[
Ed Note: This post is long. It's almost all sports in here. So if that ain't your thang, move along to end or something. I wouldn't want your family to get mad at me because my posts are too long or they don't like the content. But there is another Mitch Albom rant worked in here, so you might want to dig for that.]
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| Because nothing else happened in the sporting world this weekend... |
I thought back through the last eight years of Michigan-Michigan State games this weekend, and I was surprised to realize that I could remember every single one. Or at least I had one main memory from each game. I really can't do that with any other rivalry, but being from Michigan, the M-MSU game has always been a highlight, if not for the game itself, then for the accompanying visitors, parties, etc.
In 2003, I remember Chris Perry's 51 carries. The pinnacle of Lloydball.
In 2004:
Braylon.
In 2005, I barely remember watching Garret Rivas kick a game-winning field goal, but I vividly remember a cavalry of MSU frat boys threatening to kill me after the game. Like, actually kill me.
In 2006, I left the game when Michigan went up 24-0. The Tigers were playing the Yankees in the ALDS, and that was a more pressing concern. I miss 2006.
In 2007:
Manningham.
In 2008: I vividly remember repressing my memories of 2008.
In 2009: A first-year QB on the throws a game-killing INT and we can't tackle anybody as Larry Caper rumbles 23 years for the game-winning TD. Thank god this wouldn't happen again.
Now, 2010. 2010 was decidedly different. Two undefeated teams ranked one spot apart. I can't remember the last time we had this sort of buzz before this game. The weather was beautiful. Ann Arbor was packed. The game started off well. It quickly went south. By the third quarter, things were definitely getting out of hand. So I excused myself and went to the men's room hoping that we would somehow score three touchdowns as I took a leak.
And that's when I met Richard. I don't really know if his name was Richard, but that was the name on his Michigan State jersey t-shirt (number 60!). Richard was an SUV-sized Sparty. He was standing in the middle of a crowded men's room at Scorekeepers in Ann Arbor, staring into the mirror, oblivious to the crowd around him.
And Richard was flexing. He was flexing his muscles in the mirror of a bar restroom. And as he flexed, he announced - to no one in particular - "Damn, I look good. Like, really good."
And that is what I will remember about the 2010 Michigan-Michigan State game.
***
Watching Michigan State fans watch their football team is like watching your dog play with a toy. They're really excited when they get the toy (before the game). Before it comes out of the box or wrapping. And then you open the toy and give it to them, and they're ecstatic. Sometimes irritating. Knocking things off tables, drooling, possibly soiling themselves.
But then they get bored with the toy and move on to something else, like licking something. It could be the bleach-blonde girl next to them in the off-the-shoulder "Ann Arbor is a whore" t-shirt, it could be their own crotch. Who knows.
But then the game starts - or you pick up the toy and shake it in their face for a little bit - and they're suddenly enamored again. They want that toy back! They want to play with it now! And so there is barking, and a lot of noise. Maybe it's "woof," or "bow wow," or "Greg Jones bitch!" or "First Down bitch!" or "yeah, bitch!"
And then Michigan scores and the toy is stupid again. They're hungry. It's time for some water or maybe a treat. And where is Crystal or Chastity or whatever blonde t-shirt girl's name was? They feel like licking her face again. And then MSU scores. "Where's my toy, bitch?!" And sometimes the TV shows Mark Dantonio, and it's like you just opened a whole carton of bacon bits. It's all very amusing.
Yeah, so you get the picture. (And by the way: the exaggeration factor in those previous paragraphs is next to zero. I'm sorry I didn't have a video camera.)
So if we're extending the above analogy, the entire second half was a "Wanna go for a ride in the car?!?!" moment for Sparty, and it was a shade above chemotherapy for me. Maybe worse, since chemo probably has far more long-term health benefits for me than this game did. All in all, a pretty painful experience. Nothing more to say about that.
***
I will always poke fun at Michigan State. I think I would stop if these people quit being walking stereotypes. And I really did try this time. But you cannot walk into a Scorekeepers bathroom and see a 240-pound guy flexing in an MSU j-shirt with presumably his own name on his back while repeating "Damn, I look good" and not write about it on your cancer blog. It's impossible. There are laws against this.
Anyway, I will also give credit when a team comes out and does what MSU did on Saturday. MSU has a very good football team, a good schedule, and with two undefeated teams left in the Big Ten, I will be pulling hard for MSU over the other one.
And I really don't hate MSU. It's a different type of rivalry. I'm friends with a ton of Spartans. I don't really have any strong desire to see them lose to, say, Illinois. I'd rather them do well. It's more fun when the game is like it was this year. Most of their fans are not terrible people. Terribly amusing, but not terrible people. Even the ones in the bar on Saturday were rather cordial.
So without a hint of sarcasm: Good win, MSU, and good luck the rest of the season.
***
My favorite part of Saturday: the people watching. I don't know if I got old in a hurry or what the deal was, but dear lord, I am 50% more ok with chemotherapy possibly destroying my sperm because I have ruled out ever having a daughter because of the possibility she may someday dress like some of the things I saw in Ann Arbor this weekend. I have also reconsidered having a son because of the possibility that he may come near one of these creatures at some point in his life. I don't remember if the females dressed this way when I was in college and I just didn't remember it, or there was some whore-ish revolution that occurred around 2008 and I didn't receive the memo. Either way, the only way I can appropriately describe the clothing situation among some of the females in Ann Arbor on game day is by posting this picture:
And explaining that Ann Arbor sororities must have these machines in their houses to help their members put on their pants in the morning.
***
I'm declaring the following things beyond stupid, for any fan base, at any time:
1) Taking pictures of a scoreboard. What's the point here? What am I supposed to do with that? Say, "ooohhhh,
you guys won the game today? Thank you for informing me. I have been celebrating for several hours. I shall now cease."
2) The "day count." As in "School X has not beaten School Y in XXXX days." Uh...we've been crappy in basketball for a decade and crappy in football the past two years. We beat MSU every year from 2002 to 2007. You know how long that is? Six games. Probably a couple thousand days. You know why? Because the game is played only once a year. And I guess you could say "Michigan State hasn't beaten Michigan from the day after the 2001 game to the day before the 2008 game!" and make that a big number. But it would be insanely stupid.
3) The "Little Sister" thing. I mean, yeah, I get it, because...you know...little brother is a boy, but little
sister is a girl. And I think I've figured out the implication: that we are GIRLS! and haha girls are yucky.
But it doesn't make any sense. "Little Brother" made sense because we snatched games away in soul-crushing fashion in 2004, 2005, and 2007...just like an older brother sometimes does with his little brother. Combine that with Sparty's inherent inferiority complex, and that galled the shit out of them. "Little Sister" is just like saying "you are a girl." Which...if we're in 3rd grade, burn. But the insult has increasingly lost its effectiveness since then, and it isn't doing it for me. You guys won a big game, jab away. Just try to be somewhat clever or original with things.
***
One of the worst things about the loss is the fact that we will now have to listen to more "Fire Rich Rodriguez" crap. As far as I can tell, the "Fire Dickrod LOL!!" people fall in three camps:
1) "I don't like that new fella they got from the back woods he talks funny and he broke his contract and in my day a contract was sealed with a handshake and some chewing gum that we got from Potter's Corner Pharmacy for one penny and that guy swears a lot when I was in school my teacher would whip my eyelids 20 times with a ruler if I swore and back in my day people respected their elders and Harry Truman was a real American!"
2) "Rabble rabble we are MICHIGAN and rabble rabble here at MICHIGAN we are MICHIGAN and to be MICHIGAN we must be MICHIGAN and rabble rabble Rich Rodriguez is not MICHIGAN! Rabble MICHIGAN rabble!"
3) Idiots whose philosophy on firing coaches consists solely of the precise number of games he wins in year three of his tenure.
I exaggerate, of course, but only slightly. And if you fall into one of these three groups - as about 80% of the "Fire Dickrod LOL!!" crows does - I am not paying attention to you. You can paint your argument in whatever terms you want: Talk about how the team doesn't play with "heart" or "emotion" or how they are "soft," which is just a response people have to, "I see football team lose. Must make generic statement to explain why." You can talk about how the team hasn't shown enough "progress," which means, "Adequate progress according to me, an insurance adjuster, and in the time frame I deem fit." You can yap about the "scheme" all you want, but for 80% of football fans, "scheme" means "I like offensive plays that work and I like defensive plays that work. I do not like offensive plays that do not work and I do not like defensive plays that do not work." You're entitled to your opinion. I'm entitled to deem it worthless and call it stupid.
What it boils down to for me is things like this: I think we lost the game when Mark Dell caught a 41-yard TD pass in the third quarter to put MSU up 24-10. On that play, MSU had one wide receiver. We covered him with a cornerback and a safety over the top. MSU is a running team that seemed likely to run out of this formation. We had 9 guys in the box. I remember watching the pre-snap alignment and worrying that MSU would throw out of the formation, and I remembered being burned by 1-man routes in the past. Plus, our starting cornerback had just been injured on the previous play.
So the ball is snapped. Mark Dell takes off on the route and runs a double move. Cullen Christian (a freshman who is only in the game because of injury) bites on the first move and gets burned up the sideline. Cameron Gordon, our safety, is nowhere to be found. Dell walks into the endzone for an easy score. Two TD lead in the third quarter against a good team. Easy.
So here's what happened: Michigan assigned two guys to cover one receiver. One of them was a Freshman cornerback. He was only in the game because our starter was injured. Our starter was James Rogers. James Rogers used to be a wide receiver, then a safety, then a running back, then who knows what. He's only starting because one of our starting cornerbacks shattered his ankle before the season began. Oh and another cornerback foolishly decided to leave for the NFL and went undrafted. And we recruited like 3 defensive backs in three years. Then, said MSU receiver beats Freshman cornerback on a double move, which might be fine, except our safety is doing god-knows-what. Which is not totally unexpected, since he's a redshirt Freshman who was playing wide receiver up until this spring, and the only other real options at safety are guys who didn't make it into Michigan, guys with dangling limbs, and white walk-ons.
I don't know if Cullen Christian had a short zone assignment or thought he had help deep and actually didn't. I don't know if Cameron Gordon got sucked up on play action and blew his coverage. I don't know why our #1 punter recruit turned into shankapotamus and why our #3 kicker recruit has been beat out by a walk-on. I'm not sure why Denard Robinson threw three picks, two of which were simply cases of him throwing behind a breaking receiver. Which, although I don't know how we coach our quarterbacks, I would be heard pressed to believe that we tell them to do that.
But I can hazard a guess: It's probably because everybody mentioned in the above paragraph is an 18 or 19 year old kid playing in at most his 6th college football game, and easily the biggest football game any of them have ever played in. And as one astute MSU fan said to me on Saturday, "Hey man. Shit happens."
I guess you can avoid thinking through things like that if you choose to throw your blinders on and join one of the three groups above. But unless you can actually comprehend stuff like that, or have at least thought through things like this, if you start talking about firing Rich Rodriguez again, I will nod and smile at you and secretly wish you would stop talking.
***
You know what makes me sadder than cancer? Newspapers. Especially sportswriting in newspapers. You already knew this, but here are some headlines from the crack reporters over at the Detroit News and Free Press:
"MSU fans ecstatic after win, U-M not so much."
"Outcome shows Spartans' strengths, U-M's flaws."
"Robinson can't match otherworldly numbers from previous games."
Extra! Extra! Fans of the team who won are happier than fans of the team who lost! The team that won played better than the team that lost! And the guy who had 300 yards of offense and 2TD's did not have 500 yards of offense and 5TD's!
Is there any wonder why virtually every newspaper in the country is dying a slow death?
Oh, and just like Spartan fans, I will stop making fun of Mitch Albom when he stops being so Mitch Albom-y. But he has not. The "Outcome shows Spartans' strengths, U-M's flaws" column is his. For starters, at no point in my entire life have I ever said to myself, "I wonder what Mitch Albom thinks of this significant sporting event." I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no human being under the age of 60 has said anything similar. And the fact that I have a 65-year-old's disease has not changed that.
That said, I stumbled across another Albom column in which he...
actually seems to favor repealing the First Amendment? Huh?
I'll let you click on the link and read it if you wish, but I have anti-nausea drugs and you don't, so I'll summarize. Basically, Mitch doesn't like the Westboro Baptist Church (those nutjobs who protest at soldiers' funerals and stuff - courageous stand Mitch, I know). And, as a journalist, Mitch is presumably familiar with the First Amendment. So he says pretty much what we all think about these people - we live in a country that cherishes free speech to the extent that we will allow even vile, hateful, indecent speech. God, Albom says, will have to deal with these people and their hate. True that. That's the system. I know of no God that would respect what these people do, but I do know of a country that will tolerate it. And I think both are right.
Except Mitch goes a step further. And says we can deal with it. Right here. Right now. How?
Which may mean changing laws, modifying laws and rewriting laws. If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. And if common decency prevailed, we wouldn't have to do it...
...It is hard to stop these funeral protests while protecting our cherished principles of free speech and the First Amendment.
My guess is they won't be able to.
So we must.
People are not being decent! So we must enforce it! By law! And how shall I make that point? By ending one of my cliched three-part columns with a cliched three-word sentence! MITCH ALBOM YOU MAKE MY EYES BLEED BLOOD!!!!!
And if we can't change the big ones that protect us all -- such as the First Amendment -- perhaps we can change some small ones that affect just them.
I swear to you, I spent about 10 minutes searching a crappy 700 word column for an explanation of that sentence because I thought it was a punch line. It literally says, "If we can't change the constitutional amendment that protects unpopular minorities from having their speech curtailed, perhaps we should pass a law that curtails the speech of unpopular minorities."
And that, I'm afraid, is the direction we're going. With the Internet, YouTube and 24-hour news, behavior has sprung up that our forefathers never anticipated. Common decency was common back then. It is in shatters now.
Herrrrrrrrre we go. You know the folks in category 1 of the "Fire Dickrod LOL" section. They're Mitch Alboms. Hear that, category 1-ers. You're in a category with Mitch Albom. Enjoy.
I'm not even sure what the point of the column is. I think it's something about we are no longer decent like we were back then (in, say, 1960, when half this damn country acted like the Westboro Baptist Church because their 8-year-old might have to go to school with a black kid. Ahh, the decent days.) Oh and we should pass laws to move these protests 10 miles away from funerals. Fair enough, Mitch. Because you would need some rudimentary understanding of First Amendment law - a type of understanding that you would only have if you were, for example, a journalist, whose entire existence depends on First Amendment law - to see why that would be a problem. Hey I have a good idea. Why don't we place them in the "
Free Speech Zones" that were parodied in Arrested Development?
***
Since this is my cancer blog, perhaps I should probably mention something about me and my cancer. As you can probably gather from the fact that I've knocked out over 3,000 words on this thing so far, I have been feeling pretty good this weekend. I felt exceptional on Saturday, even though I really struggled with the lack of hair combined with an unrelenting sun. And it was hot as hell, which forced me to consume a ton of water.
But really, everything else - appetite, energy level, mood, stomach - was wonderful this weekend. I felt as good as I have since the late days of cycle 1, and I was four days into cycle 4. I'm happy about it, not sure how long it will last...but I've said that about every other cycle, so whatever. Whatever happens happens. It's just pretty uplifting to be feeling this good after cycle 4.
