Bent Corner

This Sunday’s game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seattle Seahawks will have one less old guy at the game. NBC’s NFL color analyst John Madden will be taking the night off.

Madden hasn’t missed his analyst duties in 476 games. Why is he missing this one? Because of Madden’s well documented fear of flying, he travels to games in a tricked out luxury bus. Madden was bused from his home in northern California’s bay area to Jacksonville on October 5. He then bus trekked to San Diego for the October 12 game. The Bucs-Seahawks game on October 19 would have required yet another cross-country bus trip.

John Madden is 72 years old. The amount of bus travel NBC is subjecting him to is stupid and unnecessary. It’s nice that they decided to give him a week off, but why they make him schlep from game to game is ridiculous.

It’s 2008, not 1968.

With the magic of modern technology, Madden doesn’t need to travel to games to provide color commentary. He can do it from anywhere. NBC could set up a remote booth near his home in northern California. It would allow him to call games and sleep in his own bed every night. [Washington Post]

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DC United goalkeeper Louis Crayton was talking with fans after a 0-0 draw with the Houston Dynamo when a Dynamo fan approached him and called him “a monkey”. He then told him to go back to the jungle.

Crayton responded to the fan telling him he could not talk to him that way and that he was a human being “just like him”. I think perhaps Crayton was giving the fan way too much credit.

Security personal immediately moved in and removed the racist fan from the stadium and immediately banned him from all future games indefinitely.

Where did the fan think he was, a McCain-Palin rally? [Washington Post]

The Rangers first round pick in the 2007 Entry Draft pick Alexei Cherepanov died during a game in Russia. He was 19.

Cherepanov played for Avangard Omsk, a KHL team located in Siberia.   The KHL is a newly formed professional hockey league based in Eurasia.

The facts concerning this story are kind of sketchy.  Initial reports stated that Cherepanov was involved in a shift change when he collided with teammate and former NHL superstar Jaromir Jagr.  Cherepanov was able to return to the bench where he immediately colapsed.

There are some reports that there was a delay getting Cherepanov to the hospital because there wasn’t an ambulance at the arena.  There was one there earlier, but it had already departed for some unknown reason.  Reports state that there was a 15 to 20 minute delay in getting Cherepanov to the hospital. [TSN]

Last night Sheri and I went to RFK stadium and watched the U.S. national soccer team trounce the Cuban national team. The final score was 6-1. The score is misleading in that the game was not nearly as close as a 6-1 score might reflect.

It was a drumming. The Cubans weren’t very good. Two of the players evidently defected before the game and were nowhere to be seen.

You know what else took a drumming?  My wallet.  We paid $50 each for our tickets up in section 446.  That doesn’t include the $18.20 “convenience charge” Ticketmaster charged me for buying two tickets.  It also doesn’t include the $4 processing charge or the $4.75 they charged me for the convenience of printing the tickets with my own printer using my own ink.  We also had to pay $15 to park in a poorly maintained, unlit parking lot next to the stadium.

The stadium had a massive amount of empty seats.  The announced attendance was 20,293. If there were that many people there, many of them must have been dressed up as faded burgundy and gold plastic seats covered with bird droppings. Maybe if they charged a lot less for the tickets, more people would have attended. Maybe.

The spectators sitting in the lower level did their best to make up for all of the empty seats. They beat drums. They blew whistles. They wore American flags as capes. They screamed and yelled and tried their best to draw attention to themselves. Mostly, they were just annoying. I’d like to think that most people were at the game last night to watch world-class soccer, not to see a bunch of basement living dorks pretending to be soccer hooligans.

You know what’s dumber then spending $8 on a Bud Light? Throwing that $8 Bud Light high up in the air, covering you and your fellow spectators in beer every time the U.S. team scores. There were some in the lower section doing that.

For some unknown reason, some in the lower section would also light smoke bombs after the U.S. team would score. Smoke bombs? I don’t know a lot about smoke bombs. I do know they stink. This made me wonder why they even bothered searching people’s bags when entering the stadium if some are allowed to bring in smoke bombs.

I think I’d rather just watch soccer on TV. It’s cheaper, nobody is setting off smoke bombs, and nobody is throwing beer in the air. In my home, beer is for drinking, not for liquid confetti.

Sheri and I are heading down to Washington D.C. to watch the U.S. men’s national team take on Cuba in a 2010 World Cup qualifier match.  The U.S. team has been good so far in the first round of qualifying games.  Cuba on the other hand, not so much.  The U.S. sits atop the CONCACAF’s Group 1 with three wins in three games.  The Cuba national team has failed to score a point.  Cuba’s best player, forward Roberto Linares, was red carded in his last game and subsequently will be suspended for tonight’s match.

This will be the first soccer (football) game either one of us has ever attended.  The more I watch the English Premiere League on Fox Soccer Channel, the less I am able to watch the NFL.  American football (throwball) is just too boring.  An NFL game consists of four 15-minute quarters and because of the never ending time outs and commercial breaks, it takes nearly four hours to get through.

A real football game (soccer) consists of two 45-minute halves and it takes around two hours.

There are no commercials during play.  There are no times out.  Commercials are shown during the 15-minute break between halves.

The game will be shown live tonight at 7:00 p.m. on ESPN Classic.  Look for me on the TV.  I’ll be the guy in the stands dressed up like Uncle Sam holding a sign stating that Fidel Castro’s parents were brother and sister.

For the past year, Los Angeles Laker’s forward Luke Walton has been stalked by Stacy Beshear, 34, of El Segundo.  From the Orange County Register:

“I would drive out, and I would see her peeking through. It would suck, because I know I’m leaving my home, and I know she’s still there. What am I supposed to do? Is she planning on breaking in? Am I going to come home one day and she’s sleeping in my bed? Is she going to steal my dog?

And to think that I thought the worse thing that could happen to an NBA player is that he could be drafted by a team that is moving to Oklahoma City.

Eric Smith, The New York Jets player that committed the dirty hit on Arizona receiver Anquan Boldin in the final seconds of a blowout game is appealing the one-game suspension and the $50,000 fine levied by the NFL.  Not that I am surprised.  From the AP article:

With 27 seconds remaining and the Jets leading big, Boldin tried to catch a pass from Kurt Warner in the end zone, but was hit in the back by Kerry Rhodes. As Boldin was falling forward, he then took a shot to his helmet from Smith. After being worked on for several minutes, Boldin was immobilized and placed on a stretcher before he was carted off the field. Boldin missed the Cardinals’ game Sunday against Buffalo and is out indefinitely after having surgery to repair a fractured sinus.

The hit was not only dirty, it was vicious. Smith hit Boldin helmet-to-helmet while he was being held by another player and was already falling forward. The helmet is a personal saftey device, not a weapon to be used against other players.

I watched the beginning of the Ravens/Steelers game on Monday Night Football.  Though I didn’t get to watch most of the game, I did get to see the pre-game coverage including Raven’s linebacker Ray Lewis give one of his infamous “pep talks” to his teammates. Lucky me. He screamed to his teammates, “Whenever someone touch the ball, someone’s getting knocked out.” I didn’t attend the University of Miami like Ray Lewis did, but I think what he said was grammatically incorrect. Not that I should be the one to criticize anyone’s grammar.

It’s also completely stupid. If he wants to knock someone out, maybe he needs to forgo football and become a boxer or a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter. Knocking someone out is actually one of the intended goals in either one of those two sports. That is not the case in football.

In the opening kickoff, Steelers special team player Andre Frazier lay motionless on the field with a suspected spin injury. The game was delayed while medical personnel removed his face mask with a screwdriver and strapped him to a backboard. He was then removed from the field on a cart.

Watching at home, it was a scary thing to see. I can only imagine what his friends and family were thinking while watching Frazier being strapped to a backboard and taken off the field.

What about Ray Lewis? Did it make him happy? In the world of Ray Lewis, is a spinal injury even better than a knockout?

It turns out that Andre Frazier is fine. In fact, he may even play in the Steelers next game. Unfortunately, injuries are part of the game. They are an unfortunate byproduct of the game being played at it’s highest level. That doesn’t mean players should step on to the field with the intention of injuring their opponent, especially when the intended injury is a brain injury. That’s what a knockout is. It’s an injury to the brain.

Does Ray Lewis even know that?

I started to watch the Green Bay Packers - Tampa Bay Buccaneers game and I heard the commentators say something about Buc’s kicker Matt Bryant and the fact that he decided to play even with what happened to his family this week. I didn’t know what they were talking about so I turned to Google.

Matt Bryant and his wife Melissa experienced probably the worst loss that two people can experience in that they awoke Wednesday morning to find their three month old infant son Tryson dead.

I can’t imagine the pain the Bryant family is experiencing. I also can’t imagine choosing to play a football game only a few days after something like this. Some things in life are important. Football is not one of them.

Supposedly the Bucs only have one place kicker on the team, and because of this fact, Matt Bryant probably felt pressure to play. Whoever is in charge of player personal for the Buccaneers should have had a list of available place kickers available on the free agent market. What would they do if Bryant sprained his ankle? Instead of signing a kicker, they were planning on using safety Sabby Piscitelli as their place kicker.

There’s a reason people take bereavement time when they experience such a personal loss in their lives. Grief is a very real thing that must be dealt with. If you don’t deal with it, it will deal with you.

If the Buccaneers organization had any class, they wouldn’t have put Matt Bryant in the position to decide to play or not.