PRO BOWL FOR MEDIA DUMMIES

Don Ho

(Born in Honolulu before “Pearl Harbor,” broadcaster and author Ron Jacobs began his sportscasting career as the backup trackside announcer when Roller Derby came to Honolulu in the 1950s. While in Hollywood he co-created American Top 40 in 1970. He has written extensively about traditional and popular contemporary Hawaiian culture. Jacobs' OBAMALAND: Who Is Barack Obama? is the #1 best-selling nonfiction book in Hawaii since its publication in 2009.)

Please pass this on to anyone you know at ESPN or the sports people at the other networks: It’s HO-no-lulu … got it?

Let’s begin with the most onerous transgression committed by the off-Islander TV and radio announcers: They often blunder into the mispronunciation of the name of the Aloha’s State’s capital city: Honolulu. Al Michaels gets it right since he kicked off his broadcast career right here in Hawaii. Boomer Berman gets it right because he always does with most things besides having frequently flown to and from Hawaii to qualify as an Honorary Kama’aina (old timer.)

It is not pronounced: HUH-nah-lula. To anyone who knows the Hawaiian language or merely just how to pronounce the name of my hometown saying it that way aloud is excruciating to the “local” ear or anyone who knows the correct way to say this word, which literally means “protected bay.” Anyone who let’s loose with “Huhnahlula” is thereafter known as not akamai (hip) to the place and everything about it. There even might be a spillover of doubt as to the mispronouncer’s credibility when it comes to other “details.”

It would be easy here to cite examples of how the names of pro and college athletes from Hawaii and the rest of the South Pacific have their names butchered up by some sportscasters who have never been west of LA. Worse even is when they just quit trying and “cleverly” assign a Polynesian player a convenient nickname. At this they are not particularly creative. When the NFL’s St. Louis Rams drafted tight end Michael Patrick Hoomanawanui of Illinois in the fifth round announcers threw in the towel during the preseason games that revealed that Hoomanawanui was a keeper. He was re-labeled: “Illinois Mike.” And thus was he known by the play-by-play callers unable to tackle “hoh’-oh-ma-NAH-wah-noo-ee” for fear of what we say in Hawaii street Pidgin English: “Make ass.”

There is one sure fire way to remember how to pronounce the name of this town: Think of its most famous son (other than the current President of the United States.) Who else but: DON HO.

Can you say “Don Ho”? Great! You are on your way to nailing it like a native. Take my dear friend’s first name—I knew and interviewed Don Ho over a period of forty years—and add: “No” and “Lulu.” HO-no-lulu.

A small thing you might think. Until you think about the last time someone blew the pronunciation of your hometown or whatever. But unless you’re from a major city the chances of the town’s name popping up in the news are slim. But hey, this is Honolulu, baby. You know, the place where the crew from HAWAII 5-0 patrols the scene, keeping it safe for all who arrive here, whether or not they can pronounce correctly the HNL designation on their baggage tags.

The Pro Bowl is played in Aloha Stadium. The word “aloha” indeed can mean both hello and goodbye but in connection with this venue it may as well translate into: White Elephant Rusting By The Sea. Actually to say that in Hawaiian you must pronounce it: He 'elepani ke'oke'o e ki'o kukaehao ana ma ka pili kai.

Aloha Stadium was conceived to be one of the first multi-sport venues, the kind where grandstands could be moved about to fit either a football or baseball configuration within its oval structure. Someone sold the reigning bureaucrats on the idea of, like, “floating sections” of seats that could be moved about from season to season.

To the best of my knowledge they never moved all that much after the Hawaii Islander baseball team left town. The all-metal structure opened in 1975, replacing venerable Honolulu Stadium, the old “Termite Palace” in Moilili in town, which had been the major outdoor arena since the Territorial Twenties. The old wooden structure wore down over half a century but it did not suffer from what has afflicted Aloha Stadium since day one: Rust. Park a car next to the Pacific Ocean for thirty-five years then have a look at what remains.

Of course Aloha Stadium is not a ’75 Chevy parked at Sandy Beach. So over the decades it has been as massive metallic political football, so to speak. But it all boils down to the place is still there and perpetually under repair with no viable alternative in sight. There have been studies, proposals, legislative boogies and all manner of suggestions but the place remains the only big game place in town.

Compared to the worst NFL stadium, whichever that may be, Aloha Stadium is bush-league and downright shoddy in just about every category except for Beautiful Weather in January. (The same can be said of Miami, but when the NFL shifted the Pro Bowl there last year it lacked the aloha and allure of the Fiftieth State so The Great Meaningless Filler Game is once again being played out in Halawa, within a few hundred yards of Pearl Harbor itself, with its metal-munching ocean saltwater. However the United States Navy keeps things shipshape unlike the rusting stadium that looks out at the USS Arizona Memorial next to the docked USS Missouri. Fortunately these historic landmarks have been preserved. As well they should be. They are not only perpetual reminders of the infamous December 7, 1941, sneak attack on the naval base but they are also the state’s number one tourist attraction. Officially the 2011 Pro Bowl generated $28 million in visitor spending and $3 million in state tax revenue.

These days the game is staged during the interregnum week between the conference championship playoff games and Super Bowl. This manufactured “all star” game, which originated in 1938 way before the AFL-NFL merger in 1970 but bounced around the country in eleven different stadia in search of fans who would fill the seats for this most exhibition of all NFL games. By 1979 someone figured out that high-paid pro football stars would compete in a meaningless game if it could be played in “paradise” and they could bring along their families and/or entourages while paying for the spree with their game check. Players on the winning squad take home nearly as much as Mitt Romney makes in a day: $45,000 per player to the victors and $22,500 each for the losers.

The rap has always been, “The teams mess around for three quarters and then play to win at the end so they can earn the victor’s share to help pay their wives and girlfriend’s shopping sprees.” A winner’s game check can evaporate at Waikiki’s “Luxury Row” on Kalakaua Avenue, a Rodeo Drive West, featuring stores like Tiffany & Co., Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and so on.

Meanwhile the game itself is always video-garnished with the same mai tai, waterfalls and hula girl images of Hawaii that are great for those who serve the “visitor industry” but bear less resemblance to reality than the polyglamorous picture postcards peddled at souvenir counters and tourist traps.

The stadium in which the Pro Bowl is played is located “about twenty minutes from Waikiki,” but that really applies only to emergency vehicles with flashing lights and screaming sirens. In that days when UH football was hot and all 50,000 seats were sold a game could cause traffic jams for miles in all directions, all aiming for parking lots too small to hold maximum crowds.

Nonetheless, islanders who have never seen an NFL game in person regularly show up for this faux battle, which is usually a high-scoring, no defensive game just a few notches above flag football. And for those who do go and have a ball—good for them.

In a display of how meaningless this game is NFL players will be allowed to tweet during the Pro Bowl. Sort of. Before you get too excited, realize players will not be using their own personal devices. Rather, they will be using designated kiosks on the sidelines. If people do indeed “roll over in their graves” Vince Lombardi must be spinning faster than a Ferrari engine at maximum r.p.m.

Most of us football fans who live here in Hawaii watch the Pro Bowl game on TV, if at all. And we understand that nothing much is at stake but that’s cool; good for the guys whose plays merited their selection to these elite squads. I just hope that those in the broadcast media, the same people who have mastered the pronunciation of such Super Bowl players’ names as the New York Giants stars Amukamara, Kiwanuka and Umenyiora learn how to say “Honolulu” correctly. Before they focus the following week on Super Bowl XLVI played at that stadium in Indian Apple Us.

FILLING SPACE ON TIME

After decades of meeting deadlines for broadcast and print it is nice to throw off such commitments and write these things called “blogs.” The online Webster definition of such things is: “a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.”

For those not keeping track (or giving a damn) the origin of the term "weblog" was coined by one Jorn Barger in December 1997. Wow—that was all of fifteen years ago. The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who, in 1999, broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog. Let’s ask Google, “How many blogs are there on the Internet?”

(Returns to keyboard after ninety-minute ‘net search for this statistic. Data is either outdated or wildly conflicting. If you know the answer please let me know. But from reading many reports and studies just now it is safe to assume that someone somewhere is blogging about something. Who those people are and what they blog about has been probed by intensive studies. And to me these cross-tabbed data dumps based on who-knows-what-kind-of-sample? or questionable methodology add up to nothing but confusion. Let’s just say that more people are blogging by the minute. But unlike library books that can be discarded, the blogosphere apparently can handle an unlimited mass of this stuff and of all society’s major problems, over-blogging ain’t one of them, like burned out dead space hardware dropping from orbit into your swimming pool or Yankee Stadium.)

My admiration is limitless for those pioneering and persistent bloggers who crank out a new posting each and every day. Interesting. Most all the studies I checked reveal that the majority of these folks do so without pay or any kind of monetary compensation. Once upon a time a “diary” was a closely held book (some came with locks and keys); a place to stash private thoughts and feelings. But with the advent of all this electronic connectivity these once solitary thoughts have become public domain in the most literal sense.

Blogs are like a mega-amped Speakers' Corner, which is located at the north-east corner of London’s Hyde Park. Outdoor public rants, debate and discussion are allowed. Speakers there may rattle on about any subject, as long as the police consider their speeches within lawful boundaries. Years ago, when I visited the spot many of the ravers accompanied their pleas and tirades with hand-made placards announcing the Main Point of the oration, which was usually something about the world coming to end in the immediate future.

Putting aside commercial blogs, which are merely the newest forms of advertising, PR, bulletin boards, etc., sponsored by business entities of all types. People who track this stuff say commercial blogs comprise about 50% of what is spamming out of monitors globally. The other half are posted by individuals who blog about virtually every subject known to (and yet to be discovered by) mankind.

I started this blog after urging the Scribe For All Seasons, Ken Levine, to offer his clever unscheduled emails to friends. Ken, who I think was born typing, had already made his rep as a screenwriter and beyond. He was a “Hollywood hyphenate” back when most folks thought the term referred to some form of sexual deviation. Meanwhile Ken was expanding into sports broadcasting. (In a Walter Mitty universe Ken Levine would be deliriously happy to be legendary sportscaster Vince Scully or a rockin’ Boss deejay like the inimitable Robert W. Morgan.

He quickly transitioned from sitting in the Dodger Stadium bleachers doing play-by-play games—into a small cassette tape recorder. This is how he honed yet another talent. And one of those cassettes landed him a job in a Major League Baseball radio booth. Since the team was located in Baltimore, about 2300 miles away from his home in West LA, Ken’s “travelogue” reports expanded beyond his dispatches about family vacations, usually spent in Hawaii and described in his well-honed style of observations punctuated with punch lines. I’m certain that I wasn’t the only one urging him to present his hilarious highlights in the form of the then-still new form of a blog. What matters is that he officially became an online scribe in November 2005. His first entry contained commentary on everything but key elements of home plumbing (and further examination might indeed find concealed, covert, coded messages about the kitchen sink itself given Ken’s facile use of multiple entendre and his consistently cool POV.) Basically a humorist by trade, Ken sums it up in this question from one of his recent posts: “Who needs to write satire when stuff like this actually occurs?”

But even as impressive as the content of his entries—named one of the “Best 25 Blogs of 2011” by TIME Magazine—it is Ken Levine’s ’ that continues to impress. Doing it daily for more than six “Internet Years” is a long time. The blogs tar were started and since abandoned in that period number in the mega-digits. Shit, unless and until the Internet crashes all these time pellets of trivia will be, like, out there…subject to recall at any moment. This will result in a rainbow of consequences. Folks whose electronic epigrams like Ken Levine’s are a true body of work deserve all the space required on the digital shelf or whatever the metaphor is for The Cloud, quickly replacing the trusty old library. Gone are Borders and Barnes & Noble and cheers for the “small independent booksellers” like the kind often featured on CSPAN’s “Booknotes”—which is my personal method of filling the TV void created at the end of the football season. Nothing beats the NFL for us junkies locked and loaded into it but “Booknotes” dwells in the nonfiction world and is methadone for pro football addicts on when post-Super Bowl Cold Turkey sets in. And it can be watched with one’s eyes closed, know what I mean?

Of course such programming deals with “serious” writers who may have or still blog but that is not at the top of their resume. Blogs are still somewhat the back alley of “literature.” But then again punctual pasquinades like those of Ken Levine and countless others may be “books in the making before our very eyes.”

Jack Kerouac’s monumental “one roll” approach to his masterwork “One The Road” was a Blog-A-Thon in its own way. In 1951 Jack Kerouac took a continuous 120-foot roll of paper, threaded it into his manual typewriter and began to write his masterpiece, which he did, fueled by whatever version of the legend one believes and punched the thing out. Or, how about what in my opinion is the most amazing chapter on sports ever written, “Ice,” from David Maraniss’ classic, “When Pride Still Mattered”—a/k/a “The Lombardi book” that spawned the Broadway play— was written by him, fueled on coffee, in a day and night marathon. If you not read the book, then dig up a copy of this fantastic work. It is also a great way to fill those non-football hours looming up on us.

So throw a random “something”-blog into your browser and play Internet roulette. And if this happens to pop up do let me know. Even if by the old school way: a note in a bottle that will someday wash up here on Oahu’s North Shore.

I have thus fulfilled my ulterior motive in putting this down in approaching 1300 words. That is to get rid of the last damn NFL-related blog. It was time-specific and I gotta get something up by kickoff Sunday or I will be awash in guilt and even more jealous of Ken Levine and all the others like him who pound out good stuff with the consistency of the changing of the Royal Guard at Buckingham Palace in London.

Speaking of which, to add an incorrigible blab of limited interest: In a precedent-setting move the St. Louis Rams of the National Football League have just announced that they will be playing one game per year—for the next three seasons—in London’s Wembley Stadium. It is superior in every way to the team’s home dome, one of the oldest and dilapidated in pro football. If only you could drive there from St. Louis. Not THAT would be some kind of tunnel.

NEW ORLEANS NIGHTMARE

If "something happens" to Drew Brees this is who takes over.

After all this is the biggest NFL weekend traditionally and this year's matchups are as good as it gets. And as usual most all the "experts" are not about to stick their necks out. Even though they are "my" team's biggest rival I must pull for the NFC Western Conference champion San Francisco 49ers.

And let's not beat around the bush: the team who can take out the opposing quarterback usually has an instant advantage. I have nothing as Mr. Brees as a person and he is one hell of a ballplayer. But now he must be a matador in the mud playing against a strong defensive unit in a town praying for a return to the Frisco teams heyday.

So this is a little note that I can always erase if I am dead wrong: Across the line from the Saints QB will be Isaac Sopoaga, former defensive star at the University of Hawaii, and a full wrecking crew.

Would I bet against the Saints? Immaterial since I don't gamble. So let's be real: I've attended hundreds of NFL games in person. People holler, "Kill the quarterback!" They don't say, "Have a nice day." At least I hope so tomorrow in the city by the bay.

PS - Congratulations to the St. Louis pro football franchise for doing something sane for the first time in many a season.

CAMERON CROWE 40 YEARS LATER

It seems that every jag off of a certain demographic wants to be some aspect of Cameron Crowe, whose talent erupted in sync with the rhythms of the times and the trends in technology.

Had he been born in Ancient Rome, young Cameron would have been chasing around Caesar’s gardens using his wit and love of the arts to ingratiate him with those who created it, and from whom he could get a breathless, exclusive interview.

Once I was a Wunderkind. Unless one has been through the barrage of expectations that increase with success at an early age, it is difficult to understand the yin-yang attached to being really famous in a world when once “almost well-known” was more than enough.

Forty years ago, Cameron walked into my office at KGB Radio-San Diego accompanied by two other hippies with chips on their shoulders. This long-haired barefoot trio showed up at the radio station to tell us what “the people” wanted — make that, needed — on and from the radio. I represented the corporate rats that stood in their way. At least that was my POV sitting there at the programming helm of the most messed-up radio station I’d ever signed up with in a town that everyone envied for its surf, sea and sun. All of this was manini kine stuff to me, born as I was in Waikiki where the real watermen of the Pacific dwell in the swells, and so many other sights and scenes are unknown in what was then billing itself as “America’s Finest City.”

To me San Diego was the anal sphincter of California in many ways. But one of my treasured memories is of watching the shifty-eyed kid who seemed to know more than he should about life and music for a high-school kid emerging from his nerd cocoon. Cameron hung around and our mutual passions bridged the age gap. I was 35-years-old and at the top of my professional heap: rock’n’roll radio. Cameron was a 15-year-old kid who wanted to snuggle up to Led Zeppelin albums until he could meet the group live and in person and live to tell the world the rest of the story.

In Pidgin English — the street slang of my hometown of Honolulu — Cameron would be called the “Sly Mongoose” type. His intellect and curiosity expanded like a sumo belly, overflowing with torrents of words that made you wonder: Is this kid writing that stuff? Mozart and cats like that have always confounded their elders but those were unwired days. Cameron plugged into and played back his way so far and so fast that the only way I could describe it as an observer would require my lapsing into sports writing clichés.

Many of the wannabe moviemakers now unleashed and unrestrained online write about an artist’s work as if they know or knew the person directly and they hold the key to revelations held within the world as seen through film.

I need not waste one word on those straining their brains to match words and wits, syntax and insight with a master such as Cameron, whose life is multi-faceted in ways that those who “analyze” his films cannot grasp.

To paraphrase the old Rough Rider himself — Theodore Roosevelt in his famous “Man in the Arena” pronouncement: those who don’t jump in and DO IT can go sit back and fuck themselves.”

While making movies and not measuring his mark in the intervals between doing so, Cameron whizzed through more life changes than a cartoon super hero. As Joe South once wrote and Elvis echoed: “Walk a Mile in My Shoes.”

Making movies is like fighting a war and those involved should be cheered for getting out of there alive. When the paying customers emerge from the theater with a smile or a tear it makes it all worth it. Here's a shove your way Cameron: Congratulations and check back sometime during the next forty years