Super Bowl memories

The first NFL-AFL championship football game was played in Los Angeles. I recall that it was a sunny day. The game was televised by two networks and blacked out in the city where it was played and I lived, Los Angeles.

          My dad wouldn’t go to the game. He wouldn’t spend the money to see a National Football League team beat up on a team from the inferior American Football League. It would be nice to have a pair of used tickets from that game today.

          Still, dad was a football fan. He climbed up on the roof and turned our television antenna toward Santa Barbara. The game was broadcast on a station in that town and we were able to watch in our living room, despite the desires of the National Football League and the American Football League.

          Boy and man, I’ve been watching the Super Bowl ever since. I’ve attended two.

          Many Americans use the Super Bowl as a sort of carbon dating. We recall times in our lives based upon what happened in the Super Bowl that year.

          I’ll never forget the third Super Bowl. I was in junior high school and junior high sucked. But then came January 12, 1969. Joe Namath and the Jets beat the Colts, a stunning upset. Dad and I watched that game together and it was one of my favorite days ever. It was one of those games where I couldn’t believe what I was watching and I kept thinking the Colts would come from behind to win.

          They didn’t.

          A year later, things had changed personally but the game was another great one. Dad and I watched together again as the Chiefs beat the Vikings, the second straight year in which the AFL representative won the big game.

          A few years later, having graduated from college eight months earlier, I was sitting in the Rose Bowl watching my beloved Rams fall just short of upsetting the Steelers. I had been lucky enough to buy a pair of tickets from a friend. Spent every penny I had to buy those tickets. My roommate supplied the car and gasoline in exchange for a ticket and we traveled from San Diego to Pasadena.

          Three glorious quarters ended with a thud in the fourth period, but it was another day that I’ll never forget. My Rams playing in the Super Bowl at the Rose Bowl, darn near a win. And, truth be told, I have yet to watch the entire recording of that game. Can’t do it. Still haven’t forgiven Steelers’ quarterback Terry Bradshaw for his performance that day. He was too darn good.

          The years went by and I ended up in the newspaper business. That got me to my next Super Bowl in Pasadena, watching the Cowboys destroy the Bills. “When the Bills fumbled, the Cowboys rumbled,” I wrote. The media was given plenty of swag and I still have most of it.

          I was married by then, the father of two. And those toys were important souvenirs. The day is one I’ll never forget. I covered the Super Bowl as a journalist.

          It was a while before the Rams returned to the big game. When they did, they won it. I gave the family the entire house that day, save the master bedroom. That room I took and watched spellbound as the Rams beat the Titans, winning the game on the final play. I watched and shouted at the television and cheered. Loudly. Boisterously.

I learned later that my wife and kids sat in the other part of the house and laughed at my antics. They might never forget that game either, even though they didn’t watch a play.

Two years later, I rushed out of the Daytona International Speedway and toward my hotel, having just finished working at the Rolex 24 Hour sports car race. In that hotel room I watched the Rams lose to the New England Patriots on a last-play field goal. I’m still not feeling too forgiving toward Tom Brady, the Patriots quarterback, any more than I’ve felt toward Mr. Bradshaw all these years.

The game a few years ago that was a precursor to this year’s game was a classic. An upset, a thriller. A stunner.

For families across this nation, perhaps this year’s rematch will be a lasting memory. I sure hope so. For me the Super Bowl is about family and memories.

Sometimes the game is cool, too.

Thanks for reading.

You'd better get used to it...

                I believe it was the comedian Gallagher who said during a stand up routine that he had to pay his children every time one of them did something funny. He’d work the event into his next comedy bit and he paid the kids for their contributions.

            Gallagher probably got a tax write-off somehow.

            Our kids know I’m too cheap to pay them for this blog but they have contributed greatly to my list of stories to tell. I have a small collection here.

            You need to understand that our house was filled with humor and sarcastic wit. My wife Amy has a terrific sense of humor. Our kids grew up with the idea that sarcastic smack was and is an acceptable form of communication. Be respectful, we told them, but speak your mind. Be polite, our kids were taught, and understand the situation. But kids learn from watching and I’d be a hypocrite if I had told them that a little sarcasm is a bad thing.

            Or a lot of sarcasm.

             So it really didn’t come as a big shocker when Sean came home from school one day with a story. He’d been stuck with on-campus detention and was unimpressed with his fellow detainees. When one of the other kids complained about the food they were brought for lunch, Sean gave ‘em a sensational comeback.

            “You’d better get used to it,” my son opined. “That’s the same stuff they’re going to serve you in prison.”

            Oh baby.

            Then there was the time some idiot was irritating Sean during a junior high gym class. Bored with the verbal noise directed his way, Sean sat on the floor beneath the rope and climbed to the ceiling, hand over hand in the pike position. Touching the top of the rope, he peered down at his spellbound audience and asked, “How do you like it?” before descending to the floor. The noise continued the next day, so Sean picked the other kid up and asked the instructor, “I have a piece of trash here. What do you want me to do with it?”

            The instructor didn’t seem to have an idea, so Sean threw the kid in a convenient trash can.

            Maybe I should mention here that Sean was a state gymnastics champ while in high school. Thin, yes. But he was and is very strong. The LA Times wrote a story about him, I kid you not.

            Regan’s sarcasm is a little less demonstrative, but it stings none-the-less. I know because much of hers is directed at me. Every time she hears about me making a mistake, and she hears about that a lot, she’ll say, “Excellent,” or, “Good job, Dad.”

            And when the kids get together, well, it is something to behold. Throw in Amy’s love of laughter and you have the makings for a great deal of fun. Give that bunch a target and things just naturally begin to happen.

            As you may have read in an earlier blog, I visited the Chickamauga National Battlefield Park last year. While photographing a historically important area of the battlefield, I wandered off on the wrong trail and got lost. I went about five miles in order to cover the 400-yard distance I had intended to walk.

            “Good job,” Regan enthused.

            So, when we gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania for my birthday a few months later, the kids presented me with a compass. It’s a nice one with various navigational aids and a mirror for signaling the search aircraft the next time I get lost.

            Excellent.

            Thanks for reading.

I am right. Everyone else is wrong.

                Everyone loves to pick on a winner, when the winner isn’t their favorite. Ask anyone who has ever been elected President of the United States. Winners make easy targets. It isn’t much fun picking on losers.

            And so it has been with the University of Alabama’s national championship football team since the Crimson Tide rolled through, stomped on and sped away from LSU’s outstanding Southeastern Conference championship team in the BCS National Championship game Monday.

            The final score was 21-0, Alabama. The Tide won the game, the championship and the glass trophy that goes with all of that.

            Since the game ended, newspapers, talk radio hosts and non-Alabama fans have been critical of the victory because Alabama scored just one touchdown during the contest. The winners also kicked five field goals in the championship game. When the teams met during the regular season, LSU won a tremendous game, 9-6, in overtime. Nobody scored a touchdown in the first meeting.

            “Half a great team,” opined the Los Angeles Times after the title game. The talking heads have said worse.

            The criticism is unwarranted, uninformed and unfair.

            Unfair, that is, to the LSU team. The Tigers’ defense kept Alabama’s powerful running game out of the end zone for better than 100 consecutive wonderfully brutal minutes of college football. Two of the best defenses the college game has seen in decades thumped each other for 60 tough minutes in the championship game.

            When did we get to the point where winning with defense is a bad thing? If you really love the game, you appreciate great players on both sides of the ball. Baby, read this carefully: Alabama and LSU had great players on both sides of the ball but that Alabama defense was something special. What’s wrong with that?

The championship game kept you on the edge of your seat (unless you were pacing back and forth in front of your television, mumbling to yourself) from start to finish. The best two teams in the country hammered at each other for the national championship and Alabama won.

If the final score had been 56-54, would the Times have groaned about “Half a great team,” that won the title? Probably not and that’s silly.

A final point: Announcer Brent Musberger evoked the name of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, the legendary Alabama coach, during the closing minutes of Monday’s game. Musberger wondered if the Tide’s second title in three seasons under Coach Nick Saban was enough to make Alabama fans forget Bryant.

Then Musberger answered his own question, saying, no, they’ll never forget Bryant in Tuscaloosa.

What Musberger could have said was that Saban’s 2011 championship effort was Bryant-esqe. Alabama played hard-nosed defense, defeated LSU’s excellent special teams and threw in a few surprises while avoiding mistakes on offense to win the national title. That, my friends, was Bear Bryant football.

Somewhere, the Bear was shaking hands on Monday and complimenting all the mommas and papas for the way their boys played. That’s what the LA Times and all the rest of us should be doing.

Thanks for reading. Roll Tide.

Just two little words....well, maybe not so little!

Years ago, there was really only one nationally televised college football game each week. Frequently that game involved the University of Alabama, coached by Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.

            The Crimson Tide. The best-known college football program in the South. Frequently the national champion in those years.

            As a small boy I knew my Dad was born in Alabama and I thought I was supposed to root for Bryant’s boys. I did and, may I say, with gusto. I loved reading about those tremendous Alabama teams and grew up holding Bryant in very high regard.

            I found out much too late that Dad attended Auburn before World War II.  He was a Tiger. He was not a Bryant fan. And his family; brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces and in laws, all rooted for Auburn. They like to say, to this day, ‘War Eagle.’

            So there I was, a Californian, rooting for Alabama. I also cheer loudly for the University of Southern California, which my parents both attended and I cheer with great vigor for San Diego State University, my alma mater.

            This evening, I watched the Crimson Tide defeat LSU by a score of 21-0 in the national championship game. I thought of Dad and all of my relatives on Dad’s side of the family.

            When the Tide won the national title for Gene Stallings back in the early 1990s, I wrote a newspaper column about this family situation and, sadly for me, Dad got hold of a copy of the column (because I sent it to him), made copies and distributed those clippings to his relatives. That move got me in plenty of hot water with the family, let me tell you.

            I don’t want to create more unrest in the family, so I’ll close here with just two words:

Roll Tide!!!!!!

To you, the Speedyleeway readers

I decided to take a look at the readership history of this blog. Now that I’ve done so, I know less than I did before I looked at the stats.

Okay, okay, I know that isn’t saying much. But the point is that, armed with all this information, I feel like Sergeant Schultz from the old Hogan’s Heroes TV show because I know nothing.

I’m sure I’ve met people who are native to the nation of Russia, but I don’t really know anyone living there. I don’t speak Russian and I know just a smattering of Russian history. I’ve not blogged about Russia.

Yet, after the United States, my second largest number of page views comes from Russia. I don’t even know the Russian word for ‘hello.’ I know the Russian word for ‘goodbye,’ but I can’t spell it. So if you are a Russian reader, try to image me standing here, waiving a friendly greeting.

Canada, a nation where I have friends and that is a friendly, neighboring nation to my own, has produced a grand total of three page views.

Three.

If I hadn’t blogged about a terrific quarterback of the Canadian Football League, I doubt I’d have a single Canadian reader. Oh Canada, how have I done you wrong? (Sing the opening line of the Canadian National Anthem here. See how the last line matches up?)

Malaysia, which I can’t find on a map, is third in the Speedyleeway readership poll. I’m grateful; I just don’t know where you are.

Germany is next and this makes sense. Not only do I know where Germany is, my son has been there twice, while he was in the service, and my Dad visited Germany as a tourist once about 15 years ago. All I can do is assume both Dad and my son made a lot of friends while in Germany. A lot of friends.

India is tied with Canada for fourth but both are a far distance behind the legions of rabid Speedyleeway followers in Malaysia. I once worked with a woman who was born in India. She was brilliant and a terrific writer. I haven’t seen her in two decades and I doubt she is among my Indian readership. But at least I have known someone from there.

Latvia and Indonesia are near the bottom with two, count ‘em, two page views each. The Ukraine is last one with a solo page view.

I am sure there is a logical explanation for all of this. There must be some kind of a server pattern or a world wide web use projection that explains how I ended up with readers in so many far away locations. Maybe there is a discompounded anomaly in the grid management system which distends the reception matrix, echoing the rebound routers.

I know that can happen sometimes. That’s how systems can develop a dysfunctional Gresham card.

I wrote that with a straight face. Thanks for reading, wherever you are.

It's a new Speedylee record!!

The best way I know to celebrate the coming of a new year is to set a personal record at the end of the old year. Think about it: You roll into the next 12 months hot on the heels of a significant achievement.     

            That idea in mind, I humbly offer the following tidbit:

During the run-up to the New Year I called a few college basketball games. As mentioned in earlier blogs, I call the play-by-play for some of the sports teams at California Lutheran University on the internet at www.clutube.com. I’ve announced football, men’s and women’s basketball, baseball and softball for the Kingsmen (the men) and Regals (women).

The basketball programs each host a tournament over the final three days of the year. Between the two tournaments, run concurrently, I called nine games in three days and on Friday, December 30, 2011, I called five college basketball games in one day.

My previous personal best came a year earlier when I called three games in a day.

Broadcasting was my original career goal. I wanted very much to become the radio play-by-play voice of the Los Angeles Rams. I started in radio after college and then ran smack into The Great Wall of Talent. I guess I wasn’t good enough. The Rams never called. I drifted into the newspaper business and finally made it into public relations, a career move I have enjoyed very much.

But when the chance to do some side work in sportscasting opened up, I took a headlong dive. After 25 years, I was wearing a headset again. The folks at CLU have been very nice and I’ve been able to work with some students, preaching about the importance of preparation.

All of which led to five games in one day. Without commercials. I had a student help with color commentating for one game, but handled the other four myself.

And loved it.

I knew my voice would get through Friday’s five games. After all these years, I know my strengths. The two games a day earlier were an excellent warm-up.

The challenge was calling Friday’s fifth game with the same energy levels I used to call the first on Thursday. I will state here that I had to push myself through the second half of the last game of the day.

I do not compare my fatigue that day with the exhaustion a soldier feels after a long patrol in the mountains of Afghanistan, chasing after a heavily-armed international criminal. But I will say I was tired.

The next day, New Year’s Eve, I left a game on the table. I was not in the gym to call the first of three games that day because my wife and I have a long-standing date for lunch with friends every year on December 31. I served as color man during the second game that day so that one of the CLU students I work with could get a chance to do play-by-play. Then I worked the play-by-play for the final game of the weekend.

The final stats: Nine games of ten, play-by-play for eight, seven straight games over two days and, that new record, five games in one day.

If you watched any of the games, thanks for your viewership. If not, thanks for reading.