The Spag Wad
I was actually paid to watch football games back in the mid-1950s as the “technician” twisting “pots” for the four Honolulu Interscholastic League tilts played each weekend in the “Termite Palace” on South King Street and broadcast on KGU (NBC affiliate and “The Voice of Hawaii.”) Several years later in 1957 I would introduce Elvis Presley in his first island concert only on the field not high up in the rickety press box with Gene Good calling the plays and the Reverend Chuck Halter handling the stats and Capt. “Corky” Donahue of the HPD doing the color.
It is night’s like this that make me wonder why I have spent thousands of man hours pulling for this coalition of creeps. And I know I am not alone in my helpless rage.
The current empty-headed head coach of the St. Louis Rams—my first ex-wife calls him “Spag Wad”—hit bottom on national television tonight, December 12, 2011, bringing more momentum to the movement to see the fakir bounced out and away from the team (and the city, state and planet as far as possible as far as I care. And I’ve been observing this football team for forty-seven seasons and never missed a game one way or another and that’s not RJ hyperbole but rather a certifiable fact. Take 47 seasons at an average of 15 games including playoffs and that is at least 705 Rams games plus “exhibitions,” long called that since ATM (After The Merger)—a bit of statistical laziness that keeps people from knowing that Deacon Jones of the LA Rams Fearsome Foursome not only invented the sack in tribute to the raging warriors who ravaged all in their way, he who regularly got to the passer faster and meaner than anyone who ever played defensive end in the NFL including Reggie White, Bruce Smith, Mean Joe Greene. All those overpaid, babied chest thumpers of today who bleat when they beat some kid who couldn’t keep #75 in the blue-and-white from mashing the opposing quarterback into the turf of South Central Los Angeles and the LA Memorial Coliseum and everything in his way before his bust came to rest in Canton. But enough of real men and pre-digitized football.)
Tonight was one of the most inept Monday Night Football games ever “played” and shown for pubic consumption. A certain deranged demographic known as Rams Nation knowingly avoided dining during the massacre of their heroes, though I’ll bet Mitt Romney $10000 that the team’s performance did induce some vomiting and smashing of things lying around and officially licensed by the NFL with their horny, once Ram-ugh logo.
I have seen almost every important MNF game from the night they first signed on ABC-TV. Football went from Pop Warner to Marshall McLuhan. Tonight’s teams went into the fray with losing records and no chance of playing into the postseason--when the NFL rules the minds and wrenches the guts of most American males as well as women and foreigners.
And now the headline on the computer monitor display reads, “Seahawks stifle struggling Rams for home victory.” I have not written (only mumbled about and kvetched to select friends) about this team since they totally blew it in Seattle last year. Okay, maybe some snide asides but after the Greed Strike there was Hope for This Year. The recently concluded 30-13 beating was a thumping not accurately reflecting the ineptitude and confusion of the once-mighty Rams team. The loss must have least bothered the head coach whose mind dwells in a reptilian domain that relates to no one else’s reality while he is unable to relate anything to the media that isn’t straight out of “How To Point The Finger.” Or “Coaching For Dummiers.”
Everyone who has ever aspired to write for the entertainment and enlightenment of others somewhere secretly wants to be a sportswriter. Or at least they did in the horse and buggy days of the sports writing giants going back to Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and those men spying from high in press boxes wearing fedoras while smoking Camel cigarettes and banging out the action and their opinions of same on a manual typewriter as pro football climbed up the ladder, weaving itself into the heart and soul of this county. Up rose pro football. Past Roller Derby and “professional” wrestling. Then beyond boxing. Dug in deeper than car racing and the ballet that is the NBA when well done. And finally topping baseball as the All-American game itself. And Dan Jenkins’ “Semi-Tough: A Novel,” a dreamy 1972 science-friction vision of US football imagining the game evolving and exploding into a media monster with print still feeding the globule village scores and stories to those masses who now have levitated this rugby and cannibal–inspired sport all to a patriotic orgasmic frenzy as the Super Bowl became the most important day in the Union while exponentially expanding technology probes the pores of sweat dripping down a tackle’s massive nose in highly defined live megapixels-by-da-million or whatever display the game is playing on—certainly one that would prove the grit and guts of what we dying farts call Old School. Oh but if we could see Sweetness in widescreen and Jimmy Brown defying hi-def or witness Bob Waterfield hit the “Coffin Corner” on every punt. Football before Velcro and polyethylene. No. We fall on our officially licensed NFL prayer rugs and bow in the direction of Lambeau or Soldier’s Field and chant some strange shit even too bizarre for the History Channel.
I figure the super bowl game with the roman numerals is the closest we come together as a nation—this country in its years as an Obama nation. Every Super Sunday I’ve always wanted to through a rock through the window of Tiffany’s on Kalakaua Avenue in Waikiki during a tight game while the entire island stay frozen watching TV especially if it involves the 49ers or Raiders or the Cowboys and the Steelers.
Taking the long view of this band of gypsies known as the NFL Rams has tested my patience beyond limits I didn’t know existed. (Only bet money on them but once and the loser. Mitch Fisher duly send a ten-dollar check to the rabbi up in Nuuanu. Having lived in Hong Kong for a year in 1964 I was forced to learn the real world’s “football” on Redifussion. That was the name for the telly in the Kowloon flat I spent my year out of the country pending trial sentencing and incarceration for possession of marihuana (sic.) It was grass (“reefer”) so weak that it required a pillow case full of Mexican weed with twigs the size of KFC bones to get a feeble hit in 1959 the year all manner of life-changing events happened personally for me including being present at the birth of the State of Hawaii and sampling all manner of people places and events. The Feds decided to make my scandalous behavior and example. It sure stopped millions of people from smoking pot. And I learned to watch other aspects of “soccer” that apply to our less subtle homeland game.
A dozen years later I received a pardon from President Jimmy Carter, which certifies that I am neither a drug smuggler nor a crazed maniac. And I could vote and own a gun again. One year later I was hooked. Insatiably hung up on the Rams for whom there is no expletive strong enough about now to describe my feelings about this alleged “team.”
Throughout my days I have spent hours out of my mind blown on all sorts of substances short of shooting myself up and I cannot think of any mind-altering stuff that would cause the coaching staff of the Rams tonight to (and “think” is not an available word when referring to these posturing okole) assume that doing something other than handing the ball to Mr. Rams Steven Jackson #39 after seven attempts to score within spitting distance of the goal line Pigskin Paul Allen’s Seahawk Playpen. I even got to see the ol’ KGB Chicken shtick now in its fortieth year of descenadancy from the artistry in (a hot stinking suit) of San Diego Sate’s Ted Giannoulas who made the fowl thing famous.
But of course I have run out of pre-Ram game drills for myself. The first one to topple is: “Fuck ‘em. Why should I was another second of my life and breathe caring about a bunch of people in a town that I wanted out of during the one day I was there in the 70s hustling CRUISIN’ albums?” Vinyl almost melted in the summer heat like it would collapse the arch. Passed through in 1997 to visit the then-state-of-the-art Rams facility and went along for the ride to the Miracle Season of the Greatest Show on Earth.
December 2011 in freezing Northwest. They score a touchdown. That is better than their last visit to the Land Of Costco when their no-brainer trust flew away having maneuvered the squad to scoring two field goals and blowing a fantastic chance to host a first round playoff game while winning the division Reduced tonight to a puddle of hopelessness. The crew is ready willing and able throwing them into the fray while above decks the baffled commanders display a lack of intelligence that would be dismissed in Pop Warner league battles. And probably result in the schmuck being punched out by an enraged father who cain’t take another second—another three-an-out while this tyrannical little man steers the ship into an iceberg or in the case of today’s misplayed waste of talent.
The only bigger dimwit who is the owner of the team. He is so out of touch he makes Mitt Romney look like Mother Teresa. He is the One Percent of the One Percent and doesn’t give a flying fuck about the paying customers. Let alone those of us who believe a group of mean trying to win a boy’s game and in so doing offering up an opiate for the otherwise miserable Monday night masses.
I will paste blow the section about the Rams owner and his concern or lack of it for his toy or however he regards this once proud NFL franchise that is a few weeks older than me. What who those would take the name of mighty Fordham’s Rams and enter the league for the 1937 having no imagined or foreseen any of this forgettable unit and its lack of coaching intelligence not just “inspiration.” The thing about “My way is the highway” people is that they too eventually get kicked out the back door. And they’re enough of those at Rams Park so this fool can exit having made off with three bad seasons and a lack of human understanding.
Last game last year in Seattle this pompous mini-person fired the Rams longtime equipment manager and my friend Todd Hewitt. Thus started the post-Hewitt era begun by Todd’s father in 1967 and making them the family with the longest service to a franchise with a sub-simian putz making Todd the fall guy for a game in which the idiot coach was able to generate two field goals and end last year’s season on the infamous day he showed Todd Hewitt the door.
I mean it would be easy to try and put things into football perspective not too mentioned what has transpired on the planet in the past seventy-four ears. In a long and boring story too often told be me the roots of my Rams addiction run deeper than when I first became a season ticket holder in 1965. A pair of tickets became six seats in the LA Memorial Coliseum when I was the only department head at RKO General’s KHJ Radio and Channel Nine in Hollywood. No one wanted the seats. The team that once was the toast of Gridiron USA had slumped in the mid-60s. And who cared the way drug sex and rock and roll were breaking out and away from the Ike years and before the Nixonian nightmare began and ended.
Caring less about who can read this I type on. There is a sort of democratic satisfaction in calling the owner of the St. Louis Rams and their head coach assholes and idiots. What can they do? Sue me for my signed Maxie Baughan card or Marshall Faulk cleats?
The most applicable point made be the Heirs of Cossell was when Super Bowl winning coach cum commentator Jon Gruden proclaimed: “The Rams could play a doubleheader and still not score a touchdown.”
This team would be better off with Herman Cain as its owner and Newt Gingrich the head coach. Let Sarah Palin take over the cheerleaders. It is difficult when those girls can kick higher than the boys on the field for whom they are paid to cheer.
The head coach of the St. Louis Rams—my first ex-wife calls him “Spag Wad”—hit bottom on national television last night December 13, 20011, bringing more to the movement to see him bounced out and away from the team. Tonight was one of the most inept Monday Night Football games ever played and I have seen most all of them. Both teams went in with losing records and no chance of playing into the postseason when the NFL rules the minds and wrenches the guts of most American males as well as women and foreigners. And the headline reads, “Seahawks stifle struggling Rams for home victory.” The 30-13 beating was a thumping not accurately reflecting the ineptitude and confusion of the once-proud Rams team.
Everyone who has ever aspired to write for the entertainment and enlightenment of others somewhere secretly wants to be a sportswriter. Or at least they did in the horse and buggy days of the Sportswriting Giants going back to Grantland Rice and Damon Runyon and men spying from high in press boxes wearing fedoras and banging out the action and their opinions of same on a manual typewriter as pro football climbed up the ladder and weaving itself into the heart and soul of this county. Up from war and depression arose pro football. Higher past dance marathons and Roller Derby and “professional” wrestling. Then beyond boxing. And finally topping baseball as the All-American game itself. And Dan Jenkins’ “Semi-Tough: A Novel” a dreamy science-friction vision of US football brought the game into evolving and exploding into a media with print the globule village feeding the scores and stories to those masses who now have levitated it all to a patriotic orgasmic frenzy as the Super Bowl became the most important day in the union while technology exponentially expanding peek into to the pores of sweat dripping down a defensive lineman’s massive nose in highly defined live only whatever display the game is playing on. It is the closest we come together as a country I figure.
Taking the long view of this band of gypsies known as the NFL Rams has tested my patience beyond limits I didn’t know existed. Having lived in Hong Kong for a year in 1964 I was forced to learn the real world’s “football” on Redifussion. That was the name for the telly in the Kowloon flat I spent my year out of the country pending trial sentencing and incarceration for possession of marihuana (sic). It was grass (“reefer”) so weak that it required a pillow case full of Mexican weed with twigs the size of KFC bones to get a feeble hit in 1959 the year all manner of life-changing events happened personally for me including being present at the birth of the state of Hawaii and sampling all manner of people places and events. The Feds decided to make my scandalous behavior and example. It sure stopped millions of people from smoking pot.
A dozen years later I received a pardon from President Jimmy Carter, which certifies that I am neither a drug smuggler nor a crazed maniac. And I could vote and own a gun again. One year later I was hooked. Insatiably hung up on the Rams for whom there is no expletive strong enough about now to describe my feelings about this alleged “team.”
Throughout my days I have spent hours out of my mind blown on all sorts of substances short of shooting myself up and I cannot think of any mind-altering stuff that would cause the coaching staff of the Rams tonight to (and “think” is not an available word when referring to these posturing okole) assume that doing something other than handing the ball to Mr. Rams Steven Jackson #39 after seven attempts to score within spitting distance of the goal line Pigskin Paul Allen’s Seahawks Playpen. I even got to see the ol’ KGB Chicken shtick now in its fortieth year of descendancy from the artistry in (a hot stinking suit) of San Diego Sate’s Ted Giannoulas who made the fowl thing famous.
But of course I have run out of pre-Ram game drills for myself. The first one to topple is: “Fuck ‘em. Why should I was another second of my life and breathe caring about a bunch of people in a town that I wanted out of during the one day I was there in the 70s hustling CRUISIN’ albums?” Vinyl almost melted in the summer heat like it would collapse the arch. Passed through in 1997 to visit the then-state-of-the-art Rams facility and went along for the ride to the Miracle Season of the Greatest Show on Earth.
December 2011. They score a touchdown. That is better than their last visit to the Land Of Costco when their no-brainer trust flew away having maneuvered the squad to scoring two field goals and blowing a fantastic chance to host a first round playoff game while winning the division Reduced tonight to a puddle of hopelessness. The crew is ready willing and able throwing them into the fray while above decks the baffled commanders display a lack of intelligence that would be dismissed in Pop Warner league battles. And probably result in the schmuck being punched out by an enraged father who cain’t take another second—another three-an-out while this tyrannical little man steers the ship into an iceberg or in the case of today’s misplayed waste of talent.
The only bigger dimwit who is the owner of the team. He is so out of touch he makes Mitt Romney look like Mother Teresa. He is the One Percent of the One Percent and doesn’t give a flying fuck about the paying customers. Let alone those of us who believe a group of mean trying to win a boy’s game and in so doing offering up an opiate for the otherwise miserable Monday night masses.
I will paste blow the section about the Rams owner and his concern or lack of it for his toy or however he regards this once proud NFL franchise that is a few weeks older than me. What who those would take the name of mighty Fordham’s Rams and enter the league for the 1937 having no imagined or foreseen any of this forgettable unit and its lack of coaching intelligence not just “inspiration.” The thing about “My way is the highway” people is that they too eventually get kicked out the back door. And they’re enough of those at Rams Park so this fool can exit having made off with three bad seasons and a lack of human understanding. And a wad of money lest he becomes unemployed and unwanted never to be seen again.
Last game last year in Seattle this pompous mini-person fired the Rams longtime equipment manager and my friend Todd Hewitt. Thus started the post-Hewitt era begun by Todd’s father in 1967 and making them the family with the longest service to a franchise with a sub-simian putz making Todd the fall guy for a game in which the idiot coach was able to generate two field goals and end last year’s season on the infamous day he showed Todd Hewitt the door.
I mean it would be easy to try and put things into football perspective not too mentioned what has transpired on the planet in the past seventy-four ears. In a long and boring story too often told be me the roots of my Rams addiction run deeper than when I first became a season ticket holder in 1965. A pair of tickets became six seats in the LA Memorial Coliseum when I was the only department head at RKO General’s KHJ Radio and Channel Nine in Hollywood. No one wanted the seats. The team that once was the toast of Gridiron USA had slumped in the mid-60s. And who cared the way drug sex and rock and roll were breaking out and away from the Ike years and before the Nixonian nightmare began and ended.
Caring less about who can read this I type on. There is a sort of democratic satisfaction in calling the owner of the St. Louis Rams and their head coach assholes and idiots. What can they do? Sue me? Take my signed Maxie Baughan #55 cards or the custom Nikes that Marshall Faulk wore against Dallas in 2003 and hand-signed with a silver Sharpie?
The most applicable point made be the Heirs of Cosell was when Super Bowl winning coach Jon Gruden proclaimed: “The Rams could play a doubleheader and still not score a touchdown.”
The Team would be better off with Herman Cain as its owner and Newt Gingrich the head coach. Let Sarah Palin take over the cheerleaders. It is difficult when those girls can kick higher than the boys on the field for whom they are paid to cheer.
As with all things the buck stops at the top. The St. Louis Rams are owned by the most craven multimillionaire putz in pro sports. That is not just opinion of the raging citizens who should Occupy the Arch in protest until he dumps the useless pretentious inept faux Little Caesar whose makes me puke at the mere mention of his name. The Mussolini of the NFL. Go away. Vanish. And never appear anywhere again you lolo mea hoʻoulu pilikia.
If I were still "on the air" I would "spin" for you "This Could Be The Last Time" by The Rolling Stones. But the brains behind this Blogger software are as mooshy as the above-pictured horrid little man. So sing it to yourself. Or start something on Facebook to humiliate the owner of the sinking, stinking St. Louis Rams.
For Mitch Fisher who died today with the Patriots leading the division.
That leaves me, the last of the boys from Row 117. "I've got the key right here."
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