Bring on Soda Popinski!

As children my brother and I were never allowed to be sports players for Halloween.  When you walked around the neighborhoods going Trick or Treating, you always saw tons of kids dressed as Yankees or Giants or Rangers, but my Mom would have nothing of it.  I think she had some good points, too.  First off, kids wore sports jerseys all the time, anyway (and that's basically all dressing like an athlete entails), so wearing a hockey sweater wasn't "special" enough of be called a Halloween costume.  I also think she didn't like it because it wasn't unique, and I can respect that - Halloween is all about standing out, and you can't do that if 47 other kids in your community are wearing the same thing as you.

Now that I'm older, I pick my own Halloween costumes (though I still always consult Mom . . .).  While I'm now "free" to go as an athlete, I've never done so.  It always feels like a bit of a cop out and, unless done really well, seems a bit weak.  That being said, it's always in the back of my mind - as a huge sports fan whose life revolves around my fvorite teams, why shouldn't I go as Chipper Jones or John Tavares or Danilo Gallinari?  All of this got me thinking - maybe there's an in-between option.  Maybe there's a way I can go as something peripherally sports related, but which also brings in some of my other interests.

This year, I have a costume I'm pretty excited about.  In addition to sports, I've always been a fan of video games, particularly early 1990's era Nintendo Entertainment System games.  On top of that, I love obscure cultural references.  Is there an obscure costume that combines 20 year-old video game characters and sports, you ask?  You bet there is!  I give you a sneak preview of my 2010 Halloween costume concept: Little Mac from Mike Tyson's Punch Out!

Though he's advanced some, Little Mac's classic look remains relatively unchanged.

It's a relatively easy costume to execute, since it basically only involves black shoes, green shorts, a black tank top and boxing gloves.  It's also a good costume, in my opinion, because even if people don't get the specific cultural reference, they'll just assume I'm dressed as a generic boxer, which as a backup interpretation works pretty well.  All in all, I'm pretty excited about this idea and think I can pull it off reasonably well (and I pretty much already own all of the necessary ingredients).  Unless someone has an alternate great last-minute idea, I'm going as Little Mac this year.  I'm looking forward to seeing what other interesting sports-themes costumes are out this Saturday night.

A Walk to Remember

As a kid living on Long Island, I drove to every sporting event I went to.  I'd meet my Dad at his office in Long Island City and we'd drive to Yankee Stadium, or my parents would drive me and my friends to Uniondale and drop us off at Nassau Coliseum; we'd meet them at the Long Island Marriot after the game and they'd pick us up.  Occasionally we'd take the Long Island Railroad to Shea Stadium, though a car ride was always preferred.  The driving trend continued when I moved to L.A., where I'd drive down to Dodger Stadium or the Staples Center or struggle to find parking within a mile of the Los Angeles Coliseum.  When I moved back to Manhattan I used public transportation to get to games; Madison Square Garden, Citi Field and the Meadowlands were all a short subway or train ride away from my apartment or office.

One thing I've never really done, though, is walk to a game.  In college we'd walk from our dorms to Princeton Stadium or Jadwin Gym, and here at Stanford I walk to Stanford Stadium and soon will be walking to Maples Pavillion, but that's expected when you live on a college campus.  What about people who live in cities where they can walk to see their favorite pro teams play?  This weekend I spent a great weekend in Chicago for a friend's wedding, and had Sunday afternoon free to explore the Windy City.  When I left my hotel room on Sunday morning to explore Millenium Park and walk to brunch, I saw droves of navy-and-orange-clad Bears fans walking across the city toward Soldier Field.  As I got closer to the stadium, I saw more and more people sporting Brian Urlacher,  Johnny Knox and Robbie Gould jerseys (in white, navy and orange) heading towards the stadium.

Located close to downtown Chicago, Soldier Field is perfect for fans who like to walk.

While I guess having tons of fans walking to the game might hurt the tailgating culture, I thought the fan walk was awesome.  People would round a street corner and join the line of fellow fans heading toward the game, immediately starting conversations about the team's chances against the Redskins that afternoon.  It gave the city and the team a very unique identity which, while foreign to me, I became immediately jealous of.  I walked to a bunch of World Cup games in South Africa this summer, and bantering with fellow USA fans on the way to games was one of the best parts of the experience.  To think that Bears fans living in Chicago can have that before every home game is pretty awesome, and is something I wish I saw more of growing up in New York, Los Angeles and now outside San Francisco.

My next scheduled sporting event is an Islanders game at HP Pavillion in San Jose, which again I'll be driving to.  Some time soon, though, I vow to find a game to which I can walk.  Any suggestions for walking-distance professional sporting venues that I can go visit?

A Morning at Old Pro

I've never been a huge fan of watching NFL games at sports bars.  Sure, there are some advantages.  You usually get a nice set of screens showing all of the games in HD, and there's plenty of food and drinks around (assuming you can get a waitress's attention).  Then there are the negatives.  The fact that, no matter where you sit, you get a stiff neck from staring at awklwardly-located monitors.  The annoying Bears / Packers / Cowboys / [insert other hated team(s) here] fans who obnoxiously cheer every time their running back carries for more than a yard.  Having to pretend to be friends with a guy just because he, too, is wearing a New York Giants jersey in Northern California, even though if you bumped into the same guy in New York you wouldn't think twice about it.  In general, I'd rather watch at home with a few friends then go out to the bars, and I consistently maintained that stance while living in Manhattan over the past few years.

While living in the Bay Area has been great, one of the downsides has been limited local access to Giants football.  While we've already established that I enjoy the early Sunday start times that the west coast provides, it's an entirely different story when the Giants game is only available on Sunday Ticket.  Now, instead of rolling out of bed shortly after 9 and flipping on FOX, I have to drive into downtown Palo Alto to watch the game at one of the local watering holes - on California Sundays, non-alcoholics go to bars in the morning, too.  Watching football in the morning isn't quite as relaxing when you're doing it alongside questionable characters at a place called "Old Pro."

It's almost sensory overload, in fact - while Sunday mornings are supposed to be "chill," as the kids say (or at least as they used to say in the early 2000s . . .), a morning at a sports bar is anything but.  The air smells of stale beer from the night before, and of fresh beer from the breath of the guy next to you who inexplicably started drinking at 9:30 AM.  People are cheering at different points from all over the bar as you frantically swivel your head around to try and figure out which team did something good, if that affects the Giants in some way, and whether or not there might be fantasy football implications.  The chairs, tables and floors are always sticky, and the coffee served from a thermos in the corner is among the worst you'll ever drink in your life.  If you were there to do anything else but watch some NFL football, you'd be miserable.

But that's the beauty of it - you are watching NFL football, and that makes everything more than tolerable.  When the games are going well and your team's playing well (like the Giants did in defeating the Lions at home on Sunday), you really get into the sports bar experience.  Suddenly the smell's not so bad; instead, it's a reminder of sports and masculinity and fits perfectly with the plethora of beer commercials popping up on screens all over the bar.  The sticky chairs and floors remind you of the seats and concourses at Giants Stadium, and the annoying fans make you feel like you're watching your team play live in a hostile road environment.  In short, it's actually pretty fun.

From now on, I'm going to try and give the morning sports bar experience a fair shot to earn my admiration.  Since I'm going to be living in California for at least another NFL season-and-a-half and can't get DirecTV, I don't really have much of a choice.

The End of Summer

As you might imagine, I was pretty bummed when the Braves' season ended with a 3-2 defeat to San Francisco last night. Of course, it's always a little sad when any of your teams end their seasons, whether it be a loss in the Super Bowl or, in the case of the Islanders, elimination from NHL playoff contention that normally occurs some time in late January. For me, though, the end of the Braves season is the most painful. I'm not exactly sure why, though I think it must have something to do with baseball being the lone summer sport.

Growing up, winter sports were easy to follow. I was always home, with daily access to TV, the newspaper, and later the internet. Because I spent all of my summers at a rustic sleepaway camp in upstate NY, following America's pastime was always more of a challenge. Sometimes we'd travel off campus for an afternoon to go to the movies or go bowling, and I could sneak off to find a newspaper and take a look at the current standings. My grandfather used to clip Braves boxscores, press clippings and other baseball-related materials from his South Florida newspaper to help keep ne informed; they were always outdated by the time I received them, but I always gobbled them up anyway. Once each summer we got to watch the All Star Game on the TV in the dining hall, and I used to keep score and diligently note how each player was performing through the first half of the season.

After putting in so much work for years if my life, it's always hard for me to say goodbye to the Braves at the end of each campaign. While I'm enjoying the NFL so far, just starting to watch the NHL and looking forward to the NBA, the sports world is never the same without the Tomahawk Chop. R.I.P. 2010 Atlanta Braves. As with each of the previous 26 iterations that I have been alive to see, you will be missed.

NOTE: I typed this post from my Droid Incredible while waiting for my pupils to dilate in a Stanford Health Center exam room, so please excuse me if there are more typos than usual.

Behind Enemy Lines

When I moved to Northern California exactly a month ago, I wasn't expecting any backlash over my sports rooting preferences.  After all, Stanford is a very diverse place; there are kids here from countless countries, not to mention states and cities.  I've met Toronto Raptors fans, Houston Texans fans, a Phoenix Coyote fan (yes, really), and my love of the New York Giants, Islanders and Knicks has been met with (mostly) open arms.  While there are a lot of Bay Area natives here, the Sharks, Warriors, 49ers, Raiders and A's don't compete with my teams much.  The San Francisco Giants however, have been a different story.

Just my luck that the Atlanta Braves would get into the playoffs only to face off against the hometown Giants in the first round.  Giants fans are surprisingly passionate right now; it seems the fans want to make a name for themselves in the post-Bonds era, and locals have fallen for the laid-back attitude portrayed by by Tim Lincecum, Pablo "Kung Fu Panda" Sandoval and the rest of the club.  All of a sudden, me and my circa-1974 Braves cap are the enemy, earning dirty looks from strangers and playful heckling from friends.

This isn't my first time rooting for a hated team, of course.  I survived two Braves World Series against the Yankees and several late season battles and playoff showdowns with the Mets, but these were easy to deal with; as a native New Yorker, I know everything there is to know about Yankees and Mets fans and how to deal with them.  For a Yankees fan, just ask him an ever-so-moderately difficult question about his team, wait until he realizes he doesn't know the answer, and walk away.  For a Mets fan, say nothing, wait for the Mets to crumble on their own, and smile.  It's not that difficult.

While living in Southern California, I never ran into any sports rivalries.  The Knicks were too bad to compete with the Lakers and I don't think I met one Clippers fan in three years in L.A.  There's no L.A. football team to compete with Big Blue, and the Islanders-Kings rivalry hasn't really gotten off the ground yet.  My three years in L.A. were easy, and I returned to New York in 2008 to see tons of Knicks, Giants and even Islanders fans everywhere.  Maybe I got a little soft.

Now, while living just a half-four drive from San Francisco, it's time to get nasty once again.  I'll be sporting my Braves gear with pride this week, planning to show these orange-and-black clad fans what real baseball is all about.  Though I wasn't able to hit up either of the first two games of the series at AT&T Park (ticket prices climbed way out of my price range), it's been surprisingly fun to be behind enemy lines once again.     

Praise for FX's "The League"

Brace yourself; I'm devoting a blog entry to a sitcom on FX that's not It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Before we get started: If you're asking yourself, "FX airs something other than Always Sunny?" then click here.  If you're asking yourself, "What's FX?" then try this one.  If you're asking yourself, "What's It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia?" then I'm going to have to ask you to leave this site immediately.  Now that we've taken care of some housekeeping, let's talk about The League.

The League isn't really a show about sports.  It's actually a traditional sitcom about a bunch of guys, their wives / girlfriends / relationships, their jobs, etc.  Sounds pretty awful, not to mention fairly predictable, no?  Well, to some extent it's both of those things.  The show is extremely juvenile (even compared to Always Sunny . . .), and several of the plot lines are cliche and repetitive.  So, why do I watch The League and why am I encouraging you to do the same?  Because, in an underserved market, even a pretty crappy product can survive if demand is sufficiently high and competition is sufficiently low (see, I'm learning something in business school after all).  In this case, the underserved market is "television dedicated to fantasy football," a market that The League attacks aggressively and somewhat successfully.

Before you start to attack me with talk of Matthew Berry and DirecTV's Fantasy Tracker, I'm talking about TV content that talks about what it's like to play fantasy football, not content that tells you who to start each week (we actually have too much of that, if anything).  Anyone who has a league (or leagues) that they're loyal to and take seriously knows what I'm talking about; fantasy football takes up more time than we'd like to admit, and at times we'll do anything to secure a win.  That's what The League is all about - overly-extreme examples of how far guys will go to win their fantasy football leagues.  In one episode, one guy convinces his buddy that a random drunk black guy in a bar is Bears star Matt Forte in order to get him to trade the running back to a competing team.  In another episode, the gang races through airport security, with the first man through the checkpoint earning the first pick in their draft.  While admittedly stupid, these plotlines are a pretty clever way at poking fun at how obsessed American men (and sometimes women) are with fantasy football.

Check out The League on Thursdays at 10:30 PM on FX Network.

The show also features cameos from NFL players, so it you ever wanted to know who was a better actor between Browns WR Josh Cribbs and Ravens LB Terrell Suggs, watch last week's episode (spoiler alert: they both sucked).  Ochocinco guest-starred in the Season Two premiere, and other stars are slated to appear in future episodes.  The show also has the luxury of airing at 10:30 PM on FX, so they get away with a lot.  Not only is there some cursing, but last week there was a scene were the characters comically (and accurately) discussed racially-based diction in sports (how black NFL coaches are always referred to as "class acts" and how latino baseball players are "firecrackers" or "spark plugs," for example) that would never fly on NBC or even FOX.

The League's not the best show on TV, but it's definitely worth watching if you enjoy stupid comedies (any fan of The Hangover shouldn't consider himself too good for this show . . .) and/or play fantasy football.  I'm hoping the show gains a little more traction, because between it and Always Sunny FX has developed a surprisingly solid hour of television on Thursday nights.