Best Sports Stories Of 2007

I've often expressed my aversion to random list-making. Recently I've been all fired up about VH1's "100 Greatest Songs of the 90s", which has mostly been a ridiculously non-sensical list. I realize people ostensibly voted for the selections, but they make no sense with respect to what the popular music landscape was like in the 1990s. How could you not have a single song from Boyz II Men, Ace of Base, or Garth Brooks on the list? And if you argue it shouldn't be based on pure album sales, but artistic merit, then where is the Wu-Tang Clan or Nas? I watched this last week and just thinking about it still riles me up.

Nonetheless, I'm breaking my "no-list" rule at the end of the year, to bring you my favorite 2007 stories. I have no good reason for breaking the rule other than that I am doing it. Today, my 10 favorite sports stories of 2007.

10. "I'M A MAN!! I'M 40!!!!!"

If you're a sports fan, you might be tired of this Mike Gundy clip, but it still cracks me up, even now. For the unfamiliar, the Oklahoma State head football coach is furious with a reporter's negative column regarding one of the players. Angry that a child (a 22-year old "child"...who has a mother...a mother of children...) could be criticized in the newspaper, Gundy decided to lash back. There's nothing I can say that hasn't been said. Enjoy.



9. Michael Jordan Paints the Town Red

Someone basically walked me through how Michael Jordan hooks up with women in different cities. I've always read that the NBA is just this hotbed of anonymous groupie sex, which totally makes sense, but this all took on new dimensions when I learned exactly how someone like Jordan executes this. It's not the kind of thing I'm going to put directly in the blog, because it's of course all hearsay, and I don't want any trouble. But if you're interested (and, um, you actually know me), ask me separately. This is a GREAT story by the way. A GREAT story. I really want to emphasize the word GREAT, and would put it in 28-point font, but I don't want this page to look like a tacky MySpace.

8. Roger Clemens Goes Down In Flames

I'm so rarely right about anything that it feels especially fantastic to be right about his HGH use. I do feel bad for his children though, who all have names starting with the letter "K" (because a "K" signifies a strikeout in baseball, and Clemens has a Jupiter-sized ego, in case you don't follow sports but are somehow still reading this.) Their names are "Koby" and "Kacy" and "Kory". When they are much older, and people have forgotten about Roger Clemens, people will ask them, "Hey man, I've been meaning to ask you - why do you spell your first name like an idiot?" And instead of pridefully answering, "My father was the greatest pitcher of the modern era so I had to endure ridicule and misspellings my whole life", they will probably just cry like little babies. I wouldn't worry too much about them, though - at least they are filthy rich, which makes them swell people in my book! (FYI, the median wealth of "swell people" in my book is pretty high. But it's just a coincidence. No causation, as the social scientists like to say.)

7. Lamar Odom Makes The Play Of The Year

As a Lakers fan, no player is more frustrating than Lamar Odom. But then he makes incredible plays like these, and you remember what he is capable of.


6. Peyton Manning And The Kumars

Someone leaked these photos of Peyton Manning attending some Indian girl's Sweet 16 birthday party for $200,000 in cash, which led to a number of thoughts.

1.) Awesome.
2.) There is nothing Peyton Manning won't do for some extra cash, which is awesome. He's a "swell person" in my book, that's for sure.
3.) What kind of 16-year old girl wants to spend the money to get Peyton Manning? Why not Justin Timberlake, or Usher, or Hanna Montana?
4.) I love that even though he could have shown up wearing literally anything, Peyton Manning decided to wear a suit. He's just such a professional. You can't look sloppy for some random Indian girl's Sweet 16 party.
5.) I bet Peyton asked for all the attendee names in advance, and studied for like 3 days to make sure he could pronounce all those Indian names correctly. Don't want to look silly at the party or anything. Gotta make a good impression.
6.) You'll notice that Cedric the Entertainer is also at this party. That makes more sense, you know how 16-year old Indian girls love Cedric the Entertainer. That demographic pretty much drove the ticket sales of "Code Name: The Cleaner".
7.) Wow. Awesome.

5. Stephen Jackson Gets A New Tattoo

Basketball fans know Stephen Jackson as the incredibly talented and mentally tough Warriors swingman who likes to shoot guns at stripclubs and punch spectators in the face. Readers of this blog may know him as Leo's pick for "most likely athlete to be arrested for a homicide". Well, Stephen Jackson got a new tattoo this summer which should assuage Leo's completely irrational fears.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Stephen Jackson reported to the Golden State Warriors' training camp Monday with a new tattoo covering much of his chest. With a church window as the background, two praying hands are inked on his sternum -- and they're holding a gun.

Yes, this is the same Stephen Jackson who will miss the Warriors' first seven games under NBA suspension for pleading guilty to a felony charge of criminal recklessness after firing an awfully similar gun into the air at an Indianapolis strip club.

"I pray I never have to use the gun again," Jackson said in explanation.

4. DrunkAthlete.com

The Jordan picture comes from one of the great developments of 2007, DrunkAthlete.com. It's pretty much just a set of pictures of drunk professional athletes. Sometimes they're not really drunk, like the Michael Jordan picture posted above, but there's some fantastic material on there. Like Steve Nash giving his mating call to the ladies.

3. Last Comic Standing: Phil Jackson

Phil Jackson is on pace this season to set some kind of coaching comedy record. Between his ridiculous interviews, his complete flaunting of league guidelines, his awesome red bow tie, and his league reprimand for cheap homosexual jokes, I now declare Phil Jackson my hero.

The Spurs made 13 3-pointers in their 107-92 victory on Tuesday night, and Jackson was asked if too much penetration was leading to open outside shooters.

"We call this a 'Brokeback Mountain' game, because there's so much penetration and kickouts," Jackson said. "It was one of those games."

Here is Master Phil mocking his own up-and-coming star, Andrew Bynum.



2. Kwame Brown Isn't Invited to My Next Birthday Party

The story in a nutshell (linked above): A random guy was walking past a bar with his 2-by-2 foot birthday cake (cost: $190) when Ronny Turiaf of the Lakers exited the bar. The man asked Turiaf to pose for a picture with him, and Turiaf agreed. Before the picture could be taken, Kwame Brown exited the bar, grabbed the cake, and threw it at this random guy, covering him in his own birthday cake. Then Kwame Brown ran into a white limousine and left the scene, while Lamar Odom's bodyguard started to beat up the cake-covered guy until Odom intervened and stopped the whole thing.

All of this led comedian Phil Jackson to quip, "Well it's natural that the cake would slip from Kwame's hands." I was talking to Justin about this - pretty much everytime a broadcaster talks about Kwame Brown in a game, they always bring up his "really small hands" or "Kwame has those tiny hands" and "sometimes he struggles to catch passes in traffic because his hands are disproportionately small". Seeing as how hand size is anecdotally joked about as evidence of...other body part size, do you think this infuriates Kwame Brown? It's a nonstop assault on his very manhood. I think that's why the whole cake thing happened. He has excessive aggression due to the perceived implications of his often-noted "miniscule hands".

1. Ballers With Randoms

The title of this Flickr album pretty much says it all. Ballers with randoms. And let me tell you, it is an absolute GOLDMINE of comedy. Technically, this wasn't really a "sports story" in 2007, but it really should have been. I'll post a few pictures here, but you need to click the link above and see this in its entirety.

FYI

I've linked to Vish's blog before, but because it's awesome, here's a more obvious link.

http://victornewman.blogspot.com

Steve's delightful musings can be found here:

www.xanga.com/kahunasteve

And Sara has just entered the blogosphere. I am going to up the pressure on her by promising that while this blog is in its nascent stages, you need to check it out because it is just going to be ridiculously awesome. HUGE.

http://sjlsblog.blogspot.com

Lastly Winston runs a food website, check it out if you are hungry.

www.foozoo.org

Okay that is all for now.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone! I sprained my ankle in an unbelievably intense game of basketball. I was shooting the lights out (I might have been 1 for 12), when I landed awkwardly and then squealed in pain. I didn't even land on top of anyone, so nobody even feels unnecessarily guilty about it, which always happens with basketball injuries. Instead, I basically injured myself and just looked stupid. On the plus side, my semi-immobile status means there isn't a lot to do other than sit here and blog. There's always a silver lining.

My family has mostly stopped exchanging Christmas gifts, which brought my shopping to around zero. Sometimes we'll give each other food, but I don't count that, because we do that all year round. I have the world's worst memory when it comes to gifts. I don't remember what people got me, or what I got them. Like, I know if something I have was a gift, but it's hard to remember who it came from. There was one awkward moment where I gave Stephanie a DVD set of "The Office", only totally forgot that I had done that. Then when I visited her apartment I spotted the DVDs and said, "Awesome! You have 'The Office'!". Then Stephanie (obviously) replied, "uh yeah...you got that for me" and I had to scramble and pretend that I did know that. I don't think she really believed me, which is why I'm making it public now. Steph did get me something very nice this year (a book), so I have written her name in a black permanent marker on it, so that I remember she gave it to me. I have such a horrible memory.

We still get some cards at home even though we never send out any Christmas cards. Every year, after Christmas, my mom gathers all the cards in the house. Then, she writes all of those people a Happy New Year's card. In high school, I told my mom we shouldn't do that because everyone will think we forgot/didn't want to send them a Christmas card, and then had to send a belated New Year's card after the fact. She said this was nonsense, and that she simply didn't have time for it before Christmas, but that I shouldn't worry because nobody would think that. Well, every year when I come home, we have fewer and fewer Christmas cards. At least we're still outpacing Sara's family. She said they only got 4 Christmas cards this year, which is ridiculously low. I would bet even most of my Jewish friends got more than 4 Christmas cards.

I wonder when I'm older, what kind of Christmas card I'll send. A lot of families do the "family photo" Christmas card, which I don't really understand. Like, "Merry Christmas, this is what I look like." I mean maybe if you had lost 60 pounds that year, I could understand, but if you look just like you did the last year, it's not that exciting. Then some people like to send the long newsletter, like 2 pages on what their family has been up to. I'm not a big fan of that either, I think that's better suited for e-mail or a blog. The funniest ones to me are the ones that pretend to be a newspaper, only a newspaper devoted entirely to that family. Like, the "The Lewis Family Times" in some cheesy Word template. For a guy who doesn't send any Christmas cards, I sure do complain a lot. But I got several this year with personal messages, and those are always the best.

Anyways, hope you have a great Christmas, there'll probably be more from me soon, since I can't really move. And if you're thinking, "oh man, I didn't get Eric anything for Christmas", don't stress. Just click the ad on the side of my blog. That's all the gifts I need.

The Worst Song Ever

Due to the writers’ strike, I’ve been watching a lot more VH1 lately. Last night, I happened to catch songs 80-61 of “The 100 Greatest Songs of the 90s”. Now normally when I watch some retrospective on VH1, like “One-Hit Wonders” or “I love the 70s”, I have little to no clue what is going on. But last night, much to my chagrin, I recognized every single song. I need to invent some way to stop getting older. I guess Roger Clemens (vindication!) would say that it already exists, and is called HGH.

Anyways, one of the 100 Greatest Songs was Will Smith’s “Getting Jiggy Wit’ It”, a song that angers Richard to no end. He thinks it’s the worst song of all time, but that’s far from the case. Curiously, though, the worst song of all time IS by Will Smith, he just made it a couple years later in 1999. This song is so atrocious, I don’t even know where to start.

It possesses an absurdly bad chorus, sung by K-Ci of K-Ci and Jo-Jo “All My Life” fame. I’ve noticed devout Christians tend to be very big fans of “All My Life”. I often wonder if it bothers them that K-Ci likes to expose his genitals in front of kids. Must be one of those “like the art, don’t like the artist” sort of things. Anyways, here’s the chorus, reprinted in its entirety. Try not to get confused as you read.

Here it comes another year
Come on everyone, new millennium
Here it comes another year
Everyone, new millennium

As for the lyrics, Will Smith’s parts are so G-rated Sesame Street fans would be bored. The video, meanwhile, is an expensive disaster trip through time (presumably the millennium, although to Will Smith, the millennium seems to have started in 1929), flush with hilarious antics and “celebrity” cameos (Bill Bellamy! I guess Tommy Davidson and David Alan Grier were too busy). The coup de grace comes as Will enters “the future”, as he does this stomp-walk while wearing both a “futuristic” headpiece that eliminates all peripheral vision and a heavy metal jockstrap.

Here’s the glorious first verse, so you can rap along with Will:

Here it comes the party of a lifetime
31st of December
Man I remember when
the ball dropped for 90
Now it's 9-9, ten years behind me
What's gonna happen?
Don't nobody know
We'll see when the clock gets to 12-0-0
Chaos, the cops gonna block the street
Man who the hell cares?
Just don't stop the beat
No time to sleep, yo it's on tonight
K-C you feeling me right? (Yeah)
2-0-0-0, the Will 2 K
The new millennium, yo excuse me Willennium

And now ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the greatest moment of the Willennium, Will2K!


I dare you to name a worse song than this.

Tis The Season

Do you ever hear people ranting about how Christmas has become too commercial? I never grasped that question, because it’s not like there was a time when Christmas wasn’t commercial and we all just sat around pondering the complexities of matching important elements of Christianity to pagan holidays. That never happened. Certainly not in our lifetimes. Instead of complaining and wistfully remembering an era that never was, I prefer to bask in the now. I enjoy the decorations, the songs, the lights, the heavily discounted merchandise. All good stuff. What I don’t enjoy? Grumpy people. (Except Vish, that guy’s cool.)

I know there’s comfort in the familiarity of popular music, but isn’t it surprising that in the last 25 years, the popular music industry couldn’t produce a widely popular Christmas song other than “All I Want For Christmas Is You”? The whole industry bases itself off of creating pale imitations of a few original successes – it’s weird that this whole formula failed for Christmas music. Don’t get me wrong, I like that song a lot, but you would think they could make other ones.

It’s always good times when the ridiculous holiday commercials start airing. Counting down, here are my favorites:

5. JC Penney.

Have you seen this ad?
http://tunesontv.com/2007/11/17/jcpenney-christmasholiday-commercial-songs/
It's pretty elaborate, but the general idea is that a little girl decides she wants to build a rocket and go to space. Somehow, this should make me want to go to JC Penney. So far, I have not had the urge to go shop there. Weird, because the commercial ties to the store so directly.

4. The Lexus “December to Remember” ads.

You’ve seen these, right? Where one rich person gives their also rich spouse a Lexus with a giant red bow on it? There’s a lot that bugs me about these commercials. First, in all likelihood, these people have joint bank accounts. So unless it’s like the 1950s and Lexus believes in “Man sign checks, Woman wash dishes”, you would think that buying a freakin Lexus would need to be a joint decision – after all, you can’t just go back and exchange it. Surprises are for birthday parties, or haircuts. A Lexus feels like a joint decision.

Then there’s the red bow. Seriously? Do people really purchase Lexuses like this? Is it a better gift with the giant bow? Seems like it would be a pain to take off too. My absolute favorite is this one ad where people get this guy “crappy” gifts like a razor, or books, and the narrator says that this Christmas, maybe you should get yourself a gift, and they show this smug asshole walking out to the driveway to admire the new Lexus he bought for himself, again, probably without consulting his wife.

3. All the jewelry ads.

Maybe it’s just me, but there seem to be an incredibly high number of jewelry ads this year. There’s always a lot, but between Kay, Zales, Jared, and some local places, it seems like it’s more than I’ve seen in years past. What I find most ridiculous about these commercials is that evidently it’s not enough to get a woman a diamond necklace – you have to give it with panache. You have to like, construct a poem, or eat a lot of chicken so you can make her pull a wish bone just so you can jump in at the right moment and “wow” her. (The wishbone one is my favorite, by the way – what was the guy going to do if his wife pulled the small bone? Eat another whole piece of chicken and try again? Rich’s favorite is this Zales commercial where kids are having a snowball fight and they all stop because they see the dad has a bag from Zales, prompting the Vanessa Carlton music to start. “Like those kids even know what the fuck ‘Zales’ is.”)

2. Sorry, more jewelry ads.

As ridiculous as the Kay and Zales commercials can be, nothing compares to the Jared commercials. Do these commercials run in your TV markets? Basically these commercials are built around OTHER WOMEN hearing that a guy went to Jared Jewelers, and getting all envious as a result. A typical commercial goes like this:

Woman #1: “Did you hear? Brian went to JARED!”
Woman #2: “He went to JARED?!?!”
Woman #1: “He went to JARED”
Woman #3: “Did I just hear you guys say Brian went to JARED??!?!”
Woman #2: “Yes, he went to JARED”
All 3 Women, simultaneously: “EEeeeeee!!!!!”

At least the Kay and Zales commercials sell the idea that if you get your wife or girlfriend jewelry, she’ll love you more/remember that she loves you. The Jared commercials explicitly go after the angle that buying your wife jewelry will make HER FRIENDS JEALOUS, which in turn is what makes her happy, not that she loves you in any way. The cynical among us might be like, “uhh…well….that’s true, you know?”, and to that I say, touché. But it still seemed like a quantum leap in the jewelry commercial world.

1. Citi Credit Cards.

There’s this absurd ad where a guy, maybe 20 years old, is shopping for his mom’s Christmas gift. He looks for a while, can’t figure what he likes, so ultimately decides to buy HIMSELF a suit, which is apparently the greatest gift mom could ask for. Then he brags that he looks great in his new suit. In the future, this is going to be my move whenever someone asks why I didn’t get them a gift. “Oh, I’m sorry – but you know what I did do, I bought myself a big steak dinner! It was delicious!” Also, in order for the commercial to make sense visually, the guy doesn’t take the tag off his suit (so we know that’s what he bought with his Citi credit card), and just looks like a complete moron wearing a suit with a tag on it. As a last comment, how all of this advertises effectively for Citi credit cards is highly, highly dubious.