Out in LA: Rugby

The Alma Mater vs. UCLA

Vintage Baseball: Palmdale Blue Stockings

 

Football in L.A.

Football in L.A. is mostly the Trojans. Sure the town now has two pro teams, neither of which are the Raiders, and UCLA has been playing well the past few years, but still, when people here think of pro football, odds are they mean soccer.But the Rams are back in town and no matter with whom they share a stadium, be it Carl Lewis or Marcus Allen, they will all be playing in one of America’s most iconic venues.

I will watch anyone play football any where, but not every game is played in a place with an olympic cauldron {insert shout-out to the University of Utah here}. Now granted, most other venues have better luxury suites, or tailgating, or at least one modern bell or whistle, but none of them are in Los Angeles.

And being in L.A. means elote and agua fresca. Everywhere should have elote.

Now forgive my limited sample size (just LA and Philly), but here is what I can say from what I have seen- or experienced. Rams crowds are about 1/28th as aggressive as Eagles crowds. Perhaps it is because of the better weather, or because you would need a pitcher’s arm in order to hurl a battery from the cheap seats to the field in the Coliseum, but I saw people wearing the other team’s jersey in the stands without harassment. I got a sun burn. No one hurled obscenities at their own team’s players. But, in both places, the players ran, tackled, threw, caught and kicked.

And football fans were pretty much still themselves.

A Prayer of Thanks and Thanksgiving

For some of us there is an inexplicable need to crash into another person. There is no malice in it, just a reciprocal pleasure in collision. Its fun.

At this season of giving thanks, and turkey bowls, I must offer my gratitude for those who have fostered God’s great game on Earth. Whether it be the primordial birth at English boarding school, the formation of an ivy league, or the frozen tundra of Vince Lombardi’s soul- thank you.

Thank you to Joe Cool, Ronnie Lott, Jerry Rice, the backfield combo of high knees crazy eyed Roger Craig and smash mouth soft handed Tom Rathman and the greatest second string QB to ever play, for making the fandom of my youth worthwhile.

Thank you Walter Camp for making Web Ellis’s game into a militaristic chess match and thank you Bo Jackson for knowing.

There may possibly, but only maybe, be some other way to satisfy the mannish desire to dress up in armor and gear and run and jump and win and lose and scream and play and dance and fall down and put your face right into someone so hard that snot bubbles up in their nostrils and spit flies from their throat and then you offer your hand to help them up. Or maybe you just stand over them and roar. There may be some other way, or venue, to do these things, but they are, or would be, inherently inferior.

Thank you Barry Sanders for shifting sideways better than everyone. Thank you TO for giving me reason to say out loud, “Wait! Did you see that? Did he just pull a Sharpie out of his sock and sign the ball? Did you see that!?” Thank you Lawrence Taylor for that moment of sympathetic terror we all had in those moments when you got around the corner and the QB hadn’t seen you yet. Oh yes thank you for that.

Thank you Jonah Lomu for being a freak before Jevon Kearse and thank you Jerry Collins for making my sternum hurt despite having never met you.

Thank you Chad Hauser for that one time in wind sprints where you didn’t see me coming and thank you Asi Mohi for my first broken nose. Thank you Deb Bilbao for teaching me in 6^th grade that a girl can pick a boy up over her head and toss him away like trash, and thank you Vern for teaching me every dirty trick a lineman should know despite my being 2 years and 100 pounds your inferior. Thank you gigantic racist Afrikaner for teaching me that if you reach your right arm all the way over toward the loosehead’s waistband it will keep him from boring in.

Thank you Jon Brown for being both classy and terrifying. Thank you Randall Cunningham for throwing the ball in Randy Moss’s general vicinity so he could make amazing things look easy, and thank you Steve Atwater for nearly chopping people in half.

And thank you Thanksgiving for providing a day to celebrate gluttony and collisions together.

click here for a visual ode to beauty, grace, and truth.

Also… team in D.C…. Change your name. You are ruining everything.

I Promise to Lock it Up This Time: I want a bike

I had a bike once. Not an expensive or fancy one, but it was pretty much exactly what I wanted. It appears someone else appreciated my taste in bikes enough to steal mine while it was resting on my front porch.

I want another bike.

Simple, fixed gear, no embellishments, I liked it. I have no intentions of completing a triathlon or riding in a pelaton, but I expect the bike to work well enough to ride.

Now should Santa want to upgrade just a little perhaps there are some other options…

A Brooks saddle and toe clips would be welcome.

A rack complete with a wool blanket (refer to previous blanket post) and some chrome accents… also acceptable.

Really, if I’m completely honest, I want a carbon fiber lightweight frame in matte black, no stickers or logos. I want black wall slick tires, only a front brake, preferably disk, fixed gear, chrome seat post and handle bars, natural leather saddle and grips.

I also want a 1960’s Ford Bronco.

Shakespeare in Chicago: New Zealand All Blacks

The game of rugby was born at a small boarding school in England. These young boys grew up and took the game with them, spreading it around the world, or at least anywhere in the world that at one time saw a concentration of former English school boys. This game remained a game till it hit New Zealand. There it became an art.

The United States was well established as its own country by the time rugby was invented, but American Universities like Harvard and Princeton were still fashioning themselves in the image of places like Cambridge and Oxford. All of those schools, especially the American one’s, played rugby. Over time the American version morphed a bit, we started blocking players who weren’t carrying the ball, stopped play after each tackle, and finally, the move that forever swept American’s away from rugby, the forward pass was made legal.

Rugby became football and Americans fell into a deep passionate love with gridiron. It started in the ivy league schools of the East Coast, spread to schools nationwide, and then, mostly in the Midwest, the game went professional. Those early days of the NFL are forever in our memory as black and white images of games being played on frozen fields in places like Green Bay, Cleveland, and Chicago. Soldier Field in Chicago, home of Mike Ditka and the Chicago Bears, is a living temple dedicated to the memory of the early days of football and the steel toughened game we love.

I love both games. They are cousins. Birthed of the same parents but reared oceans apart, they tell the same story in different languages, and as the language of rugby goes, the New Zealand All Blacks are Shakespeare. The Americans who still play the game are more like Steinbeck.

They flow with flourishes of color and beauty. We are straight forward, dusty and plodding. I like Steinbeck but watching the Grapes of Wrath performed is not Midsummer Night’s Dream. Reading either is fun, but New Zealand performs. They embody beauty. The Americans travel dirt roads toward California scrounging for a better life.

New Zealand rarely plays against the American national team (Eagles). When they do meet, it isn’t in America. Every time they have met, New Zealand has won. Handily.

But sometimes legends do meet, Washington knew Jefferson, Socrates and Plato, and then Soldier Field and the All Blacks. The match was attended by 60,000 people, the largest crowd in American rugby history, and I was there. Me and every other rugby fan in the States. Every thick chested, Guinness drinking, tree trunk legged American sat in the frozen stands and got wobbly kneed when the Kiwis did the haka.

The score was as predicted- Shakespeare plays never have new endings, but the performance is always worth watching. Seeing it live…

transcendental.

Califriday… in November

Head down, knees bent.
Keep your head down and swing all the way through.
Ping!
Uhhh, yeah… you didn’t keep your head down.

I do not own a set of clubs and my game reflects it.
I am OK with this, which means that most real golfers are not OK if forced to golf with me. This group was extra forgiving. It is hard not to be forgiving when it is 79 degrees in November.

The tournament was a scramble. Everyone tees off, then you all play from where the best drive lands.

Mine was rarely the drive we played, no matter what tool we used to hit the ball.
But golf is rarely about hitting that little ball.
It is more about spending time outside with people you like.
Or would like to like.
Or are getting to like.

Its called business.
That would make this work.

I like to work.

So I wonder what the weather is like in Philly?