Left Field

I don't only read sports magazines. I'm an indiscriminate fan of several publications, many of which are left on my coffee table and toilet tank with the intention of letting my houseguests and/or bathroom users know of my varied and erudite interests.
So now you know why I was reading Esquire the other day. As I flipped through a few pages about how to appropriately dress for the upcoming fall season in clothing affordable only to the male versions of Sex and the City characters, I damn near dropped the magazine. Why? Well, because looking back at me with an uncomfortable degree of sexiness was Tom Brady. And this wasn't an article about the NFL's fading stars, but rather an advertisement for Ugg boots.

If you're an American human male between the ages of eight and 108, it's quite probable that you have, at the very least, a passing interest in American-style football. If you're a female in the same age bracket, you're also likely to enjoy the occasional pigskin matchup, too. Football addiction doesn't discriminate along gender lines. If you don't watch football, that's fine. Totally understandable. Worthy of applause, in fact. Someone out there has to cure cancer and read Proust, I suppose.
But for much of our football-consumed population, this weekend's college football kickoff is a time of transition from summer to something much, much lazier. We trade our sunscreen for sweatshirts, mojitos for canned beer, family time for bar time, chase lounges for couches, the glow of campfires for the flicker of your rich uncle's 97-inch high-definition plasma screen. We become first-down obsessed versions of our former selves and if you're in a fantasy league, you're probably just barely able to function in any sort of industrious capacity.

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As I write this, only 10 days remain between this very moment and the day that the 2011 college football season kicks off. I'm slowly reacquainting my brain with the football season version of itself, which is able to find games, and plenty of them, every day between Thursday and Monday from the beginning of September until Christmastime. But here's the thing. There hasn't been that much hype about the upcoming college football season, and my brain requires such hype to efficiently switch gears from its summer mode (during which it decides to wear shorts to work and drink too many gin and tonics). In terms of the NFL, there's been plenty of talk orbiting around who got traded to where and which Raider fan punched which 49ers fan and why the Seahawks trying so hard to blow this season and that sort of stuff.
But when it comes to the college game, however, there isn't the sort of rah-rah media pump-up I'd expect this late in the summer. Rather, all attention is on the scandals that have all but pushed any commentary about the game itself to the sidelines. And, of course, I'm talking mostly about the recent allegations that more than 70 University of Miami players and coaches took cash, booze, dinners, hookers, lodging and other absurdities from a booster named Nevin Shapiro, who just so happens to be serving time in a federal prison because his Ponzi scheme turned out to be a, well, Ponzi scheme.

I was in Virginia last weekend, sitting in a hotel named after a Confederate general and watching, of all things, kids from Bend, Oregon, play baseball. As you should know by now, Bend's all-star Little League team (from the South division) went all the way to the championship of the Northwest regional championship. They were one game away from heading to the Little League World Series.
But they lost 7-1 to a squad of kids from a town in Montana most of these young Bendites had never heard of, putting an end to a summer these young guys won't forget. I'm not trying to say that playing on national television is the best thing that will ever happen to these kids because no one peaks at 12 years old. OK, maybe Mozart and Gary Coleman, but for the most part, there will be great things ahead. Nevertheless, it might have felt like that to some of these players. When I was 12 and played Little League All-Stars, I did, in fact, feel like it was the most important thing in the world. At the time, it probably was.

Last Friday night, I was earnestly paying attention to a guy in a crowded bar who was telling me how crowded this bar happened to be when my eye caught a glimpse of one of the many televisions in this particular drinking establishment, prompting me to tell this new acquaintance to “shut up for a second.” I then pointed to the television where I could see about 50 men, half wearing the orange and black of the San Francisco Giants and the others being members of the Philadelphia Phillies, pushing and shoving each other. Well, some of them were pushing and shoving, others (like the presumably quite stoned Tim Lincecum) were merely milling around the fringes of the pack trying to look involved while actually wanting nothing to do with the whole affair.
The brawl wasn't really much of a brawl and probably wouldn't have even turned into the disappointing showing of fisticuffs it ended up being had it not been for Giants' catcher, Eli Whiteside, inexplicably performing a weak-ass double-leg takedown of Philly Placido Polanco. But, as is protocol, both benches emptied and all hell broke loose for five minutes, after which the umpire dramatically tossed a few players from the game.

Growing up, whenever there was a mention of infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper, my dad would tell me a story about attending a SuperSonics game a few days after Cooper hopped out of a plane on Thanksgiving eve, 1971. During a lull in the game, the public address announcer said, “We have a late-breaking score. D.B. Cooper: $200,000, Northwest Orient Airlines: 0.”
The crowd laughed and plenty of folks cheered, my dad tells me. And since the first time I heard this story, I've considered D.B. Cooper to be the Northwest's first true underdog.
If you haven't already heard, the FBI has what they're calling a “credible lead” that might finally lead to the true identity “D.B. Cooper,” the man who parachuted out of a passenger jet somewhere outside of Portland and was never seen again. The suspect, a Pacific Northwest resident, has been dead for 10 years, they're saying, meaning that some guy might be about to discover that his grandpa was D.B. Cooper. Now, you'd think this would bring shame on a family and it probably would – that is, if this wasn't the Northwest, where D.B. Cooper is more of a hero than a criminal.
It's not like we in the Northwest applaud the act of hijacking. I'm 95 percent sure that most Northwesterners are categorically opposed to the hijacking of anything, and the other five percent mistakenly figured “hijacking” had something to do with improving the functionality of their bongs. But, as Northwesterners, we look at someone who jumped out of a moving airliner with $200,000 strapped to his body without hurting anyone and say, “Well, you have to hand it to him for pulling that off.”

There was a buzz of relieved excitement in my office on Monday morning when news came across the wire that the NFL and the players union were about to approve a new collective bargaining agreement that would effectively end the great lockout of 2011. In short: there will be NFL football this year.
But I didn't really rejoice. This surprised me. I'm a card-carrying NFL fan (that was a metaphor, there is no actual card required to watch football on Sundays) and have been since the days when I dressed as Steve Largent (the football player, not the slightly racist politician) for Halloween. I then realized that I had given up on the millionaire owners and the millionaire players coming to any sort of sensible plan as to how they could all remain millionaires while also holding a 2011 NFL season for the non-millionaires to enjoy.

Games have rules, as do sports and public swimming pools (“no horseplay” being my favorite). Without rules, you'd just be aimlessly wandering, maybe with a ball. That's not a game. That's just screwing around.
So it is with this in mind that I make a call for consensus in the world of beer pong. As a retired beer ponger (I wanted to spend more time with my family) who still plays in the occasional charity tournament or takes to the table to instruct a misguided youth or two, I would like us to finally acknowledge that this game has become one of our nation's more beloved pasttimes. I would guess with some confidence that more people in this country have thrown a ping-pong ball at a plastic cup of Natural Light than have held a hockey stick.
Hell, the suddenly quite funny Jimmy Fallon faces his guests in an ongoing beer pong tournament and the last time I was at the grocery store, I noticed a set of “beer pong balls” next to the cheap end of the beer cooler. This is remarkable, not just because someone has probably skipped up a tax bracket by placing crappy ping pong balls above the PBR, but because this appears to be the only drinking game that's managed to assimilate itself into mainstream culture. You don't see Jimmy Fallon playing quarters on TV or beer bongs for sale at Safeway, do you?

“Holy f***ing s*** I love hitting home runs.” – Babe Ruth, to a bedridden child. 1932.

The home run is, unequivocally, the most exciting thing in baseball. Well, next to some drunken college junior jumping down onto the field and eluding security for five minutes of excitement that eclipses anything baseball could ever offer.
The home run, however, should be awesome. It's the great equalizer. It can instantly change a game and has long been reason enough for stadiums to light off a few hundred dollars worth of fireworks, sometimes even indoors (see: Kingdome, The). It's also capable of eliciting hugs between strangers, which is otherwise awkward – trust me.

I began my Fourth of July morning like many other Americans. I woke up, put my Lee Greenwood mix on the stereo and red, white and blue underwear on my nether regions, fired a few bottle rockets skyward and then tuned my television to ESPN to watch some weirdos gorge themselves at Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York. And not just a few hot dogs, but more than 60 of the mixed-meat wieners and their accompanying buns in 10 minutes.
Hot dogs, and the grotesque overeating thereof, are quite American, so I'm not going to say that a wiener-eating contest (oh come on, get your head out of the gutter) has no place as a Fourth of July tradition. What I'm more concerned with is that ESPN would recognize competitive eating as a “sport.” If wasting food is a sport, then so is throwing diamonds down sewer drains or showering daily with Evian. But on the other hand, what's more American than throwing away things people in other parts of the world would die for?