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.

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. 

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. 

Vintage Cardboard Gems

I recently received these awesome vintage cards in the mail from Mark over at RetroSimba, (Check it out, it’s one of the most important baseball publications out there) and I was curious about the history of these cardboard gems. Here’s a wonderful vignette Mark wrote about those origins:

My boyhood world in the 1960s was Bayonne, N.J., a working-class city of ethnic neighborhoods across the bay from New York City. Depending on what part of town the Catholic church was in, you could hear Masses conducted in Polish, Italian, German, Spanish, English, and, of course, Latin.

Chuck Wepner, the heavyweight prizefighter, operated a liquor store on Broadway. They called him “The Bayonne Bleeder,” because of the pounding he took in the ring. Sylvester Stallone acknowledged Wepner was the model for the “Rocky” movie character. Like the city he came from, “The Bayonne Bleeder” was tough and streetwise. He went 15 rounds with Muhammad Ali. When he worked the champ into a corner, Wepner stepped on his foot so he couldn’t shuffle, then knocked him on his ass.

Around the block from where I lived on 31st Street was Sam Pope’s candy store. Sam and his wife ran the place. She always was nice. Sam always was all business. He wore a wide, white apron and would pass for the twin of actor Vincent Gardenia.

The store was stuffed with stuff, but my attention was on the same items: Comic books, Spaldeens, popsicles, Chuckles candy, gum, and baseball cards.

A pack of baseball cards cost a nickel. I’d dig out a pack near the bottom of the shelf, the theory being that’s where Sam Pope was stashing the ones containing my favorite players. Nothing quite matched the exhilaration of spilling out onto the sidewalk, tearing open the pack, and examining each card, hoping that behind every Washington Senators player or checklist was a Hank Aaron or Roger Maris.

The start of the school year meant the end of the baseball card supply at Sam Pope’s. It felt like another lifetime or two would have to pass before the new sets arrived in spring.

Bring back these uni’s, please.

Then, on a visit to the store one autumn day, a batch of cards appeared on the shelf. What’s this? Football cards? Sweet Jesus. What genius thought of this?

On TV, football players were faceless people in helmets with big numbers on their backs. The football cards brought them to life. So, that’s what Merlin Olsen looks like.

The names and faces captivated the imagination. Is there a more perfect name for an offensive lineman than Tom Mack? On his football card, he looked as solid as the truck, too. A quarterback with the name of both a gladiator and an archangel? There he is–Roman Gabriel, looking the part.

I saved my baseball and football cards, adding more over the years. They accompanied me on every journey from childhood to adulthood.

Now, I like to give them to others to enjoy. Some go to a school in Indiantown. Others delight sons of friends or kids in my Florida neighborhood. And a few have found their way to a Rams blogger, a young talent with an old soul.

Rams Bloody and Beat Brady’s pirates

The last time the Rams and Bucs played in the playoffs was the NFC Championship in January of 2000, and I feel like I’ve lived ten hardscrabble lives since then. I was working at a bakery/cafe and unfortunately had to work that day, (yours truly was fired soon thereafter for calling in sick and was caught red-handed by one of his co-workers at a party later that night having a good time) but watched the second half at a little Irish tavern across the street where Christina Aguilera’s awful “What a Girl Wants” was playing on the juke–the number one hit at the time.

Ricky Proehl caught a TD pass from Mr. Hollywood with 4 minutes and change on the clock to squeak out an 11-6 win and metamorphosed into a Rams legend in the process. I remember feeling elated, but the bar was completely dead, (on a Sunday?) and there wasn’t a soul to celebrate with. In the end, I’m glad it played out the way it did, and I’m glad I was alone as I needed pause to process the culmination of elation, foregone heartbreak, time, and their relation to each other. Sports does weird shit to people, and apparently existential dread is one of them.

My cousin sent me a DM on the day of the modern game. He’s a Raiders fan, so of course, the message was cocky and demanding even though the “bad boys” in black haven’t done jack shit since Rich Gannon was throttled by his recently slandered ex-coach, Chucky Cheese in the SB. They have so much misguided pride–it’s actually kind of endearing once you get past the pathetic part.

Sunday’s game was a sphincter punch as well but just not in the same way the 2000 game was:

–Blowing a  27-3 lead by allowing 24 consecutive points caused by 3 (!) second-half turnovers and a missed field goal. 

–A Tom Brady split lip 

– Cam Akers with 2 HUGE fumbles, the second of which caused a mini-stroke and histrionic fits

–Cooper ” Mr. YAC” Kupp being otherworldly. 

I woke up this morning only to listen to the talking heads make every excuse for Tom Brady that could possibly be incorporated into an argument, (never once mentioning that his entire career was bad optics for a sport often whispered to be fabricated) and it seems the gratuitous worship is getting ridiculous to the point that it borders on the homoerotic. C’mon guys, my only request is that we stick strictly to sports and logical analytics and leave your closeted sexuality for your unsatisfied wives and uninterested therapist to deal with. I’m not trying to be hyperbolic either. Now…onward to the NFC Championship against our arch-rivals and nemesis–The San Francisco Whiners–and we will take with us an open mind, an open heart, and a love for people who embrace their true sexuality without hindrance. Now didn’t we all learn a lesson here?

Rams Advance to Play the Bucs in the “Land of Strip Clubs” on Sunday

The “Bye Bye St. Louis” Bowl

What kind of idiot decides to do a weekly gridiron vignette when the season is almost over? Well, I suppose it takes a special kind of stupid but you can’t decide when inspiration strikes and that’s what ostensibly happened.

As the devil himself said via the Rolling Stones, “Please allow me to introduce myself.” I have been a Rams fan since 1986, and not once have I cried when my squad was eliminated from the playoffs. (ok, well maybe I shattered a few random things against the wall) The question is– will Cowboys fans ever shed their reputation as (literal) crybabies after being outed on national television sobbing en masse like toddlers? Redemption isn’t foreseeable anytime soon, as the memes were flying and people actually stopped watching porn or trolling political forums for a few hours Sunday evening in order to join the melee. Kick ‘em while they’re down I say–particularly those smug asswipes from Texas. Give the song “The Crying Game” a spin if you get the chance, it’s a 1964 classic crooned by Dave Berry and it’s frightfully fitting for the dystopian shit show that occurred in Arlington that day. I think we can all agree that it’s a favorable time to be a therapist in the greater Dallas area.

Tonight’s game in LaLa Land brought back memories of an ex-girlfriend whose father would play bocce ball in the park with his friends while ingesting copious amounts of red wine, prosciutto, and smoked meats. We would lay in the grass while the old men smoked cigars, and she’d read my horoscope–which I thought was a sham–but she was a beautiful Italian girl, and I let her read to me so I could listen to her voice and watch her flip her hair while the sweat would bead above her lips. Her family had transplanted to Phoenix (a desolate, hot as balls, facsimile of hell) and her dad would tell me almost gleefully, “The Rams aren’t worth a shit!” in the New York City linguistic tradition of being biased against pronouncing an “r.” How could I be offended? I’d been hearing that for over 20 years in multiple linguistics to the point of exhaustion, and I was also respectfully shagging his daughter, my fidanzata.

Well, it was a fun game for about 2 quarters, but the contest was in the barf bag pretty early helping Matty Stafford finally get the malicious playoff monkey off his back. I ran out of beer in the 3rd quarter, so I stumbled to the corner store without fear of missing anything. The Rams now advance to play Old Man “Tuck Rule” Brady and the Buccaneers next week in the tropical, and full-on batshit crazy “Land of a Million Strip Clubs.” Brady is 44 years old and apparently still playing because of his vegan diet, a nightly cold cream made from the blood of virgins, and a softer, more humane NFL. Will he be gently touched on the shoulder garnering a “roughing the passer” penalty? Tune in to find out! Earlier in the day, I was aimlessly checking out LA Rams sites where I stumbled upon an (inspirational?) poem written by an 8-year-old called “Keep on Ramming It,” and for some reason, football wasn’t the conjured imagery. Thanks for keeping pigskin innuendo alive, kid–let’s keep the spirit of John Madden in our hearts and in our dirty minds.