Welcome to another jam packed edition of the Questions. This week I'm joined by Stuart Gilchrist, who writes about recruiting for this site, Secaur from Blackburn Review and Hot hot from Card Chronicle. They all gave some great answers this week, so this part will be short. The links are on their names are to follow them on twitter, so be sure to do that part.
Questions in bold. Throwing a continue reading on here because there is moderate cursing. You could probably tell with a gif that say's "let's rock this bitch," but it's for the children.
What's the more annoying sports story that won't die, Alex Rodriguez and all his shit, or Johnny Manziel and all his shit?
SG: This is really hard since I am honesty tired of both. Since I cant choose both I would have to say Johnny Manziel only because everyone already knows ARod is a fraud. Johnny Manziel tries to play it off as the innocent college student that’s just trying to live a college life. Mr. Manziel, you aren’t a typical college student and every student athlete is told the rules during the freshman year it really isn’t all the hard to adhere to them. Sure the rules may be stupid but the rules are the rules. I guess what bothers me the most here with the whole Johnny Football story is that you’ll have people who will sympathize with the kid when he has been wrong on every step of the way. Maybe if he would just stop and thinks before he does stupid things he wouldn’t be looked at like an idiot.
For one, why did he think it was a good idea to go to a University of Texas frat party? As a Bearcats fan, just imagine if Teddy Bridgewater or Geno Smith came to a frat party on campus? Would UC students do the same thing? Probably. But those two aren’t idiots enough to think it was a good idea to go to a rival school and party there. You may thing you’re the best thing since Tim Tebow but that doesn’t mean you can go along doing whatever you want. Also, why does he feel the need to tweet stupid things like how he can’t wait to get out of College Station? It seems like to me Manziel is the type who sits there and says, “I haven’t been in the news lately, let me tweet something out to make sure the media still knows I’m here in the offseason.” All Johnny Football is doing is killing his chances of having NFL teams take him seriously. Not like I’d see him being a good NFL quarterback anyways.
S: This is like asking me if I’d rather have herpes or the clap. But if forced to choose, I’d have to go with the A-Rod story if only because the dude is 38 years old and clearly in the twilight of his career. Who really cares if he is suspended for 200 games or 200,000? It’s not like he would have played beyond another year or two anyway. The only suspense (and I use that term loosely at this point) is whether or not he’ll be blackballed from the Hall of Fame.
The Manziel story is ever-so-slightly less annoying only because it has immediate impact on something I care about – the upcoming college football season. If Manziel can’t play this year, A&M goes from a potential top five team to a virtually irrelevant one. So that’s something I guess.
HH: Both are annoying because there's been nothing else to talk about this summer aside from golf and racist southern chefs. I've seen more talk about Manziel than A-Rod on Twitter but have purposefully not pursued either story all that much, outside of reading Wright Thompson's piece on Manziel and his family. I think I read a tweet that said A-Rod was suspended through 2014 but is appealing it, so he continues to play, is that right? The only thing I saw on Twitter aside from that were jokes about the Yankees rooting for his suspension to save money, which is kind of ironic.
Speaking of A-Rod, the more I think about athletes using science to help recover from injuries, the less I'm outraged about it. How big is the difference between Kobe Bryant using HGH to speed up his return so he can fulfill his contract and someone having Tommy John surgery so they can pitch again? It's almost to the point now where I could imagine athletes being judged–mostly by their teammates–if they aren't willing to risk their reputation and 40-game suspensions by using whatever means necessary to come back from an injury as soon as humanly or scientifically possible. I think it's likely we'll look back at this period of uproar over PEDs and laugh at how sanctimonious it was.
Just throwing this out there: do you think purist adult entertainment fans–that is, fans of naturally enhanced bodies–formed a union and lobbied against breast implants and other enhancements when they first became popular? This is a terrible analogy but for the sake of brevity, I'm assuming they embraced plastic surgery because it helped the industry. Ok, I should get back to the other tangent.
In the future, I hope one of the pro leagues takes a transparent approach to PEDs. As in, all PEDs are deemed legal but make it mandatory for each athlete to publicly disclose what PEDs they're using if they're using them. Maybe just for injuries. I'm not sure how viable this is or will ever be, but hopefully we'll figure out a way to detect stuff like HGH so if the NFL legalizes its use, then there's a way to test for it so nobody can lie. Oh, RGIII used blank for four months, then did three weeks of this? Kobe had this procedure in Europe and then took x and y for five months? I think I'm ok with that. I hope other athletes can use the same technique. Hell, I wish I knew how to recover like Adrian Peterson did because my knee hurts every time I run farther than my mailbox.
Anyways, since the Manziel story is pretty harmless but receives as much attention as the highest-salaried pro athlete receiving an unprecedented suspension, I'll side with the Manziel story being the more annoying BIG THING because it's relatively harmless. I don't blame entities like ESPN, though. It's the offseason, the average sports fan loves this kind of negative story and the autograph broker thing could very well turn into a Thing but is still something I don't care about. An athlete making a few bucks off his signature? Meh.
I think this, not when nothing is happening in July, is the worst time of the sports year. Mainly because we get a ton of football non-stories thrust at us for a solid month before anything football related actually happens. Do you agree or disagree? And why?
SG: The beginning of July through Mid-August is by far the worst time of the sports year. There is baseball which is nice, but there isn’t anything else in the way of watchable sports. Instead, we are forced to sit and listen to realignment rumors from The Dude of WVa, MHVer, and TuxedoYoda which just throw things out there and for some reason people listen. Why? Because we desperately cling to anything that is said about football in general. This year I decided to pay more attention to Bearcat recruiting as a way to help the time pass and that has definitely helped. It’s better than watching ESPN aka TMZ-Sports and hearing them talk about Manziel, ARod, or whatever “sports” scandal is out there. August 31st cannot come soon enough.
S: That’s another tough call, but I’d have to give the edge to July. The week of the MLB All Star Game is beyond brutal. There’s literally nothing happening in sports other than the Home Run Derby (I hope you die, Chris Berman), the ASG itself, and then TWO more days of no baseball games. By the way, did the All Star break add a fourth fucking day when I wasn’t looking? It used to be Monday through Wednesday with real games resuming after that. This year there were exactly zero games scheduled that Thursday. The fuck?
At least now, in early to mid-August, I can trick myself into thinking important things are happening. Preseason football? “Roster spots are on the line, people. This shit matters!”
HH: It's the worst because I have to watch golf and pretend I'm having a good time. I do disagree a little though, because sometimes the excitement of thinking about what lies ahead exceeds the fun of experiencing what actually lies ahead. If my team, Louisville, loses to Ohio in week one, that will suck. Like, I'm not talking to anybody for a whole week suck. And yes, that's a negative way of looking at things, but you have to acknowledge it could happen. On the other hand, I get to daydream all summer about Louisville's Sugar Bowl win, a possible undefeated season and who knows what could happen this fall. That's fun. It's like the car ride when you're on your way to meet someone at that yogurt place in town on your second date and you're 95% sure you're going to make out before the end of the night fun. Ok, 51%.
And when you compare them to the last couple years, the non-stories haven't been all that bad this summer. The realignment cycle has died–or at least stalled out for a season or two. And the summer is when I get to catch up on books I got for Christmas (some of them two years ago) and all the shows and movies I've been queuing up on Netflix and HBO Go. I've gotten my ladyfriend into Deadwood, The Sopranos and The West Wing which has and will occupy our entire sports offseason, which makes for a happy ladyfriend. She knows exactly what's about to happen when football kicks off, though. I almost feel sorry for her. in 2011, she sort of accidentally started a tradition of making me a Louisville football-related food item to celebrate the first weekend, and now that's become, for us at least, the tangible end of the offseason. So that's nice.
If you had to come up with your dream announce team for baseball, football and basketball, who would be on those teams?
SG: This is a tough one. To me announcers make or break the game experience from home. No one wants to hear terrible announcers and no one wants put a game on mute either so having a solid announcer team for a game is crucial. If we are going by current announcers I would have to say for the MLB it would have to be Vin Scully because he’s been around for so long and knows the game, Joe Morgan because frankly, he’s a Red and you can’t keep Marty Brenneman even though he only does radio. For football I would have to do a mix of college and NFL so I would say Brad Nessler since he does both NCAA and NFL. Next would be Mike Tirico since I love his play by play analysis and lastly Al Michaels because he just does a great job. The NBA is probably the easiest to pick of them all, Marv Albert is the first choice since he is not over the top during the games, Jeff Van Gundy is another good one but I do wish he would get back into coaching and lastly it would be Kevin Harlan who works alongside Albert on TNT.
S: Oh baby, this is right in my wheelhouse. You hit my sweet spot, so I better not fuck this up:
Baseball – Dan Shulman and Orel Hersheiser. Am I allowed to pick Vin Scully in his prime? If so I’d go with that, but I don’t want an 85 year old man on my broadcast team. Yay ageism!
Football – Mike Tirico and Cris Collinsworth (NFL). Collinsworth gets mixed reviews sometimes and I’m a Cincinnati guy, so I may be a little biased. But if you look at what the other networks have (Aikman, Simms, Gruden), I think Collinsworth is an obvious choice.
Rece Davis and Kirk Herbstriet (CFB)
Basketball – Marv Albert and Bill Raftery. I was tempted to go with Shulman again, but I didn’t wanna use him twice. This is for college b-ball; obviously, I’d replace Raftery if it were an NBA game.
Note: Notice how now sideline reports are listed. The last sideline reporter I found useful was Mean Gene Okerlund. The rest should be banished from sports forever.
HH: For baseball, definitely Chris Berman. I love his pop culture references and the back, back, back schtick. Ok, not really. I struggle to care enough about baseball to think of announcers I like. I love fantasy baseball, it's my favorite fantasy sport by far, but I can't stand to follow it as an actual fan of the game itself. I could cite my entire fantasy roster by name, the positions each player qualifies for and tell you who's been on the DL or NA and for how long, etc…but couldn't tell you what teams half of them play for. I guess I like McCarver's voice because that's the soundtrack I remember from all the baseball games I watched on TV with my Dad growing up. I'm sure everyone hates him and he's terrible now if he's still calling games but that's the voice that's synonymous with baseball for me. Along with the narrator from that Ken Burns documentary. Can I pick that guy?
For football, I loved Pat Summerall. Man, that guy's voice was awesome. I was too young to really know how good he was at his job, but I loved hearing him call a game nonetheless. Keith Jackson is another voice I'd have to have on my team, especially college football. All these guys so far are symbolic voices from my childhood, watching games with my Dad. I'm sure that correlates to some type of psychological issue. Let's move on.
For basketball, I think the team has to start with a play-by-play guy like Dan Shulman. He's the best. I could be boring and say Jay Bilas and Bill Raftery but I feel as though part of the allure of their tandem is fading along with the old Big East. We'll see. I go with Bill Walton instead because he can make late-night Pac-12 basketball interesting. Big Walton fan. For NBA hoops, I'd have to go mainstream and say Marv Albert. The 1993 NBA Finals sticks out for me the most. I was a big Suns fan back then. I had two Majerle Suns jerseys and once wore the road version to school picture day with a turtleneck and purple nylon pants. I was a big deal at my school, obviously. I should find a photo of that for Twitter humiliation. Anyways, I guess I'll keep Albert with Mike? Fratello because 1993 and because nobody else stands out for me.
I nearly had a fist fight with someone who said Alfred Hitchcock was the most overrated director in history. Two questions from this. 1, are Hitchcock's movies overrated? 2, who is your choice for the most overrated director? If overrated is a poor word, what about what acclaimed director makes movies you can't stand?
SG: I would have gotten into the fist fight if I were you. Anyone that thinks Alfred Hitchcock is overrated clearly doesn’t appreciate a good movie. I’m the type of person that thinks it’s okay not to like something, but if it is great (like Hitchcock movies), you have to at least respect it. To me and many others, Alfred Hitchcock will be one of the great directors of all time and without him in my opinion, suspense movies would not be what they are today. As for whom I think is an overrated director, I would have to say Michael Bay. For some reason people love his movies and besides Pearl Harbor, I think all his other movies are decent at best. Transformers Trilogy was above average, but too many explosions. Texas Chainsaw Massacre was average but Armageddon was good. I just don’t get why so many people like him. I will put it like this, I will never be in a huge rush to see a Michael Bay movie.
S: You’re barking up the wrong tree on this one. I’m fairly certain the only Hitchcock movie I’ve ever seen is Psycho, so I really am not informed enough to even have an opinion.
When you said overrated directors, the name that immediately popped into my head was Michael Bay. But we’ve all pretty much agreed that he makes shit movies at this point, right? I’ve always thought Tim Burton is super overrated. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of Edward Scissorhands and some of his other early stuff, but has he made anything decent in the last 15 years? Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer? Pass! I was going to make a similar case against Spike Lee, but I am afraid people will call me racist.
HH: I think Hitchcock is properly rated, I like most of his work. We saw Vertigo this past winter at a local theater that's been around since the 20s or 30s and recently renovated. I've seen it a dozen times by now but it was still one of the best movie experiences I've had in the last couple years. I know it's vogue to say now, but I can only recall one or two movies recently where I thought "this is better than Breaking Bad/Game Of Thrones/Louie/Boardwalk Empire" or "I'd rather be watching this Tom Cruise sci-fi flick than streaming Netflix in my bed right now." And we watch a lot of movies in the theater. We just caught the Wahlberg-Denzel buddy cop flick last weekend and the costar female role, aka token hot lady who gets naked, ruined the movie for me. She had this weird squinty-eye, raspy delivery and it just didn't work. I'm sure she's a classically trained actress but it felt like they hired a model and gave her the speaking parts and role of an actual actress. Are Denzel and Marky Mark not enough of a draw? The movie was kind of silly and over-the-top so whatever, I wished we had stayed home and watched House of Cards or the new Bourne movie that's on HBO now.
As for most overrated director, I'd pick Woody Allen or Tim Burton. I respect their work but do not particularly enjoy it.
On the flip side, what's a kind of awful movie that you love for no real reason? Mine is Hot Rod. I've watched it with people who didn't laugh more than twice while it cracks me the hell up.
SG: This one is easy for me. The Room by Tommy Wiseau is quite possibly the worst movie ever created but for some reason I bought it and have watched it multiple times. The acting is terrible, the plot is terrible, the sex scenes are terrible, just about everything is terrible and I still love the movie. Just look at the cover of the DVD case and you should already know you are in for a terrible movie. Besides my friends in college, no one that I’ve shown the movie to has liked it. Hell, even IMDB rates the movie at a 3.3/10 and it gets a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes. Maybe the best part is that the director/star, Tommy Wiseau put 6 million of his own money into the project and thought it was actually going to be a suspenseful drama.
S: How awful do these awful movies have to be? I mean, does Varsity Blues count? ‘Cause I will watch the shit out of that movie any day. (ED: Varsity Blues absolutely counts) Same goes for Teen Wolf (Michael J. Fox version only, please). Out Cold is another that comes to mind. I saw Pitch Perfect not too long ago and actually enjoyed it. I’m not sure that’s an awful movie so much as it is a movie that guys shouldn’t enjoy.
HH: I don't think I've ever seen Hot Rod. I like a lot of awful movies, but one I love is The Beach with Leo DiCaprio. The first time I saw it, I was in the front row of the theater because my (high school) friends had to um, smoke something first and we got there late. I was in the car when they lit up and felt high during the movie so I'm not sure if I involuntarily relive that contact high every time I watch it or if it just taps into some weird remote island adventure fantasy in my brain or both, but I love that GD movie. Even the ridiculous video game part.
Do you sing karaoke? If so, what are your go to songs? If not, why are you against fun?
SG: Never have done Karaoke. I would have to have an insane number of beers in me for me to even consider it. It’s not that I am against fun, more like I’d rather spend my time drinking if I am at the bar. A couple friends of mine have done Karaoke before and they say it’s a good time though.
S: It would take a lot of alcohol to get me to sing in front of more than, say, seven people. That’s not to say it’s impossible by any means. I usually stick with country music when I go for it. Garth Brooks and Toby Keith are usually solid choices. “Fishin’ in the Dark” is one I would feel pretty confident about. “Wagon Wheel” is also a great choice because I can usually get the crowd to sing along, thus taking the focus off of my own terrible voice.
HH: Not so much now, but when the Air Force sent me to Vegas and Florida, aka when I used to have friends, we sang some karaoke at bars and at parties I guess. There was this sushi place that's probably still open in Fort Walton Beach that has a tiny room in the back where they do karaoke on the weekend. It's just this tiny Japanese lady running the show. She would pick up a second mic and help out anyone who bombed and it was hilarious because she had a thick accent and sang at such a high pitch. I always picked an ironic song because I suppose I thought it was funny. I was usually inebriated which is a fairly common karaoke requirement. Backstreet Boys and Kid Rock were my go-to karaoke artists. A few of us had mullet wigs because there was an annual Mullet Festival in a nearby town–mullet the fish by the way–and so we celebrated by wearing mullet wigs to the festival. Annnnnyways, my buddy Chris would wear his mullet wig to one of those clubs that had line dancing, a hip hop booty grinding room, a billiard hall and a karaoke bar all under one roof. It was so Florida. Chris would always do Bawitdaba by Kid Rock with his mullet wig on and we'd jump on stage with him after the "My name is Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid Rock" crescendo and that was pretty much the highlight of our karaoke experiences. I still own the mullet wig, but I think my karaoke days are over.
Huge, huge, huge thanks to Stuart, Secaur and Hot Hot. Be sure to follow them on twitter @StewieGilchrist, @UDFlyers and @ULHotHot, as well as checking out the links above. This was a tremendous edition of the Questions, definitely one of my favorites. A big thanks to them once again.
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