A baboon's ass or Chris Berman's face? You be the judge.WELL, THAT'S KINDA SWEET
So, hey, we have a kick returner again. It's been a long time since Eddie Drummond was told to get the fuck out of town by Matthew the Terrible, which effectively ended the Lions long and proud tradition of kick ass return men. From Mel Gray to Desmond Howard to Drummond, the dude returning kicks was always a weapon for us, even in the worst of times. I would have said in both the best of times and the worst of times, but, well, you know . . .
Indeed. And maybe we're not in any sort of place yet where we can start talking about the best of times, but we're not in the worst of times any more either and Stefan Logan's emergence is yet another sign of that. His 105 yard run to glory felt like a flashpoint, didn't it? Everything before that moment was gray and confused and tense as hell. Everything after it was sunshine and candy and blowjobs and happy, happy, happy.
Now, I'm not one for human interest stories. I tend to find them saccharin and treacly, superficial and dumb, the sort of thing that causes Mitch Albom to get a monstrous boner that can't be relieved until he's written 50,000 words about the time he changed an old man's diaper. But, I am but a simple human being (allegedly), and there are times when even my fucked up heart strings get pulled. I'm not sure why it happens sometimes, but it does.
Anyway, I read that Stefan Logan's parents had come up for the game - which apparently is an unusual occurrence - and that Stef's dad is suffering from kidney failure. After the game, Stef talked about how great it was to get to do that in front of his parents because he's not so sure that his pops will ever get a chance to see him do it again.
That shit moved me. Maybe it's because my own dad is coming off his own 12 round war with cancer, which tends to change your perspective on things. I don't know. But it was a nice story and it's just one more thing that should make you smile when you think about what happened on Sunday. *cue the violins*
HEY, CHRIS BERMAN? SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.
And now, we take those violins playing that sweet, sensitive music and we smash them into a million pieces.
Sunday night, I was flipping through the channels and I stopped on ESPN to watch some highlights of the day's action. Now, I'm gonna tell you something here: I hardly ever watch these things because I absolutely cannot stand the gibbering jackasses who vomit forth their idiot drivel when they narrate the action. I hate - hate - all pregame shows and studio shows and all that stupid shit. It is worthless and shitty and there are never any insights, just a parade of slackjawed buffoons beating each other up to make the lamest joke and the most hackneyed observation. It is just a hailstorm of cliches, stupid and utterly without thought or insight, just a bunch of old men hollering at each other, all of them saying the same basic thing over and over and over again, like they are just reading from a script entitled CONVENTIONAL WISDOM FOR DUMMIES. It's just so, so . . . banal, you know? Fuck, I'm getting irritated just thinking about that dumb shit and if I don't move on, I might end up ranting and raving for another 1,000 words. Okay, damn it, breathe.
Okay. Okay. Anyway, I actually stopped on that buffoon Chris Berman and Tom Jackson yammering on - which I haven't done in forever - because I wanted to see the highlights of the Lions win over the Rams. Again, this is something I haven't really wanted to do in a long, long time. One quick note before I move on - Berman never really changes, does he? He's always been that fat dude with thinning hair who looks like he could possibly be a drunk. He's looked that way my whole life (the span of which, incidentally, coincides perfectly with the lifespan of ESPN.) Therefore, when I was a little baby, Berman looked like a tired fat dude with thinning hair who looked like he might choke on a piece of steak or have a heart attack in a crowded bar after doing lines of coke while trying to impress some girl half his age. And he still looks like that. I mean, yeah, he looks a little older, but the dude's basic look is still exactly the same. Now, he looks like a dude who might choke on a piece of steak or have a heart attack in a crowded bar because he took one too many hits of Viagra.
And really, the more I think about it, the more I could say the same thing about Tom Jackson. A little older, yes, but pretty much exactly the same as he's always looked. Are they keeping these dudes in some sort of cryogenic freezer or something during the week? Maybe they have to stick Berman in there so he doesn't accidentally sexually harass half the ESPN workforce during the week. Just imagine him drunkenly pawing Michelle Beadle in the cafeteria or trapping Hannah Storm in the elevator with his boozy come-ons or taking off his pants in front of Robert Flores. The only person other than TJ and the rest of the cretins who cover the NFL for ESPN that they probably let Berman interact with is Linda Cohn, who just wearily trudges into his cage with a steak on the end of a long stick and hopes to God that Berman will be too drunk or slothful to do anything other than grab it with his teeth, gnaw on it for a while and then pass out in a pool of his own piss and vomit. Poor lady, she's been there for far too long. She probably feels like some sort of zookeeper who's seen so much weird and tawdry shit that she's just desensitized to it all now. She's seen monkeys fucking. She's seen a polar bear eat its dead baby. She's seen Chris Berman stumbling around naked from the waist down.
Okay, I kinda got carried away there. Anyway, I stopped to watch the highlights, and immediately I wanted to punch Berman in the face. Throughout the highlight, whenever the Lions did something, he would say "Lions?" in a way that was cartoonish as hell, like he couldn't possibly believe that he was saying it. "Lions?" he said over and over and over again, his voice rising ridiculously on the second syllable. It was irritating as all hell. All I wanted to do was watch the highlights of my team finally kicking somebody's ass. I wanted to celebrate it, to enjoy it, but instead I had the fact that they are the Lions and have been historically awful for so long rubbed in my face by that asshole. It really, really pissed me off in a way that almost surprised me. I just felt like screaming at Berman to shut the fuck up.
Look, we get it. We know how bad the Lions have been. We've been here this whole time. We've watched it. We've felt it. We don't need some carnival barker huckster cheap ass shill to scream it in our faces. You red faced buffoon. Your face looks like a baboon's red ass. I'm getting carried away here but I can't help it. Shit. I bet Tom Jackson must have to constantly restrain himself from punching that fool in the face. TJ must be a saint. He has to be.
Anyway, to sum up: Chris Berman? Shut. The. Fuck. Up.
WHAT . . . WHAT IS THIS? IS THIS HEAVEN?
As Lions fans, we have no idea how to handle it when our team does something good. We turn into retards, slobbering all over ourselves, gibbering like methed up monkeys to frightened friends who just stare at us all wide eyed and wonder if they should call the fine folks who run the county nut house. It's a mixture of utter joy and complete confusion. Our senses overload and we are incapable of dealing with how we feel. And so we hoot like idiots and say things that don't make any sense.
I love it when this happens. It makes me feel close to all my fellow Lions fans. They are the only other ones who understand my half-retarded feelings in the wake of something like what happened on Sunday. And I understand them.
I laughed like an idiot when I read the comments below my post following the game. UpHere was gibbering on about babies waving around toilet brushes like scepters in the middle of a store. CJ was trying to make up German words to describe how she felt. JP was threatening to jack off in his front yard and throw shit - and by shit, I mean literal shit - at passing cars. Just imagine if the Lions ever won the Super Bowl. You'd probably find me staggering naked down the highway at 3 in the morning, bombed out of my mind, and I wouldn't be alone. We'd be like an army of zombified idiots, all delirious with joy, unreasonable and incredibly annoying. It would be like dealing with a whole legion of Jimmy Buffett fans.
Anyway, I loved it. We should do this shit more often.
SWAGGER.
One thing that I noticed in the game against the Rams was the incredible amount of swagger the Lions seem to be playing with. I've seen glimpses of it all season, but holy shit, these guys looked like the descendants of those Miami Hurricanes teams of the mid-80's. I loved it.
The defensive backs in particular all have that cowboy attitude and they seem to be feeding off one another. I'm sure they make Joe Whiteman tug at his carefully starched collar and then beat his wife and kids in an impotent rage, but fuck that guy, you know? I don't wanna hear a bunch of shrieking banshees screaming "Oh God, think of the children!" I'm sure Joe Buck hates the disgraceful way in which our players behaved. I don't give a shit. Fuck all those people. I love it.
I want to see Corey Williams dance after every play. I want to see him and Ndamukong Suh choreographing intricate moves in order to express the fact that yes, they will kill you dead. I want to see Alphonso Smith doing The Carlton and I want all our defensive backs to have dreads and to carry themselves like they are Haitian gangsters. I want to see Nate Burleson make overly dramatic first down signs with his hands after he makes a big catch. I want to see him dance his way to the end zone and I want to see him punt the shit out of that son of a bitch ball after he scores. I want to see Jim Schwartz laugh with him afterward and I want to see the whole team get excited and loose and play like they are the cockiest fuckers on the planet. Because, you see, that shit is contagious as hell. And if you think you're King Kong, well, you know what? You pretty much are.
You could just see that swagger - that fun - build as the game went on. You could see the team feed off of it. You could see them become more and more confident, and you could see them change from a team that wanted to believe in itself to a team that did believe in itself.
People hate that shit and it always feels vaguely racist to me. It always feels like a bunch of sad old white men wagging their finger and saying "Alright now, you negroes behave." It's awful and it always leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It's like they want all of their athletes to either be Joe Midwestern Homecoming King, with his bland, soulless eyes and his Troy Aikman haircut and nice square jaw or they want him to be the quiet, dignified, respectful black man. Yessuh, I hand you the ball like a good boy. (Yes, I recognize that is possibly the most offensive thing I've ever written here, but damn it, I'm trying to prove a point. There is no room for subtlety here.)
Fuck that. I want the guys I cheer for to be alive. I want them to be full of fire and to, well, to have swagger. I grew up cheering for the Bad Boys Pistons. I loved Miami even though everybody else hated them. Those are my dudes.
Swagger. The Lions have it and I love them even more because of it.
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