Jim Jodat…Buddy Holly Glasses, Iron Man

So I’m watching a Rams/49ers game from 1977 when announcer Vin Scully mentions to his cohort Sonny Jergensen that the Rams kick returner is wearing coke-bottle, Buddy Holly-style glasses, which immediately catches my attention. I had never seen such a thing and was instantly intrigued. Who was this guy? (note: this was also Joe Namath’s last game as a starter for the Rams, outdueling Jim Plunkett 34-14.)

I must admit that Jim Jodat certainly didn’t look like much of an athlete, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote.

He had a squatty build and suspect eyesight, but he sure could run. The 5-foot-11, 210-pound Milwaukee native also had a fanatical work ethic and gritty determination that drove him to become Carthage College’s career leader in rushing, to play in the NFL for seven seasons, and to return the opening kickoff in Super Bowl XIV in 1980.

In 1976, Jodat was selected by the Los Angeles Rams in the 12th round of the NFL draft, the 344th overall pick. He went on to play with the Rams, the Seattle Seahawks, and the San Diego Chargers over seven seasons.

Jodat spent his rookie season on injured reserve with a sprained knee. In 1977 he made his mark on special teams since the Rams’ backfield was clogged with talented backs John Cappelletti, Lawrence McCutcheon, Cullen Bryant, and Wendell Tyler.

“He was behind a lot of great players with the Rams, but Jim was never a guy to try and talk a coach into more playing time,” Tom Brannon said. “He just didn’t have that kind of personality.”

In January 1980, Jodat appeared on the cover of The Sporting News as the special teams’ captain for the Rams. Jodat, as mentioned above, returned the opening kickoff for Los Angeles in Super Bowl XIV against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Unfortunately, the Steelers won, 31-19 after the Rams let a 19-17 lead dissolve in the fourth quarter.

Jodat died on October 21, 2015, of cancer in Lake Forest, Ca.

Wendell Tyler’s Car Accident

Wendell Tyler was 23 and coming into the prime of his life. He’d just signed a new contract with the Rams after rushing for 1,109 yards and leading the team to the Super Bowl, where they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers.

He’d gone to West Virginia with his wife in the offseason to spend time around her family. On the night of July 4, 1980, he went to a dance at a local church. It was the offseason and Wendell thought he was entitled to a good time, and by the end of the night, he was tired so he slept while his brother-in-law drove home.

When Tyler’s brother-in-law fell asleep at the wheel with his foot on the accelerator, the car careened into the ditch and came to a stop against a mountain. The brother-in-law had a broken arm. The brother-in-law’s neighbor, who had been in the back seat, had a broken leg. Tyler was lucky–he dislocated his hip.

The car got the worst of it. ”It looked like an accordion,” Tyler said. ”Only you couldn’t play it.” He laughed weakly at his joke, then said seriously, ”It was truly a traumatic experience.”

Tyler spent the next two weeks in a hospital, with not much more to do than think about how he had got there. Even now, with his fortunes turned around and his life in order, he shudders to think what might have happened had the car lurched in the other direction towards a cliffside.

In 1981 the Rams finished 6-10, but Tyler ran for 1,074 yards and scored 12 touchdowns. In 1982 the strike cut his yardage production nearly in half, but he still scored nine touchdowns.

”I was lucky,” he said of the auto accident. ”I had a non-football-related injury. The Rams didn’t have to pay me, or do anything. But they stuck by me. They took care of me, even after the doctor had told me I only had a 10 percent chance to play again.”

Eventually, when the Rams figured they had a chance to get Eric Dickerson, they traded Tyler to the 49ers with Cody Jones, an aging defensive lineman, and a third-round draft choice for one of the 49ers’ two second-round draft choices and a selection in the fourth round.

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I’d like to send a wholehearted thank you to Michael Cruz of the 702 Rams Club for sending me this AWESOME swag recently. Please check out their site for some really great t-shirts, beanies, pins, and stickers. If you’re in the Las Vegas area they have weekly family-friendly gatherings for all the games during the season. It really is a great organization, and if I didn’t live a thousand miles away I would definitely be a weekly attendee, although I’m proud to support them from afar in Texas. (Oh yeah…f*ck the Cowboys)

This Team Stinks

It was November football at its worst, played in the shadow of a billionaire’s shiny new toy and a cadre of bored celebrities. I have so many projects left unfinished–paintings left unattended and books left unread. Yet, I still find time to watch this team without fail every week and every week it’s the same lifeless dumpster fire. I’ve also considered that I could be doing other things like going for a hike, chugging suds at the local brew pub, or kayaking on the river. More life-affirming, nuanced pursuits. 

What happened? Well, the Rams are a horrible excuse for a football team, losing 27-17 at home to the god-awful Arizona Cardinals (who played without their own starting QB) to fall to 3-6 in a game that really wasn’t as close as the final score indicated. This was an unwatchable display from every perspective and one could compare the experience to spending the weekend in a rainstorm with an ex-girlfriend that you particularly despise. This team has challenged the theory over and over that there are limits to incompetence. Still, as always, my loyalty remains…it’s just how I’m hardwired.  

Football is undoubtedly bread and circuses, but when it fails to appease why would you sit around and subconsciously suck up the endless array of overblown and heavy-handed truck and beer ads if you didn’t have to? Why would you watch an endless number of exasperating 3-and-outs while holding your head in your hands and wishing that lunatic Putin would just push the goddamn nuke button? Popular consensus and the good ol’ fashioned eyeball test tell me that this squad, frankly, sucks.

I have followed this team since 1986 when I (unfortunately?) fell head over heels in love, and have endured decades of dark and forbidding futility, including a prepubescent and unstable bedroom thrashing after a Wild Card loss to the now antiquatedly named Redskins. (that loss was a highlight compared to the 90’s dregs decade, and was also an early sign of my future psychotic behavior, or “fandom.”) Heed this stubborn and broken fan’s amusing and unjust example of testicular fortitude: “Wait ‘till next year!”

Horns Beat the Red Birds in the Desert

I usually don’t give the best advice, but smoking half a doobie and having a few man-sodas before your afternoon walk isn’t the worst thing in the world. My tiny neighborhood world seemed hushed and restful and Billy Joel’s Big Shot was blaring through my headphones. I have a precarious relationship with this “hangover” song–sometimes I find it to be charming and at others it makes me want to tear my eyeballs out with its repetitive chorus that open palm slaps the nouveau rich NY coke scene.

The Piano Man was an infamous alcoholic/car crash aficionado who is doing much better these days now that he is sober and finally accepting of his divorce from Christie Brinkley. (ever notice how banging supermodels makes you borderline suicidal in the end? depression as humble pie.) I was having none of that, however, as today I was going to watch some ol’ pigskin on the tube and cheer until my heart burst while pounding a Wade Boggs-on-an-airplane amount of beer. ‘Merica.

I was three-sheets-to-the-wind by halftime and had crushed about 8 of the self-styled “King of Beers.” Budweiser tastes like beer-flavored water because it’s not something you’re supposed to sit around and contemplate. The taste of “nothing” (or a fizzy water drink lightly flavored with grains and a touch of malt) is nostalgia. Its advertising campaigns – its entire ethos – seem designed to target a particular drinking style and drinking public, more than any particular flavor. It’s meant to be quaffed mindlessly until your running back fumbles the ball on the 1-yard line and you can sense your inner maniac slowly rising from the pit of your stomach in a crescendo of childish and loosey-goosey irrational behavior that ends with a copy of Steely Dan’s Can’t Buy a Thrill album being hurled against the wall. Good times.

In the end, the Rams held on for a very hard-fought 20-12 divisional road win against a pesky Arizona Cardinals team that hung around all game but faltered in part thanks to some very strong red zone Rams defense. I thought Matt Stafford played very well. He was 18-25 249 yards for a rating of 103.6, was sacked once, and threw no interceptions. Aaron Donald also added to his legacy by garnering his 100th sack. It’s always good to get that first divisional win, and the Rams are sitting at 2-1 having won two in a row. The squad still hasn’t hit their stride, however, and is definitely not in championship form, but the season is young and there is no reason to fret or wax poetic quite yet.

Hiccup.

The Origin of the Horn

Fred Gehrke was a Rams halfback who was an art major in college and worked during the offseason as a technical illustrator for aircraft companies in Los Angeles. In early 1948, he had the idea to paint the team’s plain leather helmets blue with yellow ram horns. In those days, helmets sometimes had a stripe or two, but no one had ever thought to put a logo on one.

While this show of creativity seemed obvious to Fred, he had to take a helmet home and paint it for his coach to understand exactly what he was getting on about. ” I took one of those gosh-awful brown leather helmets and painted it blue, then made a free rendering of a ram’s horns in gold. It’s the same thing they have today, except the gold is now white, due to television. The blue-and-gold helmet was much prettier,” said Gehrke

When team owner Dan Reeves saw the helmet, he liked it so much that he offered Gehrke $1 per helmet to paint the rest of the team’s 75 lids over the summer. When the helmets made their debut on the field, the stunned L.A. Coliseum crowd reacted with a five-minute standing ovation. An icon was born.

Often, Gehrke would take helmets home at night to retouch the ram’s horns which suffered chipping damage from player collisions. Eventually, a logo frenzy followed. The Baltimore Colts followed with the second logo–the famous horseshoe. These were the first steps in creating team identities and brand loyalty that could be commercialized to generate income for teams and the league as a whole.

Gehrke died at the age of 83 in 2002.

Jack Snow, Palm Springs, and Chuckie Manson

“Hippie is all yesterday’s headline bullshit.” –Allen Ginsberg

Snow and Elizabeth Montgomery

Sherri was from Florida and smoked Marlboro Lights. She was from a very small town–a coastal town so humid that it called for tube tops and short shorts that barely concealed the beads of sweat dripping down her hairless legs. This was an existence of double-wide trailers, crack cocaine, titty bars, barely legible tattoos, and a life philosophy of “I need my shit.” 

Despite her dubious upbringing, I liked Sherri, so when she asked me to house-sit over a weekend in Palm Springs I obliged because I wanted to soak up some rays by her pool and maybe even party with her degenerate neighbor, who just happened to be a semi-famous game show host (now cancelled) from Vancouver that didn’t have many friends and was adamant about global warming denial. A relaxing way to commune with myself. 

“You can smoke pot inside, but there is no internet so I’m not sure you’re gonna make it out of here with your mental health intact,” she briefed. “And keep it mellow…no Miles Davis crap.” (I didn’t get the reference either, perhaps she was intimating his infamous heroin habit?) 

There was, however, a television from what looked to be the Nixon era, so I decided to embrace the nostalgia tapestry and settled on a show called Bewitched from 1969. LA Rams receiver Jack Snow just happened to be a guest on this episode, and Snow was magically transported (by a witch, of course) in this fictional world from the gridiron to a department store where high jinks ensues. When informed he was now in New York he looked dumbfounded. 

“I was just playing the Cowboys in Dallas, Texas,” he said, “and was running a down and out pattern.” (Snow was known to have excellent hands, and his son, J.T. inherited those trusty mitts as he was a 6-time gold glover in the big leagues)

There was also a Rosemary’s Baby reference in this episode which was a sobering moment as director Roman Polanski’s wife would be murdered roughly six months after it aired. A group of brainwashed, hippie dope fiends snuffed out her and her child’s life over an unrelated dispute between Charles Manson and Byrds producer Terry Melcher, who just happened to be Doris Day’s son. The so-called end of the “Summer of Love” thanks to a drug-addled criminal and a bored Beach Boy (Dennis Wilson’s solo project left much to be desired) who just simply wanted to fuck mud-caked hippies proves that there truly is only one relevant subject–the relation of beings to time. 

A Mellow Saturday Visit To Night Train

“It is a sign of a coward who says, “This is my bad luck and I will have to accept it.” A positive thinker would say, “I will decide my fate and my own destiny.”–Richard “Night Train” Lane

Sometimes as you get older you learn to not sweat the small stuff, take life day by day, and how to take ‘er easy. All cliches, I know, but getting older is somewhat tricky, so I just follow the social cues and mind my own business and it seems to work out for the most part. Pious life advice aside, a friend and I decided to check out one of those breweries that also sells coffee and pastries over on the bohemian/east side of town. Idyllic domesticity. You can sit outside at a table and stare at people or dogs or even the band on stage as you sip your beverage of choice. It’s nothing special, but it was a fine-by-me-activity on a delightful, breezy, and sunny Saturday.

Before the festivities, however, we decided to stop by football/Rams great Dick “Night Train” Lane’s grave and pay homage. Dick was known as one of football’s most fearsome hitters, and when he wasn’t knocking your block off, he was picking your quarterback’s pocket as he holds the single-season NFL record for interceptions with 14 set in 1952. The cemetery, being predominantly black, was vandalized a few years back with spray paint, but the community came together and scrubbed away all the offensive garbage. The story made me angry and sad, but I was also proud of the community for their tenacity and how it bolstered their dauntless and bountiful sense of pride. You’ll find that most knuckleheads like the “graffiti artist” don’t have much determination or bravery, so eventually, they just give up until their decrepit brain and unfounded hatred devours their flimsy psyche.

Dick himself had a rather rocky upbringing as he was thrust into the world by a prostitute and her pimp, and after roughly three months they were irritated by the child so he was simply placed in a garbage can amongst newspapers. Discarded like trash.

Lane later recalled, “My father was called Texas Slim. I never saw him – I don’t know if he’s the one that told my mother to throw me away. A pimp told my mother I had to go. They put me in a trash can and took off. Some people heard me crying. They thought it was a cat.”

Our lives are impacted by forces we cannot explain, often changed for reasons we will never totally understand. Can you call it kismet? Dick survived the trash bin and was thereafter adopted and raised by a loving woman, eventually going on to play minor league baseball before joining the U.S. Army. After serving four years he worked in an aircraft plant in Los Angeles but found the work tedious and unsatisfying. He would ride the bus to the job every day and observed that he was passing by the L.A. Rams offices. Fate leads the willing and drags along the reluctant: one fine day Lane waltzed in and asked for a tryout and was almost immediately signed. Imagine the cajones on this guy! Night Train, in the course of time, played in the NFL for 14 seasons, and like most old-school players was charming and urbane on the surface with a fierce, smashmouth steeliness below.

Lane was eventually worn down by complications from diabetes and reduced mobility from numerous knee surgeries. He died of a heart attack at an assisted living center in Austin, Texas on January 29, 2002.  He was 74 years old.

RIP ‘Train. 

“Tank” Gets in Trouble While Tanked

Hardly a “bum.”

L.A. Rams fullback Paul “Tank” Younger played before his home team fans in the Jan. 10, 1953, Pro Bowl game. Few of those fans, though, knew that Younger was in the game on something of a “work release” program. Younger earned $600 playing in the game, which his National Conference team won, 27-7.

A Los Angeles judge had earlier sentenced Young to 14 days in jail for assault, plus a year on probation, but stayed the sentence so Younger could participate in the charity game.

Younger had been convicted of giving his mother-in-law, Neatheola Olermo, a “shove” after she had called him a “bum football player,” and threw a Moscow Mule — complete with copper mug — at him in an alleged drunken fracas.

Later that year, Younger’s 19-year-old wife Wylene sued him for divorce for the second time in their year-old marriage, alleging that he had struck her, “on numerous occasions.”

Everything wasn’t all bad for Younger, however, as he was the first African-American to become an NFL front-office administrator, working for the Rams until retiring in 1995. He lived in Los Angeles, California until his death on September 15, 2001, at the age of 73.

Remember the L.A. Rams Ode to “Ramming?”

“I learned long ago that if you Ram It just right, you can Ram It all day and Ram It all night”.

If you’re just listening to this song in a strictly audio context, (see sidebar to listen) it might vaguely register in the adolescent portion of your brain that there are some lyrics in “Ram It” that could be considered references to, like, fucking. The question as to whether these references are naive and accidental or wink-and-nudge purposeful eventually evaporates into a damp cloud of mortified discomfort when the visuals are added in. It is one thing to hear Gary Jeter describe his defensive prowess in terms like “I come from the end, lookin’ for the sack/I don’t stop comin’ ’til I put ’em on their back.” It is another, far more bewildering situation to actually see it with his accompanying shimmies and wiggles and scowls.

There are other bits that scan as embarrassing in more bad-showbiz ways. Jim Collins, already dealing with the disappointment of being sidelined with a season-long shoulder injury, delivers his lines with a dissociative, middle-distance stare and a half-hearted shoulder shake. Carl Ekern both looks and sounds like he’s rapping through gritted teeth as he hunch-straddles over a motorcycle. But let’s face it: there are a lot of verses in this song that juxtapose a fondness for Ladies and an enthusiasm for Rammin’ It in a pretty suggestive way. And that’s where the comments section comes in.

Trying to track real-world sentiment through YouTube comments is like trying to follow the news from bathroom graffiti. Suffice it to say that a lot of them are along the lines of “this is gay”—not merely in the teenage “synonym for unmacho corniness” sense but in the belief that “Let’s Ram It,” despite being an actual NFL Officially Licensed Product created in the nauseatingly normative heart of 80s Reagan America, is literally an expression of homosexual desire. I’m not at the proper Kinsey scale point to confirm this in the positive, and I’m not struck with the kind of anxious-hetero Penis Panic that immediately jumps to the negative interpretation. But something seems to be at work here, even with the full assumption that this video was intended as “a little something for the ladies.”

This is because there’s no camp in football. Nope. No thanks. Save your comedic irony or your Tim & Eric weirdness for lower-stakes sports like baseball or basketball, the ones with a modicum of tolerance for absurdists and eccentrics like Bill Lee or Shaq or Ichiro. Under the imperium of The Shield, where punk meant Jim McMahon writing passive-aggressive Pete Rozelle callouts on his unauthorized headband, there is only Pride and Honor and Battle; humor and irreverence seem to be abandoned unless it is somehow accidentally buttfumbled into existence.

The NFL, as it exists at this moment, is an anti-nonconformity machine constructed to make examples out of the Cam Newtons and Ricky Williamses of the world, and the one game that’s least aware of its status as a game. It has leveraged that self-serious attitude to become the single most omnipresent entertainment institution in the entire United States. Our valiant gridiron heroes must never look like anything less than the most constricting, conservative version of True Manhood; if they fuck that up somehow, then that facade has crumbled. One must never let that mask slip, ever.

For some Rams players, participation in the “Let’s Ram It” video wound up defining them more substantially than their actual playing careers. Norwood Vann, who caps off his verse with a hip thrust that would make “Ravishing” Rick Rude stammer, has more Wikipedia verbiage on his “energetic appearance” in the video than on his actual pro career. For others, it’s a goofy footnote, the kind of thing that might get dragged out as a clip if the Hall of Fame induction ceremony ever doubled as a roast. (“Hey Slater, are you actually playing that saxophone?”)

They are all worth saluting: grown men unafraid to look like total goofy ding-dongs, many of them not far removed from historic athletic landmarks or careers that would enshrine them in Canton. This song is silly, yeah. It’s definitely easy to laugh at, even if it means inadvertently laughing with it, too.

And if you’ve sincerely believe there’s no place for this kind of ridiculousness in professional sports? Well, these dudes have a suggestion as to what you can do with it.

Written by: Nate Patrin, Vice Magazine, Feb. 2016

Rams make Bangles feel a “Manic Sunday”

Poor girls never stood a chance.

I decided to try something different and be a bit more social, so I attended a SB party at the behest and invite by my equally anti-social “lady friend.” This was the type of party where everyone would listen in rapt attention as someone recounted a plot in a movie they had seen recently or a trivial disagreement with a co-worker: a mishmash of nightmarish, repetitive, anti-narrative while the most mundane modern pop and Axe Body Spray wafted and commingled in the background.

There was a sense that everyone was desperately trying to be charming and urbane. Of course, I was made to feel like a caveman for drinking beer instead of margaritas, unapologetically tearing into the hors d’oeuvres, (kudos to the hired old lady that created them–and who was obviously unimpressed by the soul-crushing atmosphere) and actually being concerned about the outcome–but with both parties enjoying the consummate pinnacle of self-congratulatory, late capitalistic, trashy, commercialized absurdity…who can judge?

What can I say that hasn’t been blathered ad nauseam about this game? (even I’m tired of hearing about the X’s and O’s) I certainly didn’t start writing to become redundant, and that seems to be the MO of any sports writing hack with a laptop and limited knowledge of sports history and even more limited writing skills. These Bangles weren’t the mustache-twirling villains like the Patriots. No, my friends, these were the dumb-luck, up-and-comers who gave Cincinnati fans the delusional fantasy for about 2 weeks that they had the greatest QB of all time! Perhaps a fool’s paradise is a better option than a loser’s purgatory–and don’t most of these nitwits live in (shudder) Ohio? I seriously want to imbibe on whatever psychedelic substance they were collectively smoking, (I’m envisioning a Jefferson Airplane video with Grace Slick twirling around in a Ja’Marr Chase jersey, bathed in a spinning, multicolored strobe light with a couple guys off camera whipping bath towels to spread the dry ice smoke.) but as I like to often say, “sports does weird shit to people.” 

A random idiot had the gall to say L.A. was “Raiders Country” until I finally spoke up, no doubt miffed by the Radiohead/PM Dawn remix in the background. 

“I have lived in Los Angeles for the better part of a decade, good sir, and not ONCE have I seen a single piece of Raiders gear being worn by an actual human.” 

Another ham-fisted narrative, spoken for the sake of narrative, burned to the ground. Tinseltown is a city where you can’t even walk to the corner store without seeing a Dodgers cap, so the unadulterated fandom is there–just not on the side of the one-eyed pirate and their billionaire owner whose hair is occasionally cut by a blind 8-year-old with a salad bowl and pruning shears. 

We all know what happens. Cooper Kupp on a jet sweep on 4th down. Matty Stafford with the no-look pass to Kupp for a 22-yard-gain that destroyed the hearts, minds, and delusions of many Cincinnatians, (Perhaps the death of WKRP’s fictional Johnny Fever was a close second?) as Aaron Donald impersonated Lawrence Taylor in Tecmo Bowl “beast mode” to end the game. Grown men crying, formulating excuses and conspiracy theories, essentially making Cowboys fans look like the apex of masculinity and good sportsmanship. The good guys get the trophy and I’m elated because I waited 20-plus years to see this again, and all the B.S. seems to drift into the background. I stumble home knowing my cats were going to be troubled that I wasn’t there to give them dinner. It’s hard to believe, but they really don’t give a toss about the Rams or the Super Bowl…the hungry little bastards.