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

NORMAN CORWIN (Peace On Earth)

Norman Lewis Corwin (May 3, 1910 – October 18, 2011)

Above all, my true “Radio Hero” was a man who lived and wrote during the 1930s and 1940s: what is now called, “The Golden Age of Radio.” Norman Corwin’s work is too prodigious, perceptive, personal and profound for me to even begin to list his “audiography,” let alone his work in other media. If you think it all began with Allen Freed and the rest of the Rock’n’Roll/Top Forty stations and deejays then you might want to learn more about the father of the “Theater Of The Mind” and most things good in radio, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Corwin

Post-World War II American radio, as with cars then “Made In The USA,” began with extensions of what was produced in our country until 1941.

Then there was a hodgepodge “on the air” of everything from farm reports to the Metropolitan Opera’s live concert broadcasts. The style and substance of pre-TV radio emerged from war’s cocoon and began to fly as new innovators gave new ideas a try.

But even by 1965, when Bill Drake and Gene Chenault gained control of RKO Radio’s Los Angeles outlet, which we co-conspirators renamed 93/KHJ Boss Radio. Before the format switch (and the wakeup Robert W. Morgan Show) the morning program offering was a “bed in breakfast” program featuring Steve Allen and wife Jayne Meadows. The couple discussed the day’s events while snuggled in their Beverly Hills bed, sipping orange juice and nibbling bagels while Bill Mouzis handled the “remote” engineering chores back to the main studios and on to the transmitter and towers at Fairfax Avenue and the Santa Monica Freeway.

This affair was followed by the “Radio” Michael Jackson announcing from our fortress at 5515 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, just down the street from KNX Radio, at CBS Square. (Mr. Corwin started at the CBS Radio Network in 1938, when I was one-year-old and crawling around Waikiki Beach on Oahu, which had two stations, one of which was KGMB, the local CBS affiliate.) That is where Corwin’s masterwork, On a Note of Triumph, was commissioned by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to celebrate the victory of the Allies over Madness. Broadcast live around the world on VE Day, May 8, 1945. This program, in my blatant opinion, is the greatest long-form radio production ever made.

Later in 1972, while living in La Jolla, California and working at KGB-AM-FM, I began reading Corwin’s fantastic array of books about all manner of things, mostly veering to the socio-political. This was way back in the old days before email. So I wrote him a fan letter. Thus began an exchange via US mail between the master and myself, both who toiled in LA radio, albeit decades apart.

Norman Corwin was unaware of the 48-hour History of Rock and Roll, the KHJ original (and only cool) version, narrated perfectly by Morgan: the best announcer with whom I ever worked, besides all his other talents. I wrote Corwin about how disappointed I was that when my program finished and there were zero phone calls to the station about the epic event, neither good nor bad. Full specifics about the program are at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History_of_Rock_and_Roll,

I thought we had created a monster flop and had wasted two days of valuable airtime chronicling a subject that had been around for all of thirteen years (if one considers Bill Haley’s “Rock Around The Clock” as the first hit music of the “rock” genre; a major hit that exploded “rock” into global consciousness). This twelve-bar-blues-based song peaked at the #1 spot in the US and UK.

Returning to work the following Monday, February 24, 1969, I realized that in spite of my paranoid and insecure state of mind that praise for the HRR was pouring in, mostly in the form of those things called telegrams. Ratings revealed that one out of three Southern California radios were tuned to the production on which we had worked for months. (For the rest of the story of this program see: http://woodygoulart.com/wg/rock-and-roll-radio-history/people/jacobs-and-drake-on-the-record/history/

The outpouring of praise locally and nationally was rewarding to all of us. It is not every local radio show that is requested for inclusion by the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute. I wrote Mr. Corwin about that roller coaster climax to that project. In his return letter, Corwin told of finishing up his postwar tribute—which featured everyone in Hollywood fighting for even the smallest part and included FDR himself live from Washington—and staring at the studio “hotline” phone, which remanded deathly silent at the broadcast’s conclusion. Not a single ring. The genius writer, thinking he had launched his own bomb, went to a Gower Street bar and drank away his disappointment. Until the following day when acclaim for his artistic and patriotic effort showered him to his dying days.

Since it is “The Season” and the world goes through its beleaguered changes, I feel it my duty to place electronically the following words from Norman Corwin’s piece de resistance, the crown jewel of his unsurpassed body of work, On a Note of Triumph.

Today his words ring true to life as they appear on your computer monitor (or by whatever means you see this).

Mele Kalikimaka & Hauoli Makahiki Hou!

Lord God of trajectory and blast

Whose terrible sword has laid open the serpent
So it withers in the sun for the just to see,
Sheathe now the swift avenging blade with the names of nations writ on it,
And assist in the preparation of the ploughshare.

Lord God of fresh bread and tranquil mornings,
Who walks in the circuit of heaven among the worthy,
Deliver notice to the fallen young men
That tokens of orange juice and a whole egg appear now before the hungry children;

That night again falls cooling on the earth as quietly as when it leaves your hand;

That Freedom has withstood the tyrant like a Malta in a hostile sea,
And that the soul of man is surely a Sevastopol which goes down hard and leaps from ruin quickly.

Lord God of the topcoat and the living wage
Who has furred the fox against the time of winter
And stored provender of bees in summer's brightest places,
Do bring sweet influences to bear upon the assembly line:
Accept the smoke of the milltown among the accredited clouds of the sky:
Fend from the wind with a house and hedge, him whom you made in your image,
And permit him to pick of the tree and the flock
That he may eat today without fear of tomorrow
And clothe himself with dignity in December.

Lord God of test-tube and blueprint
Who jointed molecules of dust and shook them till their name was Adam,
Who taught worms and stars how they could live together,
Appear now among the parliaments of conquerors and give instruction to their schemes:
Measure out new liberties so none shall suffer for his father's color or the credo of his choice:
Post proofs that brotherhood is not so wild a dream as those who profit by postponing it pretend:
Sit at the treaty table and convoy the hopes of the little peoples through expected straits,
And press into the final seal a sign that peace will come for longer than posterities can see ahead,
That man unto his fellow man shall be a friend forever.

SILENCE THESE RAMS

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."

HEADLINE OF THE CENTURY

Add for December, 2012: This is the link to PEACEFUL ARIZONA, which was written by Gordon Freitas in the the 1970s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qTF7KTo0sIhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qTF7KTo0sI

FOR MP3 OF STUDIO ORIGINAL FOR AIRPLAY CONTACT: rj@hawaii.rr.com

Take a listen, please. For full story of the KKUA HOME GROWN album series see:http://archives.starbulletin.com/97/12/01/features/story1.html

Headline of the Century

by Ron Jacobs

In the mid-1930s, Ellen Carroll came on vacation to the Territory of Hawaii from San Francisco. One night, dancing under the stars at the Moana Hotel’s famous banyan tree, the pretty young woman with the bright red hair met my uncle, the tan, suave Samuel E. Jacobs, who had arrived in Honolulu in the early 1930s from New York City to seek adventure and fortune.

“Al Kealoha Perry and His Singing Surfriders were playing. You could hear the ocean. Uncle Sam cut in, we began dancing and it was love at first sight,” remembers my Aunt Ellen, “What a romantic setting!” My parents, who arrived in Honolulu two years later, witnessed the wedding of Sam and Ellen at Judge F. M. Brooks’ house in Nuuanu Valley on March 3, 1939.

My favorite aunt and uncle were avid golfers. Sam was a charter member of the Toastmasters Club and the Aloha Temple of the Shriners. He also belonged to the Honolulu Police Reserve and worked undercover with Army Intelligence to trap the infamous Otto Kuen, a German who spied for the Japanese, flashing signals from his home on Windward Oahu to Admiral Nagumos’s fleet.

In the winter of 1941, Sam Jacobs was selling Cadillacs, La Salles, and Pontiacs for Schuman Carriage. Ellen worked for Riley H. Allen, longtime editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

I recently asked my Aunt Ellen, now 76, widowed and living in Hollywoood, Florida, to share her memories of that day.

Dear Ron,

The following are some anecdotes that I remember from December 7, 1941.

Your Uncle Sam and I were living in a rented guest house at 274-B Lewers Street in Waikiki. That Sunday morning I was pouring a waffle when Web Edwards (“Hawaii Calls” radio announcer) issued an announcement with the memorable words, “This is the real McCoy.” Ben Glazer and Harold Davis—“selectees”—whom Uncle Sam and I met at the Jewish Community Center—were in the backyard with Uncle Sam and our springer spaniel puppy, Jakey.

The three of them had planned to go to town and clear a plot of land on which Uncle Sam was planning to open a used-car lot, down on Kapiolani (now the site of the Blaisdell Center). He had talked the Ward sisters into letting him have the area—something which no one else had been able to do.

In any event, they had this planned for after breakfast, which we never had. The radio also said that all servicemen were to report to their posts and that meant Harold and Ben. I remember saying goodbye to them and they scrambled back to Fort DeRussy on Ala Moana.

Then the radio told us to crawl under the bed, which we did, along with Jakey. I guess we were under the bed about 20 minutes when we looked at each other and said, “this is silly” and decided to get busy. I called Riley H. Allen, editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, for whom I worked as executive secretary. He was the boss and very much in charge. I enjoyed working for the Starbull and everyone connected with the paper. Back in those days we seemed to have a special camaraderie. Mr. Allen said he didn’t need me, but called back in a half-hour or so and said I had better come down to the paper.

I remember that we drove down Kapiolani Boulevard and then cut over to Ala Moana at the Honolulu Advertiser—don’t ask me why. All I know is we missed the Japanese planes which supposedly bombed the waterfront and we finally got to the Starbull at 125 Merchant Street, downtown. Uncle Sam took me inside, made sure I was safe, and then took off for Schuman Carriage on Beretania Street, which had some broken windows and, we later learned, a death.

Shortly after I got to the Starbull we had an air raid and Riley Allen, Paul McIree (the paper’s treasurer) and yours truly got under the lithograph tables, which they had decided was the safest place to be in case we were bombed. The all-clear sounded and we headed back upstairs. There were all sorts of rumors that had to be checked out. The big one was the destruction of the Japanese Sunday School class at McCully and King Streets. It was caused by falling U.S. Navy anti-aircraft shells. That was awful. Part of the ferocity of the attack was due to the fact that we were “on maneuvers” and had nothing but dummy ammunition. There was immediate censorship. I did what I was told to do until closing.

The 50 years since that day have become blurred details of the excitement, fear and activity. Betty McDonald, our society editor, insisted that Uncle Sam and I stay at her house together with Helen Smith and her husband, Don, a free-lance photographer. The McDonalds lived up against the mountains out at Black Point and figured we would be safer there than at Waikiki.

Sam and I went home, left Jakey with lots of food and water, and then drove out to Betty and Mac’s with our headlights covered with the blue paper they gave us at the Bulletin.

Dinner that night was soft-boiled eggs and toast. We were all fearful and bewildered. It was dark. I can remember getting dinner by flashlight. All the wahines slept together on the living room couch, which opened up. The men were protecting us and had worked out shifts between them. (Don, when it was his turn, paced the “widows walk” with a bottle in one hand and a gun in the pocket of his robe.

I laugh now, but at the time it was serious and we were plenty scared.)

Sunday evening, December 7. All night long we could hear the movement of troops and ammo. In addition, from our location up against the mountain we saw what we took to be Japanese planes returning Sunday night. ‘Thank God,’ we thought. They didn’t bomb us, but flew in quietly and secretly. They exited the same way. We actually saw the planes from the “widow’s walk.” I remember going out there and keeping very quiet—we were scared even more deeply, if such could be possible.

It was terrible trying to wrestle with the unknown while we were really in the dark in more ways than one. There is so much you know and so much you don’t. Don’t ask me why but the Army’s censorship bureau was in charge and all I know is that, at the time, nothing was said other than there were “sporadic raids.”

We later learned that a friend, Eddie Harris, had been talking on the phone during an attack, with one hand holding the phone and the other hand in his pocket, when an unexploded anti-aircraft shell hit his shirt. A fragment struck his hand that was in his pocket, leaving him not only with a constant memory of the day, December 7, 1941, but with his masculinity intact.

On Monday, we all headed for the paper as usual. Uncle Sam and I stopped at the house, checked on Jakey and then went on to work. I distributed gas masks until nearly 5 o’clock and remember wishing I could go home at 4 like everyone else.

They put barbed wire on the beaches because we didn’t know whether or not the Japanese would return. One night somebody got a finger stuck on a machine gun. What an eerie sound, especially in the middle of the night with it being so black and everyone under curfew.

The war sure played havoc with all of our plans and wishes for the future. Pearl Harbor taught us one thing though; and that is we must plan for the future. No one but the Good Lord has the final say and it is going to be done His way, come hell or high water. Looking back, in spite of the ruthlessness of the assault, we were able to organize and ultimately win the war.

I hope this letter helps you to remember Pearl Harbor.

Love and aloha,

Aunt Ellen

© 1991, 2011 Ron Jacobs (Originally published in HAWAII MAGAZINE, December 1991.)

December 7, 2012

We, who were here on the most infamous day of the Twentieth Century,

REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR