Underwhelming. No, more than that. Weird.

If this man were the president of my university, I would strongly advise against producing any future video messages. This message does not inspire confidence.

It might inspire me to write a poem about a deer trapped in the headlights of an oncoming freight train.

Or perhaps to write a short story about a man who suffers from an inability to blink his eyes naturally.

But it does not convince me that he is the man to lead Penn State out of this recent scandal and into the future.

The whole thing just looks strange.

Some people aren’t suited for video. Dr. Rodney A. Erickson would appear to be one of these people.

The inability to convey a message via video does not make him a bad leader.  It’s the decision to post the video after previewing it that makes me question his judgment.

Defying the odds, the most unlikely delivery ever, and burning Tebow in effigy

Highlights from the Patriots 45-10 victory over the Denver Broncos: My friend, Eddie, purchased a random ticket for the game while still in Norway and then flew into the US the day before the game. When he met us in the parking lot to begin our tailgate party, we learned that his seat was directly in front of ours.

In a stadium that seats over 60,000 people, he managed to purchase the one seat available in our section.

We hoped it was a sign of things to come.

Friends from California also arrived at the game, via train and taxicab, and texted me from the Patriots Pro Shop asking if we needed anything. My friend, Shep, had been taunting me about a hat he purchased weeks back, and so I took a photograph of the hat atop his head and asked the girls to buy it for me. They did, and then somehow we managed to find one another amidst the shanty-town of tents and Easy Ups that filled one of the many parking lots adjacent to the stadium.

It was the most unlikely delivery ever. A plane from California to Boston, a train to Mansfield, MA, a taxi to Foxboro, MA, a walk to the Pro Shop, and then a delivery to our tail gate.

And it was well worth it.  The hat rules.

Oddly enough, our friends from Norway saw our friends from California in the South Street train station in Boston but didn’t know each other, so both groups eventually found their way to our tail gate party, where they reunited.

It was one of those strange days.

There were thankfully few Denver Bronco fans at the game, but I did have a run-in with one after he became enraged over a fellow Patriots fan’s derisive comment about his team allegiance.

“Why would you say something like that to me, man?” he yelled. “C’mon! I’m a Florida Gators fan, so I like Tebow.Why do you have to hate on me like that? What’s your problem?”

Clearly this guy had never been to an NFL game before. If he expected that he was going to be able to dress like an orange and not be berated, he was kidding himself.

The two guys looked angry and ready to fight (which happens from time to time at game), so I jumped in and explained, “Look, man. This is Massachusetts and we are Patriots fans. We don’t even like each other.  There’s no way in hell that we are going to like you.”

This caused the people around us to laugh and the situation to diffuse.

A few minutes later a Christmas tree labeled a Tree-bow was burned in effigy amidst the tents and grills in the parking lot. Drunken Patriots fans danced around the burning tree, nearly catching themselves on fire in the process.

You never know what is going to happen in an NFL parking lot.

Cheesy, over-the-top, obnoxious nonsense

How does one possibly explain this?

Is it a Miami thing?   
Or a Miami Heat thing?
Or a Lebron James thing?

I spent some time this morning viewing several other NBA team’s introduction videos (many of them can be found on YouTube), and unlike the Heat’s video, every one that I watched featured highlights from the previous year.  Three-point buzzer beaters, thunderous two-hand jams, behind-the-back passes and the like.

Nothing like this. 

After last year’s media fiasco involving the introduction of LeBron James and Chris Bosh to the Miami Heat fans (below), how could the Miami Heat media relations people actually this intro video was a good idea?

Or maybe it was a good idea. 

Maybe this kind of thing plays well in Miami. 

Oy.

How a fan of Boston sports fell in love with the Yankees

Robert Krulwich writes about how we become fans of the teams that we love. Based upon the research, it tends to be a love instilled upon us primarily by our fathers.

This video demonstrates this fact beautifully, if not a little cruelly.

My father and my step-father were not sports fans. Neither ever spoke a word about sports to me, nor did either one ever play a single sport with me. I am an outlier when it comes to the research cited by Krulwich. My undying love for certain teams came through means other than my fathers.

In general, my love for sports teams tends to be geographic in nature.

The Patriots were the only football team on television each week (when they weren’t blacked out due to poor attendance), so my obsessive infatuation with the team (I’m a season ticket holder) was born from indoctrination based upon exclusivity.

The Patriots were all I had in terms of football, so I loved them with all my soul.

I also love an underdog, and in the 1970s and 1980s, the Patriots were consistent underdogs. Even when they were good, they lost.

My love for the Bruins was similar in nature. Channel 38 in Boston broadcasted grainy footage of most of the games throughout the 1980s, but in Boston, a love for the Bruins was also expected.

No, demanded.

If you were living in the Boston area, it was highly recommended that you root for the Patriots, the Red Sox and the Celtics, but when it came to the Bruins, you had no choice. Bruins fans are an angry, violent, often drunk bunch of young men. To profess your love for the Rangers or the Red Wings at the time would have risked a genuine beating.

I had no choice but to love the Bruins.

But Ray Bourque and Cam Neely were playing for the team at the time, so they weren’t too hard to love.

My love for the Celtics is credited to my mother. She was an insatiable Celtics fan. I would often fall asleep to the sounds of her swearing at the television when things weren’t going well. My mother lived and died with every basket of the season, and she cried like a baby when they won the championship in 1986.

You also can’t underestimate the enormity of the Celtics in the Boston area in the 1980s. The Celtics ruled the sports landscape at the time. I remember marching in a Memorial Day parade on the same day that the Celtics were playing in a playoff game against the Pistons. In order to keep us abreast of the score during the game, two students armed with transistor radios were charged with listening to the game and moving through the rows of musicians, relaying updated scores as often as possible.

There was nothing bigger in the Boston area in the 1980s than the Celtics. Falling in love with them was a no-brainer.

And then there is my love for New York Yankees, which is credited to my brother.

My brother loved the Boston Red Sox more than anything else in the world.

I did not like my brother.

Therefore, I liked the Yankees.

Conveniently, the Yankees games were broadcast on Channel 11 out of New York, which I was able to pick up on the UHF band on most nights. I grew up listening to the late Phil Rizzuto describe the heroics of players like Ron Guidry, Willie Randolph and the great Don Mattingly.

What admittedly started out as spite eventually transformed into pure, unadulterated love.

Has there ever been a better love story?

Young, thin and preferably blond

As a Patriots season ticket holder, I attend almost every home game, so I have become quite familiar with the way in which the game is produced inside Gillette Stadium. The selection of music, the firing of muskets, the introduction of players, the pregame entertainment, etc. It’s all very scripted and very predictable.

Throughout the game, during timeouts and other stoppages in play, the enormous television screens at either end of the field often feature images of fans in the stands.

If you’ve ever been to a live sporting event, you’ve probably seen it before.

The camera alights upon a group of four young men. They realize that they are onscreen.  It is clear that they are all slightly drunk. They all wave in the wrong direction.

The camera alights upon an enormous man whose beard makes him look as if he could’ve played for Led Zeppelin. He grins and offers the camera a lazy thumbs-up.

The camera alights upon a small boy in a Tom Brady jersey eating a hot dog.  He sees himself onscreen and begins jumping up and down, causing me to worry that a hunk of hot dog is about to become lodged in this throat.

These are typical images captured by the Gillette Stadium “Fan Cam” each week.

At last Sunday’s Patriots game, the camera operators returned several times to an attractive young blond wearing tight jeans and a shirt that exposed her midriff when he arms were in the air. Each time the camera alighted on her, she was already dancing, smiling and otherwise bouncing about.

She was the only person who appeared on the screen more than once that day, and she may be the only person to appear more than once on the screen in my three years of season ticket ownership.

I’m not dumb. I know why this young woman was featured so often onscreen. She was beautiful, enthusiastic, and dressed in considerably less clothing than most fans. And at more than half of the fans in the stadium are male.

But it left me wondering how this made the female fans feel.

For a man to be chosen to appear onscreen, he can weigh 300 pounds and have a beard that reaches down to his waist.

He can be wearing a saucepan on his head and a clown nose.

He can be covered in silver and blue makeup from head to toe.

A man’s size, weight, age, facial hair or style of dress seems to have no bearing on determining if he will be featured on the big screen.

But the women who appear on the screen tend to be young, thin and beautiful.

How does this make the rest of the women in the stadium feel?

I’d like to think that I can imagine how this must make the rest of the women in the stadium feel, but the only thing I know about women with any degree of certainty is that I should never pretend to understand women with any degree of certainty.

But as the father of a little girl, it does not make me happy.

I’m not exactly sure why, but it does.

You get 40 points just for breathing

Someone please explain to me how a quarterback can fail to complete a single pass or do anything productive for his team and still have a rating of 39.6. Shouldn’t his rating be zero. Or at least closer to it?

Perhaps there is something to be said about ESPN’s new QBR rating, which at least operates on a 100 point scale.

I’ve changed my mind. Cheese isn’t always good.

Leave it to a Packers fan to ruin cheese.

This is not about God. It’s about a man’s ability to throw an oblong sphere through the air. That’s it.

I’ve decided to add the “Bottom line: Tebow is a winner” refrain to my “I told you so” calendar. It’s set to fire off at the midpoint of next year’s NFL season.

Tebow’s situation is a strange one.

He is completing just 44% of his passes and has thrown 7 touchdowns in 8 games this season.

He has yet to throw for 200 yards in a game all season.

He is 4-2 as a starter, but he has beaten teams with a combined record of 16 wins and 21 losses.

In fact, none of the teams that he has beaten has a winning record.

Is Tebow a winner on the NFL level?

If winning a handful of games against subpar teams while performing exceedingly poorly by NFL passing standards is winning, then yes, Tebow is a winner.

I suspect that time will prove, however, that he is not.

In last night’s game against the Jets, Tebow had one well-timed scoring drive at the end of the game, helping to propel the Broncos to a win. But had Mark Sanchez not thrown an interception that resulted in a touchdown earlier in the game, Tebow would have never had the chance to win the game.

In 56 minutes, the Broncos had managed to score just 3 points, and those points had come on a 50 yard field goal.

I watched the game. The guy can’t throw the ball. Even on his final 95-yard drive to the winning score, he only completed 2 of 5 passes. Almost all the yardage came on the ground, and while Tebow ran for a good portion of that yardage, there are running backs who could do the same.

You’d hope your quarterback could pass the ball a little.

With all that said, I have nothing against Tim Tebow. As long as he is not playing the Patriots, I have no problem rooting for him, as I was last night.

last night, I loved the guy.

But at this point in his career, all empirical evidence indicates that the guy is a below-average quarterback who is not effective at passing the ball.

But that’s not the strange part of the Tim Tebow situation.

This is:

Tebow is a very religious man. He can be seen praying on the sidelines during the game and thanking God after scoring drives. He is vocal about his spirituality and has been embraced by the Christian community.

As a result, there has been a almost unprecedented backlash against anyone who claims that Tim Tebow is a subpar quarterback. Even sportscasters and former NFL players have been treading carefully when discussing Tim Tebow in the media in fear of the reaction they may receive after criticizing this man’s play on the field.

Some of the greatest players in the game are criticized on a weekly basis for subpar play. During their recent two game losing streak, three-time Super Bowl champion and future Hall of Famer Tom Brady was criticized for his erratic play. He had thrown an excessive number of interceptions and failed to get the ball downfield on a consistent basis.

He’s one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history, and yet he was criticized by many in the media.

Yet there was no backlash. There were no Twitter bombs or angry calls into sports radio shows claiming that broadcasters “wanted Brady to fail”.  Facebook was not alight with defenders claiming that anyone who did not believe in the man’s skills was a hater.

Yet Tebow has engendered responses like this repeatedly.

Criticize Tim Tebow’s quarterback play and you you had better duck.

There’s nothing wrong with liking Tim Tebow. There’s nothing wrong with believing that he will have a long and prosperous NFL career.

But there is also nothing wrong with someone looking at the data and determining that Tebow is probably a subpar quarterback who is beating subpar teams and has little future in the NFl.

It has nothing to do with faith or religion or mean-spiritedness.

It’s just football.

Could we please keep God out of it?

We’ll see what happens when my “I told you so” calendar fires off next year, reminding me to tell those Tim Tebow supporters that their popular “Bottom line: Tim Tebow is a winner” refrain proved less than accurate, at least on the NFL level.

Perhaps I will be eating my words. But I suspect not.

Football is beautiful.

My daughter came into the living room after her nap and looked at the television.

A football game was on.

She walked up to the television, her noses inches from the screen, then spread her arms out wide, palms up and said, “Beautiful!”

One of her finest moments thus far. 

Perhaps the finest moment.

Don’t swing hard!

Any golfer will tell you that the harder you swing the club, the worse the result. Not always, but often enough.

And yet we continue to swing hard, because it just seems to make sense.  We want the ball to go farther, so we try to hit it harder.

It seems to work out just often enough to keep us trying.

Then I watched this TED Talk, which has nothing to do with golf, and yet it explains perfectly why golfers should not swing hard.

Today I took this advice and shot a 46.

My best round ever.

A coincidence?

Probably. And it’s November.  I’m sure I’ll forget this lesson by spring.

Julie Andrews trumps the Patriots

I missed my first Patriots home game in three years yesterday while attending the final performance of our rock opera, The Clowns. Don’t get me wrong. I couldn't have been more thrilled to see my work performed onstage, but missing the game was tough on me.

The fact that the Patriots lost their first regular season home game in almost three years made my absence infinitesimally more palatable.

But my friend and fellow Patriots season ticket owner, Shep, made no attempt to make me feel better about missing the game.

In fact, he actively tried to make me feel rotten about it.

Only after he was in the stadium did he divulge that his girlfriend, who was sitting in my seat, was a fan of the Giants, the Patriots’ opponent.

Had I known this earlier, I would never have given her my ticket, which I suspect Shep probably knew.

He also sent me texts and photos from the pre-game tailgate party, including this exchange of texts and photos which illustrates how my day went rather well:

Shep:  Norwegians (friends of ours), ribs and cornbread in the parking lot.

Me: Men talking about Julie Andrews. Literally.

First carrousel ride

The first time my daughter saw a carrousel, she cried.

The second time she saw a carrousel, she cried again. 

I thought it would be years before she ever boarded one. 

But while she and Elysha were in New York last weekend, she rode her first carrousel in Bryant Park, and she didn’t cry the entire time.

She didn’t sit on any horses, but she did go round-and-round while sitting on one of those benches.

Elysha took her for her first and second rides (sans tears) and her aunt took her for the third, more tear-filled, ride. 

I was in Foxboro, Massachusetts, at the time, watching the Patriots defeat the Jets, which is one of my favorite things in the world to do.

Watching any Patriots game is always spectacular, but to watch my team crush the Jets produces near euphoria. 

But I must admit that watching my little girl take her first carrousel ride would have been just as good. 

Maybe.  

     

A near-perfect assemblage of words to describe the fabulousness of roller derby

When I was a kid, I watched roller derby matches on television. In the Boston market, the television stations would air this sport at odd times opposite things like candle pin bowling and Saturday’s Creature Double Feature. I haven’t seen a roller derby match since those childhood days, but I have a friend who actually plays the sport in North Carolina, and I am secretly hoping that my next book tour will take me there so I can see a match.

In his Idyll Banter column, Chris Bojalian explains the beauty of roller derby perfectly:

There are any number of reasons to explain the crowd at the Champlain Valley Exposition, but my sense is that any sport that combines interesting, athletic women in fishnets and ripped stockings with speed and the possibility of violent collisions is going to have appeal. There is also a soft, gauzy halo of nostalgia (didn't our grandparents watch roller derby?) combined with the hard edge of good-natured and completely filthy sexual parody. Half the skaters have derby names and numbers that are brilliant and, alas, unprintable. Here, however, are a few that are: "Ivana Thump," "Terminate Her," "Miss Dairy Air," "The Atomic Muffin" and "Track Infection."

Most embarrassing golf shot ever

I was standing at the 18th tee on Sunday, moments away from one of the worst golf shots in human history.

Throughout the morning, I had been experimenting with moving the ball forward in my stance during my tee shot, and the change had improved the trajectory and consistency of my drives considerably.

For my last tee shot, I decided to move the ball up even further. I had no chance for a decent score, so a bad tee shot was not going to ruin my day.

I was wrong.

I had placed the ball so far forward in my stance that as I swung, I had to reach out and bend in order to hit it, causing the ball to fly straight up and curving right in the direction of the the first green, about 30 yards to my right. Four guys were on the green, lining up their putts, unaware that the moron on the adjacent tee box had somehow found a way to hit a ball at a 90 degree angle in their direction.

I saw the ball almost immediately and nearly yelled “Fore!” before determining that its trajectory would thankfully land the ball well short of the green and at a safe distance from the foursome who were preparing to putt. They might see or hear the ball land nearby, but none were in danger of being hit by it. I sighed the sigh of someone who has avoided embarrassment and humiliation of the worst kind.

Then the ball landed, striking the asphalt cart path and launching 30 feet back into the air in the direction of the green again. Before I could warn the guys on the green, my ball landed in the middle of the foursome, barely missing two of them as they prepared to putt.

I am rarely embarrassed on the golf course. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was embarrassed. Since I am a below-average golfer, I feel very little pressure while playing, and even the worst of shots don’t rattle me.  The best players in the world hit horrendous shots. I just hit more of them.

But hitting your tee shot onto an adjacent green while a foursome is putting is pretty bad (and probably impossible to ever repeat), and failing to warn the players that the ball was coming makes it even worse. I’ve been playing golf for four years and have never seen anyone come close to hitting a tee shot onto an adjacent green.

To their credit, the foursome did not give me a hard time. They smiled as I approached the green, and the one closest to me grinned and said, “So I guess you’re putting for eagle.  Huh?”

I’m not sure if I would’ve been so kind.

I’d also like to add that I hit a clean 7-iron off the green with my bag still strapped to my back (a shot I’d never been required to make before), so at least I experienced a smidgen of success in my midst of my abject failure.

A bouquet of amusing words

My daughter is two-years old, and as a result, she has a lot of amusing things to say.  A few gems from the past couple days include:_______________________________________

Me: Why didn’t you take a nap this afternoon, Clara?

Clara: A lion is coming. I have to tell someone.

_______________________________________

A conversation that Clara had with herself while looking in a mirror at the mall:

"I'm wearing my doggy shirt. We're both wearing doggy shirts."

"I have my hat tat (her word for hair elastics). We both have hat tats."

And the best one:

"I'm Clara. I'm Clara, too."

 

_______________________________________

While negotiating a split between football and Peep and the Big Wide World on Sunday afternoon:

Me: Okay Clara, it’s my turn to watch football now.

Clara: NO! Peep doesn’t want to watch football! Peep wants to watch me! I’m running away!

The way the Patriots played on Sunday, I would have been better off watching Peep.

I loved kickboxing. Kickboxing did not love me.

In 2002 I took kickboxing lessons for about six months. I was excited about the lessons. I thought the sport was going to be a lot of fun.

I like to punch things.

But the class was all-female with the exception of me, so the instructors structured the class such that it was 80% kicking and 20% punching.

The ladies, it was explained to me, were more interested in working on their legs and butts than their shoulders and biceps.

But I stuck with the class anyway, learning to take pleasure in kicking the hell out of things almost as much as punching, until the day that we were allowed to finally spar with an opponent.

Since the class was all-female, I was forced to spar against a male instructor.  After donning head gear and gloves, we met in the middle of the room.

About ten seconds later, the instructor was removing his head gear, informing me that he would no longer be sparring against me.

“You don’t understand the definition of sparring,” he said. “You’re not supposed to try to kill me.”

I had landed a couple jabs and an uppercut before he knew what had hit him.

In fairness, I don’t think he ever expected the vicious assault that I launched upon him. He had his gloves up, but had lifted them a second before my first jab.

That was my last kickboxing class.

Cracked ribs, cracked shmibs

Much has been made about Tony Romo’s return to the football game on Sunday and leading his team to victory with broken ribs.

Words like courage and heroic have been bandied about quite a bit when describing Romo’s performance. 

The last time I played flag football with my buddies, I suffered a concussion and my friend, Shep, broke two ribs. 

The only difference is we kept playing despite the pain, and no one called us heroes. 

Shep didn’t even realize that his ribs were broken until a few days later. 

Just sayin’.

Football in every direction

While sitting in the seats of Gillette Stadium yesterday, watching the Patriots defeat the Chargers, I had the following options viewing available to me:

1. Watch the game on the field

2.  Watch the game on either of the two enormous monitors located in each end zone

3.  Watch the actual telecast of the game from an enormous monitor positioned outside the stadium but well within view from my upper deck seats

4.  Watch any current NFL game, including the Patriots-Chargers game, on my phone via the NFL.com’s mobile app

5.  Watch the game being televised on the side of the blimp hovering just above the stadium

It really has become a world consumed by screens and choice..  

No buyer’s remorse here.

“Wait!” my wife said as she was heading upstairs to take a shower. She turned around, went into the living room and switched on the television. 

“What?” I asked. 

“I saw a commercial for the new Hard Knocks (HBO’s behind-the-scenes look at a NFL training camp).  I want to make sure we record it.”

Reaffirmation that I chose the right girl.

The best girl.

“Mother may I, Mr. Brady?”

From Mike Reiss’s piece on the Patriots preseason victory last night:

"The thing that New England does just as well as anybody is their tempo. When you have a quarterback like [Brady], he's able to come out and control the tempo the way he was; he never lets you settle down and never lets you get going," Buccaneers coach Raheem Morris said. "They knew exactly what they wanted to do in every situation, and he was in complete control."

The pace was so fast that Bucs defensive tackle Gerald McCoy looked across the line of scrimmage and said, "Um, Mr. Brady, can we line up?"

Seriously.

Has there ever been a better exchange of words across the line of scrimmage?

Especially if you are a Patriots fan?