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Bar Chat

01/19/2012

Good Ali...Bad Ali

NFL Quiz: It’s said running backs don’t have a long career, which is true. So, Morten Andersen is the all-time leader in games played, 382 (1982-2007), while among non-kickers (I’d include George Blanda, 340, more in the kicker category), Jerry Rice leads with 303, followed by Brett Favre, 302. The top three in games for running backs, including fullbacks, have totals of 239, 226 and 223 and all started their careers after 1980. Name ‘em. [It’s a little tricky, so I’ll give you No. 4 at 222 as well for any potential disagreements that involve domestic or premium.] Answer below.

NFL Bits

--Tidbit I forgot last time. It is pretty amazing that the last six Super Bowl champions have failed to win a playoff game in the following postseason, if they qualified in the first place.

XL…Steelers…no playoffs next season
XLI…Colts…lost 28-24 to Chargers
XLII…Giants…lost 23-11 to Eagles
XLIII…Steelers…no playoffs
XLIV…Saints…lost 41-36 to Seahawks
XLV…Packers…lost 37-20 to Giants

“A remarkable season by Aaron Rodgers – his 122.5 passer rating set an NFL record, and his 45 touchdown passes trailed only Drew Brees’ 46 – carried Green Bay to a 15-1 record and the overall No. 1 playoff seed. But the offense sputtered against the Giants, bogged down by four turnovers, four sacks, six dropped passes [Ed. some say eight] and other misfires as the Packers failed to win a single postseason game in defense of their championship.”

As the Packers cleaned out their lockers Monday morning, no one knew what to do. As receiver Donald Driver put it, “No one was prepared to leave this week.”

--The weather forecast for the Giants-49ers game is deteriorating in a big way. Rain, rain and more rain leading up to it and on game day, which will make for a sloppy field and the end of any hope Giants fans have of an aerial display like in Green Bay. Advantage Niners.

--On the betting front, Phil W. passed along the following from FoxSports.com.

“If there’s one city outside of San Francisco pulling for the 49ers in the NFC championship game against the New York Giants on Sunday, it’s Las Vegas…

“After a Week 13 loss to the Packers left the Giants at 6-6 and losers of four straight, oddsmakers shifted the Giants’ Super Bowl odds to 100-to-1. Giants fans pounced.

“Even two weeks later, after the Week 15 loss to the Redskins left them a game behind the Cowboys and only a game in front of the Eagles in the NFC East, the books had the Giants at 50-1 to win the Super Bowl. Their fans pounced again.

“ ‘The Giants right now are our biggest loser if they were to win the Super Bowl,’ Kevin Bradley, Bovada sportsbook manager told the New York Post last week.

“ ‘Before the first Cowboys-Giants game (in Week 14), we actually had a big customer put down a large bet on the Giants to win both the NFC crown and the Super Bowl,’ Chris Andrews, assistant director of Club Cal Neva Sports Books, said. ‘This customer took 60-1 for the Super Bowl and 30-1 for the conference.’”

Geez, I want sports betting in Atlantic City. At least Gov. Chris Christie took another step towards this goal in signing a bill approving such a move, though it could still be years away as a federal statute limiting sports betting has to be overturned first.

--Meanwhile, the Indianapolis Colts fired coach Jim Caldwell after the team’s disastrous 2-14 season. Caldwell was 28-24 since succeeding Tony Dungy. Indy, of course, had fired Bill Polian as vice chairman and his son Chris Polian as general manager a few weeks earlier. As for quarterback Peyton Manning, the dismissal of Caldwell, with whom he had worked since 2002, is yet another sign the team is not going to give Peyton his $28 million roster bonus in March, thus setting him free to become a Jet (mused the editor, entirely unrealistically).

--Denver team president John Elway and head coach John Fox made it clear that even after the Patriots debacle, Tim Tebow has earned the right to head to training camp as the No. 1 quarterback. Yours truly says Tebow emerges next season as a much more polished NFL signal caller.

--Time to jinx New England Patriots running back BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who, as Tom Perrotta of the Wall Street Journal points out, has never fumbled in his career after 562 runs, receptions and kickoff returns, the longest such streak to start an NFL career since the league began tracking fumbles in 1945.

--The television ratings for Giants-Packers last Sunday were the best for a second-round NFL playoff game in 15 years (1997 – Carolina beating Dallas).

College Basketball

AP Poll

1. Syracuse
2. Kentucky
3. Baylor
4. Duke
5. Missouri
6. Ohio State
7. Kansas
8. North Carolina
9. Michigan State
19. Georgetown
12. Murray State
16. San Diego State

The AP poll is released on Monday, but that night, Kansas defeated Baylor, 92-74, leaving just Syracuse and Murray State as the lone undefeated teams in the nation. No. 19 Michigan also beat Michigan State on Tuesday.

As for Murray State, they are actually No. 10 in the ESPN-USA TODAY coaches poll. I don’t care who they’re playing (and, yes, the Ohio Valley Conference blows), but running the table would still be a huge achievement. The pressure, though, must be unreal.

The big debate concerning the Racers is getting more and more heated. Where do you seed them if they go undefeated? I say they’d be a 3. Others say they’d only be worthy of a 6-seed.

Thoughts on Ali Turning 70

Long-time sports columnist Jerry Izenberg of the Star-Ledger here in New Jersey reminisced on Ali’s career.

“Is it really 48 years since that night in Miami when Sonny Liston went out on his stool and Cassius Clay (about to become Muhammad Ali) stood in the ring and pointed down at us and screamed:

“ ‘You…you…you…I fooled you all…I shocked the world.’

“Is it really 37 years since the surreal pre-dawn moments on the edge of the Zaire jungle when Little David went to the ropes and Goliath hammered him there round after round. And all through it, Little David wasn’t singing psalms. He was telling him what eventually was going to happen as sure as night follows day in the moment he willed it to be so.

“It came in the eighth round…a short, chopping right hand…a hook…another right…and George Foreman came tumbling down just the way Muhammad had told me he would back in training camp when he insisted ‘I’m gonna knock that sucker out.’

“ ‘Is it really 36 years since Ali and Frazier fought as no two heavyweights before them…fighting in the blazing heat of an arena in Manila without air conditioning and under the hellish television lights that gave the ring the feeling of a fiery furnace…a night when neither could surrender and neither really could have gone on much longer…a night that linked their names and their psyches forever.

“When I reach back in my memory to define Ali, my fondest memories are of the quiet times at his Deer Lake, Pa., training camp. I remember a day when we sat there in a fine drizzle and talked about how his view of America had changed.

“ ‘It’s not about color,’ he said. ‘I know black people who are devils and white people who are good and caring. And I know plenty of both who are the reverse.’

“I brought my kids up there one day, and Ali shook hands with my son, then swooped down to pick up my little daughter and held her high over his head as she giggled.

“ ‘Is that your daddy?...Don’t lie to me…Is that your daddy?...That’s not your daddy…That man is ugly and you are beautiful. They Gypsies musta brung you. Gimme a kiss.”

But then came the fight with Larry Holmes in Las Vegas. Izenberg said those closest to Ali had begun to detect the slur in his speech. “And we were afraid of this truth: On fight night, he would emerge not as the Ali of old but as an old Ali, a burned-out and weary shell of a fighter who was risking permanent injury.

“He had no chance. Holmes opened and held firm as a 3-1 favorite, but as the fight drew closer, a strange thing began to take shape. Holmes’ advantage in the betting line began to erode.

“The guys who ran sports books tell me they had never seen anything like it. This wasn’t the smart money. It was the heart money.  It was an avalanche of minimal bets so strong it actually swarmed over the ‘smart money.’ It came from the bellhops and desk clerks, the blackjack dealers and craps table stickmen, the bartenders and waitresses, the car parkers and chambermaids.

“By fight time, the odds were almost even. In the town that invented legal fight bets, the least-powerful economic group in Vegas had moved the odds. It never happened before. It hasn’t happened since.

“On fight night, the glitter crowd, the high rollers and the people who scraped together a week’s pay for the cheap seats came together to will Ali through one more big fight.

“And physically, Muhammad did look good. I had been in Ali’s room the night before the fight and he suddenly stripped off his shirt and said, ‘How do you like my chances now?’

“It was eerie. He looked like he did the night he won the title from Sonny Liston, 16 years before. But I knew his conditioning was only skin-deep: cosmetic deception at its health spa best. He was in beach shape, not fighting shape.”

Well, Ali was indeed a shell of his former self that night and Holmes scored a technical knockout in round ten. 

“In a men’s room, of all places, at Caesars Palace, I heard a tribute I will never forget. It came from an attendant who was handing me a towel.

“ ‘Why? Why? Because I owe him for a piece of my dignity. Because he’s Muhammad Ali, that’s why.’

“For a lot of Americans – black and white – who lived through perilous times, that said it all.”

“Bob Arum, chief executive of Top Rank Boxing and Ali’s lawyer and promoter for many of his fights, tells of the time they were in London, training for a fight, and Ali’s handlers got a call that a wealthy Pakistani dignitary had invited Ali to his home.

“ ‘It seemed like a command appearance, so Ali went and I went along,’ Arum says. ‘The closer we got to the place, the worse the neighborhood got – not a neighborhood of a rich person. We arrived at a row house, and when we went in, we had to take turns eating because the kitchen was so small.

“ ‘We knew we had been had. It turned out the man had a pretty young daughter he wanted to introduce to Ali.

“ ‘Most big athletes would have stomped out. Not Ali. He didn’t miss a beat. He sat right down with all of them, played the piano, did magic tricks and treated the family like they truly were royalty. We stayed for two or three hours.’”

George Foreman, despite his loss to Ali in the “Rumble in the Jungle,” “has deep affection for Ali and calls occasionally to check on his health. Foreman says that Ali can speak and be understood if you call in the morning, before fatigue sets in. On one recent call, Ali asked Foreman how many grandchildren he had. Foreman told him five.

“He is a man who has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, who traveled to Iraq to negotiate directly with Saddam Hussein for the release of American hostages, who was involved in calling for the eventual release of the three American hikers in Iran.

“He has lived a life of everything and anything. He has been liked and disliked and is now mostly beloved. He is an enigma and a treasure.

--Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby is still suffering from concussion-like symptoms, this after skating with the team for the first time since Dec. 5 the other day. “The motion stuff is still a little bit iffy,” said Crosby. This is depressing. The superstar is just 24.

As in the Eagles and Steelers aren’t still in the NFL playoffs, “But the Giants and Ravens are. Pennsylvanians would rather bite into a cactus than watch that.

“Not like (Pennsylvania) hasn’t had its share of tough days in the past. It went through Gettysburg. It went through a flood in Johnstown. It went through Rocky V.

“Start with baseball. The Pirates had a losing season, of course. Nineteen in a row, and counting. Meanwhile, the Phillies were supposed to have enough star pitching to suffocate the National League, but didn’t get past the first round of the playoffs….

“The Eagles came along with a locker room full of Pro Bowlers and the only question seemed to be where to hold the parade after the Super Bowl. Then they started out 4-8….

“Penn State. Jerry Sandusky. Joe Paterno. That by itself is enough of a dark cloud to last a state for a decade, and it’s not over yet.

“Counting all the interims, the University of Pittsburgh has had six head football coaches in 14 months, possibly setting an NCAA record.”

“It’s not much prettier in college basketball. That’s Pittsburgh at the bottom of the Big East with (a now 0-6 mark after losing to Syracuse on Monday)….

“Pitt is a program that has gone to 10 straight NCAA tournaments, and was ranked No. 11 preseason in the ESPN/USA TODAY coaches poll.”

Well, the 76ers have started out well and the Flyers are doing OK, but there’s a long ways to go with both of them.

--Skier Lindsey Vonn won her 47th race last Sunday, a super-G in Cortina, Italy. In terms of all-time World Cup titles, Vonn trails only Austria’s Annemarie Moser-Proell (62) and Switzerland’s Vreni Schneider (55).

--The Washington Post’s Norman Chad is convinced Phil Jackson will come back to coach the Clippers. Why?

“At the moment, the Clippers’ coach is Vinny Del Negro. Now, I have nothing against Vinny Del Negro, but – at the end of the day and, more important, at the end of any NBA game – he’s still Vinny Del Negro.

“Del Negro came to the Clippers last season after the Bulls fired him; the Bulls made the conference finals once freed of Del Negro.

“Del Negro reminds me of this unbelievable bargain you pick up on Tuesday morning, then you go home, and by Friday evening you realize why they were selling it at such a cheap price.

“Del Negro doesn’t make your team better; he just makes sure all the players get on the team bus.

“For those of you who never have seen Del Negro coach an NBA game, it’s sort of like watching a head-bobbing pigeon in the park searching the path for bread crumbs.

“I never want the Clippers to call a timeout, because I have no idea what Del Negro might tell them.”

--USA Basketball has selected the 20 players who will vie for spots on the Olympic team, with Blake Griffin and LaMarcus Aldridge added to the 18 holdovers from either the 2008 Olympics or 2010 world championship who have said they wish to be considered again.

Returning from the team that won gold in Beijing are Kobe Bryant, LeBron James (Booo! Booo!), Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and Deron Williams. Back from the reigning world champions are: Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose, Tyson Chandler, Erick Gordon, Rudy Gay, Kevin Love, Lamar Odom, Chauncey Billups, Russell Westbrook and Andre Iguodala.

Mike Krzyzewski is back to coach. 12 make it, plus a few alternates, so we can lop off Odom and Billups, for starters, and I’ve gotta believe Bosh, Gordon, Gay, Westbrook and Iguodala also don’t make it.

--Oh, the vagaries of baseball contracts. The Tigers’ Victor Martinez hit .330 last year with 103 RBI, but he just tore his ACL in an off-season workout and is most likely out for 2012. He’s in the second year of a four-year, $50 million contract. Not easy replacing that production in the lineup.

--Speaking of big contracts, Red Sox outfielder Carl Crawford had wrist surgery and will miss the beginning of the season. Crawford is entering the second year of a seven-year, $142 million deal that is already one of the worst contracts in baseball history, this after Crawford had career lows in batting average (.255) and stolen bases (18).

--Mets starting pitcher Mike Pelfrey went 7-13 last season with a 4.74 ERA. In other words, he sucked, yet he made $3.93 million last year. This coming season he will be paid $5.68 million after the team avoided arbitration.

If this makes zero sense to you, you’re not alone. I would have taken him to arbitration and submitted the major league minimum as my offer. No doubt the judge would have ruled, “Mr. Pelfrey, the team is right. You blow. This is what you deserve. Next…”

--On one hand, it’s not right to name a high school athlete as a “Jerk of the Year” candidate, but Gunner Kiel qualifies. The phenom quarterback had announced he was going to LSU, but on Tuesday suddenly enrolled as an early entrant at Notre Dame, citing the school’s proximity to his home in Columbus, Ind. The thing is, last August, Kiel said he was going to Indiana, but then backed out of that commitment in October, settling on LSU end of December. [Then again, Notre Dame alum Mark R. just said, “Hel-loo Gunner!” Fandom being a fickle thing.]

“New head football coaches at major-college programs will be paid an average of nearly 35% more next season than what their predecessors made in 2011, a USA TODAY survey finds.

“The increase means the average basic compensation of the schools making changes will go from a little more than $1.1 million this past season to a little more than $1.5 million next season. This rise will fuel what is likely to be another annual increase in the pay for all head football coaches in the NCAA’s Bowl Subdivision, even as instructional spending at many schools slows or declines amid economic struggles and shrinking state education budgets.

“ ‘This just shows…the difficulty of bringing (football) into the right proportion, the right balance with the academic mission,’ says Penn State emeritus professor John Nichols, who chairs the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics, a faculty group advocating for athletics reform.

“It also underscores what Nebraska Chancellor Harvey Perlman says is the public’s belief that the association’s recent pursuit of cuts in scholarships and other football spending simply would free up money for schools ‘to continue to raise coaches’ salaries and continue to do a number of other things.’”

A perfect example is Arizona State. Last year they paid Dennis Erickson $1.5 million. Then they hired Pitt’s Todd Graham (a real a-hole for the way he treated Pitt and its players in his sudden departure) and he will receive $2 million; a clean 33% increase.

--I watched virtually zero of last weekend’s Sony Open, won by Johnson Wagner, and didn’t realize until after there was quite a clash between Vijay Singh and Rory Sabbatini on Saturday. As reported by the New York Times’ Karen Crouse:

“Paired on Sunday with 20-year-old Seung-yul Noh of South Korea, Singh, 48, completed a round of two-under-68 at Waialae Country Club without incident. The same could not be said of his third-round pairing with Rory Sabbatini, which ended with Sabbatini weighing whether to file a formal complaint against Singh with the PGA Tour for verbal abuse against Sabbatini’s caddie, Mick Doran.

“According to volunteers who said they witnessed the incident, Singh, just after missing a 6-foot par putt on the first hole of his third round, swore at Doran for moving while he had lined it up. When Sabbatini spoke up in defense of Doran, Singh swore at him loudly enough for volunteer marshals near the gallery ropes to hear. Singh and Sabbatini continued to jaw at each other. A security volunteer, Alan Awana, said he had never seen anything like it in his more than two decades working on the tournament.”

Singh said after the round there was “just some misunderstanding…That’s it. We’re cool.”

Sabbatini said it wasn’t finished in his mind, but Rory wouldn’t say if he’d write Singh up, which wouldn’t be made public anyway.

--Just a little gruesome history for you. I saw the following in the January/February 2012 edition of The Atlantic, a story by Jeffrey Tayler on a remote archipelago in Russia where the Solovetsky Monastery is located on an island just outside the Arctic Circle.

The Solovetsky Monastery is one of the nation’s most important, but it’s also “a kind of Russian Golgotha, a temple-graveyard haunted by both the holy and the horrifying. Mass graves are scattered across the island. My guide summed up the experience of living here: ‘Wherever we go here, we feel we’re stepping on bones.”

Solovetsky, you see, was also the site of many of Stalin’s worst gulags, scattered on what are called the Solovki islands.

“Camp officials welcomed each group of arriving inmates by immediately shooting two prisoners dead, and pummeling the rest with shovels. Locked in unheated cells in the winter, the prisoners slept in piles of three or four deep for warmth. Guards doused some in water and made them huddle for hours in the cold. Of the 80,000 Soviets condemned to the Solovki between 1923 and 1939, some 40,000 died here.”

--Havre de Grace was named Horse of the Year, thus becoming the third consecutive female to win the honor at the 41st Eclipse Awards dinner on Monday night. Havre de Grace follows Rachel Alexandra (2009) and Zenyatta (2010). Havre de Grace, as a 4-year-old last year, won five of her seven races, including a victory over males in the Woodward Stakes at Saratoga.”

2-year-old Hansen won the Eclipse award for his age group. Your Kentucky Derby winner this spring? Probably not. The last winner of the award to then go on to win the Derby was Street Sense (Cal-vin Bo-rel up) five years ago.

“Swimmer killed by shark at one of ‘world’s deadliest’ beaches"

“A South African man has been killed by a shark while swimming in waist-deep water at Second Beach in the rural Eastern Cape, one of the world’s deadliest spots for attacks.

“Lungisani Msungubana, 25, from the Transkei region, was bathing among a crowd of swimmers on Sunday when the attack took place, said John Costello, local station commander for the National Sea Rescue Institute

“He sustained ‘multiple traumatic lacerations to his torso, arms and legs’ where the shark bit him repeatedly, Mr. Costello said.”

[Sounds like the shark had a great time, doesn’t it?]

“ ‘At the clinic, medical staff declared the man dead after all efforts to save him had been exhausted,’ said Mr. Costello.”

[“OK, who’s got the leg? You got it?” “Nope, but I have his arm.” Only Bar Chat takes you inside the clinic as it all went down.]

“The scenic beach in the forest-fringed town of Port St. Johns is among the world’s deadliest for shark attacks and has had six fatalities in six years – three in 2009 alone.

“In January last year, a teenage surfer was killed in an attack seen by onlookers.”

“Scientists believe that Zambezi sharks – also called bull or whaler sharks – have been behind most of the attacks at Second Beach. The sharks are known to be aggressive and capable of shallow water attacks.”

Watch out when your local community opens up the town pool next summer.

--Reminder…if you do not want the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue…you can call customer service at 1-866-228-1175 and it will be sent to a deserving senior center in your area.

--The late Elizabeth Taylor had quite an art collection, including one of the better Van Gogh’s I’ve seen. This landscape, “Vue de l’Asile et de la Chappelle de Saint-Remy,” is part of a collection of hers that is going on the block in London next month. The Van Gogh is expected to fetch between $7.6 million and $11 million.

But I also see Taylor had a Pissarro, Camille Baby being one of my personal faves. Any time I mention Pissarro, though, I feel obligated to remind the casual follower of the art world that Camille is no relation to former major league hurler Juan Pizzarro, 131-105 in a lengthy career, nor is Pissarro to be confused with another pitcher, Camilo Pascual, 174-170 lifetime. This is always a common mistake as people stare at Pissarro’s works in the world’s great museums.

Back to Liz, her father bought the Van Gogh painting in 1963 on his daughter’s behalf for $257,600. Not a bad return on investment.

--By the way, I did watch the Golden Globes on Sunday night. I never do, but following the Giants game I was wrapping up BC and it was on in the background as I made a feeble attempt to stay hip. I have no clue who is who these days, especially in television seeing as my viewing is limited to news, sports, PBS’ “Frontline” and “60 Minutes.”

Anyway, back to the Golden Globes, Madonna’s outfit was godawful (I felt sorry for her breasts, being pinched in that way), whereas Reese Witherspoon and Salma Hayek were outrageously beautiful and sexy, as usual.

--As part of a legal battle, the Star-Ledger forced the N.J. Sports and Exposition Authority to release details on its performance contracts. If you live in the area, this may be of mild interest, as in what the fees are.

The authority normally charged $80,000 plus expenses to rent the Izod Center, plus it received $3.50 per ticket as a facility charge. The artist typically took all the gate. The authority then retained all parking revenues, and usually concession revenue as well. So if you’re bored, doodle on a beer coaster…19,000 seats Xs $100 a ticket… “Yeah, I’ll have another…”

--We note the passing of Jimmy Castor, a multi-talented singer, instrumentalist and songwriter who spanned all genres. He was 71.

Growing up in Harlem, Castor often subbed for Frankie Lymon when Lymon couldn’t make a performance with his group, the Teenagers. Castor formed his own group, Jimmy and the Juniors and wrote a song, “I Promise to Remember,” that Frankie Lymon made a Top 10 R&B hit summer of 1956.

In 1966, Castor had one, “Hey Leroy, Your Mama’s Callin’ You,” with a calypso and Latin sound that reached the Billboard Top 40. In ’72, his Jimmy Castor Bunch band had a No. 6, “Troglodyte (Cave Man).”

--Finally, I saw Frankie Valli in concert on Tuesday. Wouldn’t you know but the superstar who is turning 75 this spring pulled it off. Valli had four guys backing him up, plus an 11-piece band, and he sang every hit you would have wanted to hear in a 90-minute performance. He was terrific. The place was sold out, the first of three straight sellouts in the Morristown, N.J. theater, and you never saw more smiles than at the end of the show. The Four Seasons’ music is timeless, as anyone who has seen “Jersey Boys” knows. I’m glad after all these years I finally saw the original…the one and only…Frankie Valli, an American treasure.

NFL Quiz: Games played RB/FB: Lorenzo Neal, 239 (1993-2008); Emmitt Smith, 226 (1990-2004); Brian Mitchell, 223 (1990-2003); Marcus Allen, 222 (1982-1997).

Now you might be thinking, hey, Brian Mitchell wasn’t really a running back, but that was his primary position and he carried the ball at least multiple times in every year of his career except 2002. But if you’re fighting with your cubemate over who buys the domestic, then you have to give each other Allen as a backup choice. As for Lorenzo Neal, six times in his career he carried less than 10 times, but this primo blocking back did have at least one carry in each of his sixteen years.

Top 3 songs for the week 1/15/66: #1 “We Can Work It Out” (The Beatles…decent group) #2 “The Sounds Of Silence” (Simon & Garfunkel) #3 “She’s Just My Style” (Gary Lewis and the Playboys…not just Jerry’s kid…Gary had talent)…and…#4 “Five O’Clock World” (The Vogues…heh…heh…heh…) #5 “Ebb Tide” (The Righteous Brothers…good make out song, but you need to time the ending well or, err…never mind…) #6 “Day Tripper” (The Beatles…there they are again) #7 “Flowers On The Wall” (The Statler Brothers…not too bad of this kind) #8 “The Men In My Little Girl’s Life” (Mike Douglas…poor man’s Merv Griffin…who was a poor man’s Johnny Carson) #9 “As Tears Go By” (The Rolling Stones…easily one of their five best) #10 “No Matter What Shape (Your Stomach’s In)” (The T-Bones)

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