TC the Terrible

I’ve got to be honest folks.  I’m getting tired of all this crap with the NFL and the players union.  The whole on again, off again thing is tiresome enough but to think that it’s all over how much more money millionaires can make.  Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for being able to get paid as much as you legally can.  I just think it is a shame that the wages of professional athletes has become such an important news item.

When it comes down to the brass tacks of the matter, the owners hold all the cards here. The only real leverage the players have is to not play.  The owners could then field a team of B-level talent from NFL Europe and the Arena League.  It would be rough for the first year or two, but after that none of us fans would notice.  Again, the NFL markets teams and logos, not players.  They knew what they were doing when they took that path thirty years ago.

And despite Freakdaddy’s protestations I’ve got to plug a little golf today.  If only for the reason that Lefty’s failure can make me feel better. Sure, any pro can hit a member of the gallery on any given day, but few of them walk around with the cash to buy the fan off on the spot.  Plus the way he hit the water two shots in a row lets me know that I’m not alone in that skill.  Of course Tiger won the tournament and gave the new car to his caddy.  But that’s not really a shock.  Villegas wearing an orange belt with matching shoes was the real eye opener.

The Oscars were a dull as ever from what I’ve read with Reese Witherspoon being the only really bright spot of the evening.  We had company over so I have no first hand knowledge of how dull they really were.

Back with more eventually.

Charles “Ed” Hicks falls into the category of ‘functionally insane.’  He has been married seven times, divorced five times with none of the seven wives dieing.  The simple math is that at least once in his life he has been married to two women (wives five and six) at the same time.  That is nuts people.  Why would anyone want more than one wife at a time?  Most guys that I know can barely manage the demands of one wife.

To add to his shame he got busted out by some Big Girl that was at home munching on food stamp Twinkies, watching the damned Dr. Phil show.  

Not that it really matters in the grand scheme of things, but the NFL owners and players have bought themselves some time to get a new contract done.  I’m the guy that used to only have cable during the football season and used rabbit ears (kids ask your grandparents what those were) the rest of the year, so it’s pretty clear that I’m an NFL junkie.  Even at that I understand that professional football is only a game, no matter how rich it makes everyone involved.  So what if they never come to another deal?  The owners can do what they did in the 1980s and simply hire new teams to play the game.

One of the strengths of the NFL has always been that they market teams and logos, not players.  Unlike the NBA whose fate is eternally twisting on weather or not the league stars can stay out of jail, the NFL has the highest rate of criminals in pro sports and still pulls in the most money.  That’s called smart marketing people.  The owners could field entirely new teams and in two seasons the NFL would be running business as usual.

Tiger pulled ahead of Lefty with some great chip shots yesterday.  Which really means diddly if his drives start flying into the gallery this weekend like they did last weekend in match play.  Precision golf is not Tiger’s strong suit and could open the door if he gets sloppy late Saturday.

I’m a day late, but there are two opinion pieces from yesterday’s Post worth mentioning.  The first is from Robert Kaplan, the writer of Balkan Ghosts – a book that shaped Clinton’s foreign policy, about how not all dictatorships are evil.  In fact he argues that some of them may be better than what replaces them.  

The second is from the Post’s resident conservative and clear thinking George Will.  It’s an interesting concept that part of what makes a nation is that the government has a monopoly on legitimate violence.  That makes sense on the surface and it is clear that the new Iraqi government is a good distance from the day that it can make that claim in honesty.  But we as Americans have to keep in mind that the current state of Iraq is not that different from the condition of our own nation in the years just after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

We took eight years to fight our war, another two to get around to writing our Constitution, and finally about four more years to ratify the danged thing.  Our Founding Fathers were not nearly as divided over the major issues of how to form the nation (excepting slavery) as the leaders in Iraq.  They also had some practice in governing themselves, another item missing in Iraq at the moment.  For Americans to think that the Iraqis should have their act together by now is not realistic.  It is time to understand that concept.

See how long winded I get when I miss a day?

Back with more later.

Random thoughts time.

A couple of weeks ago I went to the Food Court for lunch with one of the guys from the office.  We noticed a lot of people wearing cheap backpacks with funny logos.  Upon closer inspection, the logo read “Community-Based Abstinence Program”.  Which made us wonder if the entire community had to pledge to not get laid?  Turns out that it is a bona-fide government program to keep kids from having sex.  Great idea, but isn’t that what parents and church youth league volleyball are supposed to do?
TaB is back.  Yippee.  One of the neighborhood moms drank this stuff when I was a kid.  If memory serves, gasoline out of a lawnmower tasted better.  At least the new version is pink and comes in a cool looking can.  I guess we can consider that progress.

Labor negotiations aside, the Redskins are still screwed at quarterback.  Brunell is about to fall apart so he knows this is the last real money contract he’s going to get.  How can you blame the guy for not wanting to re-negotiate?  Ramsey is a done deal for Coach Gibbs, (really this was old news two years ago), but the ‘Skins are still crapping on him.  Sure, they are letting him shop around for a new team, but they won’t commit to trading him.  It’s time Gibbs did the right thing by this kid and takes whatever the Jets/Dolphins offer for him.

If CBS really was pissed (as they should have been) about Stern pimping his gig on Sirius on their network why didn’t they just take him off the air then?  Granted, they did for a day or two, but that was it.  If they wanted to hit him where he lives, they could have suspended Stern, with pay, for the entire time causing the buzz over his move to satellite radio to cool off tremendously.  Watching how this lawsuit plays out is going to be fun.

And I don’t really care where the profits are going, some one is going to burn in hell over this one.

Back with more later.