Ali, The Poet

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1960s, boxing, muhammad ali, peyton manning, poetry, sports, the greatest, tom brady, writing

I’m not old enough to remember when Muhammad Ali was in his fighting prime, but I’ve always enjoyed watching old film clips and documentaries about him in those days. I especially love the poems he would write and share with the press before big fights. In addition to being the greatest boxer in the world, he was a genius with words and phrases. Ali coined “Rumble in the Jungle,” and “Thrilla In Manila,” the phrases we use to recall two of his most pivotal bouts. Grantland Rice would have been hard-pressed to come up with better catch-phrases than those.

Ali wrote the following poem, “I am the Greatest,” when his name was still Cassius Clay. He was 21 at the time. National Public Radio featured the original audio recording of the poem earlier this week.

Do you know any 21-year-olds who have the self-assurance to read a piece of verse they wrote to a large gathering of strangers? Do they also possess the skill to make the piece boastful, but humorous and playful at the same time? And do they have the charisma to read a poem called “I am the Greatest” without coming across as an arrogant jackass? Finally, how many 21-year-olds do you know who could back up that performance by actually being the greatest at what they do?

It has been written many times that Ali was a one-of-a-kind, and that is true for many reasons. For me, his charisma stands out as something totally unique in the dull, calculated, humorless world of sports. Can you imagine Tom Brady or Peyton Manning sharing poems they wrote before an upcoming Super Bowl?

Here’s the poem. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did:

This is the legend of Cassius Clay,
The most beautiful fighter in the world today.
He talks a great deal, and brags indeed-y,
of a muscular punch that’s incredibly speed-y.
The fistic world was dull and weary,
But with a champ like Liston, things had to be dreary.
Then someone with color and someone with dash,
Brought fight fans a-runnin’ with cash.
This brash young boxer is something to see
And the heavyweight championship is his des-tin-y.
This kid fights great; he’s got speed and endurance,
But if you sign to fight him, increase your insurance.
This kid’s got a left; this kid’s got a right,
If he hit you once, you’re asleep for the night.
And as you lie on the floor while the ref counts ten,
You’ll pray that you won’t have to fight me again.
For I am the man this poem’s about,
The next champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.
This I predict and I know the score,
I’ll be champ of the world in ’64.
When I say three, they’ll go in the third.

So don’t bet against me, I’m a man of my word.
He is the greatest! Yes!
I am the man this poem’s about,
I’ll be champ of the world, there isn’t a doubt.
Here I predict Mr. Liston’s dismemberment,
I’ll hit him so hard; he’ll wonder where October and November went.
When I say two, there’s never a third,
Standin’ against me is completely absurd.
When Cassius says a mouse can outrun a horse,
Don’t ask how; put your money where your mouse is!
I AM THE GREATEST!”

Be Royal

Tags

humor, kansas city, kansas city royals, major league baseball, san francisco giants, sports, Stephen Roth, world series

Today I have nothing to share except this:

And this:

That will be all. Have a wonderful Thursday.

The Agony of the “Griefs”

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alex smith, andrew luck, chiefs, denver broncos, football, futility, indianapolis colts, kansas city, kansas city chiefs, losing, NFL, peyton manning, playoffs, sports, wild card

There’s a lot of manufactured excitement here in Kansas City this week. The local NFL team, the Chiefs, is in the playoffs for just the third time in the past 10 years. Kansas City sports talk radio stations are filling air time with roundtable discussions about whether the Chiefs can steal a win from the Colts in Indianapolis on Saturday. The Kansas City Star has interviewed everyone from quarterback Alex Smith to the team’s water boy about the big game. This, according to the local media, is a major sporting event for Kansas City.

Missed field goals in the playoffs, like burnt ends, are a KC tradition.

Here’s the thing, though: everyone in town knows that the Chiefs will lose this game, and probably lose it badly. That is not just because the Chiefs are playing on the road against a team that thrashed them, 23-7, just two weeks ago. It is because losing in the playoffs is part of the team’s DNA. It is what the Chiefs, known to some Kansas Citians as the “Griefs,” do more effectively than perhaps any other NFL team.

Since winning their only Super Bowl in January 1970, the Chiefs have gone an amazing 3-12 in the playoffs. They have not won a single playoff game since January 16, 1994, when Joe Montana led them to an improbable win over the Houston Oilers. That was such a long time ago that the Oilers are now the Tennessee Titans, and Joe Montana has a son who plays quarterback for Tulane. Twenty years is a long, damn time between playoff wins. During that period, there have been a handful of heartbreaking losses to keep everyone entertained, including:

– A 10-7 defeat at home to the Colts in 1996, a game in which the heavily favored Chiefs turned the ball over four times and missed three field goals in sub-zero weather.

– A demoralizing 14-10 loss to archrival Denver at Arrowhead in 1998 in which Chiefs quarterback Elvis Grbac could not convert a fourth-and-one deep in Denver territory in the game’s final minute (Chiefs fans, check out this Denver fan’s gleeful summary of the game if you really want to get steamed). The Broncos went on to win the Super Bowl that year.

Yes, it’s been a while.

– Another loss at home to the Colts in 2004, this time by a 38-31 score. This game is notable for the fact that the Chiefs defense never once forced the Colts to punt. Peyton Manning toyed with the boys in red by completing 22 of 30 passes for 304 yards and 3 touchdowns.

This record of futility is well-known to the Colts, who have beaten the Chiefs three of the last five times Kansas City has made the playoffs. The people of Indianapolis can’t wait for the Chiefs to get into town. They might even throw them a parade.

Well, maybe the Chiefs are due for a little postseason success, you might say. Maybe they will do better since Saturday’s game isn’t at Arrowhead, you might suggest. Well, that’s possible, I guess. But even if you ignore 20 years of futility, the current-day fact is that this Chiefs team, like so many before, just isn’t all that great. The Chiefs got off to an impressive 9-0 start by capitalizing on weak competition – only one of the wins over that stretch came against a playoff team. Over the last seven games of the season, as the competition has gotten tougher, the Chiefs are 2-5, winning games against hapless Washington (3-13) and Oakland (4-12).

A smiling Peyton Manning is a familiar sight for Chiefs fans.

There’s another long-time bugaboo working against this Chiefs team: the quarterback position. Alex Smith, whom the Chiefs acquired from the 49ers in the offseason, is a capable field manager. He doesn’t make very many mistakes, and he is having a career year this season. However, the Colts have an even better quarterback in Andrew Luck, heir to Peyton Manning and the player that everyone expects to be the Colts’ cornerstone for years to come. When the Chiefs and Colts faced off two weeks ago, Luck threw for a touchdown and Smith tossed two interceptions. No one will be too surprised if those numbers are similar in Saturday’s rematch.

The lack of a superstar quarterback, more than anything else, has been Kansas City’s undoing in the playoffs. In games against Dan Marino, Peyton Manning, John Elway and Jim Kelly, the Chiefs have put up Steve DeBerg, Trent Green, Elvis Grbac and Dave Krieg. Sad, isn’t it? In my opinion, there’s no coincidence that the team’s only real playoff success of the past 40 years, wins against the Steelers and Oilers in 1994, came with a fading but still great Joe Montana at helm. The formula is simple: you need a brilliant quarterback to win NFL playoff games. Other than the Len Dawson glory days of the 1960s and the two seasons they had with Montana in the ’90s, the Chiefs have never measured up in that department.

While this year’s team will probably be hitting the golf course after Saturday, there is hope that Chiefs can someday make some postseason noise. Head coach Andy Reid led the Eagles to several trips to the NFC Championship and one Super Bowl. He is known as a savvy developer of pro quarterbacks like Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick. The fact that he has the Chiefs in the playoffs at all this season is a small miracle. The team went 2-14 a year ago with most of the same players.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to see all of Kansas City celebrate a playoff victory. No town deserves it more. I just don’t think it’s going to happen this year. But, for the first time in a long time, the future looks good for Kansas City’s favorite sports team. Maybe someday soon, they will steal a big game from one of those great teams like the Colts, Broncos or Patriots. Then, and only then, will the Chiefs no longer be the Griefs.

Bible Stories for Our Times, Part 1

Tags

applebee's, baseball, bible, disciples, jesus, miracles, satire, sports

And from there they walked to Applebee’s, and the disciples said, “We only have enough to order one 2 for $20 meal.” And Jesus said, “Don’t worry about it.” And the disciples ate and were satisfied. And when the restaurant manager saw what Jesus had done, he treated all of them to free Blue Ribbon Brownies.

Jesus left there and crossed the four-lane expressway to a baseball park, where a very small boy stood at the plate awaiting a pitch. The boy, seeing Jesus, cried out, “Lord, help me!” The disciples, knowing the boy had only been on base twice that year–both times being walks–begged Jesus not to get involved. “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. He walked up to the boy and said, “You have great faith! Your request is granted.” And he told the boy that, to begin with, his bat was too big, and that he needed to choke up and shorten his swing. The tiny boy did this, and hit a sharp grounder through the second baseman’s legs, driving in a run to tie the game. The people were amazed and asked, “Who is this man?” Jesus left the ballpark, and large crowds followed him. Word spread about him quickly throughout the metropolitan area.

Image courtesy of a Facebook friend.

Coaches Can be Bullies? You Don’t Say!

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basketball, bullies, bullying, coaches, coaching, mike rice, mr. woodcock, opinion, rutgers, sports

Mike Rice, captured mid-scream.

In the last few days, there has been much hand-wringing and posturing in the media about a newly released video of Rutgers University basketball coach Mike Rice screaming, shoving and hurling basketballs at his players during practice. The footage, we are told, is “shocking.” Several celebrity sports figures, including NBA star LeBron James, have called for Rice to be fired. Rutgers administrators did just that on Wednesday and are now answering questions about why they didn’t fire the coach months ago when they first learned of his abuses.

To me, what’s most shocking is how a big-time coach like Rice can behave like this on camera and not expect it to eventually wind up on YouTube or ESPN. What is less surprising to me is the coach’s disgusting behavior and demeaning treatment of his players. Coaches have acted like this for a long time, even on the lower, more hidden levels of the sports world. Surely jock-worshipers like the talking heads on ESPN are aware of this.

When I was in fourth grade at a small private school, we had a surly P.E. instructor named Coach Whitney. He was also the school’s varsity basketball coach and it was pretty clear to everyone that teaching 10-year-olds was not a favorite part of his job. One day, my classmates and I were lined up for some sort of exercise and I was giggling with one of my friends. The coach grabbed a dodge ball, hurled it as hard as he could from about 20 feet away and hit me square in the face. My classmates laughed nervously. We were all afraid of Coach Whitney, who stared me down for a few seconds before turning his wrath to someone else. I was embarrassed and, obviously, red-faced, and I never spoke to anyone about the incident.

My subsequent coaches were a little better, but not much. In seventh grade, one of them strongly suggested to my class that I was a sissy because I took piano lessons and was good friends with one of the more sensitive boys in our grade. In 8th grade, another coach basically ignored me until it was time for me to received a paddling for misbehavior. In 10th grade, I had a female coach glare at me and tell me I was worthless.

Was Bear Bryant a great coach? Absolutely. Was he an abusive megalomaniac? Perhaps.

I don’t bring this personal history up to inspire pity. I had a good childhood and was not scarred in any way by my bad teachers or coaches. My intent is to point out that coaches, in many cases, are jerks. There were a lot of them who behaved aggressively and churlishly when I was in school in the 1980s. I’m sure there  also were coaches who were caring, inspiring molders of young men and woman. I don’t remember knowing any, though.

I know things have changed a lot in the 30 years since I was a kid. Our camera-filled, media-saturated society is less tolerant of bullying behavior, which is a good thing. But I sense that there are probably still a few jerks out there in the coaching ranks, as Mike Rice’s now-famous tantrums suggest. For anyone to pretend otherwise is to be totally ignorant of sports on even an elementary school level.

There’s a reason why Billy Bob Thornton’s Mr. Woodcock strikes a chord with many adult men my age. It’s not because we have incredibly bad taste in movies. It’s because we all knew a Mr. Woodcock at some time during our formative years. Many of us would probably like nothing more than to bean him with a rubbery dodge ball today.

So how about you? Any “shocking” gym class stories you’d care to tell? Or maybe you can recall a coach who encouraged and inspired his or her pupils? Do you believe Rutgers’ treatment of Mike Rice was fair and just? I’d love your perspective.

Images pulled from of http://www.redelephants.com and http://www.chicagonow.com.

The Many Trials of a Mizzou Fan

Tags

college basketball, college football, humor, kansas, missouri, mizzou, sports

Nebraska’s infamous (and illegal) kicked-ball play against Missouri.

Four nights ago, the University of Missouri’s basketball team enjoyed a thoroughly impressive 93-63 thumping of its new rival, Arkansas, on the hardwood. The win was big because it came against Missouri’s former coach, Mike Anderson, who left Columbia two years prior in the dead of night without so much as a farewell text to his players.

So it was a nice, score-settling victory, which makes me nervous because it means the Tigers will almost certainly lose their next, even bigger game at Tennessee today. And not just because Tennessee is pretty good and Missouri has struggled on the road this season. It’s because following a big win with a wrenching, heart-gouging loss is what the Tigers do. It is their thing, as certain for Missouri as snow storms in the middle of March.

To paraphrase a famous Star Wars droid, we Missouri fans were made to suffer. It is our lot in life. I got my first taste of this as a college freshman. I was an out-of-state student and mostly unfamiliar with Mizzou’s sports traditions, or lack thereof. The football team at the time was very bad, mired in the middle of 13 straight losing seasons. But the basketball team, led by stars like Doug Smith and Anthony Peeler, was a force. The Tigers beat Kansas twice with the nation’s number one ranking on the line. They seemed primed for their first Final Four appearance when things fell apart. There were late-season losses to Oklahoma, Notre Dame and Colorado (really? Colorado?). Peeler went into a shooting slump and his teammates couldn’t seem to pick up the slack.

Still, there was optimism as my dorm mates and I headed to the basement rec room of Hatch Hall to watch the Tigers take on unheralded Northern Iowa in an early afternoon NCAA tournament game. Two hours later, after the Panthers scored a last-second bucket to upset the 3rd-seeded Tigers, my friends and I trudged to the upstairs cafeteria to eat our lunch in stony silence. It was the last day of school before spring break, but you would have thought that three more months of winter had just set in.

That was a painful indoctrination, to be followed by several other soul-crunching Tiger defeats like the 5th Down Game against Colorado, the 1997 “Flea-Kicker” loss to Nebraska and Tyus Edney’s coast-to-coast drive and shot to beat Missouri in a 1995 March Madness game. There’s nothing I can say about these contests that hasn’t been written a hundred times before. Yes, they sucked. And, yes, I remember them all very well.

Angry Missouri students tear down goalposts after losing 5th Down Game

Those were milestone defeats. But there were smaller, equally bizarre losses in between that also ate away at this Mizzou fan’s cast iron heart. During my senior year in 1992, the Colorado Buffalos returned to Columbia for the first time since they needed five downs to beat the Tigers on the last play of the 1990 game. The ’92 rematch was going to be the biggest football game for Missouri in a generation: national television, a first-ever night game at Faurot Field, free admission for any student who wished to attend… It was a sneak peek at big-time football for Missouri. And maybe that was why a cold front blew in just moments before kickoff and blasted freezing rain on the stadium for the entire game. It was early October, but it felt like the middle of February and most fans had retreated to their cars by halftime. The Tigers put up a fight. Down 6-0 late, they got the ball deep in Buffalo territory. A winning touchdown seemed eminent before the ball slipped from quarterback Phil Johnson’s hands and into the arms of a Colorado defender. “Missouri luck,” a friend muttered to me as we stood shivering in the student section.

Tyrus Edney’s game-winning shot for UCLA

There’s been bad luck, or bad judgment, off the field as well. In 1989, Missouri passed on an opportunity to hire Bill Snyder as its football coach. Snyder went down the road instead and turned Kansas State into a national power. Perhaps making up for that mistake, Missouri hired a different Snyder – Duke assistant Quin Snyder – as its basketball coach in 1999. It chose him over a young Tulsa coach named Bill Self, who would go on to lead Kansas to a national championship and enjoy many, many lopsided wins over the Tigers along the way. Missouri luck.

Despite this inglorious history, I remain a proud Mizzou fan. After all, it’s where I went to school and formed some of my closest friendships. And, while the Tigers haven’t loaded up their trophy case with conference championships over the years, they are competitive in both football and basketball, which keeps things interesting from September through March. I sometimes feel sorry for Kansas or Kentucky fans, who usually have nothing to cheer about until Midnight Madness. And don’t they get a little bored with all that basketball success, all those McDonald’s All-Americans churning out championship after championship? Wouldn’t that get a little dull? I’m asking the question because I have no idea if it would or not. That level of sports greatness would be as foreign to me as a day trip to Jupiter.

Also, suffering through Missouri’s pain means that success, when it comes, is especially surprising and sweet. I’ll never forget the football Tigers beating Kansas at Arrowhead Stadium in 2007 and getting the nation’s number one ranking. For a week. There was another great football win over Oklahoma in 2010 – followed by a dispiriting loss to Nebraska. And last year’s basketball season was nothing short of glorious. The Tigers went 30-5 and won their last three Big 12 games to win the conference tournament championship before a noisy, partisan crowd in Kansas City.

There have been a few good sports moments for Ol’ Mizzou.

Of course, they followed that up with a shocking loss to Norfolk State in the first round of the NCAA tournament. But by now, I should have seen that coming. It is my lot in life as a Tigers fan, always waiting for that other boot to come crashing down.

The Story Behind the Tattoo (Maybe)

Tags

bad tattoos, fiction, humor, olympics, sports, swimming, tattoo, wet dream

Candy, a few years after the dream had faded.

Candy and Justin met the first night of U.S. Nationals in Denver, at one of those cheesy ice cream socials the Olympics people set up so swimmers could get acquainted. The two of them hit it off, talking into the early morning hours about Pixar movies, their favorite 1980s hair bands and the captivating prose of Nick Hornby.

Two nights later, when Candy finished third in the women’s 100-meter Butterfly and Justin came in second in the Freestyle, they celebrated by hitting a few clubs in the city’s LoDo district. They were both in their teens but nobody thought to card the two tall, toned swimmers still giddy over advancing to the Olympic team qualifying round. At some point, on a drunken dare, they stumbled into separate rooms of a tattoo parlor. Justin emerged with a shoulder emblazoned with a gold medal and the words, “Athens 2004.”

When he saw the script lettering above Candy’s chest, he laughed.

“Dude,” he said. “Do you even know what that means?”

Of course she did. It meant that Candy was one step closer to realizing the goal she set for herself the first time she dove into a lap pool: to someday represent the United States as a swimmer in the Olympics. And, of course, to take home the gold.

When Justin explained the baser, more popular meaning of the term, “Wet Dream,” Candy was surprised and a little embarrassed. She was 17 and so focused on her sport and schoolwork that maybe she was a little unfamiliar with the latest teen slang. She knew she was inexperienced. That night was only the second time she had kissed a boy, the two of them snuggled under Justin’s fleece Team USA jacket a few feet from the entrance to Coors Field.

Years later, after she failed twice to qualify for the Olympic team, long after Justin ditched her to live with a Bulgarian gymnast, Candy began to resent the tattoo. She suspected its prominent place just below her neck hurt her chances at a respectable office job and locked her into life as a waitress at a Pennsylvania roadhouse called “Meats.” Candy thought more than once about getting the tattoo removed. But that would be painful, and not just in a physical sense. It would mean turning back from a dream she’d held close since she was a little girl staring up at the posters of Mark Spitz that hung in her bedroom.

Candy wasn’t prepared to make that break. Not yet.