We're Tiny White Specks on a Bright Blue Planet

Congratulations to Mr. John Middleton for correctly naming "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin as the Monday Song of the Day.

I'm back in Space City after a quick weekend trip to visit the lady friend in Nashville. We thoroughly enjoyed our time on Saturday night at a soggy Neyland Stadium along with 96,000 of our orange-clad friends.

My favorite part of the entire visit to Knoxville happened during the "Vol Walk."

What's the "Vol Walk" you might ask?

Head Coach Johnny Majors came up with the idea for the Vol Walk after a 1988 game at Auburn when he saw the historic Tiger Walk take place. Prior to each home game, the Vols will file out of Stokely Athletic Center, down past the Tennessee Volunteers Wall of Fame, and make their way down Peyton Manning Pass and onto Phillip Fulmer Way. Thousands of fans line the street to shake the players' hands as they walk into Neyland Stadium. Through rain, snow, sleet, or shine, the Vol faithful are always out in full force to root on the Vols as they prepare for battle. The fans are pumped up with Rocky Top played by The Pride of the Southland Band.

Thanks, Wikipedia!

Back to our story...as the Vol Walk was beginning, and the players and coaches were approaching the entrance to Neyland Stadium where our group was standing, the excitement grew as we clapped in time to "Rocky Top." Suddenly, I had the sense that a very large person was standing just behind me. For those of you who are thinking ahead, no, it was not Manute Bol. Instead, it was a very large man wearing bib overalls and a Tennessee orange jacket. As Tennessee head coach Lane Kiffin walked by us, the aforementioned mountain of a man proceeded to yell "The LANE TRAIN" over and over again for a solid 2 minutes.

Was this guy the first person to recognize the rhyming properties of the words "Lane" and "train"? Almost certainly not.

Was this guy the only one who was fired up at the sight of his favorite team entering their coliseum to do battle against the foe from South Carolina? No again.

Did this guy contribute to my enjoyment of the "Vol Walk" and thus my enjoyment of the trip as a whole? UNDOUTEDLY.

Thanks, Overall-clad, Name-Rhyming Guy. You made our trip to Knoxville/Neyland Stadium a very memorable one.

Current Reading

The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy by Bill Simmons

The Autumn Bells are Ringing, but They'll Just Have to Wait

Two things before I head off to the exotic locale of Nashville, Tennessee for that thing the kids like to call Spring Break (look for me in the Nashville-edition of Girls With Low Self Esteem):

1. Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy, provides a great take on the societal menace that is the Facebook Status Update:

Other than that, the comedy of status updates can be off the charts. Like my college classmate who sends out status updates so overwhelmingly mundane and weird that my buddies and I forward them to each other, then add fake responses like, "(Guy's name) … snapped and killed a drifter tonight" and "(Guy's name) … would hang myself if the ceilings in my apartment weren't too short."

It kills us. We can't get enough of it. We have been doing it for four solid months. And really, that's what Facebook is all about -- looking at photos of your friend's kids or any reunion or party, making fun of people you never liked and searching for old hook-ups and deciding whether you regret the hook-up or not. That's really it. All in all, I like Facebook.

2. Some blessed soul has been putting all of the old GSP Sing Song acts on YouTube. We're talking all the way back to the halcyon days of 1993. In the spirit of excess, here they are in all their glory.

1993-Referees

1995-Golfers

1996-Sheriffs

1999-Matadors

2000-Umpires

2001-Barbershop Quartet

2002-Huck Finn (bonus points to the first person who finds baby-faced Dan Carlson)

2003-The Beatles show is M.I.A. for some reason. I blame Demetrius Collins for this.

2004-Top Gun

2005-Travolta (I have no idea how this show won)

2006-Frogs (The show I enjoyed the most, and, in my opinion, is the best one on this list)

2007-Firemen

2008-Magicians (I'm just going to act as though I never saw this show)

2009-Peter Pan

Before They Turn the Summer Into Dust

For those of you who know me well, you probably know that I have a moderate to severe man crush on Bill Simmons, but today the Sports Guy really outdid himself.

In his annual "NBA Trade Value" column, Simmons presented to the world the following video featuring the immortal (due to the fact that he's an alien) John Tesh performing "Roundball Rock", a.k.a. the NBA on NBC theme from the 1990's.

Just watching the video took me back to the days of Bulls-Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals, Marv Albert's toupee in its middle years, and countless showings of "Entertainment Tonight".

There's one thing that I think the Sports Guy got wrong with his video analysis, though. At the 1:17-1:25 stretch of the video where Simmons thought that Tesh was playing "air piano", I think that Yanni, Jr. is actually doing something closer to "air dribbling" of a basketball. I'm not Marcel Marceau here, but I think that's pretty close to how a mime would dribble a basketball, also assuming that the mime has an assist-to-turnover ratio comparable to that of a drunk Gheorghe Muresan.

I apologize to Billy Crystal and Big Gheorge for that last comment.

Current Reading
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I See It Around Me, I See It In Everything, I Could Be So Much More Than This

Congratulations to Mr. Peter Pope for correctly naming "Freedom" by David Gray as the Saturday and Sunday Song of the Day.

Somewhere Joey Halbert and Bill Simmons are holding each other. They cry in the dark in outraged response to the cruel, cruel world that is the 2008-2009 NFL regular season.
On the bright side, America's Team looked fannnnnnnnnnntastic yesterday in their 28-10 defeat of the Cleveland (Paul) Browns.

I hope I'm not getting ahead of myself with this one, but the Super Bowl is in Tampa this year, right?

I'm probably going to regret writing that last sentence at some point in the next 6 months.

Power and the Money, Money and the Power

There was an episode of "The Office" last year where Michael informed Jan that no one at the Scranton office was disgruntled, but to the contrary, everyone was extremely "gruntled".

Well, as has been written about here and here, it seems that William "LaBill" Simmons, a.ka. The Sports Guy, is less than, shall we say, "gruntled", with the World-Wide Leader in sports at the current moment.

As improbable as it seems, he is apparently writing for the moment at...wait for it, wait for it, wait....this site. Yes, that's correct. The most famous blogger/internet-centric sportswriter this side of Grantland Rice is using a Blogger-platform to, in the words of Whitman,"Sound his barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world."

This, my friends, is why I am fascinated by the internet. The playing field has completely been leveled. I have the same method of communicating with the masses as one of the most well-compensated/promoted/connected sportswriters of the current era. Someone could stumble from the Sports Guy Unplugged to Osler's Razor to No Genuine Issue of Material Fact to the Jig and Twig without even knowing which was written by the law professor, which was written by the student, and which was written by a de facto internet mogul.

True Colors Fly in Blue and Black

Congratulations to Mr. Jeremy Masten for correctly naming "Free Fallin'" by Tom Petty as the Sunday Song of the Day.

Rest easy, everyone. We now have proof that the Sports Guy did not mix himself a Drano smoothie after last night's devastating loss by the Great Satan.

Now it all makes sense.

You bleed for your team, you follow them through thick and thin, you monitor every free-agent signing, you immerse yourself in draft day, you purchase the jerseys and caps, you plan your Sundays around the games ... and there's a little rainbow waiting at the end. You can't see it, but you know it's there. It's there. It has to be there. So you believe.

Of course, there's one catch: You might never get there. Every fan's worst fear. All that energy over the years just getting displaced, no release, no satisfaction, nothing. Season after season, no championship ... and then you die. I mean, isn't that what this is all about? Isn't that the nagging fear? That those little moral victories over the years won't make up for that big payoff at the end -- that one moment when everything comes together, when your team keeps winning, when you keep getting the breaks and you just can't lose.

And if none of this makes sense, well ... it does to me. I just watched somebody else's team win the Super Bowl. Giants 17, Patriots 14.

"Free Fallin' Out Into Nothing" by Bill Simmons.

I must confess that a small part of me hurts for the Patriots, Simmons, and the entire fanbase of the Great Satan. Set aside their former smug satisfaction, thoughts of Spygate, and Bill Belichick leaving the field last night with :01 remaning on the clock. Instead, think if you had been working towards anything monumental for months and months, only to see it taken away at the last moment by the black sheep brother of your greatest rival.

After weeks and weeks of pressure, constant questions about perfection, and tons of potshots, the Pats fell a few minutes short of immortality, and as Eli Manning knelt to the turf in Glendale, Arizona, I was reminded once again how the pursuit of perfection is an unforgiving journey.
History will not view the Pats' season as a success despite the second-ever undefeated regular season. Instead, they will be viewed as a tragic collection of figures that, by all accounts, should have finally ushered the '72 Dolphins out of the spotlight, and entered into a rareified status that only comes along every so often in this era of parity and mediocrity.

Now, everyone is undefeated once again. When the next season begins in September, we will have these inevitable discussions around the final team remaining undefeated, constantly wondering if they can make it all the way. Those conversations will be full of possibility and conjecture, but they will always contain the phrase,"Yeah, they're undefeated, but what about Super Bowl XLII...?"

I'm a Bad Boy 'Cause I Don't Even Miss Her

Congratulations to Ms. Stacy Villescas and Mr. Joseph Halbert for correctly naming "Boys of Summer" from the Don Henley album Building the Perfect Beast as the Friday Song of the Day. Thanks are also in order to my Dad and John Middleton for the Don Henley-related trivia. If a celebrity is from East Texas, he or she is going to get the 5-star treatment here at Running Down a Dream.

Speaking of "Running Down a Dream", the editorial staff would like to thank Mr. Tom Petty for the plug tonight during the Super Bowl XLII halftime show. You'll note that we did not have to pay a hefty $3 million for a halftime plug, but merely convinced Mr. Petty and The Heartbreakers to play our namesake tune in return for a YouTube plug. Here you go, Tom.

Oh, you also want to talk about that game that also occurred on either side of Mr. Petty's performance? I can do that as well. For a game that was largely forgettable through the first 3 quarters, that final quarter was probably the most intense 15 minutes of football that I have watched since the 2006 Texas-USC Rose Bowl matchup, and we're talking about a game that featured the hated New York (Football) Giants and the Great Satan.
I'm not sure what the collective reaction in your locale was to the escape by Eli "Harry Houdini" Manning from Pats' pressure and subsequent heave downfield to an obviously living right David Tyree, but everyone around me screamed things at the television that looked something like this:

"Icantbelievewhatjusthappened!!!"

"HowdidEliManningdothat?"

"WhatkindofdealdidDavidTyreecutwiththedeviltomakethatcatch?"

"Whyareweallyellingatthetvscreenoverteamswenormallyhate?"

(Yes, we were in the "talking so fast so that all of your words run together" mode.)

As 85% of you then witnessed, Eli Manning heaved a pass to the corner of the endzone into the waiting arms of Plaxico Burress, and millions of yet-to-be born children in the New York-Connecticut-New Jersey tri-state area will be saddled with names like Plaxico Wasserstein because of that famed connection.

In the end, Eli Manning stood as the Super Bowl MVP after outdueling Tom Brady, and I am currently eating a nice baked serving of crow for all of the grief that I constantly piled on the youngest Manning brother. Frankly, I'm expecting to walk outside right now and see a flock of pigs winging through the sky in a perfect "V" and cats living with dogs in perfect harmony. It's true, my friends. Hell has frozen over, Satan (not the Great Satan) has pulled out the tire chains, and everyone is stockpiling canned goods.

As someone once said, "It's not the end of the world, but I think you can see it from here."

I would write more, but I need to do little checking to make sure that the Sports Guy and Joey Halbert have not done anything rash after the Great Satan's once perfect season fell apart like a tumbleweed in the Arizona desert. In fact, Joseph summed things up well when he told me after the game, "How the mighty have fallen. Karma is a cruel, cruel mistress."

Too true, Joseph.

Too true.

Such is the Promise, Such is the Curse

On Friday, I mentioned the enshrinement of NY Times columnist David Brooks in the Running Down a Dream author/writer/columnist Hall-of-Fame. At the point when I made that famous declaration, said Hall-of-Fame was an entirely contrived entity, and I guess it still is, but I wanted to run with the idea and commit it to the firmament of the internet. That last clause is probably an oxymoron, but I'm moving ahead regardless.

If I had to construct my version of Canton, Grauman's Chinese Theater, or Cooperstown, it would look something like this:

First-Ballot Members (since Cooperstown had 5 initial members [Mathewson, Ruth, Wagner, Johnson, and Cobb] I'm going with 5 of my own) in no particular order:

David Halberstam

As if it were not enough to have written the definitive book on the Vietnam War (1972's The Best and the Brightest), the Pulitzer Prize-winner also authored one of the best sports books in the last half-century with 1980's The Breaks of the Game.

Over the years, he developed a pattern of alternating a book with a weighty theme with one that might seem of slighter import but to which he nonetheless applied his considerable reportorial muscles. “He was a man who didn’t have a lazy bone in his body,” said the writer Gay Talese, a close family friend. Obituary in the April 24, 2007 edition of the NY Times.

David Brooks

I was introduced to the writing of Brooks through the Op-Ed page of the NY Times, but his best work, at least in my opinion, is found in his two books, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense. When viewed as two parts of a larger whole, they represent one of the most accurate pictures of modern America that I have read.

Bill Simmons

Even though his rampant homerism for the Great Satan this year has been a bit too much to handle, the Sports Guy still holds down a spot in the Pantheon (I know, I'm mixing my metaphors), due to the fact that he has introduced me to The Ewing Theory, the Manning Face, the Levels of Losing, the Tyson Zone, and "Yup, these are my readers." His first book, Now I Can Die in Peace, chronicling the 2004 World Series run by the Red Sawx, may just be required bedtime reading for my (non-existent) children or grandchildren when the Rangers, Cowboys, and Liverpool still have not won a title.

Malcolm Gladwell

Out of the Top-5, Gladwell is easily the figure that I have read the least, but his ability to present technical, jargon-laden information in an engrossing and engaging manner is a skill that I greatly admire. Whether it was 2000's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, 2005's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, his pieces for the New Yorker, or his blog, almost all of Gladwell's writing makes me view the world in a new way that I had never before considered.

Jon Krakauer

Krakauer rose to prominence based on his first hand-account of the 1996 Everest Disaster in Into Thin Air, but 1990's Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains, 1996's Into the Wild, and 2003's Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith are just as good, if not better than Into Thin Air. Krakauer's writing is reminiscent of the settings he describes: stark and often unforgiving. If the sign of a great writer is the ability to remove himself from the story and place the characters on center stage, Krakauer is surely near the pinnacle of the modern non-fiction genre.

Honorable Mention (Maybe next time, fellas)

• Ernest Hemingway
• John Grisham
• Stephen Ambrose
• John Steinbeck
• Bob Woodward
• Chuck Klosterman
• William Manchester
• Edmund Morris
• David McCullough
  
  
  
  

It's Been Raining for Hours, There's Water Everywhere

2007: Part Deux

July:

• 14: The kids from Memorial C of C in Houston compare me to the evil German camp counselor Lars in Heavyweights. I'm strangely honored.
• 20: Honestly, eating spam is not that bad for a few weeks each summer.
• 26: Lightning and I are almost tragically united.

August:

• 15: I call out Bear Grylles and somehow still survive to this very day.
• 16: Michael Vick: Federal inmate and covert operative for Al Qaeda.
• 22: Anchorwoman begins its rather brief run on Fox. The residents of Tyler exhale as one in response.

September:

• 4: "Battery Hut, Battery Hut, Battery Hut!!!"
• 7: Matt Phillips, we salute you.
• 24: Mike Gundy and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Just a Couple of Guys Keeping Things Crazy.
• 27: If you are a Texas Rangers fan, hope must spring eternal.

October:

• 1: If you don't think this is yet another opportunity to bring up the GSP Sing Song win streak, well, you just don't know me that well.
• 7: I manage to send the Baylor Bear football program to even greater depths of despair.
• 19: College football fan arrogance at its finest.
• 25: The 3rd Anniversary Post.

November:

• 8: The Trinitarian Opposition to the Evil Empire.
• 13: Ruminations on the phenomenon that is Soulja Boy.
• 15: Take it from me on this one: Always try to remember who's alive and who's dead.
• 28: The Sports Guy's date with destiny.

December:

• 5: Take this quiz and help determine the fate of the free world.
• 10: The best piece I've read so far on the 2008 Presidential election.
• 13: Happy Mitchell Report Day!
• 17: Gus Johnson's status as a liar is still up for debate.
• 19: Anton Chigurh v. Jason Bourne for all the marbles.

If You Find Yourself in That Nostalgic Rage

Jonathan referred to it in a comment on the post from earlier today, but I would be doing myself and the rest of this band a disservice if I didn't promote the heck out of The Sports Guy's record-breaking 7 hour, 4 minute chat today on ESPN.com.

For those of you who are loyal and ardent Sports Guy followers, you've probably already read the chat transcript, but for those of you who have not delved into the madness, I'm warning you.

This is like picking up War and Peace and thinking that Leo penned a tome that could be vanquished in less time than it took Howard Dean's presidential campaign to fall apart after the "Yeahhhhhh" speech in 2004.


Reading the entire transcript is going to require whatever fortitude, gumption, moxie, and mojo that you possess, but know this: You will be a better person at the end of the madness.

Just as my father constantly reminds me of the musical supremacy of the 10-year stretch from 1965-1975, my children will one day grow tired of my stories chronicling the moment when The Sports Guy vanquished the record of Rob Neyer.