All posts tagged with "sports"

There's this video that I remember from my childhood. It must have regularly come on right as Saturday morning cartoons were ending. It was the opening bit to Indiana football or basketball games.

This morning, I woke up really early, got busy scrolling through internet garbage, and then ended up waking Ko up late. I drop him off downtown, where a bus takes him to his school. This saves me a good 45 minutes, most of which is crawling through heavy traffic to get in and out of the neighborhood where his school is. So it's very important for me to make the bus.

Yes, LSU holds the record for the Rocco's Jello Shot challenge, but the record is tainted. I'm not happy about what I consider to be foul play.

Marathon, boat related, beer drinking, swim meet. This post is just a disjointed mess of small things that have been going on.

Some thoughts about the college football games this weekend, and is there still such a place as Key West?

I probably spent half a day just to come up with eight puns.

I'm going to write a whole post dumping on Clemson football, and then tell you in a single sentence that I want them to win the national championship.

I just heard that the Washington Redskins store had a Cyber Monday sale. Great deals, we missed, but you had to go to the web site, pick out what you want, and phone them to place your order.

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I really wish someone would run a weekend marathon of old That's Incredible episodes from the 1970s. I bet that show is so over-the-top bad, that the producers are embarrassed to have been associated with it. But when I was in elementary school, everyone watched it every single week. (I wonder what it's competition was. Sure, there were just three channels, but still....)

Let's face it. Unless you travel somewhere -- and somewhere doesn't include Baton Rouge -- summer is D - U - L - L, dull. College baseball is over (at least for me it's over), and the NBA will be done pretty soon. Let's not pretend that Major League Baseball is interesting. (At least not the games. The steroid controversies are a little interesting.) I have yet to cut the sleeves off of a collared shirt, and therefore don't have that part of my brain that would also allow me to follow NASCAR.

I think I mentioned once that Auburn fans think that the LSU fans smell like corn dogs. I had heard this through word of mouth, and then at the Auburn game last year, I actually heard an Auburn guy walking around LSU's campus say, "It sure does smell like corn dogs around here."

I'm sure that there's an age when a man's body and mind go through a change, and that change causes the first thought in the morning to be about the need to urinate, rather than "I'm horny." I don't know when that happens, but I'll let you know when I get there.

As I predicted in this space on Friday morning, my bracket crashed and burned spectacularly. I followed up my 14-2 Thursday with a 6-10 Friday, and of the 6 I picked correctly, 3 were a 1 seed beating a 16 seed. So really, you could call my record 3-10 on games that were questionable. It's perhaps the most unimpressive day one can have when picking basketball results.

Every year, the NCAA basketball tournament, St. Patrick, and perfect Spring temperatures conspire to make this the best weekend of the year. Either the basketball or the St. Patrick's day parade alone would make this a big deal for me, but the combination of the two make this bigger than Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, or the highly overrated Fourth of July. Heck, it might eclipse all of the fun in those days combined.

Our friend Stacie recently moved to the Dallas area. I picked up the phone one weekend right after she moved there and had a conversation that went something like this. Stacie: "Hey, what's on NBC in your house right now?"

They say that Superbowl Sunday is the biggest day of the year for wife-beatings. There's simply no reason for that. It's easy to come to a common agreement if you just try a little bit. For example,

The title of this isn't wrong. I have opinions on all of the major sport coaches at LSU.

It's been over a week since I mentioned college football here, so we're long overdue. I've enjoyed just about every LSU game this season, particularly the overtime wins over Alabama and Auburn. The Bama win is a fresh memory. The Auburn win will go down in history as "the missed field goal game."

Here are four things I know about football right now, that I didn't know Saturday morning:

I normally don't really care about major league baseball. The game is too slow, and any particular game in the regular season is too meaningless. By the time the games are important, it's football season, and regular season football ranks higher on my interest scale than post season baseball. No question about it.

I mentioned in my post about tailgating on Saturday that there were a couple of little stories that I would add later in the week. First, I want to elaborate on Shelly's request for text messaged scores while she was in Tiger stadium. She didn't say it explicitly, but clearly, she was looking for USC vs. Notre Dame updates. What she got was this series of messages, copied and pasted dirctly from my phone.

This weekend, we had our first LSU tailgate party of the year that actually happened on a Saturday. We had absolutely perfect weather to sit outside and cook and bullshit for the entire day. I think we can all agree that God owed us some good football weather, and he didn't disappoint.

I guess that today was the day that all of our new Saints fans in San Antonio found out what being a Saints fan is all about. Joe San Antonio was probably settling into his couch at noon, pretty geeked up about his new favorite NFL team. He went to the game last week, yelled long and loud, and saw his team play pretty well in beating a mediocre Buffalo squad. Today's game was against 0-4 Green Bay, who was additionally handicapped by multiple injuries to key players.

It's a good thing that college football isn't normally played on Monday night. It's a bad thing that I used up my "way too drunk" tailgate day on a Monday.

I suppose that some of you noticed that I haven't posted a damned thing in a long time. It turns out that I needed a little hiatus. "Hiatus" is a fun word, don't you think? Say it out loud right now. I dare you not to laugh. Anyway, we have a lot of catching up to do. This will be a long post.

Earlier this week, I took a tennis lesson. I don't really play too much tennis. Up until a year or two ago, I played for a couple of hours one night a week with a group of guys from work. We all sucked (more or less), but we kept up a regular game for a year or more. It was something to get outside and do with no distracting computer monitors.

College baseball for LSU finished up yesterday, ending college sports for the year (sorry Track and Field -- I just don't care), and starting the long, hot countdown to football season. Hopefully, the end of the school year takes with it the Regal Beagle LSU Jinx.

When I started riding in organized cycling events, I was always amazed at the guys with big, fat guts that could ride up and down hills like mother---ers with motors. How did they get so fit, but manage to stay fat? I don't really know how mother nature lets that happen, but I'm a walking/peddling laboratory for study of the phenomenon. I'm at least 15-20 pounds over my ideal weight, and I'm five pounds of pure gut over the heaviest that I've ever been. (If you've seen me and don't think this could be, then you should see me clad in some tight synthetic cycling gear. It ain't pretty.)

At the end of Friday concluded the best two days of the sports year. 32 college basketball games, packed in over 12 hours. I'm giving out awards.

As a basketball fan. the main thing that I haven't figured out is how much to heckle the opposition at a woman's basketball game. This is an important question for me this year, because the LSU men's team just is not that good, and the Hornets are downright godawful.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm tired of hearing people complain about how LSU did this season. There are two reasons that these complaints are annoying. First, we <b>just won the doggone national championship!</b> And in fact, we are still the national champions for another month. (Read that bold part again, and just try not to smile.) More importantly, LSU had a good season this year. Keep reading, and I'll back that up.

I guess the magic in my dirty blue hat is gone. There's no doubt that the magic existed, but there's also no doubt that it isn't there any more. Let's review the history of the magic hat. I bought the hat as a souvenir in Maine last August. It was a nice hat. Nothing special, but I liked it. I had also bought a hat at the track in Saratoga on that same trip. Again, it was nothing special.

The lapse between the previous entry and this one is probably the longest gap I've had between online entries. The reason has to do with the problems that my hosting provider unintentionally dumped on my site, which I only mention in case you blame my natural laziness. This leaves me with a backlog of topics to explore, some more interesting than others. I'm going to start with one of the less interesting: my thoughts on the Olympics.

I have really put this out of shape body through too much in the past week. Monday was one of the most sore days that I've had in several years. Today isn't a lot better, to be honest. I'm not really old enough yet to sit here an enumerate all of my aches and pains. (Although I could see getting to that point in 20 years or so. Won't that be exciting!)

I can't get enough of the Tour de France on TV. I've been watching the tour since all we got was a half-hour highlight show in the evening. Now, OLN shows us every grueling minute three times a day, so if I make the slightest effort to watch, I can catch the stage. This year, TIVO makes it all the more viewable, since I can skip the commercials and start the viewing when I'm ready for it.

I had a good time this weekend watching the Belmont Stakes. For the archivists reading this years in the future, 2004 was the year that the 35/1 long shot named Birdstone beat the favorite of both the bettors and the general public, Smarty Jones. Smarty Jones won the Kentucky Derby in the muck, then the Preakness by 11 1/2 lengths, so it was hard to imagine him getting beat. He went off at about 1/5. A truer sure thing I can't remember, but alas, it didn't work out that way.

When I was just a youngster, I took pride in being able to name the stadiums and ballparks of all of the NFL, NBA, and major league baseball teams. Now, I wouldn't place money that I could name any of them. It's not the corporate naming or all of the new stadium building that threw me. I kept up with the first round of all of that without any trouble. The problem is when corporations change names, fail, or just opt out of their naming right.

Last week, I had the chance to attend a very unusual double header. It started with game 4 of the Hornets-Heat playoff series. Tip off at 7:00 in New Orleans arena, followed by the LSU-Tulane baseball game next door in the Superdome. he basketball game was great. We had seats on the 10th row in the corner.

I don't seem to find myself as excited about what's on TV lately. And since I have nothing else to tell you all about, allow me share some complaints.

It started with an email last Wednesday from Shelly. Yes, we went to see little people wrestling. It's as problematic as you're thinking it might be.

The biggest story of my football lifetime is LSU's national championship this season. I used to say that if LSU wins the national championship in the Sugar Bowl, that I would give up watching football, since there would be nothing left to hope for. I'm still considering that as the plan for Fall, but for now, let's reflect on this past season.