Enemies List Vol. 3: This Bud’s For You

Welcome back, NESWers, to your weekly burst of rancor from your old pal DMtShooter, moonlighting from Five Tool Tool. Every week on Monday, the most hateful day of the week, you can chew on some tasty dislike; we call it the Enemies List. And with that, let’s go straight to the hate.

5) Bud Adams. Forget, for a moment, that Adams is a carpetbagging bastard that took football away from Houston for the usual stadium cash grab that, in a better society, would be cured by Mob, Pitchfork and Torch. Forget also that he made his money in natural gas, which means his fortune probably came from the blood of uncountable innocents. (I kid, Bud, I kid! Your industry is completely devoid of contract killings and rampant human greed!)

No, instead, let’s just take his last week in microcosm. Last week as his Titans were continuing their unexpected rise back towards .500 with a late game beatdown of the Bills, good ol’ Bud was seen on camera giving the Double Italians to Bills Fan from his skybox. He was fined a fairly absurd $250,000 by the No Fun League for it.

This column actually has no problem with that; if we owned a team, I’m pretty sure I’d be doing this to Cowboy Fan and worse. But here’s the part that got Bud on the list.

Today in Buffalo, the Titans bought the back page of the local fishwrap sports section to wish the Bills good luck for the rest of the year.

Um, WTF, Bud? What do you care how the Bills do the rest of the year?

Stick to your guns, Pudley; this donation to the Buffalo newspaper does nothing other than to show that someone in your PR department is as soft as the food you gum. If you are so interested in not seeming like a freaky angry old man, find the Bills’ favorite charity — every team has one — and pay them, rather than the newspaper. Or, better yet, just stay in an owner’s box with tinted windows. Owners should be neither seen nor heard. Especially, you know, carpet bagging thief owners, especially when they wear throwback jerseys from the town they burned.

4) The entire Cincinnati Bengals team. I started this defense in two different fantasy leagues, and while it was clear they weren’t going to be as up for it as the Steelers game last week, come on. They were going against Bruce Freaking Gradkowski. They had tape of the Eagles going into Oakland this year and gagging it up, so they had to know that an upset was possible. They were the consensus #2 defense in fantasy projections this week. They weren’t going to blow this. And what do they do?

Up seven with a minute to go, the new-look Bungles allow a fourth and ten conversion. To Bruce Freaking Gradkowski. After a spike to stop the clock, the next gift is a 29-yard game tying touchdown to Louis Murphy, who had no catches before this moment. With 41 seconds left in the game, gift number three is to fumble the freaking kickoff to blow even the chance at overtime. And that’s your ballgame, as even the Raiders are good enough to convert a chip shot figgie for the win.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people? Was prosperity just not to your liking? Teams have gone weeks without giving up 10 points to the Raiders, let alone in a minute, but you people do it just when I need you.

And, finally… is Larry Johnson’s Loser Aura just that powerful? Because if it is, we need to get this man to a more hateful team.

watch?v=9qRwp5V_Wgw&feature=player_embedded3) Nate Robinson. You probably missed this, seeing how it happened in a Friday night NBA game in November, which is a fine place to put people in the witness protection program. Anyway, with half a second left in the first quarter in a game against New Jersey, the Knicks inbounded uncontested to Robinson, who is employed as a back-up instant offense guard, about 60 feet from the Nets basket. Rather than taking a heave at the opposing team’s basket, or just dribbling until the horn sounds, Robinson decided to turn and fire AT HIS OWN BASKET.

Well, what the hell. It was closer.

Of course, he drained it, but as it happened just after the buzzer sounds, it didn’t count for the Nets. But it did earn Robinson a benching for the rest of the game, and one more note in the historical record (along with his play for the entire Isiah Thomas era, and his “title” in the All-Star Game dunk contest, which might have been the worst thing in NBA history) that he’s the biggest chucklehead in the Association. And That’s Saying Something.

2) Bob Costas. As a relatively educated and over-analytical NFL fan, I want to like NBC’s Sunday Night Cavalcade Of Footballery. (Hell, I’m even of the right political laundry to enjoy the stylings of Keith Olbermann.) As a Shetland Human, I’m even inclined to think kindly of Costas, at least most days. If it weren’t for the HD examination of Faith Hill’s cooter and many other grating moments, SNF would be fine, if a little annoying, because it should be on Monday night, with the weak sauce ESPN game being relegated to the less useful time slot.

But tonight, on a day whre teams that won the toss in overtime went .500, Costas had to go all high (ok, not very high) and mighty over how dumb the NFL was for allowing the current overtime system to continue. I even agree with the sentiment, but would it be so hard to point out a new system? Here’s one I just pulled out of my ass, and I’m not even employed for this sort of thing…

Fiteen minute period. Not sudden death; it’s just as if you’ve got a new fourth quarter going on. One new timeout, booth reviews for all replays, no challenges. If it’s still tied after the fifth quarter, do it again for a sixth, with the only difference being that the team that lost the coin toss in the fifth quarter has the call in the sixth.

See what I’ve done there? I’ve made every fantasy football honk go weak in the knees at Real Extra Numbers. I’ve kept every gambler in the game, as even a double-digit favorite has a shot at making the cover. I’ve taken one of the big advantages that fantasy basketball has — super bonus overtime periods, with the potential for crazy cool amounts of extra time — and given it back to football. And I’ve ended any of the nonsense about how one team never touched the ball in overtime, along with the last play posturing and positioning for chip shot field goals.

But that’s not what Costas did during SNF. What he did, instead, was blow the dust off a moldy bitchfest, and made people want to keep things just the way they are, just to stick it to the smug little puke. That’s first-class Enemy work there, Bobby. Golf clap.

1) Bill Simmons. On my home blog, I refer to Simmy Boy as Bad Tooth, which refers to a great old Bill Hicks routine about watching the show “COPS.” Hicks compares the viewing of naked state power to poking at a bad tooth with your tongue; it hurts, but you just can’t stop doing it. That’s what reading Simmons is like to me.

Here’s a guy with obvious comedic and analytical gifts. He also has every blogger’s dream job, if not their dream editors. He’s frequently aces on the NBA, which is a sport that I love, but am wildly frustrated by, mostly because my laundry (the Sixers) have not been able to do anything but trudge in the 40 to 45 win zone.

So what does he do? More or less personify why the nation has moved from hating New York to hating New England.

NESW doesn’t have enough pixels on how, exactly, Simmons has become the most exasperating voice in Blogfrica. But the core point is this: his insistence that Boston Pain is more relevant than Your Laundry’s Pain, because they are used to Better Things. It’s an essentially Un-American argument for old money, sports dynasties, zero change and no parity… in other words, all of the things that someone who was brought up in a plus market with established teams would always argue for.

So, fans of any franchise that didn’t win during Simmy Boy’s formative years? Your fandom isn’t relevant. Fans of teams that went up against the Boston teams? Inconsequential; consider, for one instance, how clutch it was for the Colts defense to make that 4th and 2 stop, not that a single media outlet gave credit to that unit. Irritated that the takeaway from everything he writes is how much smarter he is than everyone else? Get over it. (And, of course, constantly question whether you are doing the same thing.)

But since he’s still got gifts, access, and the greatest location in sports writing (seriously, I just don’t remember to read Joe Posnanski or Drew Magary as often, just because of the URLs involved), I’ll still be reading (well, OK, skimming) most of what goes up. Ow. Impacted. Ow. Ow. Owww…. oh, and he’s got the #1 book in the country right now, so I’m sure his ego and bad habits aren’t going to get a lot worse. OWWW….

Fellow haters, that’s all I got. See you next week for some more hate…