NFL Quiz: 1) Who holds the record for passes completed in a game with 45? 2) Who holds the record for seasons leading league in completion percentage? [Hint: think AFL] 3) Who entered this season with the highest completion percentage, career (min. 1,500 attempts)? [Hint: active] 4) Drew Brees is one of two QBs to have 10 games of 300 yards or more passing in a season. Who is the other? [Hint: Not a current, or future, Hall of Famer] Answers below.
So I held off posting until the last minute. Had to see if the Phils could take it to a Game 7. Alas, it wasn\’t to be and now Mets fans will suffer all winter long, and all spring, and all next summer…because the Mets have nothing to offer their fans and the Yankees will of course dominate the conversation.
But for the archives, I just have to include an incident that got a lot of play early in the week.
After the Yankees defeated Phils pitcher Cole Hamels in Game 3, Hamels, who’s had a miserable year and post-season said, “I can’t wait for it to end. It’s been mentally draining. At year end, you just can’t wait for a fresh start.”
Now understand Hamels has had a “me-first” attitude since coming up to the Big Leagues. But this was an absurd statement. Manager Charlie Manuel said, “I was surprised at that. But I don’t really understand exactly how he meant it.”
So following the Phils’ win in Game 5, teammate, and fellow pitcher, Brett Myers walked past Hamels’ locker and said, mocking, “What are you doing here? I thought you quit.”
According to Yahoo Sports, a witness said Hamels responded with an expletive. [I’m guessing stronger than “Damn you, Brett!”]
For his part, Hamels apologized for the tone of the statement and had a long conversation with Manuel, but especially in terms of both fans and in the clubhouse, Hamels is finished. This is the kind of Pat Burrell-type attitude that Father Charlie doesn’t stomach.
[And one other side note: At least my man Willie Wilson no longer holds the record for strikeouts in a Series. Ryan Howard now has it with his 13.]
SHARKS!
Even the Washington Post is highlighting Great Whites these days as Wednesday’s edition had a big story by Juliet Eilperin titled….
“For years, humans have thought of great white sharks wandering the sea at random, only occasionally venturing close to shore. We were wrong.
“Pacific white sharks spend months near the northern and central California coast between August and February foraging among elephant seals, sea lions and other prey, according to a new study published online Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. The team of 10 California-based researchers determined that these sharks probably pass close to populated beaches and have been spotted as far inland as the mouth of the San Francisco Bay, east of the Golden Gate Bridge….
“(But) the fact that ‘a major concentration’ of great whites can ignore the humans who might have crossed their path there ‘shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering,’ said Stanford University post-doctoral scholar Salvador J. Jorgensen, the paper’s lead writer.”
Well I have two thoughts on this last remark. These are “scout” great whites, checking our defenses, and, it still doesn’t account for the 3,000 going missing off the Oregon coast alone.
Actually, the work of the scientists is very cool. They’ve tagged 179 great whites that roam the Pacific and are tracking the movement by satellite. But the researchers don’t say anything about the Oregon great whites! Which is yet another reason why informed readers know the value of Bar Chat….Bar Chat: For the complete story.
*Meanwhile, from the Sydney Morning Herald… “The producer of a new killer shark movie filmed in Bowen and Hervey Bay denies the film will scare away tourists from the Great Barrier Reef, claiming it may actually boost traveler numbers.
“Tourism operators in north Queensland have expressed fears about the impact of The Reef on an already struggling industry.
“The $3.5 million Australian-made film tells the story of five young travelers who are sailing in tropical waters when their yacht sinks, stranding them in open water ocean to be harassed by a Great White shark.”
Oh baby. And just a guess, but I’m assuming the two or three girls in the flick are rather sexy.
Bear kills militants in Kashmir
“A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say.
“Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar.
“The militants were armed with AK-46s but were taken by surprise – police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.
“It is thought to be the first such incident since Muslim separatists took up arms against Indian rule in 1989. [Ed. I have written of leopard attacks here in the past.]
“The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear’s den…
“News of the attack emerged when their injured comrade went to a nearby village for treatment….
“Wildlife experts say the conflict in Kashmir has actually resulted in an increase in the population of bears and leopards.”
Forget how the disingenuous one lied to everyone about his steroid use (which is so conveniently being ignored the past few weeks), this guy’s comments on his teammates, his “brothers,” are so sickeningly sweet as not to be believed, especially when one knows that as soon as the game is over, the furthest thing from his mind is hanging out with one of them; scoring a hooker being first and foremost on his brain (even with Kate Hudson in the picture these days).
But in catching up with my reading upon my return from Oregon, I just have to note a piece by Amy Eisinger in the Daily News from last weekend.
“You’d expect Alex Rodriguez to have a bedroom filled with trophies – not bizarre portraits of himself.
“US Weekly reports the Yankee’s slugger has commissioned paintings of himself – as a centaur.
“But wait, it gets better – they’re hanging above the superstar athletes’ bed, according to the magazine.
“ ‘He was so vain. He had not one, but two painted portraits of himself as a centaur. You know, the half man, half horse figure,’ scoffs an ex-girlfriend to the magazine. ‘It was ridiculous.’”
“Like many other executives who have clung to positions of power for too long in the city of Washington, Redskins owner Daniel Snyder…is a man who has a fundamental misunderstanding of the great responsibility resting on his shoulders. In typical Washington spirit, he spent a decade throwing gazillions at perpetual failure and this year attacked a crisis of his own making (in his case, an NFL team that couldn’t score 17 points against a 145-pound-and-under Pop Warner club) with the same policies that got him there: big-ticket free agents, bad coaching hires and enough neurotic meddling to make George Steinbrenner look like the Dalai Lama.
“You have a responsibility to deliver as a football owner when you live in a city whose only other diversions are a basketball team that used to be called the Bullets and a once-good baseball team that used to be called the Montreal Expos (before someone decided to douse its players in suck juices, dress them up in bright-red uniforms that appeared to have been stolen off the backs of two-and-a-half-star-hotel bell captains, and bus them to Washington). The Redskins are the only real pro-sports franchise in the nation’s capital, and what did Dan Snyder do with it?
“Well, what has Dan Snyder ever done, except blaze a trail as the prototypical dips— sports owner who turns virtually unlimited resources (the Redskins are consistently listed as one of the most valuable franchises in sports) and perhaps the country’s most passionate fan base into losses to the historically awful Detroit Lions? And his performance this year has been a tour de force of executive douchery, solidifying his status as the very worst owner not just in football but in sports….
“But there is a lot to dislike about Snyder even before you get to his football ownership strategy. He made his fortune via a company called Snyder Communications Inc., whose main business was selling off lists of phone numbers and addresses to companies for direct-mail and telemarketing campaigns. This [expletive deleted…Mr. Taibbi has a lot of freedom at RS…rhymes with Fuddrucker] bought one of the most storied franchises in sports on the back of the junk mail clogging your box and the sales calls from haranguing call-center slaves pinging your telephone. He looks like a cross between Mitt Romney and a male nurse, with a spray-helmeted cube of black mannequin hair atop the pinched, entitled face of a guy bitching at a Howard Johnson’s waitress about his curly fries not being curly enough….
“The Rooneys in Pittsburgh are a great example of how to do it up right. Neither Art nor Dan even blinked when Bill Cowher put up a 6-10 season back in ’03. They hire coaches with the frequency of the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, avoid pricey free-agent hires, and every year put teams on the field that play in the snow, run on first and second down, and beat the living s— out of quarterbacks. They don’t market stars, they market pain and punishment, and when they don’t win, they don’t panic.
“That’s how smart owners do it, and then there’s Dan Snyder. At least Al Davis would be interesting to get stuck sitting next to on a long flight to Long Beach. And at least Al Davis is, well, old. As it often is in Washington, D.C., the wait for real change will be a long one.”
–And then you have the Cleveland Browns, with head coach Eric Mangenius. The other day the club fired GM George Kokinis, but initially Kokinis just walked out, whereupon the team issued a statement saying the GM “is no longer actively involved with the organization.”
You talk about a mess, the 1-7 Browns are playing Derek Anderson at quarterback only because if they gave Brady Quinn too many snaps, they’d owe him a stupendous $10.9 million in performance bonuses. For his part, these are Anderson’s last four games.
For the year, he has a 36.2 rating with 2 TD passes and 9 INTs. You just can’t make this stuff up. This is an NFL quarterback, sports fans. Or a mannequin masquerading as one.
Like that E*Trade commercial where the two babies discuss the “brutal” economy, things must have been awful for Kokinis to just give up even if it appeared he was being forced out. [That’s my interpretation.] Owner Randy Lerner said he wanted to hire a “strong, credible, serious” football adviser after the team’s 1-7 start. I mean Kokinis was hired just last January, two weeks after Mangenius became head coach!
–The 0-5 New Jersey Nets (I’m going to have fun with this bunch this season…in case you haven’t figured it out yet) tied a franchise-record low by scoring only 7 points in the third quarter of Monday’s game vs. the Bobcats on the way to a 79-68 loss. Incidentally, this game, played in Charlotte, drew a whopping 9,380 fans. Yikes. New Jersey will have some crowds this year below 5,000.
–I was going to cut CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz slack when it came to his divorce, but now the settlement has made all the papers. Nantz must pay ex-wife Lorrie $916,000 annually, plus she keeps their six-bedroom Westport home and a nearby condo, while Nantz keeps his home in Houston and a condo in Aspen. According to court documents, Nantz earns $3.2 million a year. Unfortunately, the couple has a 15-year-old daughter who has to deal with the nasty proceedings.
–Speaking of divorces, Bill Shaikin of the Los Angeles Times observed the following:
“The Dodgers are the talk of the World Series, and not because of Matt Kemp. The buzz is about all those titillating details in the his-and-hers McCourt divorce filings, about how Frank fired his wife and branded her with a scarlet letter, about how the annual expenses Jamie claims she needs to maintain the lifestyle of a baseball owner are greater than the combined salaries of Kemp, James Loney, Clayton Kershaw, Jonathan Broxton and Chad Billingsley….
“This is too bad for Dodgers fans, for the team that finished three victories from the World Series appears headed for a sadly inevitable retreat, for reasons that involve no salacious details.”
The initial court hearing takes place Thursday, with Jamie demanding she be reinstated as the Dodgers’ CEO. Frank McCourt insists the Dodgers belong solely to him. So as Shaikin writes:
“The fans are left to handle this issue: According to a document filed by Jamie McCourt as part of the divorce proceedings, she and her estranged husband took home between $7 million and $8 million a year ‘in salary and/or distributions.’
“That would have more than covered Cliff Lee’s salary this season.”
–Boy, if you are struggling to finish in the top 125 on the PGA Tour’s money list to retain your playing privileges for next year you suffered a big blow when last weekend’s tourney in Madison, Miss., was canceled due to torrential rains. Not being rescheduled, this leaves just one event left in the official season, Orlando, Nov. 12-15. So for the guys hovering around No. 125, especially those at Nos. 124-127, it’s sudden death…for starters, you have to make the cut. That’s pressure.
I’m intrigued by some of the others, who have no special exemptions left to fall back on (as far as I’m aware).
138. Chris DiMarco…$511,225 [for such a high profile golfer, hasn’t won since 2002]
139. Tommy Armour III…$503,306 [turned 50, but wants to play regular tour because of 2010 change in grooves…thinks he has an advantage]
141. Rocco Mediate…$484,757 [Rocco also hasn’t won since 2002]
What it means is that with the way the prize money will breakdown for the last tourney, DiMarco, Armour and Mediate need a top seven finish to have a shot at finishing in the top 125. Granted, all three, however, should be able to get a fair amount of sponsor’s exemptions for 2010 regardless of where they end up.
[You know, I went to Q School one year and had a blast, but I’m thinking the last tourney of the year could be equally entertaining for a sports purist. Might have to check it out next fall.]
–Wow, when I went to Q School one guy I followed a little (and who struck me as a good guy) was Doug Barron, who has not played a full year on the PGA Tour since 2006 but was just suspended for a year for using performance-enhancing drugs; a reminder that steroid abuse exists here just like any other professional sport. The Tour does not say what drug he used.
—Women’s Preseason Basketball Poll
3. Ohio State
10. Michigan State
–Appalachian State’s Armanti Edwards became the first D-I player to pass for 9,000 yards and run for 4,000 in a career.
–I omitted the result of the New York City Marathon last time. Frankly, out in Eugene, Oregon on Sunday, I didn’t pay it any heed after checking to see if it was on (it wasn’t). But the result was historic as Meb Keflezighi became the first American to win the race since Alberto Salazar in 1982, and in a great moment for the U.S., six of the top ten on the men’s side were Americans; a real shot in the arm for the sport of running in general and the best performance overall since 1979. Keflezighi is the fellow who as a child was forced to flee war-torn Eritrea in the mid-1980s with his family, eventually ending up in San Diego in 1987.
“U.S.A. gave me all the opportunities, education, sports, lifestyle,” he said. “When you dream, you dream. You don’t give up.”
Ethiopia’s Deratu Tulu, back after having two children, won the women’s title.
–Bob S. passed along this disturbing story from Japan, via the Daily Telegraph.
“The trawler, the Diasan Shinshomaru, capsized off Chiba as its three-man crew was trying to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura’s jellyfish.
“Each of the jellyfish can weigh up to 200 kg and waters around Japan have been inundated with the creatures this year….
“The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler, according to the Mainichi newspaper….
“One of the largest jellyfish in the world, the species can grow up to 2 meters in diameter. [Holy cow!] The last time Japan was invaded on a similar scale, in the summer of 2005, the jellyfish damaged nets, rendered fish inedible with their toxic stings and even caused injuries to fishermen.”
Last time I wrote of the world’s largest crabs with a 13-foot leg span being in Japanese waters, now this. So I’m staying away from the place for the time being. I also want to see how the new administration there handles these twin crises.
–Johnny Mac almost committed hari-kari on Wednesday when he heard ESPN’s Jay Crawford say that Pedro Martinez is “borderline” Hall of Fame. As Johnny correctly offers, you can make the case that in his prime, Pedro was the best ever, for crying out loud! And so for this statement, Jay Crawford goes into the December file for consideration for “Idiot of the Year.”
–The following is for MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY: [Children under 12 need to shut off the PC…or better yet, go outside and do some volunteer work.]
So I’ve been getting Men’s Health magazine and I never asked for it. But I’ve had a ton of my other magazines go under so I’m assuming it was substituted for the balance of my subscription on one of them.
“Ask the Girl Next Door…Carolyn Kylstra”
Is it smart to send my girlfriend of 3 months a raunchy text message? – Damon, Chicago, IL.
“If you’re already sexually involved, then absolutely. Just keep it simple, direct, and about her. I would respond well to ‘I can’t stop thinking about the last time we [fill in the blank],’ ‘Did I ever tell you how incredibly sexy you are?’ and ‘I can’t wait to [deleted] you again.’”
Wohhh….hold on there, Carolyn. If you both work at ESPN, I wouldn’t be texting, emailing, whatever, these days per management.
And from Men’s Health Sex Bulletin:
“Encourage your girlfriend to open up emotionally. Women who are attuned to their emotions reach [err, you know, err….] more frequently, according to U.K. researchers.”
That’s an easy one for me. Just start off the conversation, “So I understand you’re a Mets fan….” She’s bound to open up emotionally then, big time.
And, “When a man tries too hard to be funny, a woman may feel she’s letting him down if she doesn’t laugh. That’s no fun for her.”
That’s why on my dates I always stay focused on Iran. It’s not funny at all. Interestingly, however, there’s then no follow-up. I just can’t figure it out.
“I’m not saying you need to look like a Crest commercial, but I hope you floss.”
Jenni, 36, adds, “God forbid he doesn’t take care of himself – we rip on him.”
Victoria, 28, says that your gym time will pay off, too, guys. “I’m going to want to brag about how hot he is.”
Gabrielle Union: “Don’t be a know-it-all. Those are the worst, and they are talked about the worst.”
Gabrielle Union: “If it’s a choice between a man who gives flowers and a man who enjoys giving [deleted], most women would take the [deleted…not flowers…know what I’m sayin’?]. And it’s free. [Deleted deleted] is recession-proof.”
No comment. But what if I bring up Wake Forest football?
Well, that’s it for today, guys. Stay tuned for your editor’s next perusal of…. Men’s Health!
–Boy, I couldn’t disagree more with the following statement from Dan Aquilante of the New York Post.
“The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is just about the worst idea ever conceived – turning music’s most vibrant, muscular form into dusty museum fodder.”
What?! The Rock HOF is one of the great museums of any kind in the world, period. The problem is in who gets selected, as it is for most venues of this kind, but the concept itself is tremendous. The purpose of a museum is to both educate and leave a record for future generations. The Rock HOF accomplishes this in spades and I can’t wait to get back to Cleveland to see it again. [Gotta go soon because of some current exhibits on display.]
But at least Mr. Aquilante went on to say the HOF’s fundraising concerts last Thursday and Friday at Madison Square Garden were top notch, in fact “one of the best, most memorable concert events to ever play NYC.”
U2, Bruce, Mick, Sting, Fergie, Ray Davies, Buddy Guy, Lou Reed, Metalica, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby Stills and Nash, Aretha Franklin, Jeff Beck….
HBO is going to air a four-hour special on the event Sunday, Nov. 29.
Top 3 songs for the week 11/9/74: #1 “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” (Bachman-Turner Overdrive…one of the great car songs of all time) #2 “Jazzman” (Carole King) #3 “Whatever Gets You Thru The Night” (John Lennon with The Plastic Ono Nuclear Band)…and…#4 “Tin Man” (America) #5 “Back Home Again” (John Denver…only if you have enough fuel, John) #6 “My Melody Of Love” (Bobby Vinton) #7 “Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied)” (B.T. Express) #8 “The Bitch Is Back” (Elton John) #9 “Life Is A Rock (But The Radio Rolled Me)” (Reunion) #10 “Carefree Highway” (Gordon Lightfoot)
NFL Quiz Answers: 1) Drew Bledsoe had 45 completions in a game for New England vs. Minn., Nov. 1994, but it was in OT. Rich Gannon had 43 in regulation for Oakland vs. Pittsburgh, Sept. 2002. And who are the only two with 42? Jets QBs Richard Todd, 1980, and Vinny Testaverde, 1998. 2) Len Dawson led the league in completion percentage a record 8 seasons, 1962, 1964-69, 1975. 3) Chad Pennington entered this year with the highest career completion percentage, 65.97. No. 2 is Kurt Warner, who started the year at 65.42. [And to be anal about it, because I know some of you will be, up to date Pennington is at 66.1, Warner is at 65.4, and Peyton Manning is at 64.7 [an astounding 71.1 thus far in ‘09] 4) Rich Gannon, Oakland, 2002 is the only other aside from Drew Brees, New Orleans, 2008, to have 10 games in a season of 300 yards.
