Look at how ashamed that poor guy looks. Oh well, I guess he needs the money. Probably to support his wife's coke habit. Look how she just lays there looking the other way. So sad.WELCOME BACK
One of my favorite things about the game against the Giants was Jason Hanson’s return to glory. The last couple of years have felt kinda like those last few years with an aged loved one, when they slip into senility and it’s awful because they are shitting their pants and never remember anything and all you can think about is how they used to be human and not some Skeletor with wasting disease and in between wanting to put a pillow over their face, they have bouts of lucidness and in these moments you remember how much you love them and how much you don’t want them to die and you curse the world for being a place where these things happen and then you wonder about the miracle of life and start to think about ghosts and life after death and God and the point of it all and then you sigh and begin to wonder about the miracle of run on sentences.
Anyway, that’s kinda how the last couple of years with Hanson have felt. He is lucid, for the most part, but then he comes duck walking out of the kitchen with an embarrassed look on his face and whispers to you that he shit his pants. All you can do is clean him up and hope that the next time he is able to hold it until he gets to the bathroom or at least remembers to wear his diaper.
It sucks watching your loved ones get old and feeble. It sucks watching them regress back to infancy, all gummy and uncomprehending, in need of diapers, their hair all soft and thin, and you just want to be able to step out of time for a moment and be with them again when they were young and strong and beautiful and perfect.
This is what it felt like in the game against the Giants, like Jason Hanson stepped out of time. Time had no meaning for him, no effect on him. It was just him, the young him, the beautiful him, the perfect him, the real him that will always live in his heart and his soul until the day he dies. He was there, again, and he showed us all the Jason Hanson we knew and loved, the Jason Hanson we want to remember, the Jason Hanson who has kicked more 50+ yard field goals than anyone in history.
And they were critical field goals too, ones that most dudes miss. The first one was a 50 yarder just before the half that he nailed. It looked kind of ugly, as it screwballed its way through the uprights, but through it went and we went into the half with some momentum. And then, late in the game, he hit another 50 yarder to draw us within one point. Both times, it felt like the Hanson of old, the cool, calm assassin with the mule leg and a heart full of thunder. It had a calming effect, like everything would be alright because Jason Hanson was back, he was alive and everyone who had missed his glory years could now see just how awesome it was to have a dude like him ready to go whenever he was needed.
It’s possible – hell, probable – that Hanson will be recaptured by time and he will continue to decay before our horrified eyes, but for one day, he told time to go fuck itself, and we loved him again because he was our Jason Hanson, he was young, he was beautiful and he was perfect.
WELL FUCK THAT SHIT
The Lions are a stupid team that makes too many dumb mistakes. That is true. Anyone who argues otherwise just isn’t paying attention. That will get better with time, with experience, and when it does, good things will happen. But it’s hard to actually move forward when it feels like every damn force in the universe is conspiring to keep you firmly entrenched in our own special realm of hell, which is kinda how it felt watching the game on Sunday.
The apex of this hellish feeling came on the Giants third touchdown drive of the game, when the Lions stopped the Giants over and over again only to pick up flag after flag as the refs jumped up their asses over every tiny thing. Okay, so Cliff Avril losing his shit like a rabid werewolf probably needed to be called, but so many of those penalties seemed like judgment calls, like the Lions were just being beat up on because they were the hapless Lions and hey, fuck them. That always feels like the attitude we get from refs. We don’t get the benefit of the calls because we haven’t earned that shit yet. At least not in their minds.
I don’t like bitching about the refs. Every fanbase does it, and it always sounds clichéd and defensive and based in nothing more than bitterness and hurt feelings. But Goddamn, you know? How many penalties can we take this season? I am willing to believe that a lot of these penalties are earned by virtue of own stupidity and the need to compensate for the fact that, well, some of our guys suck and really shouldn’t be playing. But sometimes you just need the ref to look at a play and say “It was close, but hey man, you’re cool.” Other teams get to hear that. (I’m looking at you Charles Woodson and the Packers.) We never do. Instead, if our guy is in tight coverage, well then hell, he must have been holding or interfering. It’s almost like the refs refuse to believe that our dudes could possibly make a play without fucking up and cheating. I mean, I guess I don’t really blame them. Fifty years of shitting your pants will lead other people to be wary of you whenever your stomach starts to gurgle. But, Jesus, after a while it just feels so disrespectful. You know we’ve been using the toilet lately like big boys so stop sniffing around and glancing at our pants so you can see if we’ve got diapers on. Let us shit in the toilet with dignity.
It is almost enough to make a man stare at the heavens and scream “Fuck that shit!” like our man Jim Schwartz did in the game against the Giants towards the end of the ill fated drive I mentioned earlier. It was glorious. The camera got right in his face and Jimmy just let that shit fly. I was so proud of him. Fuck that shit, indeed. Now that’s a sentiment and a coach and a man that I can get behind.
SHUT THE FUCK UP, OLD MAN
Last week, it was Chris Berman annoying the hell out of me. This week it was Dick Stockton and his idiot sidekick, Charles Davis. I mentioned in the comments of one of my earlier posts that I had something . . . special planned for Old Dick. This isn’t it. That will come sometime in the next week. Thanks to the bye week, it could come as early as Friday, but I might hold off until sometime next week too. I’m not sure. I want to let the idea ripen in my head before I launch my rockets.
But still, I wanted to mention here just how worthless those dudes were on Sunday. Jesus. The story that Dick Stockton was trying to tell was infuriating. It didn’t match what was going on in the game at all and it just perpetuated the same bullshit narrative that we have been trying so desperately to get out from underneath for years. It was a bunch of garbage about the Giants moving the ball at will against the hapless Lions and the Lions rolling over and dying because they were just a mess of a team and har, har, har, Same Old Lions, amirite folks?
No, fuck you, old man. You’re not right. The Lions played their asses off and they hung with the Giants every step of the way. Eli Manning ended up throwing for only 177 yards and that was with the Lions killing themselves with drive sustaining penalties, which gave him more opportunities to throw the ball. On a play by play basis, the Lions were not run off the field. Not even close. The Giants averaged 5.4 yards per play. The Lions averaged 5.1 with a third string quarterback playing for over half the game. The Lions actually outgained the Giants 366-334. Again, with a third string quarterback. Dick Stockton, you are a damn fool.
And Charles Davis wasn’t any better. First of all, the man sounds slow, like he’s really struggling to process the info in front of him. And half the time, he can’t even do that. I remember one play in particular, when the Lions came up short on third down and Tom Coughlin tried to challenge the spot so he could get an extra yard because the Lions were going to go for it, and try as he might, Charles couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on. Even old man Dick had to cover for him, explaining just what was happening while Charles pissed himself up in the booth. It was embarrassing.
And then there was the moment when Charles screeched, for no real reason in particular “Can anyone on the Lions get a first down other than Calvin Johnson?” At the time, Calvin had one catch and the Lions had already engineered a touchdown drive. It was awful, like the two of them had written some game notes on cocktail napkins before they went on the air and then just blindly read from them as the game went on, ignoring what was happening on the field in favor of their clichéd and stupid prewritten narrative.
It made me angry, because I can just about guarantee that there were a lot of dumb Lions fans who just bought the whole damn thing wholesale. This happens because people are idiots and believe whatever the little men in the magic box tell them. It happens with everything, from real, hard news, to politics to entertainment to sports. If the plastic man with the soulless eyes says so, then hell, it must be true. It’s ridiculous. If Dick Stockton and Charles Davis knocked on your door, you’d pistol whip them before they tried to sell you dictionaries or Amway or whatever the hell their fake asses had in the trunk of their car. You wouldn’t believe a word that came out of their idiot mouths. So why do people buy this shit just because they are on TV? Are we just that dumb? Are we such hideous starfuckers that even pathetic television announcers are treated as vessels of absolute truth? Jesus. Just wait until we get to a game covered by Joe Buck. I will go crazy. Well, crazier, anyway.
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