The moron being me, of course, as I have no idea what I’m doing. Feedback welcome, soccer fans. (Or korfball, as it’s known in England, whose league we’re borrowing.) Selected following no research at all, not even to confirm that they are, in fact, living soccer players, here’s the starting 11 for the Jupiter Wankers of the Cox Premier League:
“When you cut yourself shaving, it’s gonna bleed for a week. When you hurt your shoulder like Tim Tebow did, it’s gonna hurt for a week.”
WTF, Gary Danielson?
He also insisted on several occasions that “This is still a football game,” lest the viewer mistakenly conclude that, after two and a half hours of football, the teams were now engaged in a cricket match. And he once referred to Georgia quarterback Matthew Stafford as Mike Bobo, who last played for the Bulldogs a decade ago. Perhaps most perplexing was his mangling of the fable of the scorpion and the frog, which, apart from being creatively reinterpreted to involve a scorpion and a tortoise, was inexplicably employed to illustrate an indecipherable point about Tebow’s tendency to run the ball.
Gary, seriously, have your brain checked out first thing Monday morning.
I don’t have anything against the school, mind you, I’m just dreading the inevitable geographic confusion on the part of sportswriters and broadcasters. The University of South Florida, you see, is not in South Florida. It is nowhere near the southern portion of the peninsula we call Florida, in fact. It would be more accurately referred to as the University of West Central Florida. Why did we commit such an obvious and, frankly, embarrassing blunder? Because we are confused. We are old and confused.
Those of you not from around these parts might not have been aware of any of this. Please consider yourself educated. A map follows for further reference.
(For our American readers who might be feeling a bit lost, this post was about soccer, or “two-man luge” as it’s known throughout the rest of the world.)
Not only is it nice to receive a bit of recognition in an unfamiliar field, it’s particularly nice to place in a contest in which I didn’t even know I had been entered. No, Heavy Pressure hasn’t actually won any contests, but I do have something that I know for a fact no one else in the world has: A 118,551-record SPSS file with the height, weight and name of every player in professional football history backed up on my iPod. Suck on that, sports hacks.
While Heavy Pressure’s contest results are due primarily to the excellent reporting and writing of my colleague Carlos Frias, the story wouldn’t have happened if I, a metro-based data geek, hadn’t wandered across the newsroom and pitched the idea to the sports department. Also, one of The Post’s cops reporters placed third in the FSWA contest for feature writing with her story about an amateur boxer. See what happens when everyone in the newsroom plays nice?
Gaaaaa! Then again, I wasn’t feeling so good when Steve Spurrier left, either, and that turned out OK. (And, no, I don’t remember the Ron Zook era. I erased those years from my brain.)
And in a journalism-related digression from this sports-related digression … While browsing Florida’s many papers for news about Billy Donovan’s departure from UF for the Orlando Magic, one thing became depressingly clear: Newspaper web sites are bad.
As a 