The Autumn Curmudgeon

As summer disappears, the heat is turned on the NFL

It's autumn, and the point spreads are cooling down and turning colors, so The Sports Curmudgeon, gaining momentum, returns with an all-gridiron grump.

First of all, The Sports Curmudgeon wants to know why the National Football League is waking up on the wrong side of the bed every morning. The NFL seems to be as public-relations blind as Augusta National. Well, not that stupid. The Sports Curmudgeon once called Augusta National the American Singapore, and now The Sports Curmudgeon begs to apologize ... to Singapore.

Instead, The Sports Curmudgeon says: Hello to you, Augusta National, The American Saudi Arabia.

But, The Sports Curmudgeon digresses from pigskinianna. He asks: How petty could the NFL be not to let Peyton Manning, the Indianapolis Colts quarterback, wear black high-top shoes for one game in honor of Johnny Unitas? What a sweet and original gesture. The Sports Curmudgeon is disgusted.

But then The Sports Curmudgeon fears that the NFL has lost all sense of proportion. Believe it or not, there is something called the National Women's Football League, which draws a few hundred spectators to its big games. The NWFL wanted to call its championship game -- which was played at some high school field somewhere in Pennsylvania -- the SupHer Bowl. Get it?

But The Sports Curmudgeon is appalled to learn that the NFL sicced its lawyers on the football women, demanding they cease use of the name SupHer because it would create confusion in the marketplace. Oh please, NFL. The Sports Curmudgeon says that now his only confusion with the Super Bowl is the Tidy Bowl.

The Sports Curmudgeon says, look out, football fans. As you read when he began this rant, Mr. Momentum is back. Now, momentum never completely goes away. Football announcers use it to explain what's happening in every game. The team has got momentum. Oops, it lost momentum. The other team has momentum now. In football games, it's apparently required that somebody always has momentum. But The Sports Curmudgeon gags that the season of 2002 seems to be even more top-heavy with momentum than ever before.

The Sports Curmudgeon asks all psychiatrists and psychologists within the sound of his voice: Aren't NFL coaches the most work-obsessed jackasses in the whole world? As far as The Sports Curmudgeon can tell, you can't be an NFL coach unless you sleep in your office and get up at 3 a.m. to study films. The Sports Curmudgeon says, hey, NFL coaches, go home to your wives and children, drink some Scotch and catch all the old Seinfeld re-runs you never saw because you were watching game films.

Grouchy as The Sports Curmudgeon is by nature, even he loved Bob Hayes -- a sweet man, who was overwhelmed by fame ... except, of course, by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where he is locked out. The Sports Curmudgeon says to the statistics-crazed dolts who vote on admissions: Let Bullet Bob in or have the decency to retire and let somebody sensible take your job. Bob Hayes changed the game. And The Sports Curmudgeon says: Goodbye, good friend, good man ... you surely got to heaven in the fastest time.

The Sports Curmudgeon is certainly not politically correct and, in fact, very seldom correct at all, and The Sports Curmudgeon says, hey, it's OK for teams to call themselves Braves and Warriors, and, OK, maybe Indians is passe, but it's not mean-spirited, but, really, even an insensitive hard-heart like The Sports Curmudgeon thinks that it's time for the Washington Redskins to get a new name.

And, most important of all, full of wisdom and venom alike, The Sports Curmudgeon also says -- no, sorry, sports fans, The Sports Curmudgeon has lost his momentum.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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