Tag: sports

The Family Guy effect for sports

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m not even going to pretend for two seconds that I’m a hockey fan.  The biggest importance of hockey in my life is Al Michaels’ call of Do You Believe in Miracles? from the 1980 Olympics when Team USA upset the Soviet Union in one of the greatest upsets in the history of sports.  Otherwise, I know and care very little about the sport, personally considering it fourth-tier in the hierarchy of professional sports.  I know a lot of names of players and teams mostly through osmosis of ESPN and other sports outlets I keep my ear to the ground with, but really I’ve given no shits about the NHL ever in the history of my life.

However, it hasn’t been lost on me that over the last few years, the Washington Capitals have had some difficulty in overcoming the Pittsburgh Penguins.  Something like the Penguins winning three straight playoff matchups against the Capitals, en route to winning the Stanley Cup each time or something or other.  A cursory search shows that that the Penguins won seven consecutive playoff series against the Capitals since 1995.

This stigma had been amplified over the prior two seasons, with the respective stars of both squads, Alexander Ovechkin of Washington and Sidney Crosby of Pittsburgh in the primes of their careers, as well as the ever-prevalent and pervasive presence of social media for all the fairweather and casual fans to blow shit up more than others might want.  And as had been the norm, the Penguins ended the seasons for the Caps, and went on to win Stanley Cups each time, while fans in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area bemoaned the seemingly endless curse of DC sports.

When I noticed that the Caps and Penguins were on yet another collision course in this year’s NHL Playoffs, I talked a few times with a close friend who is an actual hockey fan, and a Caps fan no less.  And as a DC sports enthusiast, he’s pretty much been there, done that as far as the low expectations for sports teams in DC, regardless of their records or the hype.  Whether it’s the Redskins, Nationals, Wizards or Capitals, we’ve all seen them ascend to contention, only to fall from grace, perpetuating the stereotype with each crushing defeat.

We basically talked about how it was about to be another year, another Caps jobbing to the Penguins, and to prematurely begin engraving the Stanley Cup with this year’s Penguins personnel.  And then the Penguins went on to win game 1 of the best of seven, further reinforcing the feeling of déjà vu of another Caps shortcoming and another DC sports team, collapsing.

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BIG DICK SWINGING SPORTS POST

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s busy season at work.  Life itself has been pretty busy too.  Ironically, as busy life has been transpiring, things have been happening all around that have made me feel like writing, but I simply haven’t really had any time to sit down and do any writing.  There’s no downtime at work for me to slop together some words, and by the time I get home, I’m usually burnt out and not wanting to look at any screen other than my phone for my routine-like playing of Fire Emblem: Heroes.

Typically, whenever things seem brog-worthy, I jot down a quick blurb or note in a Google document for me to revisit whenever I have more time to write about them.  However, due to the busy, I simply haven’t had the time to revisit anything, but the list continued to grow and grow, leaving me feeling anxious about the passage of time to brogging dynamic that I’ve been feeling has been slipping out of my grasp lately.

So now that for the first time, I’ve found that I have a moment to do some writing, I thought I’d save myself as well as my 0 readers the trouble of doing a little consolidation, so that I don’t feel like I should be dumping 1,000 words per topic, but instead go for some quick hits that I’ll do my best to get the point across while covering all of the topics that have piqued my interest over the last week and change. 

This makes even more sense, considering that this particular conglomeration of topics all conveniently happen to be sports related, and since pretty much nobody I know except for me actually cares about sports, it’s a win-win for me, that I get to do some writing, and for the zero who will inevitably glaze over this when it’s eventually published for realsies.

And so we start off with the most notable of events, with the boys in Blacksburg, Virginia Tech taking down yet another ranked ACC powerhouse in men’s basketball, defeating the unholy and reviled #5 Duke.

For those keeping track, this marks the fourth ranked ACC opponent that Tech has defeated this year, with wins against (at the times) #10 North Carolina, #15 Clemson, #2 Virginia.  Now as much as I would much, much, much rather see a football season in which the Hokes took down Clemson, UVA, UNC and Duke, I’m genuinely pleased with the basketball program which has pretty much guaranteed a spot in the NCAA Tournament; where they will get likely get bounced in the first round, but making it to the dance is always important.

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Suck it, nerds

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This couldn’t have been scripted any better: Jeopardy! contestants struggle to answer rudimentary trivia about football, ironic hilarity and passive-aggressive bullying from Alex Trebek ensues

Seriously, this couldn’t possibly have occurred better even if it were scripted by Seth Rogen or Sarah Silverman.  The desperate avoidance of the category, from all three contestants until it was absolutely the last thing left on the board, and then the defeated resignation from all three that their scores were condemned to be final where they were, seeing as how none of them thought they had a cake’s chance at a buffet of getting any of them right.

And then to make matters worse, not only was the studio audience beginning to laugh track at their pathetic lack of knowledge of the country’s most rabidly popular professional spectator sport, they began to start getting lip from the biggest dweeb of them all, Alex Trebek.  Who completely abused the fact that he had the answers right in front of him and could easily pretend like these were basic, easy questions, regardless of if he knew the answers to them or not.

Seriously, it never fails to astound me that Jeopardy! contestants can rapidly nail the correct questions to shit like “Philippe Cozette and Graham Fagg had a handshake in this location” or “Alfred Dreyfus was among the thousands who marched through the streets of Paris during this 1902 funeral procession,” but they don’t know what a fair catch is?

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Same shit, different sport

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Continuing the tradition set by all of the other professional sports teams in the city of Atlanta: Atlanta United gets bounced from the MLS playoffs with a loss to Columbus Crew SC

Prior to me writing this, I had thought about writing about how I really hoped that Atlanta United would have pulled the ultimate miracle of all expansion teams, and somehow managed win the MLS Cup.  Not only would it have been an unprecedented performance of winning a championship in their first year of existence, but there would be something so gratifying about the expansion soccer team, breaking the “curse” of Atlanta sports, and being the first team to deliver a championship to the city since the 1995 Braves, especially after the uber-meltdown of the 2017 Falcons in Super Bowl Lee.

I had a plan to twist my choice of words to ironically talk about how it probably had everything to do with the fact that ATLUTD had gargantuan fan support since their arrival, and getting into their games turned into Dragon*Con hotel registration, every single game, they were that hot of a ticket to get into throughout the season.  And how ATLUTD was demonstrative of the power of fan support, attempting to shame the fairweathered Falcons, Braves and Hawks fans who only come out to support only when they’re good.

In fact, I was all ready to start writing the night prior, but because I don’t really follow MLS or have any inkling to how their scheduling works out, by the time I sat down at a computer and prepared to write, I discovered that the playoff game had already happened, and Atlanta United had already lost.

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Life is boring lately

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but as it pertains to my want to write every now and then, it sure doesn’t help when there’s nothing to really talk about outside of sports.  Like really, I comb through news sites, and I try to watch a little bit of news here and there, but on a regular basis, it’s the same old shit that’s being driven further into the ground every single time it comes up, so there’s really nothing particularly interesting to me that gives me any inspiration to really write.

On the local level, the AJC further reinforces the notion that they’re a clown outlet, since the front page of the site has basically turned into the SEC football daily, providing links and news for not just Georgia, but just about every single SEC school’s football programs.  Granted, I guess it sure beats the alternative to the daily shootings, robberies and killings in Southwest Atlanta, but surely, surely, there has to be stuff worth reporting on aside from college football.

National and global news are more of the same crap involving sexual harassment dogpiling, talk of building a wall, and the perpetually constantly rising tensions between the United States and other countries.

Same shit, different day.

It’s no wonder why I always fall back onto sports and wrestling to talk about, because there’s not much else worth writing about that doesn’t just trigger, bother, infuriate or simply annoy.

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Writing when I’m not feeling writing

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Every now and then, I’ll hit a point where I look at my docket of written things, and feel as if I haven’t written anything in a while, and then I feel anxious because I’m OCD like that and feel like I should be writing at the very least, once a week.

However, admittedly a lot of it has to do with the fact that I’ve been feeling like the world around me is in this stagnant state where on any given point, it feels like the world’s primary topics of discussion are encapsulated in these really small capsules as of late, and it’s like the same things are discussed and rehashed 50,000 times before the next thing that should probably be taking a back seat to larger things emerges and the cycle repeats itself.

Like, for example, it seems like the only things being talked about in the world are:

  • Sexual harassment that stemmed from Harvey Weinstein
  • Gun control that stemmed from the Las Vegas shootings
  • Kneeling during the National Anthem that stemmed from Colin Kaepernick
  • Football

Despite the fact that there are vastly bigger issues in the world currently such as:

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I like Deshaun Watson

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Good people just get it: Texans rookie quarterback, Deshaun Watson donates his first NFL paycheck to NRG Stadium workers affected by the flooding of Hurricane Harvey

Seems fitting to talk about this since we’re on the eve of the biggest college football game of the season for me, when #12 Virginia Tech hosts #2 Clemson, where it just might be a good game, but nobody on the planet can defeat Clemson, so it’ll be the that game where Tech stumbles and falls far in the rankings before dropping out outright by season’s end.

But in spite of my general disdain for Clemson, and how they have owned Virginia Tech for the last five years, I have to confess that I’m a Deshaun Watson fan.

At first, I hated the guy for being so good and just so far beyond everyone else on the field, and thanks to his talent, Clemson’s success never wavered while he was at the helm.  I rooted for any team to beat him; NC State, Boston College, Auburn, Alabama, and even teams that I really don’t care for, like Georgia Tech and even fucking Florida State.  But that’s just how much I wanted to see Clemson knocked down, because if they didn’t take some losses, they were always a threat to the National Championship, and they were about the last team I wanted to see winning one.

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