The Five Greatest Super Bowl Halftime Shows

With American musical preferences as varied as they are, the Super Bowl Halftime Show is the one place where the entire world watches a concert. And everyone watches it. Even if you hate the performer (see: Eyed Peas, Black), you still watch. And believe me, most of the concerts have been TERRIBLE. But here are the five best.

5. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers--2008: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are really the perfect example of a band that gets what it is. They've never been cool but at the same time, they've never been uncool. They're a traditionalist, Rolling Stones-meets-Byrds band, that has spent most of the last three and a half decades making strong, untranscendent rock and roll. And in 2008, they performed a strong, solid set at the Super Bowl halftime show. I do have to deduct points based on their song selection (three of the four songs came from a Tom Petty solo album, and yes, there is a difference between Tom Petty solo and Tom Petty with the Heartbreakers and the latter is better), but "Runnin' Down a Dream" is a grand song to play at the Super Bowl, and when a band can play a song about a girl committing suicide ("American Girl") and nobody bats an eye, that is rock and roll at its finest.

4. Michael Jackson--1993: As I've said before, Michael Jackson was not a great musician, but he was a great performer. He was, especially at his peak (though this probably qualifies as slightly past his peak), the perfect person to do the halftime show. And this was a vital halftime show--once the biggest star in the world did the halftime show, Up With People was screwed. His performance provoked the ratings of the game to go UP, somehow. And his song selection was pretty strong too ("Jam", "Billie Jean"--his best song and nobody will ever convince me it's close, and "Black or White").

3. Paul McCartney--2005: The Super Bowl the year prior, with the wardrobe malfunction, sucked. I hated the music in it to such an extent that even being the fifteen year-old boy I was, the presence of boobies didn't make it much better. So in 2005, they brought in the living dean of popular music. It's that simple. If Paul McCartney is on the bill, he will never not be the final act. With all the great bands at the Olympics and at the Hurricane Sandy benefit concert, it centered around Sir Paul. There were several "safe" elements about this show--the songs, the selection in and of itself, and the decided lack of wardrobe malfunctions. But Sir Paul could have come out and taken a bow and it still would have been better than the awful Rolling Stones (who I like) performance the next year.

2. U2--2002: I didn't grasp the greatness of this performance at the time because I was too busy freaking out about the Rams, but upon further replays, this was pretty great. Could any band other than U2 have done what they did? Regardless of your opinion on their music, they are the ultimate stadium band. Their stadium shows are practically Billy Graham revivals. "Beautiful Day", still a fresh new song at the time was good enough on its own to make this list, but "Where the Streets Have No Name" being played with the names of 9/11 victims scrolling in the background...amazing.

1. Prince--2007: Prince is simply a genius. He will always be compared to Michael Jackson, because they were both super-popular solo African-American artists during the same time frame. But Prince was in a class of his own. He wasn't just a great vocalist and a great showman--he was a spectacular guitarist/multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, and in his halftime show of the pretty bad Super Bowl 41 allowed him to flaunt all of his many powers. He played bits of six songs and even though he's one of the best songwriters of his generation, three were covers. The three highlights were, in order--his performance of his best hard rock song ("Let's Go Crazy"), his scathing/soulful/fierce Foo Fighters cover ("Best of You", in a version that members of the band have admitted is better than their original), and his too-grand-for-words rendition of "Purple Rain", which had all the guitar heroics of his original but also included AN ACTUAL RAINSTORM STARTING DURING THE SONG. God Bless You, Prince.

The Grobitch Confessional

Hello, my name is John Fleming. I am twenty-four years old. And I am the founder of the Twitter account @grobitch20.

This seems like a silly coming-out really; I suspect that for most people who follow both me and Grobitch on Twitter (which is a lot of people, many of whom interestingly enough followed Grobitch before following me, including the man who eventually outed me), this comes as about as big of a surprise as when George Michael came out in 1998. It’s a formality; it isn’t Earth-shattering news. Like George Michael, I’m only confessing because I got caught, but I knew this day would come. Frankly, I’m surprised it took as long as it did. I never wanted to go out on top. That wouldn’t be in the spirit of Grobitch. I wanted it to go down in flames.

I hope that anyone who reads this who is amused by Grobitch is amused for the same reasons I had so much fun doing it. Grobitch is a parody of @grobot20, not an indictment. Is the account critical of its target? No question. But it is also, as its bio long said, “a loving tribute to @grobot20.” For anyone who doesn’t know, I am actually friends with Nick in real life. And we were friends before I got Twitter. In fact, I got Twitter largely because Nick said I would enjoy it. He was right. And if I weren’t at least somewhat amused by his shtick, I’d have no particular motivation to satirize him. And that is why I started Grobitch. This account has lasted ten months. It started when Nick was an undergraduate and he’s now closer to the end than the beginning of Masters degree studies. I’ve had three different jobs since it started. It’s been a fun ten months and here is the story.

Of all of my friends, Nick is the only one that I think could have a half-decent parody account made about him. First of all, he tweets a lot. Second of all, he tweets passionately—he doesn’t just say what’s going on his day, but rather he tweets excitedly about sports, TV, or whatever’s on his mind. Third, and most importantly, he has a great sense of humor. This isn’t necessarily the same thing as being funny, as most people seem to think. A sense of humor means he can, well, sense humor. He can appreciate humor, even when it is derisively directed to him. He would probably be reluctant to admit this, but I suspect the only person who enjoyed Grobitch more than I did was he himself. And fourth, and almost as importantly, he had a large Twitter base upon which to build a following. You can’t parody somebody that has twelve followers. Frankly, I suspected Grobitch would end up with about twelve followers anyway.

Grobitch was founded the night of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship between Kentucky and Kansas and it was the perfect night to do it. Nick hates Kansas basketball (as all good Americans do) and was destined to passionately live-tweet the game. However, I had actually gotten the idea for a parody account of Nick that weekend, when I went up to Kirksville for the initiation of the fraternity of which we are both members. While #LadiesLoveThemSomeGrobot, as Grobitch so often hashtagged, was actually invented by me (as myself, not as Grobitch) as a fairly sarcastic mocking, it’s kind of true. It was the second straight semester that I had come up for initiation and it was the second straight semester that, with Nick not even around, he came up in conversation and I realized that something I hadn’t foreseen was happening here. Nick was becoming something of an institution, as silly and absurd as that sounds. But anyway, the basketball game would be a tremendous opportunity for me to exhibit some of the memes that became Grobitch’s trademark. The memes were insane exaggerations of things the real Nick would use on Twitter, but they soon became the basis of the exaggeration. As with all satire, the solution isn’t to use non-sequitors; it is to become something of a caricature.

The first Grobitch tweet came at 9:00 p.m. on April 2, 2012. “Kansas is proving right now that they’re overrated. The SEC is the best conference in the universe. #MIZSEC #NotBiased.” In retrospect this was an okay tweet, as it does pick up on a secondary Grobitch meme of ridiculing homerism. Tweet 2 said “Doron Lamb is getting laid tonight. Just like me.” Thus beginning Grobitch’s infatuation with “the ladies” (or “teh ladies” if you prefer). Tweet 6 is, in my opinion, the tweet that really launched Grobitch: “Bill Self is an asshat. Thomas Robinson is an asshat. Everybody is an asshat.” It’s a totally insane comment that Nick on his worst day wouldn’t even make but at the same time, it works as satire. It calls people an asshat and it evolves from calling Bill Self an asshat (which I’d be surprised if Nick hasn’t done directly), to calling Thomas Robinson an asshat (less likely, but somewhat plausible), to calling everybody an asshat (the point at which the parody is acknowledged).

I won’t lie; I thought this might last about a week.

Even early on, I alternated between insanity (“When I’m wearing my Jayhawks shirt around campus tomorrow, it’s the only thing ever that could prevent me from getting laid”) and pseudo-social commentary (“Fuck having to work tonight at a job that I voluntarily hold not because I have pressing financial need but for beer money”). And that was the blueprint.

And then the others got involved.

As per the request of others involved, I will choose not to indicate who the others are. I will say that, to the best of my knowledge, the total number of people who have tweeted under the name @grobitch20 is four and that the total number of people who knew before today for an absolute, tangible fact who was behind the account is around ten. With that said, about ninety-five percent of Grobitch’s tweets, including almost all of the reply tweets (even most of the ones that are replying to my personal tweets) came from me.

And so it has continued. Grobitch now has 82 followers. Holy shit, a parody account of a non-celebrity who has only followed people based on whether or not @grobot20 has tweeted at them has EIGHTY-TWO FOLLOWERS. I’m amazed, personally. It’s been a hell of a ride. Will it continue now that the truth is known? I don’t see why not. To some extent, Grobitch had probably seen better days even without being outed. One thing I can promise is that Grobitch will be deleted before it ever resorts to insisting on prior review from, as he would put it, “Real Me”. Thanks to everybody who has made this the most fun ten months anyone could ever hope to have on Twitter.

Love,         

John (@johnjf125)

P.S.—If you have any further questions about Grobitch or the Grobitch process, leave them in the comments section or DM me (either under @johnjf125 or @grobitch20 will be fine) and I’d be happy to answer them under a separate post.

Johnapedia's Ten Greatest Sports Stories of 2012

Rather than dealing with stupid sentimental media stories like Tim Tebow or the Miami Heat or something like that, Johnapedia is going to address the REAL ten best sports stories of the calendar year of 2012.

10. LeSean McCoy, All He Does Is Win--Forget Tim Tebow, whose in the two seasons which occurred at least partially in 2012 will combine for a total of one playoff win.  The true clutch gene of 2012 goes to LeSean McCoy, who in spite of what so-called "experts" have called a disappointing season, he was the first round pick of the champions of two of my three fantasy football leagues.  HE SHATTERED THE MOLD!

9. Revenge of the Halak--For the first couple of months of 2012, all I heard about in St. Louis among my (predominantly white) friends was how Brian Elliott was so much better than Jaroslav Halak in spite of the fact that Halak had several seasons of solid goaltending play on his resume and Brian Elliott had basically been the hockey equivalent to Akili Smith up until a hot stretch during the season.  So then came hoards of clamoring for Halak, arguably the team's best player, to be benched in favor of a guy who was basically given away to the St. Louis Blues.  Halak continued to be critiqued in spite of his general excellence until the Blues faced off against the Los Angeles Kings in the Western Conference (I think it's called Western, right?  It's not like Wales or whatever the fuck it used to be back when people somehow cared less about hockey) Semis and Brian Elliott showed worse at goaltending than if a manican had been placed in goal.  I hated to see the Blues get swept because while I'm largely apathetic about hockey, I do still root for the Blues.  I did, however, love to see blatantly racist hockey fans (GASP!) get their comeuppance.

8. Golden Tate things--Theoretically, this is a negative story since it meant the wrong team won a game.  But the reason the Golden Tate TD fiasco with the replacement refs between the Seahawks and Packers was fucking awesome is because of the passions it brought out.  I was on Twitter that night as well as Election Night and the former was angrier.  T.J. Lang wrote a series of vulgar tweets about how his team got screwed.  Aaron Fucking Rodgers got into it as well.  And neither got fined!  It was a strange loophole in the general rules of professionalism.

7. Lionel Messi is the best athlete in the world--The best athlete in the world, which I define as the person who is mostly clearly the best in the world at their sport, plays the world's most popular sport.  Lionel Messi is the best soccer player I've ever seen--he's better than Ronaldo (either of the Brazilian or Cristiano variant), better than Ronaldinho, better than Zidane.  In fact, let me take it a step further--if Messi wins a World Cup with Argentina in 2014, he's better than Pele.  Yes, better than Pele.  Pele's argument for best ever is World Cups and Messi already kicks the ever-loving shit out of Pele in terms of professional success (seriously, Pele went to the U.S. and it wasn't even a considerable drop-off in terms of opponent quality from his club career).  And this was his best year.  He scores goals with unfuckingbelievable regularity.  It's like if Sammy Sosa had an entire season in which he was playing like he did in June 1998.  And Messi's doing it.

6. Raul Ibanez?--The question mark is how I best explain this.  Ibanez was such a huge WHATTHEFUCKISGOINGON that I found myself rooting for the Yankees (provided he was playing).  9/11 didn't make me root for the Yankees, but this guy did.  When his unbelievable coda, a pinch-hit home run to tie Game 1 of the ALCS in the 9th inning, occurred, I was in a casino, standing around tables, and my eye bulged and I just looked around, seeing a few other guys amazed that HE DID IT AGAIN.  Worth repeating--I live in St. Louis.  Nothing Raul Ibanez did made a damn bit of sense and that's why it was great.

5. Last Day of the EPL Season--I was rooting for Manchester United but I couldn't help but love what I saw.  It was basically the equivalent of Game 6 of the 2011 World Series but for the rest of the world.  Flipping between United and Manchester City, seeing City somehow equalize and take the lead in extra time, which was capped by Liam Gallagher pouring champagne on people in a private box because Liam Gallagher.  It's also why international soccer leagues get it right--rather than trying to expand playoffs or anything silly like that, all the drama comes out on Game 38 of the season.

4. Texas A&M beating Alabama--Let me be perfectly clear here, I fucking hate Alabama.  I always have.  But then when they hired Nick Saban, who is quite frankly fucking evil, I began to hate them to new and previously unthought of levels.  Mike Dubose blamed losses on God, Mike Price had an affinity for unattractive strippers, Dennis Franchione bolted for more money, and yet Nick Saban's eternal dickishness will always be the most unforgivable facet of Alabama football to me.  So to see the anointed assholes who some very dumb people claimed could give an NFL team a run for its money get run all over by a FRESHMAN quarterback who for all intents and purposes won the Heisman in one night (I honestly don't think he even gets an NYC invite if that game never happens) was just majestic.  The highlight of a crazy college football season.  This event is somewhat diminished by Alabama, for a second straight year, having to pay absolutely no consequences whatsoever for a home November loss, but the memories of that evening remain.

3. The New York Giants defeat Evil--There's never a reason to root for the Patriots.  Most teams I root against in sports I respect.  I respect the fact that Lebron James took less money to play for a contender, even if he left in a dickish way.  I respect Duke basketball playing the right way and actually giving a damn about academics.  I don't respect the Patriots--I think they're a group of egomaniacal, cheating bastards who essentially got away with being the crooks they are because a group of idiots claim that winning the Super Bowl in 2002 somehow was a triumph after 9/11 (just as I'm sure the thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina totally had that offset by the Saints making the 2006 NFC Championship game).  But anyway, while this triumph of not-evil over evil wasn't as satisfying was the team that stopped the perfect season, it was still pretty damn great.

2. Game 5 of the 2012 NLDS--Much like Albert Pujols triumphing over Brad Lidge in the 2005 NLCS, this game will certainly be obscured over time because it didn't lead to a World Series win, and also perhaps because it was less exciting than Game 6 of the 2011 World Series, but the fact that it happened AGAIN almost made it better.  The batshit craziness of the Cardinals making a "Just. Won't. Go. Away." comeback AGAIN makes for a lame script but an awesome reality.

1. The 2012 Olympics--I don't give a shit about the Olympics, by and large.  USA basketball winning was nice but I don't consider gymnastics a sport (for the same reason I don't consider acting a sport--it's skillful and often requires great physicality, but in the end, it's a judge deciding the winner) and the swimming was a letdown from 2008.  Usain Bolt is still fast and all that.  The reason the 2012 Olympics was the best sports story of the year is because it led to this: http://metro.co.uk/2012/08/13/spice-girls-and-liam-gallagher-put-15-year-rift-behind-them-at-olympics-closing-ceremony-534926/

And that is why the 2012 Olympics are the best story of 1996.  Happy New Year, everybody!

Four Insane Post-Election Arguments

This is a no-particular-order list of facts-optional things I heard said on Twitter or on faux-news within the last few days after the re-election of Barack Obama

1. "This is still essentially a center-right nation.  Because of this, Republicans have an inherent advantage and just need to communicate their message better."

Famously, in 1972, film critic Pauline Kael was (largely mis-) quoted as saying "I don't know how Richard Nixon won.  I don't know anybody who voted for him."  This quote, even though wrong, is a perfect summation of liberal ignorance of the nation as a whole--they live in a bubble of like-minded people (this fact is actually in the vein of her actual quote) and don't seem to realize just how many people disagree with them.

Pauline Kael, meet Dick Morris.  Dick Morris, Pauline Kael.

If you aren't familiar with Dick Morris's pre-election pro-Romney bravado, Google it.  What happened, though, is that Morris predicted a Romney landslide, completely disregarding polls as liberally biased (which, if you think about it, makes no sense; if you're predicting Obama wins by a ton, wouldn't it dissuade people, most of whom listen to you are liberal, from bothering to vote?).  This shouldn't be a HUGE shocker--Dick Morris lives in his own little Fox News bubble in which everybody he knows is voting for Romney and hates Obama.  This doesn't reflect the nation as a whole; it reflects the fairly small sampling of people Dick Morris knows.  Post-election, I suppose he has to acknowledge that Obama got more votes, but there's no specific need for him to acknowledge that, if given perfect information not skewed by "the liberal media" (a phrase said on a nationally broadcast news network on a daily basis), people would vote Romney.

There's also the fact that Obama's platform would be considered center-right in most of the western world (strong military presence, continued presence of Gitmo, etc.), but that would require Dick Morris to look to other continents while he won't even look outside of his personal bubble.

2. If the GOP wants to expand its base, it needs to be more liberal on abortion.

With most issues, young voters tend to favor the Democrats over the Republicans.  Abortion isn't one of them.  It's not that young people are overwhelmingly more pro-life than older people; it's just that there are so many clearer issues on which the GOP could actually gain young voters.

People tend to lump abortion and gay marriage as issues which are one in the same but this is hilariously untrue.  Abortion is the issue on which young people tend to be more conservative than their elders.  Gay marriage is the issue in which young people tend to be FAR more liberal than their elders.  One is an issue of conservative Christians inflicting their will because of their own private morality; one is an issue of conservative Christians inflicting their will BECAUSE THE LIVES OF BABIES ARE AT STAKE.  Whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, it shouldn't be THAT hard to see that the issues are pretty damn different.  Unless "be more liberal on abortion" means "don't have guys like Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock on the ballot", abortion is not the problem.

Abortion is an interesting issue to me in that there are a large, large amount of people who vote exclusively based on it.  Pro-lifers for Republicans, pro-choicers for Democrats.  Say, hypothetically, that somebody's biggest issue is abortion because they're pro-choice.  If the Republicans all of a sudden say they don't want to overturn Roe v. Wade, is this person going to change their mind, or are they going to view them as political opportunists?  Republicans lost on abortion this year not because people are especially pro-choice; it's because they lost their collective minds.  Even something like a late-90s "no abortions except for rape or incest, appoint judges who will protect life, etc." Republican platform is perfectly viable as long as you combined it with other shit.

Side note: While the dumbest argument in politics is people saying that gay marriage bans are "to protect traditional marriage", as though gay marriage somehow bans heterosexual marriage, the second dumbest might be "protecting a woman's right to choose".  And I say this as somebody whose stance on abortion is closer to the Democrats than the Republicans--if the choice, in the eyes of people who oppose you, is generally that of murdering somebody, who the fuck wants available choices?

3. With Obama no longer seeking re-election, he will now impose his anti-business, anti-gun, anti-religion views on the United States.

Similar arguments to this were made in 1996.  In 2004, people argued that George W. Bush would now just appoint a bunch of pro-life judges and start new wars and whatnot.  Clinton didn't impose stricter gun restrictions and Bush didn't start new wars.  It's a bold assumption to assume they ever wanted to do this in the first place, just as it's bold to assume Obama wants to "take yer guns away" given the complete lack of evidence to back this up, but let's say, hypothetically, that Clinton and Bush both wanted, in a perfect world, to impose their political agendas.  So why didn't they?  They didn't have to worry about their re-election to the presidency.

Well, they didn't.  But their party did.  The people they agree with did.  Bush had a Republican congress and a right-leaning Supreme Court for two years after he was re-elected and they didn't make any drastic changes to foreign policy.  It's almost as though, *gasp*, democracy is self-regulating and unless your party is planning on folding soon, there's an incentive to stay pretty much in line with the beliefs of Americans, maybe to support slight minorities but not to go too nuts with it.

4. Barack Obama only won because people voted for him because he was black.  White liberal guilt and racial favoritism fueled his base.

Sort of like the abortion thing, this is just so hilariously the opposite of reality.

First of all, I want you to think about this logically--has being a racial minority (not just in terms of numbers but in terms of amount of people in positions of power, in case you were thinking South Africa) EVER been more beneficial than being in the majority group?

Obama lost white voters and it wasn't THAT close.  It wasn't as big of a blowout as every other racial minority voting for Obama, but Romney still won the white vote without really having to sweat it.  Now, Democrats generally lose the white vote, but as with Obama/Romney, it's the smallest gap along racial lines.  Any sort of liberal guilt feeling would have to be totally internal, first of all; someone can say they're voting for whomever they like and then change it and nobody but them would know it.  

If you want definitive proof that Obama didn't win the black vote because of his race, look at 2004.  John Kerry, with no particular credentials in terms of helping the African-American community (and hailing from a predominantly white state with a bit of a racist history), was going against George W. Bush, who appointed black people into positions of power previously unthought of and, in sharp contrast to Kanye's insane ramblings, did not hate black people (that agreed with him politically, at least).  So obviously it would at least be a close race, right?

In what was probably the most lopsided in favor of the Republican in terms of race relations presidential battle since the civil rights movement, George W. Bush lost by 77 percentage points. 

*Drops mic*

The David Freese Photo Controversy?

Note the question mark.  It's part homage to the GNR album "The Spaghetti Incident?", which I always found bizarrely titled, but also just a question.  There's a controversy?  There's a debate surrounding this?

Now, first, here is the article that started the shit-storm regarding David Freese.  http://elmaquino.com/2012/11/04/freese-looked-less-than-sober-at-st-louis-bar-last-night/ It comes from @elmaquino, somebody whom I have followed for some time, and vice versa on Twitter, somebody who is one of my favorite people to follow because he (an assumption, I know nothing about EM beyond the blog and the Twitter account) is always willing to discuss whatever the day's events are.  Obviously his following is relatively small so it's different from some of the big guns in sports journalism, but I always appreciate somebody willing to defend what he says and willing to answer to criticism.

I will say, right off the bat, there is one thing about this article that I find objectionable: The headline.  The headline offers a presumption of guilt without so much as an "allegedly" or "reports say" with what I must say is fairly flimsy evidence (the whole story is based on hearsay and pictures in which he is not holding drinks and in which his inebriated nature is debatable).  But other than that, I fail to see the problem here.  Besides the headline, it's just a smorgasbord of facts.  Now, it's not a strong set of facts, but what it does is say "Here is the evidence of what happened".  It's a few guys on Twitter saying he was drunk.  The evidence, however strong the evidence is, is there.  You can draw your own conclusions.  The conclusion I've drawn, personally, is "David Freese went to a bar and according to a few people reporting anonymously on Twitter, possibly just seeking attention, he got drunk there."  It's sort of like when people argue whether or not you should teach evolution in schools--I'm an adamant believer in evolution, but I totally support also teaching creationism because I have enough of a belief in my side of the argument that mine will win out if considered equally.  But the point is, it's a story to be reported.

Just as Josh Hamilton's relapses were news-worthy last off-season, so are Freese's this year.  The situation is extremely similar--both are talented, nice guys who have serious demons and who have had problems in the past.  This isn't slander--both of them would be among the first to acknowledge this.  And if you don't think the Josh Hamilton story is significant--people are laughing off his desire for a 7 year, $175 million contract right now.  He's a few years removed from an 8.4 WAR season and has been the best hitter on the best team in the AL over the last three seasons.  If it weren't for his past, it wouldn't be outrageous that someone would offer Josh Hamilton this contract (I would consider it an excessive amount regardless, but that's neither here nor there).  David Freese is a similar player.

It's a valid criticism to ask why the media, of any size, would care about the relatively minor personal details of professional athletes.  But why does the criticism only come when the attention is bad?  Is it innocuous to obsess over if David Freese went to a bar?  Maybe.  In fact, probably.  But if the story had been "David Freese volunteers at an animal shelter and plays with sick puppies", there would have been no firestorm.  It's not a major news story--it's essentially a private citizen doing something people do every day.  But because it's David Freese, it gains attention, for the positive.  Just as Freese at a bar draws attention for the negative.

While I expect there would be some backlash over this had it been any Cardinals player, it's a different situation when it's David Freese.  David Freese is an almost cartoonish caricature of what constitutes a home town hero.  Like, I remember occasionally fantasizing in grade school about hitting the winning home run in a World Series game for, like, the Padres or something just because it was so damn implausible that a kid who grew up rooting for the Cardinals could have the storybook thing happen to him...and then it did.  And unlike Mark McGwire and Albert Pujols, by far the two biggest "stars" of my lifetime in St. Louis baseball, Freese wasn't a quiet or hesitant star--he was quiet, but he also had an inherent charisma.  He wasn't McGwire, the larger than life hero--he's a normal guy.  Everybody growing up in St. Louis knows somebody like David Freese, or so it seems.

The fact that the local sports media protects Freese should go without saying.  It's really nothing special.  They've protected players forever (poor Barry Bonds had the Chronicle reporting on BALCO while he was playing and Big Mac had the P-D scoffing that this Androstindiwhateveritis couldn't possibly be the reason for his home run production so it might as well be ignored).  They do it because people want to hear what they want to hear, for lack of a better term.  A basic rule of the internet, and media in general, is that if you want to be noticed, be negative, but if you want to be liked, be positive.  The Post-Dispatch is already noticed, so it tries to be liked, and it generally succeeds.  Bernie Miklasz has written columns in the last month about 1. Why Matt Holliday is a good player, and 2. Why John Mozeliak is a good GM.  It doesn't even matter that a vast, vast majority of fans agree with both of these points, and that nobody within the baseball industry is questioning either.  It's feel-good.  The fans want to hear about how wonderful the home team is.  The same thing happened in New York in the 1950s--Mickey Mantle was living a hard-partying lifestyle that eventually led him to an early death, but people didn't want to hear this.  They wanted to believe the legend.  And it appears, if St. Louis is any indication, they still do, and they're willing to shoot the messenger along the way.

Frankly, I hope it turns out El Maquino totally whiffed on this story, not because I wish him ill will, but because as a Cardinals fan, I quite frankly want the David Freese story to be as damn good as it often appears.  But I also hope that if this is the case, he doesn't do as Kent Brockman did on The Simpsons in the episode "Homer Defined".  In this episode, he questions Mr. Burns on the safety of his nuclear power plant as a meltdown seem imminent.  After (by fluke) the meltdown is averted, Kent Brockman says on air, "This reporter promises to be more trusting and less vigilant in the future."  That's not what the media is for--that's what PR is for.  The St. Louis Cardinals have their public relations under control and they effectively control the Post-Dispatch and Fox Sports Midwest.  They don't need another arm of it.  To make what is probably a way over-the-top analogy, there's a lot of G. Gordon Liddys taking shots at Woodward and Bernstein here.

It's one thing to question the details of the story.  I do, and hopefully EM is self-critical and does the same and works to make sure the story is told as comprehensively as it possibly can be.  It's one thing to question why it's a story--I mean, there is a presidential election in two days and there was a pretty major natural disaster a week ago; you could pretty easily argue what the value of sports journalism as a whole is.  But when you question somebody's right to publish something you don't like, or when you say any publicity to the Cardinals which is anything besides glowing, adoring, giddy fanboy praise is slander or libel, I do have a problem with that.  My journalistic bona fides are, to be generous, borderline--I was an editor for my high school paper's Opinions section and was, for a couple of unpleasant months, a staff writer for my college newspaper before I quit and gave up on journalism to such a degree that I became an accounting major.  A major part of the reason was that, for as big of a troll as I am, I defaulted to cowardice when it came to actual reporting.  I respect the hell out of those who will say something that'll scare people if it's something that needs to be said.  

We all should.

Three Reasons College Football is Simply the Best

I joined Twitter in March 2011, right as Major League Baseball was getting started, and largely because of this (at least this is my theory), I immediately became accustomed to tweeting a lot about baseball.  And thus a lot of my followers are primarily baseball fans.  And baseball is fine.  So is the NBA.  So is the NFL.  And so on.  But college football is, quite simply, the best.

A lot of people don't really give a shit about college football, but ever since I was eight years old, it has fascinated me.  The stereotypical (white) sports fan loses his mind over college basketball, which I like, but in the end, if given the choice between watching the national championship game or a NBA Finals Game 7, there's no dispute.  Even in the regular season, if my choice is watch Indiana/North Carolina or watch Lakers/Heat, I'm choosing the latter.  But college football is different--when Alabama plays at LSU next week, you could not in a million years pull me away from my television.  And here's a short list of the reasons why college football is the best.

1. Every game matters: In the NFL, you can lose six out of sixteen games and still have a reasonably good shot of winning the Super Bowl.  In baseball, the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals lost SEVENTY-EIGHT games and won the World Series--it is indisputable that one single regular season game isn't going to make or break you unless you've played with a mediocre streak for 150 some-odd games before that.  College football is different.  There has been one national champion, in the history of national champions, who had multiple losses.  Until last year's Alabama team, no team had lost its conference and won the national title.  Ever.  The individual game matters.  In 2005, Texas and Ohio State were both considered national title contenders and in the first half of September, they played a regular season game.  In college hoops, this happens all the time with tournaments, but unless a major conference team loses another twelve games, it won't dramatically hurt their overall success.  When Vince Young finished dissecting the TOSU defense, it was a dramatic blow to the Buckeyes.  In one game.  In September.  It's physically impossible to get that worked up about an NFL game.

2. Eclectic styles of play: In the end, basically every NFL team has the same style of play.  Some run marginally more or whatever, but have you ever seen an NFL team that effectively abandoned the run or the pass (in the last fifty years)?  There's an ideal strategy to offensive success in football (balanced run and pass, play-action to keep defense off-balance, etc), and since all the NFL teams essentially have equal access to build around that strategy, they do.  College football is different, though--it's like Moneyball.  Teams look for a differentiated factor, recruit guys who fit that mold, and they often achieve success.  Look, for instance, at Navy, a football program that doesn't recruit.  The offense they run is a throwback, a triple-option attack reminiscent of Nebraska's attack from the 80s and 90s.  Nebraska would recruit guys to run a style which didn't generally sell them to the NFL because the team would win, but then when the team began to falter, they opted for a more pro-style attack.  And on the opposite end of the spectrum, Texas Tech, Hawaii, and several other schools effectively abandoned the run and just throw it constantly.  But it allows things like Michael Crabtree going to Texas Tech happening--you play a certain style and then players at those key positions gravitate towards the school.  It's a never-ending process.  It's not a matter of watching a bunch of clones of each other.  The divide isn't what it once was--I envy people who grew up watching in the 70s who got to see USC airing it out, Oklahoma running the wishbone, and both teams achieving success by doing whatever they did well.  But it's still unlike any other sport.  It's like watching a team from the Dead Ball Era play against a modern swing-for-the-fences baseball team--it's about execution more than scheming.

3. Different Goals: In some ways, this is the benefit of the bowl system.  If you're an NFL team, whether you root for the Steelers or the Browns, you essentially have the same goal--win the Super Bowl.  If you're a Browns exec who sets his sights on an 8-8 record, you get run out of town.  Even in college basketball, the coach of Rider will always have some pressure to win it all, because he can.  But in college football, more than any other sport, realism prevails.  For instance, my good team of choice growing up was the Miami Hurricanes.  With Miami, especially back in the early 2000s, you expected to win a national title every year. Winning the Big East was a formality.  My earnest favorite team was Missouri--bowl eligibility was considered an amazing fear during the Kirk Farmer era.  And then, when Brad Smith and Chase Daniel happened, they upped the ante.  And in 2007, when the #1 ranked Missouri Tigers lost to Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship and were relegated out of the national championship picture, while many bandwagoners bemoaned it, all I could think was "Holy fucking shit, MIZZOU was the #1 team in the country."  It had to be the equivalent of being a German kid who saw the Beatles play in Hamburg and seeing them become the biggest musical act in the world.  And then in college, I went to Truman State, which quite frankly blows at football.  And Division II at that.  So when Truman got off to a hot start this year, it was exciting.  It was thrilling.  Getting excited about the first few games in most sports is unacceptable, but in college football, it's the name of the game.

The Best and Worst of Parody Accounts

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Similarly, parody can be the most loving form of it.  Things are not worth parodying unless there is some sort of love there.  There’s a line between vitriol and sharp satire.  Look at This Is Spinal Tap.  At times, it’s a brutal and relentless lambasting of heavy metal and music culture but it’s also done with affection.  There’s a reason the songs of the movie became minor heavy metal classics in their own right—there is little doubt that deep down, the men behind the movie enjoy heavy metal (though obviously a part of them, possibly a larger part, finds it idiotic).

This Is Spinal Tap is the zenith of brilliant parody.  Twitter is the low point.

Now, there is such a thing as a good parody account.  The ideal parody account will take an existing person or entity, identify a few major characteristics, and exaggerate those characteristics for effect.  One of the best parody accounts for me is @FakeDanMcLaughl.  For those of you who are not St. Louis Cardinals fans, this is a parody of Dan McLaughlin, an announcer most easily identified by being an enormous homer (not only for the baseball team he covers, but for St. Louis fans and everything about St. Louis culture) and having two DUIs.  Now, an actual Dan McLaughlin Twitter account (there isn’t one) would likely be fairly boring—generally professional observations about the Cardinals or about his life and family.  But Fake Dan prospers by defining a few characteristics and running with them.  He ridicules Dan’s upward-trending speech patterns by using phraseology such as “of carse” and “gaddammit”.  He unleashes tweet frenzies during Cardinals games in which he writes in all capitals letters with excitement about how great the beloved “Cairdnals” are.  He tweets about his love of Mic Ultras.  We don’t even know that the real Dan McLaughlin likes Michelob Ultra, but it doesn’t matter, because Fake Dan became an entity unto himself.  The comedy is relentless, lacking anything resembling subtlety, but that’s not the point.  The point is humor, which Fake Dan accomplishes (for me, and it seems most people who like the Cardinals).

The next class of acceptable parodies include two of my favorites, two accounts I retweet an absurd amount because I find their niche to be brilliant—Old Hoss Radbourn and Tripping Olney.  Old Hoss (@OldHossRadbourn) works defiantly because the real man has been dead since before Babe Ruth was born.  We don’t know what Old Hoss would tweet like it.  All we really know about Old Hoss is that he won 59 games in 1884.  Theoretically, Old Hoss, whose tweets are old-timey observations about contemporary baseball (thinking something along the lines of “Bah! In my day D. Johnson wouldn’t shut down S. Strasburg unless he had conquered 50 wins or 50 harlots.”), could be any pre-World Series baseball player.  It could have been Pud Galvin and likely wouldn’t have skipped a beat.  But the combo of the nickname, being the most old-timey looking person in history, and always being able to reference the most statistically insane season in the history of baseball makes Old Hoss Radbourn work.  Tripping Olney is also, to put it lightly, a very loose parody of somebody, but this time it’s somebody we know (hell, it’s somebody who has Twitter and use to actually follow @TrippingOlney).  But he creates a distinctive personality.  Unlike, say, Faux John Madden, which is more or less a regurgitation of fairly obvious sports jokes (while maintaining absolutely no connection to the actual John Madden—too few references to the Madden Cruiser and too many references to Kim Kardashian’s appetite for black men), Tripping Olney has a style.  Besides all caps, he has a series of hashtags that I (and others) have co-opted.  Tweets like (and these are just imitations of his style) “DANIEL DESCALSO GRAND SLAM. #TRIPPING”, “NOT GIVING UP A BUNCH OF RUNS TO IMPROVE YOUR TEAM’S CHANCES AT THE PLAYOFFS IS TOO MAINSTREAM #HIPSTERCJWILSON”, or “MICHAEL BOURN COMES UP LIMPING SLIDING INTO SECOND, JOE MAUER TO GO ON DL. #JOEMAUERINJURIES” are his trademark.  They aren’t Buster Olney’s personality, but they are the parody account’s personality.  He generates his own memes rather than trying to piggyback off something fashionable.  Anyone could make a joke about being obsessed with Albert Pujols or Roy Halladay or something.  Tripping Olney obsesses with Bruce Chen.

And now on the other end…

I mentioned Faux John Madden earlier and criticized him but I’ll at least give him credit for often having funny jokes.  Twitter is full of parody accounts similar to this but with less humor.  I refuse to give specific handles for these clowns (and also because I don’t recall them because I don’t follow them because I choose not to waste my attention on Twitter), but here’s a few examples.    There is a “parody” account of Happy Gilmore which never mentions golf, never mentions Shooter McGavin (except in its bio), and never mentions being a former hockey player.  This parody of a hockey player turned golfer with anger management issues mostly posts NFL-related pictures on Lockerdome.  In what way is that parodying Happy Gilmore?  Though to Happy’s credit, though he isn’t funny, he’s sporadically original in the same way that John Madden is original—jokes which are generic but not direct theft.  For those, look at the countless parodies of Ted (as in the Mark Wahlberg movie character) which mostly just tweets jokes you can find literally all over the internet.  Though I guess there are some redeeming qualities here—nobody is following Ted thinking “Oh shit, I can follow a talking teddy bear.”  Maybe they think Seth MacFarlane is running it or something (in which case they might just want to follow the actual goddamned Seth MacFarlane) but it’s obviously a joke.

The worst kind of parody account is one in which literally the ONLY mark of the celebrity namesake is the name itself.  These accounts seem to be run by the same people, making the same set of bad jokes over and over.  The most common seems to be Will Ferrell, tweeting unfunny and unclever jokes that the real Will Ferrell wouldn’t do (he might come up with something original and funny and then proceed to beat it into the ground over five movies but that’s a different issue altogether).  Also seen several of Daniel Tosh.  Now, Daniel Tosh has a VERY distinctive comedy style, whether you like it or not.  It’s very confrontational and politically incorrect—it’s not THAT hard to parody.  Yet the parody accounts have him telling the kind of jokes you hear people make up in middle school.  You remember when Michael Richards went on that horrific, racist rant doing standup comedy and then, shortly thereafter, when Jerry Seinfeld was on Letterman, Richards gave a sincere, heartfelt apology?  And the audience LAUGHED?  This is the way we as people are trained—to see what we identify as a comedian (Will Ferrell, Daniel Tosh, Michael Richards) and laugh.  It’s easier said than done—you have to say genuinely funny things to build up that rapport.  Ferrell and Tosh did this on their own.  Screw the people who let them do the hard work and just repeat the benefits.

The absolute low point of low points, though, are parody accounts which do inspirational quotes.  Now, if Michael Jordan had Twitter, let’s be honest—he’d be whoring out for Nike.  If he had fewer followers, he’d be that celebrity who retweets anyone who asks for a retweet.  Yet apparently, in a “parody” of him, he just tweets quotes from Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi because THAT’S TOTALLY WHAT MICHAEL JORDAN TALKS ABOUT ON TWITTER.  Probably the most common I’ve seen is Will Smith.  Like, why is Will Smith the one giving advice about self-confidence and other bullshit on Twitter?  What specifically did he do to justify this reverence where people are willing to just fucking accept him as some kind of guidance counselor?  Was it Men in Black 2?  Did someone see Men in Black 2 and think “The black guy should be a philosopher”?

But I go on plenty of rants against Will Smith, who I have explained already I think is a cowardly actor with absolutely no range who is clearly in it 100% for the money and not at all for anything resembling artistic credibility (if he decided he wanted to make an MLK biopic, they’d start filming it tomorrow, but that would be way too “controversial” for Will).  That’s not the point.  Whether you like him or not, most people like him.  He has a generally good reputation.  Racist old people like Will Smith.  The people who parody him are piggybacking off of Will Smith’s sterling reputation.  The bio of one of these accounts, whose title will be “The Will Smith” or something like that, will generally be something along the lines of “Actor and rapper, star of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, film actor, parody”.  Like, parody is just thrown in.  You’d be a fool to not think many of the hundreds of thousands of people following “parody” Will Smith accounts think they are actually following Will Smith.  And they’re following boring, run of the mill accounts because they think they’re actually following Will Smith.

As for me, I’m sure I’d get more followers if I changed my account to “Stan Musial” and quoted a bunch of safe quotes of inspiration (or if I put #TeamFollowBack in my bio).  But what’s the point?  Of my 170 some odd followers, some are legitimately entertained by my insane ramblings (not most, but some).  Some may legitimately be entertained by the same moronic jokes said ad nauseum by people riding the goodwill of established celebrities, and I’m sure they have more truly loyal fans (just by the numbers game), but those people suck so who cares?