today."
The end result of the NFL taking itself so seriously and emphasizing the importance of everything attached to it, and making sure everyone knows this, is that the media and therefore the fans treat it the same way. It builds so much anticipation that the games are not events in and of themselves, but culminations, the end results of all that came before.

To be clear, the NFL didn't create this from nothing. Football has been popular for decades, but the NFL has done a masterful, textbook-worthy job of stoking that popularity to the point where it sometimes seems like nothing else matters.



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Sunday, August 25, 2013

Being told I'm full of crap (and maybe I was)

When I posted my blog post about Danica Patrick on Twitter earlier today, I tagged the person I was writing about, because I thought it would be really weak if I wrote about her behind her back with no way for her to see it or respond.

Well, she saw it, and she responded.

To review, this is what I based the post on.
However, she said there was more to it than what I saw, so here it is.

It was someone else who made the jealousy crack, but otherwise, it was all me.

And we've been having a conversation ever since.





And yes, during the conversation, I asked the question ... and she replied.
Kudos to her for that.

I said it in the conversation, and I'll say it here. If there was something I missed, that led me to the wrong conclusion ... I'm sorry.
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Chickening out

There was this very odd incident in the NASCAR race at Bristol last night when Danica Patrick was coming off pit road just as a restart happened, and were it not for some evasive action, there could have been a huge pileup.

I don't think Gluck would be offended if you said he was skeptical at best about Danica's NASCAR career to date and her prospects going forward, but there have been a few times where she has done something well and he has given her credit for that much. I am also well aware that such relative open-mindedness is not universal, and since I sometimes enjoy exploring human nastiness, against any semblance of good judgment, I decided to read the replies to Gluck's post.

Where I found this.
I have been known, once in a while, to start an argument or two or 1,000. Most lately have been about Alex Rodriguez, but I even got into it with someone lately over whether a team from Westport, CT, should represent New England in the Little League World Series.




There was more, which I'll spare you, but we ended on a more-or-less friendly note.

But as much as I wanted to (and as much as Mrs. Last Honest, who hates when I argue with people, wanted me to), I couldn't start what could have been quite the argument with the question I was dying to ask ...
... Who is teaching your daughter to think that way?
Saying a woman belongs in the kitchen, meaning that's all she's good for, is one of the most sexist things you can say about a person, along with saying all she's good for is sex.

I don't think all of the criticism of Danica Patrick is because she's a woman. I'm sure there are people who legitimately feel her accomplishments-to-attention ratio is skewed -- although they should probably take that up with the broadcasters, particularly Fox, as it seems that TNT and ESPN have not played her up as much -- but for some reason, it's more personal when it comes to her. Can't imagine why.

(Multiple times, I have asked critics, including Kyle Petty, what they would do if she ever got good. The rare times I do get an answer, it's "She never will," which avoids the question for what I think is the same reason I have trouble engaging critics on Twitter ... too many questions.)

So why did I chicken out in the face of what looked like completely obvious sexism?

Because it involved her daughter.

A friend of mine home-schools his children, and we were having a discussion of it one day, and I made the point that while in the public schools the teachers have to be licensed, it's not required for home-schooling. Since it's his wife that teaches their kids, he took my comment VERY personally, and the conversation got kind of ugly for a few minutes.

If I had asked the question I wanted to ask last night, not only would I have called her out as sexist (which is personal enough), I would have pretty much stated that she or the girl's father was a bad parent. I don't know the woman or the girl's father; they may be outstanding parents other than one awful comment.

And that's what stopped me from pulling that trigger, not that everyone had that problem.




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Monday, August 19, 2013

Confessions of a bad fan

So ... some stuff happened in the Yankees-Red Sox game last night.



This nutter from Joe Giradi is one of the best I've ever seen. Joe
Torre would have sat on his behind and hoped the power of his
calm would make everything stop.

 From that moment on, I wanted the Yankees to get even, even if it meant CC Sabathia would have been immediately thrown out, thanks to the stupid way umpires implement the warning rule, which has the effect of giving one team a free shot ... or two, or three, or four.


I've made my thoughts on David Ortiz known more than once (and had a heated chat with my Red Sox fan mother-in-law about it over lunch yesterday), so I'll spare another rant. Instead, I'll leave it to The Captain's Blog.

I shouldn't be proud of wanting to see a player I don't like on a team I don't like getting hit by a pitch and being upset when it didn't happen. (Even though I understand there really was no right time during the rest of the game to do it, I'm a believer that if you wait until the "right time," that time may never come up.)

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was when, during the middle of the game, I turned to Mrs. Last Honest and said ...
"I don't even care if the Yankees win this game. I just want to see Ortiz get hit." 
Yes, I prioritized retaliation over winning a game, a game that would have won a series over the Yankees' bitter rivals, at a time of the season when the Yankees need every win they can get. Mrs. Last Honest didn't really say much of anything, but I could tell by the look on her face that she thought I had lost my mind.

And I kind of had. In that moment, I became the guy I hate, the guy I wrote about at the end of the game, when the Yankees were on their way to victory.

I'll try to be better next time.

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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Coincidence? I think not

Before its college football preview, this week's Sports Illustrated had a story about "Glimmer Twins" Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano, whose presence in the Minnesota Twins system was likened to having Mike Trout and Bryce Harper in the same organization.

If all goes according to plan, Buxton and Sano will lead the Twins for years to come, although an interesting sidebar to the story listed the other five times since 1990 that one organization had two position players in the top five of Baseball America's prospect rankings: Alex Gonzalez and Carlos Delgado (1994 Blue Jays), Ruben Rivera and Derek Jeter (1995 Yankees, and Rivera was ranked higher), Paul Konerko and Adrian Beltre (1998 Dodgers), B.J. Upton and Delmon Young (2004 Devil Rays) and Justin Upton and Stephen Drew (2006 Diamondbacks).

Out of that group, Rivera is the only outright bust, but Jeter is the only surefire Hall-of-Famer in the bunch, and the Konerko-Beltre pairing is the only one where you could say both became stars ... but not both for the Dodgers at the same time.

Something more subtly interesting, however, at least to me, was writer Albert Chen's description of Sano:
"Sano is a 6'4", 200-pound man-child, the kind of physical specimen that would have SEC coaches breaking NCAA recruiting rules."
Not "college football coaches," "Big 10 coaches," "Pac-12 coaches," "Big 12 coaches" or coaches from any other conference.

You can't tell me that wasn't intentional, that anyone reading that sentence doesn't understand exactly what Chen was getting at. But had they forgotten by the time they got to the college football preview itself, which had seven SEC teams in the top 25?

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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Hollander's handbooks and a trip back in time

I don't really know why the New York Times decided to publish a story today about Zander Hollander, but I'm glad they did.
"From 1971 to 1997, Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-like tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information — statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and more — freed from the restrictions of newspaper column inches and far beyond what a still embryonic cable system was providing."
I was actually thinking about the Hollander handbooks not long ago, remembering for some reason the story in the 1980 handbook (like the others I had as a kid, long lost to time and cleaning, so I'm working somewhat off memory here) about Nolan Ryan being the first player to sign a contract for more than $1 million per year, and how the story about his contract and all the others totalling $1 million fit on a single page, including the box listing all of them.

Actually, thinking of the handbooks I read as a kid reminds me of how different things were ...

... how they told you about every player in the NBA, right down to the last man on the bench, and the brutal honesty about them contained in a couple short paragraphs. Now, you can find out more about any end-of-the-bench player (I chose Fab Melo of the Celtics as an example) than you could ever imagine.

... how "fantasy football" meant the stories in my friend Kenny's NFL handbooks about a team of current stars playing a collection of greats from the past, or Super Bowls years in the future, including as I recall an American team taking on one from the Soviet Union.

... how the handbook was probably the definitive preview of your favorite team's season. Now, you can find previews everywhere, like the one my friend Rob did the other day on the San Diego Chargers that he asked me to review. (I told him, "You probably could have gotten away with five versions of 'Can they stop being undisciplined dumbasses?' and been fine.")

... how enthralled I was reading the handbook for the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, with the picture of an Eastern European team handball player soaring above a defender to shoot or a photo of the Soviet Union's Uljana Semjonova taking a hook shot. My preteen self wondered how a woman could ever be that tall. Now, people complain when the prime-time hours of the ungodly amount available on TV or online aren't live.

Thinking of the handbooks also made me think about how there has never been a better time to be a sports fan, and how that doesn't seem like enough anymore.

There are more ways to see more sports and read more about sports than there ever has been, and much like I think of my younger self as having lived in the Dark Ages, kids today will probably think of 2013 as a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

If you're willing to spend the time and effort, and sometimes the money, you can watch just about anything you want. During the Stanley Cup finals, I had a grand old time chatting with a Blackhawks fan from Chicago, and have struck up a Twitter friendship with a New England Patriots fan who lives in Miami.

Last night, after reading a terrific piece by Alyson Footer, I had a conversation with her about it. (To be clear, the Harwell example she gives is something positive, not part of the worst anyone did to her.)




All of that is great, but I fear it has the effect of not much being special anymore. Maybe the Super Bowl (although that may be as much a cultural event as a sporting one) or a rare instance of going to a game, but because so much sports is available so often, it becomes disposable. Miss one game? There's another one on today ... or tomorrow ... or the next day.

So most importantly, thinking about the handbooks reminds me of how good we sports fans have it today.
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Thursday, August 1, 2013

Three of my favorites


On his new blog, Joe Posnanski is asking people to write about their favorite athletes in 100 words or less.

I've already written about mine, Don Mattingly, in far more than 100 words, but I'll give it a shot with three others who are favorites both because of their greatness and because of the connections they have led to.

* * * * *

Jerseys of two pretty good players ...  and Diana Taurasi
For me, Diana Taurasi is women's basketball.

I never followed it until I started dating the future Mrs. Last Honest, who is a massive Connecticut fan, and so it was that one of the first games I watched was the UConn-Tennessee game Dec. 31, 2000. when Taurasi, a freshman, sparked the Huskies off the bench.

It was love (basketball love, that is) at first sight.

And there's so much to love: her shooting, her passing, her fun, her devilish sense of humor. And by the good fortune of when I started dating my wife, I've been there from the start.

* * * * *
Gilmour ... Dougie Gilmour
My junior and senior years in college, we only took breaks from hockey on the Sega for several things: classes, eating, sleeping, the radio station, going out occasionally ...


One of the stations we got locally aired the CBC, which meant Saturday night hockey, which usually meant the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hard as it may be to believe, the Leafs were really good in those years, and Doug Gilmour was the leader of the pack, passing, scoring, hitting and throwing his body all over the ice.

Me and my boys couldn't get enough.

* * * * *
I wish I could have seen more of these.
When I was growing up, my father and I watched baseball. As I got older, he drifted away from baseball and toward Michael Jordan, who I hated.

Then he got into NASCAR, and drew me into it. It gave us something to talk about, and since Dale Earnhardt was his favorite driver, he became mine. A thrill of my first NASCAR race in Dover was seeing Earnhardt come out for second-round qualifying, which he rarely did back then.

We didn't see him win like he did in his best days, but we had Bristol, Talladega and, of course, Daytona.






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