Last Sunday morning, I drove my wife to Newark Airport. That’s what Henny Youngman called “a pleasure trip.”
On the way there and back, along the Jersey Turnpike, I was surrounded by monstrous billboards urging people to gamble, gamble, then gamble more.
For those eager to become instant multi-millionaires, there were come-ons to buy lottery tickets.
And there were billboards encouraging drives to casinos, where well-dressed young men and women appeared delighted to be rolling dice, spinning wheels, seated in front of slot machines or dealt blackjack hands. Happy, happy, happy!
(Drinks on the house. Credit available. Or try your luck at one of the ATMs in the lobby.)
Then there were the sports betting billboards, lots of them, though one specifically was attached to the NFL’s and the Giants’ logos. No better way to enjoy NFL games than to have big-bundle bets on them, though the Giants ended that day 0-2 versus the spread, and the Rams kicked a nationally and naturally curious last-play field goal to cover the spread in a loss to the 49ers.
The only other billboard that caught my attention was for a mental health clinic.
On the way home, I tuned in WFAN, once an all-sports station, to hear a tout named Nick Kostos screeching in double-time. Kostos spoke as if he knew in advance how 22 men acting at once, 11 against 11, would play, and how a ball with pointed ends would bounce. A generous man, he was willing to share that info with listeners.
At one point Kostos rat-a-tatted the name of a receiver he expected to exceed a certain number of yards in a prop bet, as that receiver was replacing one “suspended for gambling.”
Well, alrighty, then.
To paraphrase Stymie, the clear-sighted kid in “The Little Rascals”: I don’t know where we’re going, but we’re on our way!
The only clear indications as to where we’re headed all point behind us, as in backward.
While the question of physical safety persists — “Would you allow your son to play football?” — we can now add, “Would you bring your family to a football game?”
It seems weekend high school games — here, there and everywhere — now include shootings of teens by teens, plus the ubiquitous “stray bullet.”
The Tennessee-Florida game last Saturday included at least 48 arrests or ejections of spectators, many of whom no doubt fulfilled their plan to arrive early, then enter drunk and disorderly.
The game ended with an on-field brawl among the full scholarship student-athletes. Four suspensions followed.
Last Sunday, the Jets-Cowboys game included at least two bloody brawls among fans dressed in the colors of the opposing gangs, er, teams.
And 53-year-old Dale Mooney, attending the Dolphins-Patriots game Sunday night, was punched in the head and later died. He’s dead.
He went to an NFL game and, according to eyewitnesses, was cold-cocked. After all, he was wearing a Pats shirt and his alleged assailant was dressed in Dolphins garb.
A preliminary examination concluded Mooney did not suffer blunt-force trauma, but something very ugly, mortally ugly, had occurred on Roger Goodell’s watch. Yet Goodell allowed the NFL’s public relations staff to issue the “thoughts and prayers go out” statement.
And to think that the only mortal danger of the “NFL Experience” used to be getting run over by “a fan” driving home loaded. In 1999, a 2-year-old passenger was paralyzed for life when her mother’s car was hit by a driver who blew a .226 after leaving a Giants game. Her family reached a $26 million settlement nine years later with the in-stadium company that continued to over-serve the man, and smaller settlements with the Giants, the NFL and the drunk driver.
So now what? Now where? You think the NFL games played today will demonstrate better live audience comportment? Neither do I. We’re left to explain what it has become as, “It is what it is.”
As for Goodell, he has not issued a public response or even suggested a post-mortem remedy, because it’s bad news, and bad news is none of his business, even as his business loses its civility to mayhem-minded customers.
The media always grant him a free pass, anyway. Don’t just do something, Roger, stand there. Besides, there’s no immediate profit in curative action. The profit on beer starts after just a couple of pours.
Besides, Goodell and team owners sit in luxury boxes, far from the frays, vomit, drunks and fights, nowhere close to where Dale Mooney was a 30-year Pats tickets-holder.
As Englishman George Orwell in 1949 wrote in his novel, “1984” about placating a future population, “… [P]etty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled the horizon of their minds.”
The Lord sure does work in mysterious ways.
First Deion Sanders fled his Texas charter school, modestly named Prime Prep Academy — abandoning behind poor black kids, unpaid faculty and unpaid bills. Five years later he took a head-coaching job at Jackson State, claiming last year during a pandering interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that he personally received his instructions from God to rescue the predominantly black college from the football abyss.
And last week on “60 Minutes” — now “Coach Prime’s” annual patty-cake TV HQ — he said he bolted for Colorado after just two seasons at JSU, again on direct orders from God. Small wonder he’s an inveterate braggart.
So that leaves hundreds of kids and young men abandoned on Sanders’ supervised, agent-of-God watch — the Prime Prep Academy kids, the Jackson State team and the scores of Colorado players Sanders told to get lost so he could replace him with his selected players, or at least those God told him to sign.
And his starting-quarterback son, who left JSU with Sanders, now owns and drives a $185,000 Maybach.
Now imagine all these Sanders-dumped young men now twice watching “60 Minutes” to hear Coach Prime declare, in semi-intelligible English, that he’s just a humble servant of God.
Mark my words. All media playing Sanders’ transparent, nauseating game will, sooner more likely than later, wish they hadn’t.
TV folks just don’t get football. They can’t help but apply baseball standards to a game that’s not even a distant relative to football.
Monday night on ESPN’s “other” NFL telecast, Saints-Panthers, a full-screen graphic showed that newly arrived Saints QB Derek Carr has impressive passing totals, 35,222 career yards, behind only Matt Ryan, Peyton Manning and Dan Marino in his first nine seasons, Carr’s all with the Raiders. But, added ESPN’s Chris Fowler, he “could never get it done” — reach the Super Bowl — due to bad Raiders defenses.
But those bad defenses helped him throw for 35,222 yards! He was often forced to throw early, often trying to play catch-up. In Carr’s case it was a “because of,” not an “in spite of.”
A list of 300-yard passing games, often used as a yardstick to explain success, is loaded with QBs whose teams logically lost the games. In 1985, Phil Simms threw for 513 yards in a game the Giants lost, 35-30. ESPN could’ve looked it up.
