Best of 1998
FIFTY
RANDOM THOUGHTS FROM '98
(Give or take a few...)....It's too bad
I can't hit curveballs because I would have been a great "clubhouse
guy."
....How come when people discuss Lawrence Taylor's great
career, nobody ever mentions his upset win over Bam Bam Bigelow in WrestleMania
XIII?
....If you created a Stalking Psycho Slut Hall of Fame and modeled
it after the Baseball Hall of Fame, Monica Lewinsky would be kinda like Babe
Ruth.
....I'm just not sure Magic's gonna be around much longer... his
show, I mean.
....With all the annoying nicknames Chris Berman comes up
with, I'm surprised he never used Bartolo "Cancer of the"
Colon.
....Let's just say that the whole Phil Hartman thing is reason
#4527 why I'm terrified to get married. The Hartmans made the Corderos look like
Mr. and Mrs. Keaton from "Family Ties."
....How come they never
know how old Cuban baseball players are? It's tougher to determine a Cuban's age
than it is to find new planetary systems.
....Jim Nantz looks like the
kind of guy who would have hit on your girlfriend in college if he knew you were
away for the weekend.
....Who the hell was Mel Kiper Sr.?
....If
I'm on the Patriots and I need to go to the bathroom, but the bathroom door is
locked, so I'm waiting... and then I hear the toilet flush and Zefross Moss
comes out holding a newspaper with a big smile on his face... well, I'm probably
looking for another bathroom to use.
....You know it's early in the
baseball season when Quinten McCracken and Hal Morris are leading the N.L. and
A.L. in hitting.
....I was so drunk last Friday night that apparently I
ordered Jerry Springer's "Too Hot For TV" video, which is
unequivocally a new standard for drunkenness in this country.
....I
didn't read nearly enough dirt about what happened in Las Vegas when 200-plus
NBA players were there for an entire weekend. Let's put it this way: The term
"working against the double-team" might have been taken to
another level, if you get my drift.
....Just what the hell are Starburst
chews made out of, exactly?
....How come you can spend a weekend with
your girlfriend, and then right at the end of it she becomes really mean and
surly... and then she'll call later that night and apologize for sabotaging the
last few minutes that you spent with her?
....Tara Lipinski is
creepy-looking in a Jon-Benet Ramsey type of way.
....Do you get the
feeling that some women use the old "Don't worry about it, I'm on the
pill" line with professional athletes and... well... it's kinda not true?
....My favorite character in "Boogie Nights" was The Colonel.
I wish I knew someone with a nickname like
The Colonel.....How
come you can buy 3,000 Powerball tickets but you can't legally gamble on
professional sports?
....Valentine's Day is no big deal... unless you
don't have a Valentine and you feel like the biggest loser on the earth. I think
all the people who were dating one year decided to create Valentine's Day just
to humiliate everyone else.
....If NESN switched Dave Shea and Bob Kurtz
one night, would that be the equivalent of the sound a tree makes falling in the
forest?
....I guess I didn't buy the newspaper that day when Patrick
Ewing graduated from Georgetown in 1985 and announced that he had decided NOT to
pursue his Rhodes Scholarship.
....Can you believe there's a porno movie
out called "Shaving Ryan's Privates"? That's the best porno title
since "Pump Friction" and "Foreskin Gump" came out weeks
apart in 1994.
....How come people like David Wells and Tom Browning and
Len Barker always seem to be the guys who pitch perfect games?
....I want
to dress up as Santa Claus, crash the New England Cable News X-mas party, and
bounce Kristen Mastroianni on my lap a few times.
....The world is
separated into two types of people: 1) People who think Stanley Roper, Hank
Kingsley and Stephen Keaton were comedic geniuses; 2) The confused
masses.
....Every time I hear Sammy Sosa's name I think of Lopez' line in
the Al Pacino classic "Scarface":
"You want me to believe that
Omar was a stoolie because Sosa said so?"
....Man, I
can't get over the fact that some of my friends from college have legally
reproduced.
....You know, it's not really a bachelor party unless you get
more than one stripper.
....When Utah coach Jerry Sloan lies on his
deathbed, I think he'll pull a Darth Vader and reveal to Jeff Hornacek &
John Stockton: "I'm your father."
....I'm not saying Norv
Turner's losing his grip on the Redskins, but the last person to lose control
behind the wheel this fast was Princess Di's chaffeur.
....Question: At
the end of "Top Gun," who exactly was the U.S. fighting against, and
where?
....Every time I've ever watched the Super Bowl at a party,
there's always that one guy there who repeatedly has to tell you how much every
commercial spot cost every time they show a commercial.
....I haven't
told anyone this yet, but during my drug-induced flu haze on Sunday morning, I
feel asleep during ESPN's "Sports Reporters" and had a nightmare that
Mitch Albom's ears were attacking me.
....In case you're scoring at home,
Steve Buckley has a column in the Herald, a regular gig on WEEI and a daily
sports show on New England Cable News. I guess my question is this: Isn't that a
little too much Steve Buckley?
....I know he's only a rookie, but
fullback Chris Floyd couldn't execute a block on the "Hollywood
Squares," much less in a Patriots game.
....Who has a larger head,
Ray Bourque or Arvydas Sabonis?
....My favorite line of "Rocky
3" is when Adrian's giving Rocky that pep talk on the beach and Rocky says,
"What happened? How did everything that was so good get so
bad?"
....Ginger Spice leaving the Spice Girls takes its place
alongside Shelley Long leaving "Cheers," Flo leaving
"Alice," Radar leaving "MASH," and OJ Simpson killing his
wife as one of the most ill-advised career moves ever.
....I'll be
honest: Chris Evert still makes me feel tingly inside, even after all these
years.
....I like to drink "jack-and-cokes" with Diet Coke
instead of regular Coke, but I always feel funny saying "Can I have a
jack-and-coke with Diet Coke instead of Coke?"... so I just end up ordering
a regular old jack-and-coke.
....Monica Seles is the only person I know
who's
literally been stabbed in the back.
....I don't want to say
Seattle's Vin Baker had the deer-in-the-headlights look last week in the
playoffs, but he was actually taking it
flaccid to the
hole.
....You know you're watching a 2:00 AM SportsCenter when Chuck
Garfein and Brad Greenberg are involved.
....I was talking baseball with
my buddy Gus on the phone today and he said, "It's fun to have a guy names
'Sabes' on your pitching staff, isn't it?"
....Do you think Bills
owner Ralph Wilson and Jets owner Leon Hess get together and talk about the good
old days... you know, when they were young and rich and slavery was still
legal?
....My 1998 Baltimore Ravens Bandwagon fell apart faster than one
of those bamboo boats that the Professor used to build in "Gilligan's
Island."
....You could hold a 10,000-team fantasy football draft at
Foxboro Stadium, make all the owners drive to Foxboro for it, hold the draft,
and then drop a bomb on the stadium... and you wouldn't kill half as many roto
teams as Jake Plummer and Kordell Stewart have killed across America this
season.
....The blonde-haired guy who played the condescending bully in
"Karate Kid," "Back to School," and "Just One of the
Guys" is one of my favorite Those Guys.
....When it comes right down
to it, the fact that Mr. Brady was gay in real life is one of the weirdest facts
of all-time.
....I'm currently filming a sequel to the Mel Gibson movie
"Ransom," where I play a wealthy fantasy football owner whose star
wide receiver (played by Isaac Bruce) mysteriously disappears from the lineup
with a 16-week hamstring injury...
(After I finish this column, I'm
calling Isaac's kidnappers and screaming, "GIMME BACK MY
RECEIVER!")
....How come they always make the fortunes in fortune
cookies so upbeat? Wouldn't it be a lot more exciting to open up a fortune
cookie if you knew there was a chance that your fortune would say, "You
will get syphillus at your friend's bachelor party next month. Or "Your
grandfather is on his last legs. He'll be dead by the end of the
month."
....After drinking a Dunkin Donuts "Big One" with
cream and four sugars, I ran a 4.14 forty-yard dash at the NFL scouting combines
last week.
....Dennis Eckersley has reached the point in life where you
don't even want him operating the TV remote control in the clubhouse, much less
pitching with men on base.
....Chris Canty is like Steve Sanders from
"90210" -- he's fun to have around, but you don't actually want him
involved in any key plots.
....Some day, NFL historians will look back at
some of the "Up-and-Coming Young QB's" of the mid-90's -- guys like
Dilfer, Shuler, Collins, Mirer, Brown, Frerotte, Hoying, Mitchell, Frieze,
Blake, Banks -- and think to themselves, "Was there an ebola virus in the
NFL that decade?"
....The only way NBC could DE-sex Hannah Storm any
more is if they had her spayed. She makes Pat Summitt look like Jenna Jameson
these days.
....When I was in elementary school, we had the kid who threw
chairs, the girl who stuttered, and the kid who went to the bathroom on
himself... but we never had the kid who came in one day and started shooting
everyone.