Sports Notes, 10/10

Both "party crashers" have advanced to the World Series, with my Yankees having been ousted in six games by the Texas Rangers of Dallas, and the Yankees' opponent from last year's Series, the Phillies, having been ousted by the San Francisco Giants, also in six games. It's the first time since 2002 that my mother's sports nemesis, the Giants, have made it to the World Series (Barry Bonds and the rest got beat by the Angels that year), and it's the first time ever that the Rangers have made it. In fact, when they won game two against the Yankees in this years ALCS, evening that series at 1-1, they recorded the first home playoff victory in franchise history.

There are advertisements around town here in Austin for the Rangers, which I think is neat...I've said all along that any team with Cliff Lee and CJ Wilson on the mound, Josh Hamilton and Vladdy in the lineup, and flamethrower Neftali Perez in the 'pen will have a shot...but this town, and this state in general, is not a baseball place. High school football gets more attention here than major league baseball. But the catch-phrase on the ads make me say wtf? It reads: "Bring the Championship Home".

The Rangers? Bring the Championship home? Which championship would that be? Texas has never had any professional baseball championships. The Houston Astros finally made the World Series for the first time in 2005, when they got swept by Corrie's White Sox. This is, like I mentioned earlier, the Rangers first opportunity. The Longhorn League, a minor league from the 40s, was pretty exciting when you look at the stats (kinda like the late 90s steroid era), but, c'mon...UT, though, has won a few championships.

Maybe they meant football...college (UT in 2005) or professional (Dallas, 1995)...or maybe basketball (Houston, 1995)?

Speaking of the NFL, last week there were some brutal helmet-to-helmet hits--you know, the kinds macho idiots love--and the league clarified the rules and levied stiff fines on those players. There has been recent discussions about the violence wreaked by a career playing the game of American football, about the concussions, about the league at first ignoring the brain damaging play and now almost confronting it, about the players union letting the old "warriors" from the 60s, 70s, and 80s basically dying in the street penniless and demented, and it's caused some unwanted press for everyone involved. So this week, there weren't any extremely vicious hits, and defensemen were complaining that the way they were trained was no longer "okay", that they might retire now, and that the game would be changed forever.

This leads me to the inevitable conclusion: Will the eradication of "American football" happen in our lifetime?

Of course my assumption here is that tackle football, as we know it, has a limited shelf life. It won't be too long before the face-mask is removed, the tackling becomes less violent, the hits become less jarring...next thing you know we'll be at two-hand-touch or flag-football status, and then what? You can't sell machismo and "battling on the grid-iron" and "warrior status" with touch football. Maybe you can, and maybe we'll see.

American football, I think I'm trying to get to as a point, with it's violence and machismo, might be viewed differently in subsequent epochs, like how we view Roman gladiatorial games now. Football, in how it's sold, marketed, and presented, is pure bloodsport, just without the blood. But, I myself did spend most of the day watching it.

Another thing sport related that will be viewed as a major mistake in the future, at least by everyone then and not just a few now, is the crime of publicly funding sporting venues. I'll have more to say about that later, thanks to a book that organizes the information by the columnist Dave Zirin.

Mustache Studies

I had been growing a beard for the sole purpose of shaving it into a mustache for halloween; I'd wanted to dress up as Gene Wilder from Young Frankenstein. After I realized that I wasn't going to do anything for halloween, like parties or trick-or-treating, I decided to shave it all off...for me it's kind of an itchy annoyance.

But, I didn't shave it all off at once, and tried a series of mustaches, much to my wife, Corrie's, chagrin. She was a good sport taking pictures...

The first I tried was part-Frank Zappa-part-dirty porn star. My soul patch wasn't large enough, evidenced here with a pair of pictures using a similar pose with Frank and myself.




I pulled another comparison shot (that wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped) with Doc Sportello, of whom only Norm probably knows.




Once I shaved off the offending downspouts, the lip-corner-framing hairs, what I had was a normal and respectable gentleman's mustache.



I tried to clean it up and messed it up, and then tried the "Chaplin", a 'stache that Hitler ruined for everyone except my old Chef at Vong, Pierre Schutz, who, as a Swiss-Frenchman, wore the "Chaplin" proudly as long as I knew him.

Then I went back to my clean-shaven self...

California Trip-3: Places

Visiting California, if you're from there like me, there are certain places that you'd like to see that may not make it to tour guide books for visitors. We didn't really make it to those places, but we made it to some...time was too tight.

But we did get to the Winchester Mansion, which is a touristy place, but something Corrie hadn't done but had wanted too for more than a decade. It was just as wacky as I remember form my first trip in 1993, when my cousin Jake was out visiting. The grounds are still pretty well manicured:



And the "13" bush is still cool and bizarre:



We did go to a speakeasy-style bar in downtown San Jose, a downtown that I realized either had changed drastically from my last visit, or that I'd never gotten that close to. The downtown area was cute and quaint, like a non-threatening Berkeley with artsy stuff and coffee shops, but not too many hipsters or panhandlers. The bar was unmarked as far a name goes. Apparently it goes by the title singlebarrel, lower case and one word like that, and above a black unmarked door on a side street is a barrel. Behind the door is a dark staircase down a flight a stairs to a basement bar. The tenders talk to you for a while and figure out what flavors you like to drink in a mixed drink, then create something for you that's similar but different. It was all very cool, but I have no pictures...

We didn't get to too many of our San Luis vistas and hot-spots of nature like (one of our favorites on Earth) Montana de Oro, Pirate's Cove, Dinosaur Caves, the beaches of Avila or Pismo or Shell, but we did get to Morro Bay, and the Rock. We decided to hit that one up since a novel I'm writing has Morro Rock as a character (I call it Chumash Rock), and we had so little time...

I like how it looms in the back of the city...



...how it looks off in the distance...



...and how it looks as a backdrop for me and my Forlan jersey.

California Trip-2: People

Many apologies to my few readers about the lagging taking place on here. Since returning from California, my schedule was kinda screwed up at my night job, and the only full days off I've had (off from both jobs) were a Saturday and Sunday when our friends Marc and Linda were visiting from New York. Throw in the near total crap-out of our little Saturn and our purchasing of a new (to us) car, a transaction that should be complete early next week, and time slips away like sands through the hour glass.

One of the wonderful things about the trip that this post concerns was the visiting of our friends and family. People were the reason we traveled west, and being with our people was the highlight.

The first day we arrived we got to hang out with Donny, a friend from Corrie's architectural school days, and a guest at our Mexican wedding. He took us to a cool speakeasy-style bar in downtown San Jose, and we talked about his work and caught up. It was a great evening that ended when we left for Citrus Heights and my brother's house.

We made it in reasonable time and spent the next two days playing in Sac with Dan and 'Pita and Norm and Holly, two pairs of people I love living less than a mile apart from each other. As a person who feels pretty mature, I can say that it's really when you're apart from your loved ones that you appreciate all those moments together, never wanting nights to end, staying up until 3 and 4 in the morning, laughing and telling stories...

The same thing happened for the one night we stayed in Fresno with Corrie's brother, Rob. It was great seeing him and talking and cooking and watching him play daddy to his girlfriend's two sons. His girlfriend is great, by the way.

The next day was Saturday, and we rolled into San Luis in the early afternoon to my boy Ryan's house, showered, and went off to the reception, the main event around which our trip was based. Ryan is one of my closest friends, a member of my wedding party, and seeing him is always a blast. On that first day we got to see him and Julie, his girl and one of Corrie's bridesmaids; other good friends Joe and Kelly, themselves set to get hitched next year; Jimmy B and his very cool girl Christine; Ken and a very pregnant Christine, friends that couldn't make it to our Mexican party; and the couple of honor, Sam and Aurie.

I first met Sam when Corrie was overseas, and after our first conversation, I knew that anytime he was around, we would get along famously. He was a SLO transplant from Seattle, a child of a white mom and Black Panther, raised Jehovah's Witness, better read than I, just as left, and just as pissed off about the far right contingent ruling San Luis Obispo.

He got his first passport to come to Yelapa. Once we got the dates of Sam and Aurie's day, we put in for time off, no questions.

After the reception, we spent Sunday at Jimmy B's house watching football, then had breakfast on Monday with Tami Love, a friend of ours that I met while tutoring at Cuesta ten years ago. We stayed connected when we both got back to Ca Poly, we visited her in Munich when she was living there and we were trekking, and she visited us when we lived in Brooklyn and she was working some freelance math/computer gig in Yonkers. It was good seeing her...she might come out here for a week or so, trying to find a place to settle for a few years.

After that breakfast on Monday, we left for San Mateo and my high school friends Rich and Lara, and their kiddies, Lily and Abby. We had a great time visiting, hanging out, and then going out to eat in Half Moon Bay, another evening that seemed to end too soon.

Now some pictures:

Mama Kate's boys and their ladies...


Dan and Norm and I hamming it up...


Ryan, Jimmy B, me, and Sam up in Paso Robles, the site of their reception...


Sam and Auriana...


Kelly, Aurie and Corrie...


Tami Love and Corrie...


Rich and Lara, my high school friends whom I hadn't seen in a dozen years, with their two daughters, Lily (almost 3), and Abby (six months)...

A Brief Interlude

I wanted to take a brief interlude from my barely begun series about our trip west to say something about baseball, a sport of which I am a fan.

At the beginning of the seventh month of regular season play (and ninth month of activities for players) and after 161 games out of 162 in the regular season, my Yankees are tied with the Rays for the lead in the East and for the best record in the American League, which means that while fans know that the Texas Rangers and the Minnesota Twins will join the Yanks and Rays in the playoffs, it still hasn't been determined who will be playing whom. That seems kinda crazy to me; nobody ran away with anything this year...and if both the Yanks and Rays lose and the Twins win, there could be a three-way tie for tops spot in the AL.

The National league is even more screwy: The San Diego Padres, San Francisco Giants, and Atlanta Braves comprise a group, out of which two of the teams are going to the playoffs. Nobody knows and there's only one game left in the season. After tomorrow, they might enter a three-way tie and have crazy play-and-then-travel-and-play games.

It's made for a pretty exciting year.