You Know You Make Me Want To Shout

Greetings again, boys and, uh, boys. Today we are once again live and rockin' in Kansas City, on the HoG's first-ever staff field trip. Seeing as how the Weekend Correspondent is in an alcohol-induced coma and Bankmeister is fixin' to honeymoon, you and I are going to be seeing an awful lot of each other over the next week. Let's establish the ground rules: you don't like me, and I do not like you. Settled.

Without question, the greatest thing about sports and being a fan is that you have something to talk about with other guys. Were it not for this fact, men would never have conversations, with anyone, at any time. Sports gives us an avenue for actual discourse with any stranger.

Face it: small talk blows. If I were forced to talk to you in a social setting, the details of your job would bore me to tears in approximately one second. Don't be offended, my job is just as tedious and awful. Work sucks, and talking about it when you're not at work sucks one hundred per cent more. I wouldn't care if you were a covert special agent for a mercenary assasin squad full of lethal strippers, after about a minute I'd prefer a hollow point bullet to the temple over your job-related war stories.

Family & kids? Please reload and fire again. Your wife is exactly the same as mine. They don't understand us and they shop a lot. Your children suck at most everything they try and they are not well-behaved. If you regale me with stories about them it only makes me hate them, and hate you.

While these bullshit details about our lives are horrible conversation, sports make it easy. I can and do spend hours babbling with complete strangers about early entries in the NBA draft, Double-A baseball and the kind of trim that bench players pull. And football. Always football. Even most gay men I've met can carry on a minute or two about the NFL.

That's why, if you are a guy and you don't like sports, you are the lowest life form possible. I'd rather deal with pedophiles than the guy who says "I'm not that into sports." What? Why do you even leave the house? These "men" sicken and disgust me, in that they make my day to day life more difficult. Because I'm lazy and I like things easy.

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Uppin' The Bloatient

Long ago, when the idea for this blog was still a tiny sperm in the throat testicle of the Blizzard, I wrote a piece called The Ten Worst Black Coaches In NFL History. That essay has disappeared, and was hopelessly outdated anyway—what with the historical badness of Art Shell and the unprecedented success of Dungy and Lovie.

So here at the HoG, we’re going to revisit the subject of the black coach, or as I like to say, the Bloach. Last night saw several Bloach developments, as Eddie Robinson died and C. Vivian Stringer lost. What, you don’t know Stringer? The gorgeous coach of Rutgers’ “ladies’” hoops team? Man, that game was thrilling. If you missed it you are not a true sports fan.

Speaking of the ladies, I would be remiss to not mention Pokey Chatman, or as I like to say, Blunch.

Robinson was significant in the history of football, winning 408 games at Grambling and giving us such NFL products as Doug Williams, who may or may not have lit up a Broncos team in the 80s. Williams succeeded Robinson as coach of his alma mater and has been tremendously successful at giving hilarious mumbling quotes in his smooth syrupy drawl.

The NFL has seen a little transition in its Bloach quotient, or Bloatient, as Shell and Denny Green got canned and the Steelers hired that dude who was in the boxing movie with Meg Ryan. We're also in the midst of the glorious Herman Era in KC. Perhaps the winning ways of the two dudes who made the Super Bowl (and why, WHY, did the Bloach angle not get more press?) will give us a higher Bloatient. We shall see. Anything that can get Terry Robiskie and Jimmy Raye back in the game is a good thing.
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