Lying Lord Silverbottom

It’s been three months now since my Seahawks forfeited governance of their bowels on the one-yard-line of Super Bowl XLIX.

And I have to admit, not one of those ninety-five days has passed devoid of a mental reunion with that sorry-ass finish. It’s like raking your elbow knob against metal. It’s a pain that stabs with intensity, then slowly ebbs, but not before muted oaths are spat about to whomever created my mouth in His image. 

My heretofore healing Hawk hematoma was infused yesterday with a fresh helpin’ of sour blood. Tedd Wells, an independent attorney hired by the National Football League, issued a 243-page report concluding that “it is more probable than not” that New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady conspired with equipment personnel to under-inflate the Patriots’ game balls, thereby allowing Brady an easier grip and giving New England a competitive advantage.

Brady, when initially questioned in the days leading up to the Super Bowl, replied, “I didn’t alter the ball in any way. I have no knowledge of wrongdoing.”

Liar, liar, hair blow dryer. Yo, GQ, no one likes a lying patriot, because while you refused to cooperate with the investigation, the other parties to the caper rolled over like Kim Kardashian putting on a dress. 

According to Wells’ report, the following text exchange occurred between equipment handlers Jim McNally and John Jastremski, after Brady complained about the ball pressure following a game with the New York Jets:

McNally: Tom sucks… I’m going make that next ball a (expletive) balloon.

Jastremski: I have a big needle for u this week.

McNally: Better be surrounded by cash and new kicks… or it’s rugby Sunday. (Expletive) Tom.

From the looks of things, the entire report could have been condensed down to that three-line text trail. It’s apparent that Mr. McNally was counting on some quid pro quo from Brady in the form of money or shoes, lest he inflate the football to the size of its rotund cousin, the rugby ball.

It’s hard to blame the superstar quarterback for lying back in January. He had to, or else risk disqualification from the big game. But now, with last season a speck in the rearview mirror, we’ll see what the NFL does to punish Tommy Football for his “more probable than not” bullshit story. Perhaps nothing.

For those of you nice enough to have read all the way through to this point in my essay, I’ve got a little treat for your troubles. Don’t ask me how I got my hands on this; suffice it to say it involved combining the Patriot Act with a few loathsome yet invigorating favors. I’ve obtained a partial manuscript of a conversation between Tom Brady and his Brazilian supermodel wife, Gisele Bundchen, just after the allegations surfaced. 

Is it authentic? More probably than not. The following conversation allegedly took place during a helicopter ride between their three-car garage and five-car garage:

Gisele: Oh, Tom, I am so tired of all these ball jokes. Hmph. Americans. It is so hurtful to the person who actually has a relationship with your testicles… and that person is me, Tom.

Brady: Baby, Gronk sees mah balls all the time! Heh! No, really, ahm not ashamed of the old giggleberries. Ya’ll shouldn’t be either, Baby.

Gisele: I think you know what I mean, Tom. So it is now that I must ask you this. You are my husband and because of that we are married. I need you to be honest with me, Tom.

Brady: Of course, Baby.

Gisele: Are you sure, Tom?

Brady: Sure as shit, Baby.

Gisele: Good, my Tom, good. Because if a man cannot be truthful with his wife, their marriage is nothing more than a feeb.

Brady: Feeb? Oh, a fib! Yeah, Baby, yeah. You know ahm a straight shooter. Go ahead, ask me.

Gisele: Well, okay…here goes…

…My abs—do they look nice today?

Damn. Thought we were on to something.

Super Bowl XLIX: New England vs. That Team From Somewhere Out West.

Wait, what? 

Let me get this straight: You’re saying that, down two touchdowns with three minutes to go, the Seattle Seahawks still managed to defeat the storied Packers of Titletown by six points? 

You mean to tell me, after 57 minutes of offensive ineptitude, our boys in blue managed to dig their talons into their ruffled tail feathers and extract a big, jagged “W” from the depths of their musky undercarriages? 

Wow. 

Seriously, I haven’t seen a comeback like that since Bill Cosby erased a 27-accusation deficit to exonerate himself, using nothing but Fat Albert and a complex Illuminati flowchart.

So, yeah, for the second consecutive year, our Hawks are swooping into the sporting world’s brightest spotlight, facing the New England Patriots in Superbowl XLIX. 

Last year, I got a little emotional about the whole thing. A lifelong Seattlite, I wallowed in Seattle’s dismal record as a major league city, whining about the dearth of championships during my half century here at the continental USA’s eleven o’clock. And this time, if I really wanted to, I could double down on the pity. After all, when compared with Boston’s storied past, this image comes to mind:

Well, screw that, because you know what? Who gives a baggy Bill Belichcik boob about the past? So what if the city of Boston has hoisted the chalice 34 times compared to Seattle’s five (including a Stanley Cup won five years after the Titanic went down). 

What matters is this game, and like any other game, it’s all about matchups. So let’s use our heads this time people, because our hearts will inevitably hitch a ride anyway. 

Here’s my take on the most intriguing micro-clashes when the two teams take the field a week from Sunday:

Tom Brady vs. Russell Wilson:

This isn’t Brady’s first rodeo. Married to a supermodel, changing his haircut more frequently than Belichick changes his underwear, the Foxborro Fox is comfortable in the limelight. Russ has his share of endorsements, but he’ll have to spend a little less time at Children’s Hospital and a little more at the Playboy Mansion to catch up with Brady.

Advantage: New England.

Vince Wilfork vs. Michael Bennett:

While both of these interior defenders display freakish athletic prowess, I’m not sure Wilfork could ride a bike in full pads without the aid of ski poles and his new friend, Jenny Craig.

Advantage: Seattle.

LaGarrette Blount vs. Marshawn Lynch:

Interestingly, Blount began the season with the Pittsburgh Steelers. Unhappy over his playing time last November against Tennessee, he left the game early and was promptly released and signed a week later by the Patriots. Marshawn Lynch would rather invite ESPN to brunch than quit on his team.

Advantage: Seattle.

Bill Belichick vs. Pete Carroll:

I guess it depends on what you’re comparing. If we’re talking about who looks more like a smudgy hobbit and smells like a gamy casserole made of burned toast and chickpeas, well then—

Advantage: New England

Overall Team Branding:

Seattle’s isn’t complicated. They’re the Seahawks, a pissed off bird of prey who looks like he hasn’t eaten since this morning. The Patriot looks more like a guy who showed up at the Halloween party with the other white dude who lives on the Raider helmet. 

Plus, a patriot is more of a compliment than a mascot. They may as well be the New England Really Good Landscapers.

Advantage: Seattle.

Finally, here’s the thing. Most New Englanders don’t even know where Seattle is. If you ask, they’d say something like, “I have an aant in Paaatland. Isn’t that neeyah theyah?” 

At least we in the Northwest were able to point to Massachusetts on a map, even prior to the the ascension of its finest patriot—Mitt Romney.

Overall advantage: Seattle. Go Hawks.

When Bad Thoughts Lead to Bad Actions.

Hey, I just got back from the grocery store. 

Let me dig deep into the bag…ah, there they are. I got fifty percent off the family-size cans of worms, so I went ahead and grabbed three. Let’s see, here’s a tin of night crawlers in gun-control sauce, which I often serve when my dad comes over. Oh, and here’s the Safeway Select Obamacare Worm Medley, also a favorite with guests…like my dad.

And ah, yes, I managed to nab the last can of these babies. They seem to be popular lately. Let’s pry back the lid and take a whiff. Mmmm…Spicy Sriracha Spankworms.

By now, you’ve probably heard the story of Adrian Peterson, superstar running back for the Minnesota Vikings. Charged with felony child abuse for whipping his four-year-old son with a tree branch, Peterson has been suspended indefinitely by his team. Advertisers like Nike and Castrol have quit this guy faster than he got snatched up in this year's fantasy drafts. 

As serious as these accusations are, Peterson’s timing couldn’t have been worse. His story broke less than a week after video surfaced of the other running back on the All-Bully Team, Ray Rice, knocking his pregnant fiancé senseless in an elevator. So yeah, you'll have to excuse us for being a little touchy about the delivery of domestic violence by world class athletes.

Peterson contends that he is not an abuser, that he’s simply disciplining his child the same way he was taught growing up in Palestine, Texas, but that just seems to be another example of the abused becoming the abuser. I’m pretty sure we’d all agree that breaking the skin on the head of a four-year-old falls outside the definition of discipline, so let’s dial it down a couple of notches and talk about spanking.

Do you spank your kids? Did you get spanked back in the day? Every couple of months or so, someone on Facebook will post a meme that says something like, “Share this if you played outside in the dirt all day, your friends were white, and you got spanked right there in your Sears Toughskins…” or something like that. 

It’s an issue that’s so multi-layered—cultural, generational, even geographical. An ABC News poll found that among Southerners, 62 percent of parents spank their kids, compared to 41 percent for the rest of the United States. 

Pansy-ass Yanks.

As I noted in the aforementioned Facebook meme, most of my fellow Boomers got whacked as well. I usually never went more than a couple of days without a good swat. Being the little DB that I was, I exhibited at an early age an aptitude for finding psychological pressure points in my siblings and parents. I wouldn’t freaking let up on people. 

Usually, after firing ample verbal salvos over the bow, my mom or dad would stomp into the kitchen and yank open that second drawer down—the one with the longer utensils. I’d watch in fear and contempt as they rifled through spatulas and wooden spoons, their wide eyes searching for the perfect instrument of revenge on their little wise ass. 

Occasionally, my parents’ elevated adrenaline or my blocking paw might force an errant swing, which would then strike me below the buttocks and squarely on the upper leg. Remember those? They hurt so much that your mouth yawned a silent scream of anguish, saliva roping and snapping between your incisors. Only when your grey matter fully registered the pain signal, were you able to emit a scream like Roger Daltrey jamming his pinky toe into an amp.

Have I ever spanked my kids? Yep, a couple of times. But it didn’t feel right. It seemed like I was teaching my daughters that when anger gets out of control, violence is okay, so I stopped doing it. It’s a decision every parent is faced with, and let’s face it, there are times when it’s tempting as hell.

But when spanking becomes battery, is it any surprise to you that a couple of professional football players might be a little prone to this behavior? For god’s sake, anger is the straw that stirs the NFL’s Sunday morning Bloody Mary. The game is based on hammering your opponent into submission; these dudes play the game with bad thoughts.

Sad as it is, until these athletes find the tools to isolate and compartmentalize their violent impulses, no amount of punishment will stop the behavior.

Kluweless in Minnesota.

It's the story of a professional athlete, but not of his performance on the field of play.

It's about the power of spin, but also about allegations no amount of spinning can remedy.

For eight years, Chris Kluwe was punter for the Minnesota Vikings. Punter is the strangest position on a football team. He can't score points, he doesn't block people or tackle people. His job is to kick the ball high enough and far enough to give the human missiles on his team enough time to launch themselves into the punt returner's most vulnerable sweetbreads.

Kluwe was good; few punters play eight seasons, let alone with the same team. At the end of the 2012 campaign, he was statistically one of the best in the game, still had a year left on his contract and felt good about his chances of hanging with the team for another year.

Then things went a bit sideways. Here's how it started, courtesy of Chris Kluwe's guest column for Deadspin:

"During the summer of 2012, I was approached by a group called Minnesotans for Marriage Equality, which asked if I would be interested in helping defeat what was known as the Minnesota Gay Marriage Amendment. The proposed amendment would have defined marriage as "only a union of one man and one woman." (It was voted down, and same-sex marriage is now legal in Minnesota.) I said yes, but that I would have to clear it with the team first. 

"After talking to the Vikings legal department, I was given the go-ahead to speak on the issue as long as I made it clear I was acting as a private citizen, not as a spokesman for the Vikings, which I felt was fair and complied with. I did several radio advertisements and a dinner appearance for Minnesotans for Marriage Equality. No one from the Vikings' legal department told me I was doing anything wrong or that I had to stop."

According to Kluwe, at the beginning of the 2012 football season, he was summoned to head coach Leslie Frazier's woodshed and told to keep his pie hole shut, that religion and politics should play no role in professional sports.

Kluwe respectfully told Frazier that he intended to continue standing up for his beliefs, and the meeting ended tensely. However, the following day,

"Viking owner  Zygi Wilf, came up to me, shook my hand, and told me: 'Chris, I'm proud of what you've done. Please feel free to keep speaking out. I just came from my son's best friend's wedding to his partner in New York, and it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.'"

I think I'd feel pretty good at this point, wouldn't you? The guy who signs your paycheck tells you he's simpatico with what you're doing and you should keep it up.

Ummm...not so much. That's when another one of Kluwe's bosses, special teams coach Mike Priefer, decided to start acting like an actual Viking. You know, those guys whose idea of a fun Friday night is a few pints of grog over at the disembowling alley.

Sorry, Viking jokes are challenging.

Anyway, according to Kluwe, this Coach Preifer started harassing him about his views at practice, at one point even announcing during a team meeting, "We should round up all the gays, send them to an island, and then nuke it until it glows."

Sounds reasonable, but I wish he'd be more specific about the island. I live within nuclear fallout radius of quite a few and my straight friends and I would appreciate a little heads up from the Thomas Edison of that light bulb.

What do you think? Is Chris Kluwe telling the truth? Was he released from the Minnesota Vikings due to his political beliefs? The team claims it was a business decision, that an aging punter was released to make room under their salary cap.

That may be true, but what about the alleged behavior of his coaches? Do you believe that Kluwe could conceivably have fabricated these allegations as part of an endgame, a devious master plan to showcase his activism on its largest stage yet?

Look, we all know that the NFL packs more testosterone-infused sausage than the meat department of a freaking Super Wal-Mart. But these players are a bunch of kids, and most of them are quite a bit more accommodating to other points of view than we, the elder class. Something tells me they wouldn't have nearly the problem that these dinosaur coaches have.

Bigotry will never disappear, but we can shrink it, we can shrivel it up, one purple-hat-wearing moron at a time. If, according to a study by the New York Times, five percent of American males are gay, that translates to two or three players per professional football team, or a total of sixty to ninety closeted athletes living in fear of their employers.

Imagine that happening where you work.

I believe Chris Kluwe.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby.

Ouch.

For the past three weeks, these poor guys have been bloodied. They've been battered and bludgeoned. They've been abused more than a dog whose tag is etched, "Property of the Romney Family. If found, please hose off and return."

The National Football League Referees Association has been on strike for the first three weeks of the NFL season, holding out for the guaranteed pensions that team owners would like to eliminate in favor of a defined contribution, or 401k, plan.

While I won't delve to deeply into the muck of this labor dispute, it is curious that the lords of a nine billion dollar industry have chosen to embed their diamond spurs over $3.3 million. According to my calculations, that's approximately bullshit point four five seven percent of the league's annual revenue.

And because these millionaires and billionaires can't seem to defibrillate their own blackened hearts, a motley assortment of replacements have  crawled up through the cracks, wearing black hats and white knickers, to officiate America's premier spectator sport.

In the words of Homer Simpson, "Those refs sure did suck last night! They just plain sucked. I've seen refs suck before, but they were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked."

Or something like that.

As recently as Monday night, my Seattle Seahawks benefited from a grossly botched ruling on the game's last play to defeat the storied Green Bay Packers. Although the Packers were justified in their outrage, there's something unappealing about huge dudes who resemble superheroes whining like my kids when they're told to go back and wipe a little better.

Bad call aside, I enjoyed watching the disciples of St. Vincent de Lombardi suck on a sour grapcicle.

And what did we expect? Our lives are crammed with experiences involving impostors and charlatans, imitations and pretenders, especially when we're kids.

I remember entering my third grade classroom one morning and there stood a strange lady scrawling "Mrs. Priqué" on the blackboard? Once we were all seated, her fakey teacher voice boomed for the first time: "Good morning, class. Mrs. Henderson was feeling under the weather this morning, so I'll be filling in today. My last name is pronounced 'Prick-ay.' No other pronunciations are acceptable, ladies and gentlemen. If you happen to mispronounce my name, you'll be corrected and given a warning. If you do it again, you'll be sent to the office."

I was a fairly well-behaved kid, but as we know, all bets are off when the sub shows up. I considered it a great opportunity to channel Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, and since I'd been given one free pass, it was time to stir up a good laugh from my fellow nine-year-olds. I raised my hand.

"Yes...let's see...Tim, do you have a question?"

"Can I go to the bathroom, Mrs. Prick?"

The class erupted. Miss Prique wrote down my name on the board and probably still hates me.

Kids have to deal with other below-par choices, too. Since they don't have the means to select their own food, they're constantly bombarded with inferior substitutes for the good stuff:

"No, it's not an Oreo, it's a Hydrox. But they taste the same."

No they don't.

"No, it's not Heinz ketchup, it's Hunts 'Catsup'. But it tastes the same."

No it doesn't. And I know you added water to it, Grandma. For God's sake, this isn't the Depression anymore.

And why was it that a company called Dolly Madison made the exact same stuff that Hostess made, only much worse tasting? Plus, they only advertised during Charlie Brown specials. I took the bait once, but after barely choking down a Zinger, I returned on bended knee to my steady girlfriend, the Ding Dong.

So let's be patient with these guys, eh? Everyone knows they're not as good as the real thing, but what replacement is? We'll keep watching because that's just what we do.

Just ask Leno.