Ozzie Ausband

Guest Post- MRZ & BLKPRJKT - The Blunder Of It All

The Blunder Of It All— “Football People” get rather excited about Super Bowl Sunday. Even many “Non-Football People” seem to get lathered up about it as well. The so-called world championship of American football is nearly always the most watched American television event of each year, with an audience well in excess of 100 million viewers. How this is estimated is anyone’s guess, but in the new age of cable/satellite content distribution, it shouldn’t be too hard for Big Brother to accurately determine just how many people are tuned in, and link it to their personal information and add viewing habits to their data dossiers. Yes, we are indeed telling you that by watching the Super Bowl you are volunteering data about yourself to be sold at a later date. The more banal side of the “Big Game” is it’s similarity to other televised events that seem to rope people in even if they have no direct involvement or vested interest in the event itself. The Academy Awards. The CMA’s. The BET awards. The World Cup. The Little League World Series. The Final Four. The Indy 500. People get pretty riled over this nonsense. For my part, the hypocrisy runs deep. I am a died-in-the-wool San Francisco Giants fan. First game at 6 months old, and aside from one shining moment in 2010, decades of suffer camp are what I have to show for it. Mind you, there’s a good deal of civic pride attached to my insanity. I was born in SF at Kaiser hospital, a stone’s throw away from Wallenberg. As far as baseball is concerned, yeah I’ve got a dog in the fight. What’s more, you’ll never hear me referring to the Giants as “we” or “us”. So what’s difficult to understand is douchebag #47,932 screaming about a team in a football game to which he has absolutely no connection, just like the overwhelming majority of other people watching the broadcast. Maybe it’s the beer and the hot wings and the guacamole and the 3-bean salad. Maybe it’s just another excuse to get a buzz on and participate in socially-inept buffoonery. Maybe it’s all about seeing just how haggard and out of sync Madonna can be during the half-time crapstravaganza.

A Story Out Of Context— There was one Super Bowl that I did get truly excited about. The 1985 pigskin spectacular played at Stanford stadium in Palo Alto, Ca. Why? Simple. The sheer magnitude of the event drew nearly all available law-enforcement personnel from each of the surrounding counties to police the hundreds of thousands of football revelers. We skated 5 pools that day, and hit a couple of instant-bust street spots as well. At one pool, an angry neighbor yelled out that he was calling the police. We yelled back “Go ahead, they aren’t going to come”. And they didn’t. We couldn’t have cared less that down on the farm, the 49’ers of San Francisco were trouncing the tar out of the Dolphins of Miami. Other than that, the only pleasures provided by the game of American football that I can recall are based on pure comedy. Janet Ms. Jackson If You’re Nasty exposing a pert tit at halftime some years ago, and the laughs we had watching our high school’s team going through their training which seemed to be centered around a good deal of running in place and turning 90 degrees every so many seconds and yelling “Hut!”. All in preparation for later human dogpiles on whatever yard line, thrilling both female and male cheerleaders alike. Testosterone goulash. Steroid stew. The astounding adventures of Thickneck Brainless. Next.

Applying An Unreasonable Amount Of Stupid Football Cliche’s To Something Because It’s What Everyone Else Is Doing— The bowl at Lasekland could easily be dubbed “The Super Bowl”. It might not hold 90,000 rabid fans, but it certainly isn’t lacking in size or intensity. No irony involved in holding a Super Bowl party of a different sort. Bucky Lasek clearly had home field advantage and was the de facto captain of both squads. No need for a coin toss or a lottery pick.

The visiting team came in with weapons such as Omar Hassan and Div Adam. Christiano tried the futbol VS football approach. The home team was prepared for a skirmish on the scrimmage line. Zach Miller was tossing the Hail Marys all day long. Paul Wisniewski statistically racked up the rushing yards with his attack and Mike Owen made impossibly long-yardage runs all afternoon. Adam Taylor arrived with referee-striped hair to regulate the action.

The pool was flagged for 2 flagrant penalties, a vicious hit which broke the wrist of Owen Neider, and a hostile face-mask penalty against Div, late in the 4th quarter. Darren Navarrette scored with his typical speed strategy and lofty passes. Mimi Knoop and Elise Dabby held it down in the girls vs boys game.

Cookiehead broke tackles and used a several trick plays to fool the defense. Steve Revord worked from the shotgun formation and came up with big gains every time. Peter Hewitt ran through a broken field, far too fast to be caught by any of the opposing team’s players, putting in an MVP-worthy game. Not to be out-done, Bucky came through with the usual barrage, making off-season training look like a championship run. Joe Montana? Ben ROFLsberger? Payton Manning? Who? What? Super Bowl Sunday is for skateboarding. But then, so is every other day.

Thanks Ozzie for letting us hijack BTO for a day! -BLKPRJKT/MRZ

Bucky’s Superbowl Video: Bucky’s Superbowl Sunday