Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

NFL 2016

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    NFL 2016

    ursus arctos wrote: Somewhat similarly, it is very Boston for the Bruins to bury the fact that they just fired the best coach the club has ever had on the morning of the Pats' parade.
    Better than Grapes. How can that be!

    Comment


      NFL 2016

      Flynnie wrote: SF has a pretty big ego as a city, and I can't imagine the SFPD doing that about Barry Bonds or Madison Bumgarner.

      Boston fans seem to have this pathological need to everyone to think that they are exceptional, and if you just think that they're teams are just like any other teams, than you are a monster because they think the team represents something much more than just some professional sports organization.
      The funny thing is that it is sort of true... in a sense. But not a good sense. Boston as a city has completely given itself over to the Sox/Pats/Celts/B's. You go to a nice restaurant in the North End and there's TVs showing sports in the dining room* and sports bars just about everywhere. It's not a great food city, even for seafood, famously not in the Pizza Belt, it's getting taken over by bland techie gentrifiers like everywhere else so all the old skool Irish bars full of guys who look like my boy Chris Nilan here are disappearing, the countercultural vibe of Newbury Street and Cambridge is just getting steamrolled by money, money, money. College students aren't irreverent pranksters anymore because they're up to their eyeballs in debt and desperately trying to land an internship and the Combat Zone is gone. And so is the Phoenix.

      I'm old enough to remember the Boston of 20 years ago - in fact, it's the Boston I really know because that's when my dad would take me over for 3-4-5 weeks in the summer - and it's shrinking almost every year. You see thahs guys who wear crucifixes over their white t-shirts and live to tell stories about how they told Roger Clemens to fuck himself in Daisy's and you almost shriek with delight, because even in Southie they're an endangered species.

      So you end up with this simultaneous mix of the older guys really holding on for dear life to their sports teams because everything else has been gentrified to shit (of course so have the stadiums of each team, tix prices for each are among the highest in their leagues, but they still watch on NESN) AND the noobs really trying to outdo them because what the fuck else makes you a Bostonian these days?

      It's an odd thing, because a lot of what I said also goes for San Francisco yet SF sports fans haven't become insufferable (although you get hints of that about the Warriors). I think the difference is Boston for decades wasn't a city you really stayed in after college, except maybe if you were from somewhere else in New England, which is OK because you're basically local then. SF has always been a place other people move to, so it's hard to do a dick-measuring contest on fandom when your claim to be authentic is you moved from Ohio 20 years before the other guy.

      *I wonder if they still do this, given the famous ratings drops for most Boston sports teams in the last 3-4 years.
      This reflects my experience there. I loved Boston when I was at BU in 95-97 - even though I was overwhelmed with depression and anxiety - but I could see it disappearing. When BU let them demolish Kenmore Square, including the Rat, Deli Haus, etc, etc, - and build a luxury hotel, I swore I'd never give those fuckers a dime, even though they keep sending me their, admittedly very good, alumni magazine.

      I really loved Marblehead/Salem too when i lived there in 2006, but it wasn't a good fit. The job sucked and, as I've discussed here before, it's extremely hard for outsiders to feel at home in New England. Not that people were unfriendly. But I think that I could have lived there for 30 years and still felt like a fish out of water. I imagine I'd feel the same in Scandinavia or Scotland or Canada, or any of the many other places I fantasize about escaping to.

      On the other hand, I never felt particularly out of place or foreign when I lived in the DC area because, it seemed, nobody really belongs there. Almost everyone is from somewhere else and nobody really has a sense of place or really cares about it. That's not true for all of DC, but definitely true for the areas I lived in.

      Comment


        NFL 2016

        Strangers always feel more at home in cosmopolitan environments — with other strangers. The idea that small communities accept outsiders with open arms is usually bollocks. It might seem that way but it's just initial curiosity, you'll never be part of the tribe, even if you marry into it.

        Comment


          NFL 2016

          The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote: I always love how the dramatic high point of the whole superbowl is when Roger Cuntychops presents the vince Lombardi trophy to the true MVP, the septugenarian owner, and congratulates the owner and his organization.

          Even Silvio Berlusconi would think that's a bit much
          I thought the same after the World Series, where the trophy was awarded to the owner, and then the president, then the manager. Finally it makes it to the players but the focus is the guy getting the MVP trophy.

          Oh, and all this happens in a locker room.

          Comment


            NFL 2016

            My New England experience was very welcoming. Vermont is somewhat different perhaps, because such a large proportion of the population are just relocated hippies but still.

            Comment


              NFL 2016

              New England has a stronger regional identity than just about anywhere else in the country, even the South (inasmuch as it's based on more than just hating Yankees), and it's very, very clubby as a result.

              My favorite Boston identity factoid is that there is a term in Southie and Charlestown, FBI, meaning Foreign-Born Irish. The locals still identify as Irish*, but there is a certain cultural tension between them and the highly-educated IT workers from Cork or Galway that are gentrifying their neighborhoods.

              * I'm laughing thinking about Ken Early describing what going to Southie is like. I think he said "It's like if an entire Irish town just decamped en masse to America and got money" or something like that. It's a bizarre place to visit if you're like me, because it's only there and in Ireland itself that I walked around and thought "Everybody looks like they're related to me."

              Comment


                NFL 2016

                Incandenza wrote: Boston fans seem to have this pathological need to everyone to think that they are exceptional, and if you just think that they're teams are just like any other teams, than you are a monster because they think the team represents something much more than just some professional sports organization.
                Really ? Wow...

                Comment


                  NFL 2016

                  Amor de Cosmos wrote: Strangers always feel more at home in cosmopolitan environments — with other strangers. The idea that small communities accept outsiders with open arms is usually bollocks. It might seem that way but it's just initial curiosity, you'll never be part of the tribe, even if you marry into it.
                  It wasn't even particularly unwelcoming or unfriendly. It was just ... I don't know what. Just weird. It felt like everyone else had known everyone else for years and I was the lone outsider.*

                  In that spoof film trailer that Seth Meyers did, Boston Accent, it mentions that the film features lots of people mentioning people that both characters know and inquiring about their current whereabouts. That's so dead on. You expect that in a really small isolated town where everyone is at least distantly related, at least by marriage, and everyone went to the same high school.

                  But Boston is a massive metropolitan area and yet people still talk like that. Every one of those suburbs sees itself, and largely governs itself, as a separate town because all of them were at one point. Whereas, in DC and other places that sprawled out mostly in the 20th century, it's all one big mass and there's not that kind of specific local identity.

                  *I could have tried harder. Maybe if I'd found a progressive church or some other kind of "scene" to be part of, I could have made a home there. But I was overcome with work and anxiety and I'm an introvert so it was hard.

                  Comment


                    NFL 2016

                    Exiled off Main Street wrote:
                    Originally posted by Incandenza
                    Boston fans seem to have this pathological need to everyone to think that they are exceptional, and if you just think that they're teams are just like any other teams, than you are a monster because they think the team represents something much more than just some professional sports organization.
                    Really ? Wow...
                    It's the mythologizing and romanticism that this Deadspin classic takes on:

                    [quote]Nothing — with the possible exception of flowers, springtime and the 3rd Earl of Pembroke — has inspired as much gooey bad poetry and aphoristic nonsense as Fenway Park. If Fenway didn't exist, we'd have to toss a bunch of Harvard professors in a room to invent it, which, not incidentally, is how we also wound up with a war in Vietnam. "Fenway Park, in Boston," John Updike famously wrote, "is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg."

                    I have never been on the inside of an Easter egg, peeping-type or no, but I will bet good money that it is nothing like Fenway, a steaming pile of steel and concrete resting on top of marshland that Boston didn't get around to filling in until the late 19th century. Somewhere along the line, however, the crooked old dump became a shrine for the local fancy classes. "I think walking up to Fenway is thrilling," the late David Halberstam once said. "The approach to it. The smells. You go to Fenway, and you revert to your childhood. You go to Fenway, and you think: 'Something wonderful is going to happen today.'" Quoth Stephen King: "There's no place like it, and it's ours." (We haven't even mentioned Donald Hall, whose poetry, without Fenway, would be just a couple of conjunctions and the word "snow.")

                    This is just a new, sporty strain of that old New England exceptionalism that John Winthrop was preaching back in the 17th century. The thinking runs thusly: Fenway, like its tenants, is somehow different, purer, a perpetual innocent in a fallen, godforsaken world. "The Yankees belong to George Steinbrenner," Sports Illustrated's Steve Wulf wrote in 1981, "and the Dodgers belong to Manifest Destiny, but the Red Sox, more than any other team, belong to the fans."[.quote]

                    Comment


                      NFL 2016

                      ad hoc wrote: My New England experience was very welcoming. Vermont is somewhat different perhaps, because such a large proportion of the population are just relocated hippies but still.
                      The general stereotype of Vermont is that it doesn't really have much of an economy aside from tourism and people bringing money they've acquired elsewhere to start organic farms, etc, but it's been so successful in attracting those people that it appears much more prosperous than other states that rely so heavily on transplants and visitors.

                      As this election proved, the cultural and economic gap between the prosperous cities and the not-so-prosperous everywhere else is getting worse and worse and there's a lot of anger and resentment. And yet that doesn't seem to stop many of those people from supporting Boston teams. It's the same here. There are tons of die-hard Steelers and Eagles fans that would happily vote for either or both Pittsburgh or Philadelphia to become Escape From New York-style prison colonies. Race has a lot to do with that, of course.

                      I wonder if this resentment and racism will eventually cause lots of non-urban people to stop caring about major pro sports.

                      I have noticed, however, that there's less of that in Minnesota. There seems to be more ginned-up tension between St Paul and Minneapolis than there is real tension between the cities and the rest of the state. That might be changing.

                      Comment


                        NFL 2016

                        I've never felt that Boston wasn't welcoming. I don't like the place, and I find its sports fans to have a smug righteousness that's deeply annoying. But the people have always been welcoming. It's just that they don't seem to have a frame of reference that extends much beyond Framingham. They seem genuinely unaware that people might not think the Red Sox are beating heart of American culture. Or that anywhere else might have had immigration from Ireland or Italy (I also sometimes wonder if they even know that people might have migrated from somewhere other than those two countries). Or that Boston isn't The World's Most Important Metropolis. It's a large provincial city, but they imbue it with a grandeur that is undeserved. So, er, yes, I don't much like Boston, but Boston and its residents have always been very nice to me.

                        Comment


                          NFL 2016

                          Incandenza wrote:
                          Originally posted by Exiled off Main Street
                          Originally posted by Incandenza
                          Boston fans seem to have this pathological need to everyone to think that they are exceptional, and if you just think that they're teams are just like any other teams, than you are a monster because they think the team represents something much more than just some professional sports organization.
                          Really ? Wow...
                          It's the mythologizing and romanticism that this Deadspin classic takes on:

                          Nothing — with the possible exception of flowers, springtime and the 3rd Earl of Pembroke — has inspired as much gooey bad poetry and aphoristic nonsense as Fenway Park. If Fenway didn't exist, we'd have to toss a bunch of Harvard professors in a room to invent it, which, not incidentally, is how we also wound up with a war in Vietnam. "Fenway Park, in Boston," John Updike famously wrote, "is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg."

                          I have never been on the inside of an Easter egg, peeping-type or no, but I will bet good money that it is nothing like Fenway, a steaming pile of steel and concrete resting on top of marshland that Boston didn't get around to filling in until the late 19th century. Somewhere along the line, however, the crooked old dump became a shrine for the local fancy classes. "I think walking up to Fenway is thrilling," the late David Halberstam once said. "The approach to it. The smells. You go to Fenway, and you revert to your childhood. You go to Fenway, and you think: 'Something wonderful is going to happen today.'" Quoth Stephen King: "There's no place like it, and it's ours." (We haven't even mentioned Donald Hall, whose poetry, without Fenway, would be just a couple of conjunctions and the word "snow.")

                          This is just a new, sporty strain of that old New England exceptionalism that John Winthrop was preaching back in the 17th century. The thinking runs thusly: Fenway, like its tenants, is somehow different, purer, a perpetual innocent in a fallen, godforsaken world. "The Yankees belong to George Steinbrenner," Sports Illustrated's Steve Wulf wrote in 1981, "and the Dodgers belong to Manifest Destiny, but the Red Sox, more than any other team, belong to the fans."
                          He might have been right in 1981. But that's not really to it's credit. When it belonged to "the fans," it legally belonged to the Yawkeys, who were racist and not really that good at running the club. Now it most definitely belongs to John Henry and anyone who actually cares about the team winning is grateful for it.

                          But I don't think the Red Sox fans are at all unique in thinking of their team as a public trust rather than a business. I think that's true of all the older teams, at least - Phillies, Reds, Pirates, Cubs, Cardinals, etc. If it's not true of the Yankees it's because Steinbrenner was so public and worked so hard to make sure everyone saw him as "the boss."

                          The best thing about Fenway is it's location - only really accessible by public transit, in the city, with loads of bars and what not. It was better when Kenmore Square was still Kenmore Square, but still. It's a million times better than some of the plans people were regrettably discussing in the early to mid-90s about building a new park somewhere else, probably in the sprawl or on some old rail yard south of Boston.

                          The park itself is unique, which is cool, and being so cramped keeps the fans close to the action, but it's also not very comfortable and there are obstructed views.

                          I think my favorite of all the big league parks I've been to is Target Field in Minneapolis. Easy to get to on public transit, easy to move around. Comfortable seats. Not too pricey. It's not ugly, but it doesn't feel "fancy" in any way and there aren't really any gimmicks or faux-nostalgic bits. Just a stadium built soley for baseball.

                          I'm going to PNC Park on April 23. I may decide I like that better, but we'll see.

                          Comment


                            NFL 2016

                            I think I've just about recovered enough to speak, now.

                            I don't think a sporting result has ever affected me so deeply as this one. It left me properly depressed.

                            Evil wins again. It will always win. The world is fucked (as if you didn't know that already).

                            For this reason, I have decided not to watch another NFL game until Brady has retired. And maybe I'll extend that to until Belichick retires, actually ...or until he gets marched out, alongside Trump, to a guillotine set up on the halfway line at Metlife Stadium.

                            Wake me up when this living nightmare is over.

                            Comment


                              NFL 2016

                              It seems like the on-again, off-again Raiders thing is back on again, after Bank of America stepped in with the shortfall from Mr Adelson.

                              https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/mar/07/oakland-raiders-las-vegas-bank-of-america

                              Comment


                                NFL 2016

                                Dwight Clark has ALS.

                                Fuck

                                Comment


                                  NFL 2016

                                  Aaron Hernandez has hanged himself in his prison cell.

                                  Comment


                                    NFL 2016

                                    I had almost forgotten about him before the end of the trial last week, and now this. I feel sorry for his family and all of the victims and their families.

                                    Comment


                                      NFL 2016

                                      Wrote a huge response, but my computer crashed. I'll try again some other time.

                                      Comment


                                        NFL 2016

                                        You know, the thing that always shocks me about the US criminal system is the number of life without parole sentences they hand out, quite literally every week. If Hernandez had committed that crime in Britain he would have got 20 years. In Germany or France probably 15-20 years in Norway he wouldn't serve more than twelve years. Yet the US sends thousands of people to prison for life every year without a single thought. Maybe if Hernandez had received a 20 year sentence he would have confessed to the truth and brought some closure to the family, but now we'll never know.

                                        Comment

                                        Working...
                                        X