Just then the creepy Ewing brother walked briskly into the room, wearing his usual polo outfit and smacking his boot with a stiff leather crop. “Are you boys ready to kick ass today?” he snapped. “Are you ready to take a Beating?”
“You bet,” I said calmly. “I, for one, am resigned to a terrible beating today. I crave it.”
He nodded happily. “We will bet heavily on every play, for this game—every pass, every kick, every fumble. I want to see money moving around this room like a high-speed cockfight.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “Some people are going to be hurt badly today, and I may be one of them. Did you hear what happened to the Raiders’ quarterback?”
“No,” he said eagerly. “What happened to him?”
“He broke his thumb in a car accident,” the Sheriff said mournfully. “He is out for the year.”
“Wonderful,” he chuckled. “Then so are the Raiders. They don’t have a chance.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Too bad I am already stuck with them. I guess I’ll need some points, now that Gannon is out.”
There was a moment of tense silence in the room, then he screeched at me & shook his fist. “Points?” he yelled. “Points? Are you crazy? Only a jackass would give you Oakland with points!”
I shrugged and laughed it off. “Okay,” I said finally. “What the hell? Why not? Forget the points—I’ll take it even.”
Just then the Raiders kicked off & the game was under way. No more haggling. He nodded quickly at me but said nothing. It was a deal.
Indeed. And the rest is history, folks. It turned out that I didn’t need those points, after all.… The halftime score was 10–10, and the Jets were looking good—so we doubled up/down and prepared for a long afternoon of raw, teeth-gritting suspense.
“Hot damn!” said the Sheriff. “We have a real humdinger on our hands, don’t we? This thing will almost certainly go into Overtime, maybe two overtimes. We might be here far into the night—and never mind those rumors about a meteorite. We don’t need it now.”
The polo prince was deeply committed to the Jets now and he was feeling pretty uppity about it. “How are you feeling now, tough guy?” he sneered at me. “Are you ready to be wiped out? Are you ready to suffer?” He smiled smugly and raised a bottle of sweet gin to his lips, smacking his boot again.… He had weathered the shock of Rich Gannon starting the game at quarterback, and now he was riding high, preparing to seize what would soon be his. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” he muttered. “The Raiders are doomed.”
I nodded sadly but said nothing. Anita laughed at me for being such a loser—but she had also bet on Oakland. Ho ho.
Well—what else can I say about it, without totally shedding my modesty and appearing to be unacceptably greedy and cruel? Why discuss it? Nobody needs that kind of rudeness.
Of course Oakland won handily. The final score was 30–10. The Jets got run out of town. They couldn’t handle the pressure and went all to pieces in the fourth quarter. Their boy-wonder quarterback got swatted around like a Ping-Pong ball and the crowd began to hoot at them, causing their nerves to crack, and the Raiders ran wild toward the end. It was a massacre.
This Raiders team is the real thing. I have been saying that ever since they beat San Francisco and Denver, back to back, to end their demoralizing streak of losses about halfway through the season.… Gannon will slice up the slower Tennessee secondary this week and Oakland will go into the Super Bowl as a 5-point underdog to the Eagles, and after that it is out of my hands. Who knows? That is what gambling is all about. Ho ho ho. So let us rumble, young man, rumble. Good luck.
—January 13, 2003
The Last Super Bowl
Wartime Super Bowls are always dismal and lame—if they happen at all, in fact—because of “tragic National Security disasters that we cannot, of course, disclose to you at this time, because of etc., etc., etc.” Alas, I know that story well. It happens every time you find a huge police agency seizing control of all sporting events, in this country or any other.
Indeed. But that is what happens in Wartime, eh? Yes sir, the War Machine comes in and takes whatever measures are Necessary to make sure our boys have plenty of bombs, wherever they happen to be. Sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice.… Hot damn, there’s a war on, Bubba. That’s for sure—but at least it won’t happen until the day after the Super Bowl—and that is when the shades will come down. Beyond that, Nobody knows. It will all be up in the air.
So we should all take a nice long look at the big game on Sunday in San Diego—because it may be the last one we’ll see for a while, at least until the War ends.… Ho ho. That is a nasty thought, as thoughts go, but it is the melancholy truth. Certainly it will be the last peacetime Super Bowl for another five years, maybe more.… But by then we will all be wearing uniforms, of one kind or another, and only the “Trusted Travelers” among us will be allowed to come and go as we please—within reasonable military limits, of course, as long as we don’t make waves and never gather in groups of more than three, and don’t spit.
Whoops! Why are we drifting into negativity here at this hour, with the final game of the season about to happen and the war about to start? Never mind that morbid gibberish about—
“You know what?” the Sheriff interrupted. “The last place in the world I’d want to be this weekend is San Diego. It will be like hell on earth.”
“Not for the Oakland Raiders,” I said. “They will be on top of the world, such as it is.”
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “The Raiders will have fun. All the others will suffer. They will all be detained, or locked up for military crimes. Military crimes. Military police, military tribunals. Military justice—Get used to it. That is the Military way.”
I agreed and quickly changed the subject. “How many draft picks did the Raiders get for Jon Gruden?” I wondered aloud.
“Many,” said a voice from behind me. “They also got enough money to pay off many signing bonuses. Al Davis will rule forever.”
Which may be true. The Raiders dynasty is already a fact, whether they win or lose on Sunday, and the dynasty is moving in full harvest mode. Stand back. Prepare to salute and pay tribute.… That is how Davis and his people are seeing it, anyway, and I think I agree with them. This is a serious football team, folks.
Which is not to say that Tampa Bay is not. No sir. But the Oakland Raiders are serious in a different way. They’re deadly serious, and you can take that for whatever it seems to mean. They are assassins, in a word, and they have everything they need in their arsenal: extreme speed, beautiful talent, smart coaching, preternaturally fine chemistry, and a rare level of individual intelligence among players.… This is a high-class unit, exactly the kind of team you would buy for yourself if you wanted to win a Super Bowl. Tampa Bay’s chances of winning the game on Sunday are about one in five hundred. You’re welcome.
I might be wrong, of course. I might be wrong. Hell, that’s always possible. Nobody can win all the time. That would be fishy. It would mean that something is wrong with the system. Why bet on a fixed game? That is nonsense, of course. The Super Bowl can never be fixed—not in Peacetime, anyway, and even if it was, I would never offer to bet on the Raiders and give 500–1 odds. Not on the Internet. That would be illegal and probably insane. Think of the trouble I would have in collecting on my bets, eh? Or paying off. Wow. That would be horrible, truly horrible, like a plague of lizards and leeches fighting all around you on the ground. These rodents are always in heat.
Whoops. Strike that. Leeches are not rodents. They are bloodsucking members of the Hirudinea class, a subspecies of the hermaphroditic sucker worm that is frequently applied to headache victims and other human sufferers. Leeches used in human treatment range in size from three inches to thirteen inches when fully bloated. They have two ugly mouths, one on each end, filled with tiny, razor-sharp teeth by which they attach themselves firmly to the flesh, prior to sucking. The leech has many eyes.
&nb
sp; The Oakland Raiders are the only team in football that still routinely uses leeches for treatment of serious injuries. It is an old-timey medicine, deriving no doubt from the team’s Bay Area roots, with its powerful Italian community and its many neighborhood grocery stores and exotic foreign delicacies, along with sausage, fresh fish, and leeches.… I have many fond memories of hanging out in North Beach at elegant Italian restaurants with Raiders players in the good old days of yester-year, when the silver and black dynasty was just getting started, long before they turned into the gigantic, high-powered winning machine that they are today.
Things were different in those years, but they were never dull. Every game was a terrifying adventure, win or lose, and the Raiders of the seventies usually won—except in Pittsburgh, where cruel things happened and many dreams died horribly. You could see the early beginnings of what would evolve into the massive Raider Nation, which is beyond doubt the sleaziest and rudest and most sinister mob of thugs and wackos ever assembled in such numbers under a single “roof,” so to speak, anywhere in the English-speaking world. No doubt there are other profoundly disagreeable cults that meet from time to time in most of the 50 states.…
But so what? There is nothing more to say. I have obviously made my decision about the Raiders. They are simply a better football team than the Buccaneers, and they will win. A realistic line for this game would be 10 or 11, but right now it is hovering around 5 or 6.
In the end it won’t matter. It will be like a track meet for tall people. Good luck, and remember this: if the Raiders lose, I will appear on national TV with big leeches all over my head and a formal confession to read. I will be ashamed of myself for being such an ass.
Indeed. But that is the nature of gambling, eh? That is why we do it. Ho ho. That is why we call it fun.
—January 20, 2003
Extreme Behavior in Aspen
Last week was a monster for the snowbound city of Aspen, which definitely needed the action. The merchants were crazy for it.… Hot damn! Yes sir! The X Games were coming to TOWN!—and a huge crowd of genuinely Wild boys was coming with them. Ho ho. Early estimates said there would be about 40,000 of them, all ripped to the tits on their own adrenaline and craving an orgy of speed. The weekend was going to be crazy, they said. The whole town was braced for it.
Why not? I thought, let’s have a look at these games, this terrifying spectacle of risk and extreme danger that ESPN brings to town every year, along with TV crews and reporters and grifters and work crews and Security specialists who had been here all week. The whole valley was seething with excitement, as if the Olympics were coming to town.
“Let’s get weird today,” I said to Anita somewhere around dawn on Saturday. “I feel like whooping it up today—and besides, we have a professional duty to cover these games.” I smiled lazily and tried to cheer her up. “I am a sportswriter, remember? Yes, and these X Games are definitely Sports. It will be a madhouse, a huge and feverish mob. I can hardly wait.”
She stared at me for a long moment and then screamed, “You fool! Are you crazy? You have to speak at the Antiwar rally today. You are the main speaker. Get a grip on yourself,” she said. “The Sheriff will be here to pick us up at three o’clock. What shirt will you wear?”
“What?” I screeched. “What are you talking about? I was thinking about wearing my police uniform and a wig, in order to mingle in peace with the cranked-up crowd and have a few speedy conversations with strangers.”
And then I remembered. “Of course! The Rally, the marchers! … I must have been drinking last night,” I muttered.
“Why is this happening?” I felt my confidence oozing away as I looked at the situation. In a matter of hours, just as the X Games were peaking, I was scheduled to make a speech to thousands of whooped-up antiwar protesters who had swarmed into Aspen from all over the state of Colorado to protest the looming war in Iraq and march through the center of town.
Indeed, it had the look of an action-packed day coming up, and some people even feared violence.
“Nonsense,” I told the Sheriff. “There will be no violence, not as long as we are there. So you can tell those worrywarts to calm down and enjoy the energy of it, which is wonderful.”
He nodded his head slowly, seeming to agree, yet apparently lost for a moment in his own thoughts. “We have nothing to fear,” he said finally, “except fear itself.” Then he laughed and whacked me sharply on the back. “That is what’s wrong with this entire country, isn’t it?”
“Exactly,” I said. “We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting downsized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.…”
These things have already happened to millions of patriotic, law-abiding American citizens, and it will happen to many more, even in the glitzy, high-rolling world of professional sports, where superstar athletes have uncommonly high profiles and large influence in public opinion polls.… What would happen, for instance, if Michael Jordan made a glitzy antiwar commercial for Nike that appeared on nationwide TV about nine times a day? Think about it.
Whoops. Ye gods. My plane is leaving for New York in two hours, and I am gripped with a helpless panic. It seems impossible. A giant blizzard hit the valley yesterday, just after I finished my impassioned speech to the cheering crowd at a park in the center of town, which included hundreds of X Gamers as well as antiwar marchers. There was not a hint of violence or even conflict. All in all, it was a good crowd to be a part of. The day was a success on all fronts.
Ah, but we are running out of time, folks. I must get to New York to celebrate the publishing of my new book. It is guaranteed to be a volatile visit, for sure. Ho ho. That’s it for now. Mahalo and remember to watch your back.
—February 3, 2003
Billionaire Swine and Kiwi Catastrophe
The Super Bowl happened less than three weeks ago, but to football junkies like me, it feels like 22 years. I have blocked it out of my memory now, although on some nights I have agonizing flashbacks that cause me to sweat and babble in my sleep, as if a roach had crawled into my spleen to die.
These moments of total recall always leave me weak. I see Rich Gannon hurling air balls up for grabs, staggering backwards in the grip of huge, speedy brutes—rangy 300-pound sprinters who run 40 yards in 4.0 seconds and love to hurt people, especially MVP quarterbacks.
The vaunted Tampa Bay pass rush shredded the massive Raider offensive line, leaving Gannon helpless to throw or even think. It was pitiful.
The whole Raider Nation was flogged and humiliated on worldwide TV like a gang of sissies. By halftime I felt stupid and wrong in every way. It was like dying and going to hell.
Ah, but never mind that wretched game. It is a thing of the past now, for most people. We will banish it from our brains forever, along with the myth of the mighty Oakland Raiders, who lived and died on their once-proud passing game. The Raiders are dead—long live the Raiders.
Right. And so much for that, eh? For at least two weeks I thought the lopsided whipping in San Diego was the most painful moment I have ever witnessed in the pain-riddled world of sports.… But last Friday a new champion emerged, and you didn’t even have to be a sports fan to appreciate it.
Oakland is, after all, only one city in one country.
The nightmare happened 10,000 miles away in New Zealand, the sailing capital of the world, where a whole nation got their heads handed to them in the feverishly awaited America’s Cup Race in the treacherous waters of the Southern Pacific Ocean. It was a hideous thing to watch, even as an ignorant, quasi-curious foreigner.
I am not a yachting person, by nature, but I have just enough experience on the sea under sail to feel a certain nostalgia for it when I see a big white racing yacht heeled over at cruising speed on the ocean, and I still tie a mean bowl
ine knot on just about anything in less than 20 seconds.
That is only one of the lifelong benefits of putting in some time on the sea, jerking big ropes and lines and sheets and extremely heavy sails around for 18 hours a day with your hands bleeding and all your toes ruptured from sliding around on the deck. Even in retrospect it is a harsh and painful life, punctuated every once in a while with moments of staggering beauty and wild adventure.
There is magic, for instance, in sailing out of a foreign harbor at dawn, gliding in utter silence across the water and heading out to sea for eight long days and nights on the ocean with no engine and no radio. It is madness, by any nautical wisdom. Only a fool or a desperate man would even think about it. The risks were too high and our chances of reaching the next island by dead reckoning and celestial navigation with no engine and no radio were about one in 44.
There were, of course, at least three compelling reasons for getting out of that country immediately, but there is no need to discuss them right now. So let’s get back to the tragedy that happened last week in New Zealand when the defending world champion Kiwi boat blew up on the first leg of the first race, for no explainable reason.… It was inconceivable. Utterly out of the question. Watching it happen in real time was like seeing the Yankees lose 65–3 in the opening game of the World Series.
The next race on the following day was even worse, ripping the heart out of the entire Kiwi nation and leaving its team 0–2 in the best-of-nine series. It was a truly heartbreaking defeat, coming as it did in the final 30 seconds of a 3-hour race when the Kiwis blew a comfortable lead and stupidly allowed themselves to be caught from behind by a slower boat and beaten by a boat length by the billion-dollar Swiss yacht crew, made up mainly of the same gang of Kiwis who brought the Cup to New Zealand for the first time in 144 years and made themselves national heroes and undisputed world champions.… They jumped ship about three years ago, when they decided to “test the market” for their special skills and found it so rewarding that they turned pro for real and hired themselves out to the highest bidder—which turned out to be a Swiss billionaire named Berteralli, who craved the Cup so desperately that he decided to spend whatever it might cost him to hire the finest sailors in the world and seize the prize for Europe from its temporary home in Auckland. Nothing would stand in his way.
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