Part III: Moving On -- Baby Steps

I've heard plenty of talk about how this tragedy will serve as a unifying factor in our country, how it will bring us together to serve a common purpose and defeat a common enemy.

But a little voice in the back of my head is telling me not to buy it just yet.

I mean, it's easy for people to pull together in a time of crisis, to pitch in and help your neighbor, to embrace a stranger, to fly an American flag and call yourself a patriot.
But what happens a week from now? Two weeks? Two months? Will we fall back into our old patterns as the around-the-clock coverage of the Attack On America becomes an update on the nightly news and a three-hour wait at the airport?

Will you still love me tomorrow?

I don't think I want to find out. Because as a country, we're just not used to loving each other. Since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago, we haven't had a common enemy, somebody to hate, somebody to fear, somebody to be the butt of our jokes.

So we've looked inward and found plenty of enemies within our own borders. The battlegrounds have been race and gender and politics and sexual orientation. The rhetoric surrounding the O.J. Simpson murder trial displayed a frightening rift between black and white Americans. Rush Limbaugh's daily three hours of liberal-bashing has polarized the right wing, while out-of-touch lefties like the PETA and NORML crowds give conservatives plenty of ammunition.

Think about the conflicts our country has produced in the last 10 years -- Rodney King, the NRA, don't-ask-don't-tell, Monica Lewinsky, gang violence, Tailhook, gay rights, Elian Gonzalez, and dangling chads, just to name a few.

You think we're just going to chuck them all aside, link arms and sing "God Bless America" as we send our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters off to rid the world of terrorism?

I hope that little voice in the back of my head is wrong. I hope we do pull together, just like that. But I'm also afraid that after a decade of battling with each other, we might have a hard time putting our internal struggles behind us as we try to finally stare down a common foe.

*****

I'm a sports guy. I'm supposed to be worried about sports right now. Instead, I'm worried about some of my fellow Americans' reactions to a week without sports.

I've had my fill of talk about "not giving into the terrorists" and the importance of playing our games, even as some 5,000 bodies lie beneath the rubble of the World Trade Center.
Do you really think Osama bin Laden is sitting in his bunker in Afghanistan, cackling to his posse that he prevented the Steelers and Browns from kicking off Sunday night? Would those people be any less dead if Tennessee and Florida had played Saturday?

Postponing the games was such a no-brainer. The country needed time to grieve, reflect and recover -- all of us, including athletes. Lest we forget, they're human beings too.
I know that we all grieve differently, and that sports can be a welcome distraction from our troubles. But if you can't see why it would be nothing short of crass to play games a mere four days after CNN was showing footage of people forced to choose between burning alive or tumbling 100 stories to their deaths, I can't help you. We speak a different language.

*****

People, this is a wake-up call like no other.

I don't claim to know where we go from here. Clearly we've got to lick our wounds, circle the wagons, and find a way to cut out the hearts of these bloodless terrorists. And we will.

But in the meantime, the best way I can think of to honor our fallen brothers and sisters is to do what they would love to have one more chance to do -- spend time with loved ones.

Put down your cell phone -- is that call more important than the people in the room with you? Slow down. Reflect on your life. Leave the world better than you found it. Take baby steps toward normalcy.

And don't forget to be peaceful.

Week 1: What we learned

Well, the first week of the NFL season is basically in the books, and here's what we learned:

1. The Rams are confounding. They've got the best RB in the NFC, one of the best QBs in the NFC and enough defensive talent to be respectable, yet they laid a giant egg in the opener, costing me my 5-team parlay. I'd rather go 4-for-5 than 1-for-5, but really, I'd rather go 5-for-5.

2. The NFC stinks. Conference champs can't move the ball or even hang onto the ball against the Chargers (and needed a bogus non-call at the goal line to keep the Bolts out of the end zone in the third quarter, or it would have been a blowout); conference runners-up get destroyed at Indy showing off an offensive approach with all the excitement of the 2006 Vikings; in the NFC East, the Eagles lose at Green Bay, the Skins need OT to beat a wretched Dolphins club at home, and the Cowboys and Giants prove they can't stop anybody. Meanwhile, the Pats and Colts obviously look like the class of the league and the Chargers showed their defense can get the job done too.

3. I don't think we learned anything about the Vikings. T-Jax was pretty inaccurate on some key throws, but he didn't make any major bone-headed plays and he was very mobile in the pocket. The defense looked great, but it was against Joey Harrington, and they can't count on two defensive TDs every week. Loved what I saw from Adrian Peterson, but if Chester Taylor can't stay healthy, that puts Peterson on the field more, which opens him to injury possibilities as well. The special teams were much better than in the past -- that's a very positive trend. But let's see what they do against the Lions before we start sucking each other's popsicles out at Winter Park.

4. FOX Sports has made a significant upgrade in its lower tier of announcers. Last year, the Vikes drew the D-team in Week 2 against Carolina, and the performance of one of the Baldingers (can't remember which one) gave me hives with his cliches and wanna-be-Madden commentary. But yesterday, the geniuses in LA paired Ron Pitts (reliably unremarkable, but remarkably reliable) with rookie analyst Tony Boselli. I didn't listen to the game as closely as I often do, but I did hear enough competence from Boselli to foster some hope for the future of the FOX D-team. For instance, as the Williams twins started dominating the line of scrimmage for the Vikings, Boselli pointed out that he didn't understand why Harrington would ever audible out of a pass to call a run up the middle. Later, they ran a graphic showing the Vikings' success running right, despite the Pro Bowl talent on the left side of their line. And even better, Boselli didn't shout, didn't say "Boom!" or "That's football!" or any other faux-folksy comments that ex-players often fall back on because Madden was so successful creating that character in the press box 20 years ago (and hasn't freshened it up a bit since then).

That's enough for now. But it's nice to learn something. Let's see if it translates to my parlay success next week.

The inaugural 5-teamer

It's become a tradition since I moved to Vegas two years ago: Because I work at home, I don't have an office pool to enter, so I form my own one-man office pool with a 5-team NFL parlay. It pays 23-to-1, so if I hit it once I'm ahead for the year. And each year, I've hit it exactly once.

Here's the magic formula (I hope) for Week 1:

Steelers -4.5 at Browns
Redskins -2.5 vs. Dolphins
Seahawks -6.5 vs. Bucs
Rams -0.5 vs. Panthers
Patriots/Jets over 40.5

Let's get it started...

Joe Henry -- Civilians

Never been much of a Joe Henry guy -- too rooted in the blues for my taste. But I have to admit, there's a lot to like from his latest effort, Civilians. He comes across like a tired soul, grateful for the end of the day, mustering the courage to face the next one but embracing life's struggles.

This album actually reminded me a lot of Dylan's "Time out of Mind," and Henry's vocal stylings are similar to the Bard of the Iron Range. If you're into downloading singles, check out "Time is a Lion" first, then "Civil War" or "Our Song." And if you dig those, get the whole thing. But make sure to read my review first.

NFL quick picks

Given that I live in a city where sports wagering is legal, I might wind up writing a bit about it on this blog. I've already had one request to post my famous five-team weekly NFL parlay, which I'll do tomorrow. In the meantime, here are my picks for the NFL season, just so I can look back in January and see how stupid I was.

NFC division winners: Eagles, Saints, Bears and Rams
NFC wild cards: Panthers, 49ers
NFC champion: Saints

AFC division winners: Patriots, Ravens, Colts and Chargers
AFC wild cards: Broncos, Bengals
AFC champion: Chargers

Super Bowl champion: Chargers

Yes, I know I'm putting a lot of faith in Norv Turner. I like to live dangerously.

One note on the Purple: I think they'll be historically bad. I have no faith in the TJ-Secret Squirrel combo, I think the defense will be worn down from having to deal with the offensive ineptitude, and their special teams have been nothing short of horrible in the preseason, reflecting a trend that emerged last year.

I hope I'm wrong, because I'm still a fan and because I still get paid to write about them by a couple of outlets, and it's always more fun to follow a winning team. But this thing smells like 4-12.

More football talk tomorrow.

This just in: Kids like candy

From the Department of the Ridiculously Obvious comes this headline from Yahoo:

"Rock stars more likely to die prematurely"

In related news, football fans like beer, Hummer drivers are compensating for a physical shortcoming, and the Republican party is filled with self-loathing, closeted queens.

Same as it ever was

What more can be said about another vomitous performance by the Golden Gopher football team? The Brewster Era kicked off with a showing that was positively Masonesque. Or Wackeresque. Or Guteyesque. In other words, completely representative of every slight that Gopher fans have endured over the past two decades.

I know what the spinmeisters (a.k.a. Sid, Mona, Maxie and the rest of the WCCO crew) are going to say -- they came out flat, fell behind 21-0, but after that they dominated the game and it's just a darn shame they dug themselves too big a hole to get out of. Heck, even the Strib story online tonight reflected that tone with a headline that read "Gophers' rally falls one point short."

Except that their rally didn't fall short. They took a 24-21 lead and couldn't hold it. Then, they took a 31-24 lead in OT and couldn't stop Bowling Green from scoring, or from completing their own rally with a 2-point conversion.

That's because when it came time to put the game away, the Gophers couldn't get it done. When the offense could have made it tougher on Bowling Green by scoring a touchdown on their last drive, they ended up with a field goal. Not that it would have mattered, probably, because every Gopher fan knows the Falcons would have scored a TD on their last drive had they needed it. They were going up against the Gophers' defense, after all, the defense that has patented the dropped interception, the fourth-down conversion, the close-but-not-quite-good-enough two-minute drill.

And we're left to read quotes like the following: "We needed to close it out. We needed to make one play on defense."

That was Brewster talking after the game, but it might as well have been Mason, or Wacker, or Gutekunst. But mostly Mason. I mean, if you didn't have fourth-quarter flashbacks to Texas Tech last year, Wisconsin the year before, Michigan in '03, Purdue in '01, Northwestern in '00 ... hell, pick a Big Ten team and I could probably find a year when the Gophers collapsed in the fourth quarter against them.

So, the Brewster Era has begun. Let's just hope we're not soon quoting another classic rock song: "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

Don't get fooled again, indeed.