Left Field

I woke on Sunday morning realizing that this day would be the last full day of football until sometime next September. Sure, there was the Super Bowl, but it's just not the same. Another season had slipped by.
Soon, Sundays would be occupied by the chores that had been swept aside over the course of the past four months. It's usually a sad sensation when football season ends. Hell, some have said that the conclusion of the NFL season may have contributed to Hunter S. Thompson's decision to blow out his brains.
Weirdly, I didn't care that the season had come to an end. When the Giants kicked that field goal, I turned off the TV and wondered if I'd even bother watching the Super Bowl this year. I will, of course, but I did ponder the thought.

I've been writing words in this paper for more than five years. Some of you have enjoyed those words while others have detested them so much that they felt the need to call me, among other things, a communist. This week, however, is my last at the Source. Next week I'm going to go write for another paper in another city that is not Bend, Oregon.
Don't worry – not that I actually thought you were particularly worried about the departure of someone who once called Tim Tebow fans a “gaggle of idiots” – I'll still be writing this column for a few more weeks and maybe longer, but you'll no longer be able to find me hunched behind my computer machine in that old brick building on Georgia Avenue.

The extra point, meaningless at this point in the game, clanked off the upright. There was a confused hush in the stadium, the television announcers fell silent and in the room in which I was watching the All-State BCS National Championship Presented by Professor Snoozington's Boredom Tonic™, I wasn't the only individual to laugh.
“That kind of sums up this entire affair,” is what uninterested parties seemed to be saying.
Trent Richardson had just rumbled 34 yards down the sideline for the only touchdown of the 120 minutes of play that LSU and Alabama had engaged in during the past two months. Finally, one of these two “defensive powerhouses” (which is code for “mind-numbingly tedious team to watch, unless you attended or live near said team”) had reached the end zone, but then the shanked extra point brought us back to a reality in which two teams from the same conference and same geographic region were playing (again) for a share in a championship that almost no one believes is actually legit.

On Christmas Eve, I – and my parents, siblings and our spouses – attended a football game in Seattle. The Seahawks were playing the 49ers in what was supposed to be a playoff-deciding matchup, so the family donned matching blue-and-green Santa hats (the too-cool-for-school 16-year-old hipster who lives inside of me cringed just a little bit), piled into the old man's SUV and arrived at a parking lot near the stadium precisely three hours prior to kick off.
In the time that preceded kickoff, I ingested the following: three bowls of chili, four pieces of cornbread, half a bag of Ruffles, five 16 oz. cans of Olympia beer and a bevy of other salty items. I didn't need any of this, which I realized about a third of the way up our Everest-like ascension to our surprisingly excellent seats. But, I had to eat and drink all that. We were at a big football game and I've long held dear to my heart the notion that all special sporting events are license to eat like a fat guy who really likes being fat and eating foods that will ensure he remains so.

The coach is named Shaka Smart?
When the first NCAA tournament brackets to ever feature 68 teams rolled out of office-owned printers across the country, no one looked at Virginia Commonwealth University's slot in a play-in game and thought, “Oh, they'll totally make it to the Final Four.” But somehow, this little-known team made it all the way there… and made it one of the most memorable college basketball seasons in recent memory.
Joe Pa… yeah you're old as hell, but come on!
Nothing was more ridiculous or disgusting as the details that continue to come out of State College, Penn., which was once known as home to Penn State, but will forever be associated with one of the most shocking moments in sports history.

Between last Saturday and January 9, there will be 35 college football contests, meaning that some 58 percent of all Division I FBS schools will engage in these holiday-season rituals. For some of the players, it's a dream come true. For others, this means that an otherwise perfect Christmas vacation has been ruined. But for fans, these season-ending contests are a necessity.
My research has left me without a solid explanation as to the etymology of the word “bowl” as it pertains to things other than the eating of soup, the rationing of marijuana and the rolling of heavy things by drunken Midwesterners. This will have to remain a mystery for the moment, but calling these games “bowls” is helpful for the weary holiday travelers who find themselves cordoned off for a week in a Christmas-tree-lit living room with people they see once a year, but are told are family. It's a “bowl” game. You have to watch it.

I just finished working out. It is three minutes past midnight and I'm in my basement.
I've been trying desperately to write something about how comic book-loving Robert Griffin III's Heisman win over the smiley face of Andrew Luck has a lot to do with the Occupy movement and the first three films of the Twilight
franchise, but have since realized that this is a horrible idea for a column. So I decided to get some exercise and planned on doing so without leaving my basement office.
While I'm reticent to discuss it at length with people who aren't already aware of my obsessive nature, I have been engaged for the past several months in a tumultuously unpredictable relationship with a certain exercise video series. The phrase “exercise video” might conjure images of Richard Simmons' (who I mistakenly have called Russell Simmons on no less than 50 occasions, an error with which the real Russell Simmons would hardly be pleased) piercing voice instructing you to perspire to the sounds of Buddy Holly, but the regimen that came into my life is nothing like that. In fact, it's not so much a work out video as it is a test of the human condition and/or vomit reflex and a routine that landed me in urgent care with unrelenting back pain. Yet, I continue to do it.

Somewhere on Sunday, likely in a dimly lit cavernous room inside a decrepit castle atop a craggy mountaintop surrounded at all times by a lightning storm, sat the group of men, likely smoking cigars and likely wearing the finest of suits, who make up the collective brain of the Bowl Championship Series. The committee had just unveiled to the world that LSU and Alabama would be playing for the national championship and had also just laid out the slate of other BCS games.
“Excellent job, men,” said one of the mysterious BCS men through a mouth full of caviar, which he quickly washed down with champagne that had been filtered through the horn of a unicorn.

I'll admit it. I've been borderline apocalyptical in my predictions about the 2011-2012 NBA season in that I have told many, many people that there probably won't be an NBA season this winter. I also wildly declared that professional basketball as we know it would cease to exist as a result of the lockout.
OK, I look a little bit like Harold Camping right now. If you don't remember who Harold Camping is, he's that old asshole who told a bunch of other old assholes to give him all their money because the world was going to end earlier this year. I, too, am kind of an a-hole, I suppose, because there will indeed be an NBA season this winter and it doesn't look like the demise of professional American basketball is coming to an end anytime soon.
I still don't know which side won this dispute or if it even matters, but I'm now faced with preparing my psyche for an NBA season slated to begin on Christmas Day. That's right, as if owners and players weren't displaying enough hubris in their “negotiations,” they went ahead and superseded the birthday of Jesus Christ for their big tipoff day.

The kick was wide left. It was one of those kicks that was doomed from the second it left the ground and it also happened to be one of those kicks that ends a team's hopes for a national championship.
But before Oregon kicker Alejandro Maldonado even took the field to try to send his team into overtime on Saturday night, the Duck gear-clad woman on the bar stool next to me said, “Our kicker is awful.” Then she said it again, and then one more time as Oregon marched down the field. It turns out this was foreshadowing the final seconds of the game when it all came down to the kicker, as it so often does.
And this isn't fair. Not in the slightest, because a kicker isn't really part of the team. Yeah, they're on the roster and they get a uniform (usually taking whatever number happens to be left over) and a helmet with inadequate facial protection, but if you were to grab a defensive end at random and ask if he knew his kicker's name, there's a good chance he'd just mumble something vaguely eastern European and walk away. Hell, kickers don't even participate in the team practice. While the squad is perfecting its offense, the kicker is typically at the other end of the field, perhaps with the punter if he's lucky, just kicking the damn ball around. They just don't fit in and even announcers don't give a damn about them most of the time, failing to even narrate the goings on of extra points – which are an expected certainty yet are actually incredibly difficult to execute.