serpent's sport

intrigued?? I bet you are. i am willing to guess that you are all wondering what sport would be a serpent's sport. I'll answer that very question here:

yes my friends, it's true. It's recently been brought to my attention that golfing has very serpent-like qualities. according to Craig Stadler the game of golf can be easily morphed from a simple game to a predatory hunt. golfers are actually hunters hunting their way to the kill (ball dropping in the hole). i know, i know... there are many other lifeforms that are predatory in nature, but stay with me. I was also informed that when a golfer is preparing to swing h(er)is club to hit the golf ball they are actually coiling back and the downswing is the strike. clearly, in this "game" a hunter lays in anticipation of it's kill by coiling up and when seeing it's target, it strikes. what other species than snakes do that? you'd be hard pressed to find one. it's obvious that the "game" of golf is actually a passtime that came to be when pagan beliefs were introduced to christianity. generally speaking people either love or hate golf, which is only explained by it's history. pagans loved the serpent and held it in very high regards, while christianity imagines the serpent to be the symbol of evil. The fusion of these two beliefs into this one "game" only leaves the two options, love it or hate it.

don't believe me about golfing actually being hunting? when you think of great golfers, who comes to mind? I bet you are thinking of Mr. Woods.
It's only to be expected that he would be a phenominal golfer with a name like Tiger. Tigers are great hunters, so Tiger is a great golfer. It's just his nature.













of course the recent trajedy that Tiger has experienced (the trajedy being that he has to drive an ugly buick lucerne for his tournament vehicle) has really hurt his hunt. But he still has his serpentlike desire to make the kill. i'm sure he will come out on top, eventually.

Anyways, i think that golf is one of the better sports, even though it has been somewhat raped by the mainstream sports media. some golfers wear rad clothes, some golfers have rockin hear-dos, and you get to act like a snake, how much better can it get? by the way, i'm pretty sure that golf is one more thing on the list of "things Lance Armstrong sucks at".

misappreciated?

with all of the recent hype about futebol (or soccer if you must) i must admit that my blood does boil at the under appreciation for the sport that requires so much more skill and determination, which in comparison makes "soccer" look like a kiddy game. don't get me wrong... some soccer players can pull off some sweet moves, but it really pales when compared to the average footbag master.

let's look at the facts, shall we? when was the last time you heard about someone being unable to compete in the great sport of footbag because of possible drug/steroid use? i'm not aware of a single time. In fact I think that the truly great footbaggers wouldn't deny using an occasional control substance.

as you can see from the few pictures that I added here, footbaggers have rad hair and "uniforms" (I use the "'s because footbaggers generally scoff in the collective face of organized sports' tendancy to have lame outfits [as has been mentioned earlier on this guy knows what i'm talking about])

if you feel as i do, that footbagging has been the forgotten step child when it comes to the sporting world then you can catch up on all things footbag here:

Footbag.org

p.s. i'm glad to be a part of such a totally awesome blog, this is ash catchem a.k.a. pillow talk a.k.a. dave (just FYI)

supporting your team through the food you eat

i will admit, I have missed a lot of the world cup games. but i did watch yesterday's match between ghana and the u.s., and this is what I snacked on during the game:

redvines
diet coke
pringles

partway through the game i noticed that my snacks had a theme to them--they all matched ghana's color scheme. take a look:



now, this isn't that strange because i'm always drinking diet coke, and redvines are my favorite.

what's weird is that after i'd noticed that all of my snacks looked ghanaian, i looked over to see what my roommate was eating and I saw THIS!!:
!!!!!!!!!

--does this mean that my snacks were causing ghana to win? i doub it (i considered this possibility for a minute. since ghana was clearly faster than the u.s. in this game, i thought about drinking some extra diet coke to help the u.s. pick up some speed. but i doubt even a redline [or crack] would have helped, so, i ruled this one out).

--was it a sign from god? possibly.

--what it definitely was, however, was me immediately switching my allegiances and cheering for ghana to win.

if this is treason and punishable by death, i'll be sure to have redvines, diet coke, and pringles as my last meal.

super saturday (sorry, you already missed it)

before saturday, i was telling everybody i talked to about how great this year's world cup has been--my friends and family, co-workers, people i sat by on the bus, blind-dates and tele-marketers. i continue to tell everybody (see previous sentence) about how great this year's world cup but now i only need to point to one day (if it's even possible to point to a day) as proof. that day was saturday.

since i stayed up late friday night watching fistfull of dynamite (loved it!), so i slept through saturday's first game. luckily i didn't also watch once upon a time in the west or i would have slept through the ghana/czech republic. this guy might have the best haircut at the world cup:

and this guy's the best fan at the world cup:


and the game was amazing. ghana was everywhere. if it wasn't for peter cech, ghana would have scored five goals. plus their uniforms were great.

the usa game, on the other hand, was a big disappointment. the game itself was crazy: multiple red cards, blood all over the field, bad anouncers. while everyone wants to blame the refs for the loss, i think it falls entirely on the usa coach. why doesn't bruce arena sub? pope spends the entire first half getting beat, giving up a goal and getting a yellow card. instead of sitting him at the half, arena leaves him in to get a second yellow card. late in the second half, when both teams are dying from fatigue, arena still had one sub and had both eddie johnson and teenwolf(f) on the bench. so what does he do? nothing. just settles for the tie. no wonder the us isn't going to get out of the first round.

how fifa deals with racism

did you notice the pitch before yesterday's world cup matches? due to a growing number of racist instances at european football matches, fifa decided to unveil there say no to racism campaign. i think it's going to help.

(i tried to find a picture of the field but couldn't. instead i made my own picture.)

how can you win without teenwolf(f)?

the 237 football fans in the united states are all crying their eyes out after yesterday's embarrassing loss to the czech republic. it was probably the worst performance so far in this year's world cup. but while many fans are crying, i'm just mad (which makes me cry sometimes, but it's different). the reason the usa lost wasn't because they thought their number five ranking in the world entitles them to more respect (read: overconfident) or because they played without any urgency or energy. no, they lost because they didn't use their best weapon: josh wolff.

josh wolff may be the world's most dangerous football player. i saw him once last year at a real salt lake game (he plays for kansas city) and he dominated the game. he has this ability to just turn on a switch and up his game; one minute he's a normal football player, the next moment he's a monster weaving through defense and scoring (or assisting) goals.

at first i didn't understand this incredible power. then, a couple months ago, i was flipping through the television stations on a saturday afternoon and came across the answer. one of the channels was playing a movie featuring a young micheal j fox (before he died). the movie: teenwolf. in teenwolf, micheal fox's character turned from a sub-par basketball player to an allstar whenever he changed into a werewolf. similarly josh wolff switches from an average player into an allstar almost at will. and his last name is wolff. obviously teenwolf is a movie based on josh wolff but the producers switched the sport to basketball and added a physical change (human to werewolf) since they thought a story about a football player wouldn't sell well in the usa.

watch for josh wolff in the next game. and when you see him suddenly up his game, just know that he's teenwolf(f)in'.

nike v adidas

one of the major subtexts at this years world cup is the battle for football supremecy. how is this a subtext? because i'm not talking about about national teams but what company makes the jerseys and supplies the shoes for each national team.

in the last ten years nike has made a real push to dethrone adidas as the premier football company, but their impact hasn't really been noticable until this year's world cup. not only are they sponsoring a large number of teams (brazil, usa, mexico and portugal to name just a few), they are actually trying to win over football fans by making very un-nike commercials. many of the commercials feature only brazillian football players, little or no english and, the most un-nike thing of all, the tagline "joga bonita." joga bonita loosely translates as play beautiful. just imagine, a nike commercial that celebrates the aesthetics of a sporting event rather than pure domination; a nike commercial thats focus is to do it beautifully rather than just do it. too bad most of the nike made uniforms at the world cup look terrible.

while nike may be trying to internationalize it's football commercials, they're still behind adidas. i mean, the jose plus ten commercials are killer. (again, no english.) but their uniforms, while better than the nike uniforms, aren't cutting it.

in fact the only uniforms that really look great are the ones made by puma. those angola uniforms are probably the best of the entire tournament.

the (north [speficially the usa]) americanization of soccer cheers

i went to my first real salt lake game of the season a couple weeks ago. i went to a number of rsl games last year and found them somewhat enjoyable--meaning there were/are a number of things i like about the games and a number of things i dislike.

the likes: soccer, in my opinion (and the opinion of this guy knows what i'm talking about), is the best sporting event to watch live (or on tv); the fans are generally cooler than other sporting events (which i think is due to a combination of lower ticket prices and the fact that soccer fans are generally cooler than other sports fans); even though seating is technically reserved, you can buy any ticket and sit nearly whereever you like; soccer players have the best haircuts in sports; and soccer jerseys, on average, are hipper than any other team sport.

the dislikes: i usually sit in the northeast corner (i forgot what they call it, but i think it's for so-called real real fans) andthe sun is in your face almost the entire first half; sometimes i can't find a scalper selling cheap tickets for the life of me and haven't figured out a reasonable way to sneak-in; and the halftime events (time-killers) are terrible (last game this girl totally cheated--she was supposed to navigate an over-sized soccerball through a line of over-sized kfc buckets then take a shot on goal and she totally skipped the last three buckets but god or satan made her miss her shot on goal for cheating since the halftime organizers didn't care).

while the likes outweigh the dislikes i do want to spend some time talking about my biggest dislike: soccer chants.

this dislike deserves attention percisely because it should be a like. in theory, these chants seperate the experience of a live soccer match from every other sporting event. these chants are not the jumbo-tron telling you to say defense or stomping and clapping along with "we will rock you." they're not even the wave or the tomahawk (which is totally racist). soccer chants are spontaneous and improvised rather than being cued by the pa system. they derive from the fans themselves and they're ever present throughtout a soccer match. this isn't simply a matter of quantity over quality, but quality growing out of an unorganized, grass-roots (dare i say democratic?) approach to cheering rather than having a jumbo-tron telling one how to cheer. (i mean, i get so annoyed at jazz games their constant messages of "get on your feet" and "make some noise"--i thought this was america.) in other words, chants should be one of the best experiences at soccer matches.

moving from the abstract to the actual, the chants at the rsl game were a disappointment. while walking to my seat i was handed a paper with the words to some standard rsl chants. this disappointed me on multiple levels. (1) if you can't figure out the cheers after one or two hearing, you probably shouldn't be cheering. (2) passing out fliers with pre-planned cheers is just a step below jumbo-tron cheers. (3) a list of ready-made cheers reduces the chances of improvised cheers.

past streamlining the chants, the chants themselves were problematic. many of the cheers were nearly out-right lies: talking about blowouts before the game has even started? if chants are going to be effective (not to mention awesome) they've got to be realistic. nobody's going to believe some boring chant about real being the best soccer team in the world (let alone the mls); but everyone (or everyone cool) can get behind a chant about how the altitude in utah will wear-out the other team.

so next time you're at a soccer match, don't accept the paper with pre-planned chants. stand up and create your own (but make sure they're funny [some of the time]).