Week 2: Gridiron Gang

My birthday celebration started last week when my parents sent me a card a week early and dis-invited me from our family vacation.

“For Someone Special.” The front of the card showed a wooden gazebo bench, empty but for a bluebird and a basket of flowers, in a corner of lawn jungle-like with all variety of colorful flowers. Had Someone Special ever appeared on this card, he/she had long since left, possibly due to severe allergies.

‘Wishing you all the things that make your heart happiest. Happy Birthday’ was the pre-printed message, which was supplemented as follows:

“God gave us this gift

One of the best son’s of the world (sic)

Proud to be your parents and brother.”

It was “signed” by my brother (in Boston at the time the card was mailed), my parents, and my grandmother (in India at the time the card was mailed).

“Hey,” I said that night on the phone. “I got your card.”

“Happy Birthday!” greeted my mother.

“It’s next week. The 21st. Like you have in the card.”

“I know,” she said. “We got your card when we got your brother’s.” His birthday was in July. “It was just sitting on the kitchen table, and we wanted to send it before we forgot about it.” I waited as she and my father hotly debated whether to change the channel. “I’m working on my visa application for India,” she continued.

For months now, ever since our planned June trip got canceled because of an early monsoon season, we’ve been talking about taking a trip to India. What was originally just my mother visiting her mother became me and my mother and then me and my parents and then all three of us visiting more than just my mother’s mother. The problem with being from a foreign country is that whenever you go back, you inevitably spend your entire vacation in other people’s houses. This time, we were planning to take some extra days to travel around to some of India’s most famous sites so that I could take pictures.

“Oh, good. I need to request mine at some point.”

“We’re going in October.”

“Wait, what?” Ever since we decided to reschedule, the plan has always been for the three of us to go in January. “I can’t go in October. It’s short notice for me to get that much time off from work. And even if I could, that’s in the thick of race season.” Between them, October and November have the Twin Cities, Chicago, Marine Corps, New York, and Philadelphia marathons, as well as the Knickerbocker 60K. “There’s no way I could go in October.”

“Mm hmm.” She paused, almost out of politeness. “We’re going to go in October.”

Onto the game…

Despite the dominant performance of “Leg of God” K John Kasay last week (2-for-2), there were still doubters out there with questions about the rest of the team. Can it run an offense without WR Steve Smith? Can they put pressure on quarterbacks?

Those questions were answered with a resounding “Yes!” last Sunday by Super Bowl favorites, America’s Team, the Tar Heel Terror Squad, your CAROLINA PANTHERS, at the expense of the hapless Vikings! In front of a pasty crowd of Minnesotans, the most complete team in the NFL went to work with clockwork precision, trading field goals with the Vikes to trail 6-3 in the second. By Odin! The Vikings defense was tenacious? Approaching the half, what could our protagonists possibly do?

QB Jake Delhomme went to the sidelines. And dialed ‘H’…for Hero.

WR Keyshawn Johnson with an amazing catch and a 40-yard run! Like the hammer of Thor, Panthers pressing on offense! 3-yard run by rookie RB Deangelo “Brown Sugar” Williams for a TD! Panthers up 10-6!

You know how, occasionally in life, you and a colleague can miscommunicate? Take, for example, something as simple as Rosh Hashannah seder this past Friday. Friday afternoon, I was walking with one of our senior legal assistants, Greg, to happy hour.

“Pretty dead around here,” I noted. “One Jew holiday and this whole place clears out.”

“Yeah, a lot of people left this afternoon.”

“Why is that exactly?” I asked. I waved my keycard in front of the door and held it open for him.

“Thanks. I think they have to be indoors by sundown.”

We walked down the stairs to the café in silence.

“You’re thinking of vampires,” I said.

With the Panthers up 13-6 in the fourth, the wily John Fox went aggressive, calling for a trick play. On the kickoff reception, CB Chris Gamble was supposed to pitch it back to CB Richard Marshall, but an errant toss gave the Vikings favorable field position! Touchdown, Vikings!

In overtime, the Vikings kicked a field goal to win. But the real story of the game was the phenomenal play of DE Julius Peppers. With five (!) sacks and a blocked field goal, the Vikings had no answer for the Obsidian Dervish, and were lucky to leave the game without being beaten more badly than they were!

Next week: With the winner of Atlanta-New Orleans taking a 3-0 lead in the NFC South, the loser of the Carolina-Tampa Bay matchup is likely out of the playoffs this year. Last time they were down there, Panthers cheerleaders got drunk in a bar, punched a local in the face, had sex with each other in a bathroom stall, and ended up facing criminal charges. Not unlike this past week’s game, where the Panthers’ smashmouth style was undone by their screwing themselves over. Prediction? The NFL’s first-ever 100-point game!

Panthers 103, Tampa Bay 26

Until next time.

RROWRRRRRRRR!

Week 1: Invincible

I tuned into the premiere episode of the controversial new season of “Survivor,” the one where the tribes are initially separated by race. When news of the setup first leaked last month, liberals were up in arms.

Aren’t you offended?, they asked me, bristling with righteous indignation. This is racist!

How is this racist? It’s not racist if they’re treated equally. It’s racist if they give the black people fried chicken, the Asians calculators, the Latinos a low-rider, and the white people a Gap.

I’m happy to say that this week, the Asians won! I was a little worried when the first half of the immunity challenge required physical exertion, but knew that it was ours when the second half turned out to be a puzzle.

Spoiler Alert: figured out the mid-season twist. One of the women on Team Honky is named Parvati. “Parvati”? The Hindu goddess of love, Parvati? Is there a double agent inside the house that crackers built?!

Onto the game…

The NFL kicked off its opening weekend with Michael Vick and the Falcons traveling to Tar Heel Country to take on the Growling Wall, America’s Team, your CAROLINA PANTHERS, in a battle of NFC South titans! The Falcons quickly found themselves overmatched, as “Leg of God” K John Kasay put on a kicking clinic for the raucous hometown crowd. Going two-for-two for six points, Kasay dominated the Dirty Birds from inside the hash marks, leaving them to savor the salty broth of Failure.

It was the stuff between the field goals that gave the Panthers problems.

Like the Acela, WR Steve Smith was both incredibly fast and out of service for the game. The Panthers were dealt another blow early on when LT Travelle Wharton went out with a broken ankle in the second quarter. After that, the Panthers’ offensive line went down like a Lynyrd Skynyrd flight. After the game, Atlanta DE John Abraham was charged with assault and battery. The victim? Carolina QB Jake Delhomme. Sure, Pro Bowl pass rusher Abraham took advantage of Carolina’s re-shuffled O-line to sack Delhomme twice and force two fumbles, but who wants a cheap victory like that? That’s like mugging a kid having an epileptic seizure. If that was how the Falcons wanted to play, then let the baby have his bottle, I say.

Oh, and what would a Panthers game be without another Dan Morgan concussion? I give him two more shots like that before he turns into the guy from “Memento.” Atlanta over Carolina, 20-6.

After the game, I went to commiserate with fellow Carolinians on the charlotte.com message boards.

“This is one man offense team. Delhomme eats too much Bojangles.”

[I don’t even know what this means, but I already like him more than Kornheiser.]

“It is time for Delhomme to be benched.”

[Umm…did you read my column last week? What’s your plan after you bench Delhomme? Start Weinke?]

The nice thing about NFC South message boards is that fans of our division rivals will leave messages too. A sample:

“Boy you guys are really bad, everyone picking you to win the Super Bowl and you can’t beat Atlanta. Panthers suck.”

“Hey, the Panthers can still make it to the Super Bowl…if they go ahead and buy their tickets now.”

“Ha ha Jacksonville won their opener ha ha ‘pampers’”

Absorbing their jeers, I sat there, now knowing how to assess Carolina’s performance, until it came to me in a flash of insight: absolutely brilliant. An opponent that can throw the ball and rush the passer? Humdrum. An opponent that can toy with a team for four quarters and drop field goals on them at will, practically mocking the effort the other team has to put in just to keep pace with them? Psychologically devastating. Hats off to another brilliant play call by the Stephen Hawking of the 3-4, Coach John Fox.

Next week, the Panthers travel to Minnesota to play Freddy Smoot and the Vikings.

Prediction: Carolina 52, Minnesota 4.

Until next time.

RROWRRRRRR!

'06 Season Preview: Return to Greatness

As might have been expended, Ernesto, having expended considerable energy leaving Cuba and crossing the Atlantic, finally made it to American soil and promptly stopped working. It still managed to wet our weekend with heavy rains, and so I ended up staying in Saturday night and watching “Memoirs of A Geisha.” (We had rented it for Thursday night, but got swept up into Agassi-Bagdhatis, easily the most dramatic tennis match I’ve ever watched.)

“Memoirs” (or, as I like to refer to it, “Catty Bitches in Japan”) was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen bad low-budget movies, but the budget and starpower of this movie made it that much worse. Why was it so bad? Where to begin. First, all of the leads, with the exception of Ken Watanabe, were Chinese. Because the producers thought that would be slanty enough for an American audience. Think about how insulting this is. It would be like casting “Schindler’s List” with Puerto Ricans. Second, instead of shooting the dialogue for a movie about Japanese people in Japan in actual Japanese, the producers decide to shoot it in English. But not conversational English; in an effort to be “authentic,” they shot it in heavily accented English. Correction: they shot a bunch of Chinese people doing bad impersonations of Japanese people trying to speak English! Next, the dialogue is terrible. The geisha Sayuri (played by Zhang Zhiyi) is renowned for her wit and reportedly able to win over anyone with her elocution and charm. But all of her lines come from fortune cookies for retards. In one pivotal scene, she’s with a commercial tycoon (Nobu-san) at a sumo match, and asks him about sumo wrestling. Disdainful of geishas, Nobu-san says something like, “What do you care? All geishas are interested in is dancing.” Her clever and endearing comeback? “Nobu-san, isn’t-a bus-ah-ness nothing more than-a tew company dancing around each oder?” And he was blown away by her answer, as though it was the most insightful comment he’d ever heard! (Secretly, I was hoping he’d say something like, “Ah, no, bus-ah-ness is rike excer spreadsheets and determining-a weighted-a average cost ur capiterr.”)

The worst part is, the movie is about the decline of the art of the geisha in the face of modernism, yet it never makes a case for why geishas are important. All I learned from the movie is that geishas had self-created a niche market for themselves that added nothing of value to society. It was like watching a movie about the last of the bathroom attendants. In what I’m sure was intended to be an oscar clip for the movie, an older geisha explains to Sayuri that geishas don’t have the luxury of loving any one person. And I was yelling at the t.v., “What is so great about this career choice? Why not open a sake shop, so that you can earn a living and bang someone you like?” Towards the end, I was cheering for industrialization.

Onto the new season…

When we last saw our heroes, an exhausted-looking franchise was limping off the field in Seattle in defeat. “FINISHED!” sang the New York Post. “BOLLOXED!” trumpeted the Times of London. “LAISSEZ-FAIRE!” sniffed Le Monde. Were experts the world over right? Would this be the swan song for the most dominant team in NFL history?

Or could it possibly be just the first half of an ingenious strategy two-year strategy to win the Super Bowl? Crazy, you say? Crazy…like a fox?

Let’s look at how Coach Fox improved the Growling Wall during the intermission of his two-act masterpiece.

Wide Receiver

Keyshawn Johnson—with the addition of “Szechuan,” the Panthers have added a second passing threat to take the pressure off of the Nureyev of the Slant Route, WR Steve Smith, and avoid the bizarre 10-on-1 coverage that shut him down during last year’s NFC Championship.

Defensive Line

Poor people draw comfort from the thought that money can’t buy happiness. In truth, not only can money buy all sorts of happiness, but money also has the added benefit of taking that happiness away from someone else. In one of the biggest coups of the offseasons, the Panthers signed 6-5/350 DT Maake “The Buffet Killer” Kemoeatu away from the Ravens. Alongside a healthy 6-4/335 DT Kris Jenkins, teams will have an easier time getting a donut past Greg Gumble than running up the middle on the Panthers.

Quarterback

This past Saturday, the Panthers cut their number three and four QBs, Stefan LaFors and Brett Basanez. ??? Who the heck are these guys? Do you realize we’re one cheap Kimo von Oelhoffen hit away from a Chris Weinke start? It didn’t have to be like this. Jeff Garcia was available. Kerry Collins was available. You don’t think these guys would consider joining a team with a shot at the Super Bowl? Even Billy Volek is available.

(Actually, I’d love to sit in on that phone call.

Panthers: We really think you have the potential to be a starting quarterback.

Volek: Really?! Wow!

Panthers: We’d love to fly you down to Charlotte for a workout.

Volek: Oh wow, are you serious?

Panthers: This is Matt Schaub, right?

Volek: No, this is…this is Billy Volek.

Panthers (giggling): Oh, sorry. >click<)

Not everything worked out as planned.

And then there were the accusations of steroid use (despite the fact that no Panthers in 2003 or since have tested positive for steroids!). Concerned, I conducted my own exhaustive impartial investigation, and uncovered two startling facts. One, the source of these spurious rumors was the Falcons’ front office! And the offending substance? Nothing more than a bad case of grits That's right, good old-fashioned grits! Who knew?!

Well, I’m glad we can put that issue to bed. Onto the preseason…

The most beloved franchise in professional sports history, America’s Team, your CAROLINA PANTHERS were, in a word, immaculate. In a level of perfection never seen outside of the Book of Genesis, the Tar Heel Terror Squad went four and oh. From Keyshawn’s dazzling performance in Week 1 to rookie RB Deangelo Williams 98-yd kickoff return in Week 3 to K John Kasay’s flawless outing (5-of-5) in Week 4, the Panthers left little doubt, that, once again, the Road to the Super Bowl takes Exit 1D off of I-277.

The table has been set. The Cats are pacing their cages.

It’s time to unleash hell.

NEXT WEEK: The Panthers kick off the first week of the NFL season by hosting the Atlanta Felons.

Prediction: Carolina 68, Atlanta 7

(and remember, keep that reader mail coming)

Until next time.

RROWRRRRRRRR!