Category: Sports

  • ODDS and ENDS: World Cup Time, Coffee Shops, and Mother’s Day

    ODDS and ENDS: World Cup Time, Coffee Shops, and Mother’s Day

    (This rock had got to roll…)

    Man typing on laptop in a busy NYC coffee shop with pedestrians outside
    It’s uncanny how much this AI image looks just like me.

    Just about a month until my favorite world sporting event which is run by one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. I speak of FIFA, and I am not the first person to say this, but the funniest at it would be John Oliver back in 2014. I won’t beat that dead horse again, but I will say that outside of the ridiculous train tickets to get to MetLife Stadium, or the lack of hotel reservations, or how everyone thinks the tickets are too expensive, everything seems great for the tournament! I hate the fact that everything going into the World Cup is nothing but greed and bullshit, and at the same time, the whole thing starts in a month, and I am stuipdly excited about it! I download the FIFA app, and yesterday I started looking at the schedule to figure out which matches I will be watching. I have a good feeling for a month, I won’t get shit done. No writing, reviews, or parenting in fact. Nothing will be happening other than me parked in front of my tv watching football.

    I wrote in a coffee shop yesterday and it was pretty cool. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and I was a tad self conscious about it for a minute. But I needed to make a change in my writing habits as I had run into a wall and wasn’t getting the productivity at home like I used to. The main reason was that there are too many distractions at home, which is also one of the big reasons I never liked working from home. I will watch tv and nap before I will get any work done. But if I go to an office, or some place that I am paying to be at, then I have skin in the game and that makes me focus. Which is what I received yesterday in the local coffee place, that was out of my neighborhood, but still was a cool place to be.

    Call your mama.

  • Tottenham: I Got My Hopes Up

    (I know that today is May 4th, and I don’t celebrate.)

    With everything going on in my life, and there is a lot, nothing awful is happening, I’m just very busy. As such, I don’t have a ton of time to sit around and watch football. This weekend especially, as me and my family were jammed packed with events. I am saying all of this because, I didn’t have time to watch Tottenham play on Sunday. Sort of…

    With all of the running around I had to do on Sunday, I didn’t think I’d be home in time to watch the match, but as luck would have it, I got home which allowed me to watch the last fifteen minutes of the game. This means that I was first shocked to see Tottenham ahead by tow goals. Then I watched Aston Villa score a goal, and the affect was that I thought Spurs were about to lose, only to actually watch Tottenham win.

    They won a match.

    They aren’t in 18th place anymore.

    I have a little hope.

    I am also aware of how much of a huge mistake “hope” is.

    I decide the best course of action was to start watching Ted Lasso again.

  • ODDS and ENDS: C’mon Rangers, Time, and Keep it Together

    (I’m just waiting on a friend…)

    I grew up in Arlington, Texas and as such I spent a lot of time watching the Texas Rangers. The ownership of that team has always sucked. Sad to find out that the owners and management are continuing the tradition of being awful.

    I am bad with time. I was supposed to spend an hour on writing this little blog post, but I am now entering my second hour of work on this. Mind you, fifty-five minutes of that first hour was looking stuff up online. Things from Texas history (due to the article above) and general curisoty of stuff, like “what are the best lights to buy for an art display in your living room?” I knew I needed to get my writing done, so I could clean up and go run my errands… But I could stop farting around. I don’t think this qualifies as procraternation… just a general laziness and… well… farting around.

    There are many thing I do for my family, but the one I have found myself doing the most this week was being the calm guy in the room. Which isn’t my natural state, as I am loud, talk too much, and can be a rather obnocious drama queen/king from time to time. But being in a family means that sometimes you have to take on different roles to get things accomplished. I think in the olden days, this would have been called “being the strong one.” What it really means is that I can’t freakout until everyone else is doing freaking out. There’s nothing major going wrong; just getting the taxes done, and the kid dealing with school.

  • My Heart is Bigger than My Head

    Not that anyone asked, but here are the teams I follow:

    MLB: Chicago Cubs

    NFL: Dallas Cowboys

    NBA: Sort of the Dallas Mavericks and the New York Knicks

    NHL: Nope

    Premier League: Tottenham Hotspur FC

    It breaks down like this:

    My family is from the Chicago area, and my grandfather on my mother’s side was a huge Cubs fan; it’s in my DNA.

    I grew up outside of Dallas, and that should explain the Cowboys.

    Never was a huge basketball fan, but I had fun during the Durk/Nash years, and I live in NYC now and the Knick are the least offensive sports team to me, due to my being a Cubs and Cowboys fan.

    I was a huge Dallas Stars fan in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, BUT I never forgave the league or the players for the 2004-5 Lockout. Hockey is dead to me.

    The first Premier League match I watched was Tottenham, and threw my hat in with them. I made my choice and I can’t change it.

                The reason I bring all of this up is because, in my life, being a sports fan is not a logical thing. It more based on an emotional response than anything logical. I sort of have a low simmering distaste for people who move to a new city and stop following their old teams and latch on to the ones in their new city; where’s the loyality?

    I will never not be a Cubs or a Cowboys fan. No matter how bad they are, or dwelling in the middle as they seem to do of recent, I will still show up for those teams. Sure, it’s hard to be a Cubs and Cowboys fan in the land of Yankees, Mets, and Giants, (Luckily, Jets fans give me a pass) but I take their ridicle as a badge of honor.

    But I am sure having some issues with Tottenham right now. I had written the team off a couple of weeks ago, but then the tied Liverpool and played a good match against Madrid. I thought for sure they had turned a corner, and would beat Nottingham Forest on Sunday, or at the worst, force a draw. I never in a million years thought I would watch a whole team give up in the second half of a game.

    I picked my club, and come hell or high water, I’m with them.

    Lord in Heaven, though… they are sure as hell testing me. Seeing how far they can push me. Will I follow them into a relegation into the Championship? Will I join in on the protest against the owner group? Should I just put a paper bag on my head when I watch the final seven matches of the season? Cause it seems like that’s what the team is asking me to do.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Who Are These People?, I Have Hope Again, and NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

    ODDS and ENDS: Who Are These People?, I Have Hope Again, and NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament

    (Of course you’re not shy…)

    I don’t spend much time on Facebook anymore, ever since my nieces and nephews told me that only old people go on that site. As I am clearly not an old person, I have stayed away from Facebook. Except for the daily check in I do, because I need to check in and see what the other old people are up to. There is a section on Facebook I generally skip over and it’s the “People You May Know” part. Today, I decided to flip though it to see if I might know any of them. And I get what the algorithm is trying to do, which is connect people to me that my other “friends” know, so inherently, most of these people I won’t know. But, going through the list, I started to play the game of “Do I know this person, because they look familiar?” I would see a face, then ask myself, did I take a class with this person in college? Or, did I do a show with this person? Or, did I work with this person? Honestly, I can’t remember anymore, which made me feel old. Which is fitting as only old people go on Facebook.

    Stupid Tottenham Hotspur on Wednesday went on beat Atlético Madrid at Tottenham. Sure, they did lose the on aggregate and are out of the Champions League now, but they won a match at home. And the whole team looked like they gave a shit. Which now means that they went out and gave all of us supports the feeling that hope was alive. That on Sunday when they face off against Nottingham Forest, another team fighting not to be relegated, that we have a Spurs team to root for. A team that doesn’t want to be embarrassed. A team that is willing to dig deep and fight to the final whistle. And just when I had written the club off, now I have to go back to caring again.

    Oh, my bracket is shot to hell. Not awful, but I did make some really bad picks. My problem with making a bracket for the tournament is that I will always pick the underdog. Sometimes it works out really well, making it look like I knew something that everyone else didn’t. Like how I picked TCU, VCU, Texas A&M, Texas, and Saint Louis. Of the first 16 games, I had picked 7 upsets. Maybe not the most logical system for picking winners, but I can’t deny who I am. I like giant killers.