Keith7
09-07-2004, 07:49 PM
I know alot of people were intrested in this, and i found this on espn.com.. so i figured i would share this with people who may not check espn.com every hour........
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There's a top-of-show tease in this somewhere, I know there is:
Bob Ladouceur had better be sweating out his job stability after De La Salle lost their first game in 12 years.
"De La Salle Loses: Has Bob Ladouceur Lost His Edge?"
"151-1: Someone Has To Pay."
"Is It Time For Bill Parcells?"
Yes, this is how it works in Your America. The De La Salle High School football team lost its first game since the First Bush Administration, a 39-20 defeat at the richly capable hands of Bellevue (Wash.) High in Seattle, and because this is Short-Attention Span America, the logical next question must therefore be who replaces Ladouceur as head coach.
I mean, he's now lost 15 games in 16 years, and one of his last one. Does he really think we're going to tolerate this kind of persistently shabby result?
God, it makes your blood boil just to think about it.
After all, the U.S. Olympic basketball team just shamed its citizens, its league and David Stern's ongoing plan for global domination by winning the bronze medal in Athens. And America has decided to hate that team and all its individual components with a fine blue-hot hatred.
The Yankees have been in freefall all summer, going from first by a lot to first by a weekend, and George Steinbrenner is ready for some October blood-letting.
Tiger Woods is No. 2, and is as close to Jack Nicklaus' majors record as he was three years ago. That's not gonna move product out of the Nike outlets very well now, is it Skippy?
And Tyrone Willingham is killing the University of Notre Dame singlehandedly, demanding the sternest administrative measures.
Now, we know that this is how the game is played in America. Successful streaks happen all the time, and are properly celebrated as the absolute zenith of human endeavor, reducing the moon landing, the polio cure and the development of the Internet as the mildly intriguing conversation starters they are. Won, and the world wins with you, Jack.
Streaks end all the time, too, because athletes get old, coaches get even more self-involved than they were when they started, and owners get heat from their investors to spend a little money on the investors and a little less on the general manager's talent fetishes. Stop winning, and the world lines up to put a steel-capped boot in your nethers.
It's bloodsport, only without quite as much blood as some people would hope. The end of a streak means that the vengeful customers and dead-air-must-be-filled-at-the-top-of-our-lungs media require a head on a stick (a delectable ballpark treat at only $7.50, $11 with the souvenir stick) must be mollified.
So why, given this cultural imperative, should the high school guys be sliced off a hunk of bread? I mean, you cannot just turn mindless knee-jerk psychoses on and off just because the objects of your affection-turned-scorn happen to be below the legal drinking age?
Thus, it's Bob Ladouceur's turn in the barrel. Yeah, yeah, his winning percentage of .950 is pure Globetrotter stuff, but it's also 0-1 since Saturday.
Yes, he had a heart attack this past spring, but there were newspaper people who thought Joe Montana should have timed his wife's second pregnancy better, so how hard is it to stretch the bounds of sense and propriety one more foot or so?
Yes, his team returned only three starters, a sure sign of incipient instability, but the fact remains he has lost 15 games with a Bush in the White House, and Larry Coker has only lost three, so why is it so unreasonable to suggest (in proper "insiders say" form) that Coker would leave the University of Miami to fix the De La Salle program before it's too late?
Hey, if that's the way the expectation game is played, then that's the way the expectation game is played.
After all, nearly everyone who follows high school football, give or take about 99.999999983 percent, has come to know and believe in De La Salle as the double platinum standard in football. These people require an explanation beyond Ladouceur's, "Bellevue just shoved it down our throats," "They put on a real good game plan," and "If our level of play helped Bellevue prepare and raise their plan, that's great. I think there should be lots of kings of the mountain, not just one."
Communist.
This kind of sensible, rational perspective is diametrically opposed to what we have been raised on for the past 20 years or so, and as anyone who listens to sports talk radio will tell you, it is way better to curse the darkness than to light a candle. That's why they gave us darkness in the first place, right?
So that's the deal. De La Salle's 12-year run of unremitting joy and glory is over, and now they're just like the rest of us -- week-to-week. Now you can honor the accomplishment and marvel at the work it took to achieve it, or you can do what we do with every other athlete and every other team.
You can start scaping goats and measuring pikes for heads. It is our way.
Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com
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There's a top-of-show tease in this somewhere, I know there is:
Bob Ladouceur had better be sweating out his job stability after De La Salle lost their first game in 12 years.
"De La Salle Loses: Has Bob Ladouceur Lost His Edge?"
"151-1: Someone Has To Pay."
"Is It Time For Bill Parcells?"
Yes, this is how it works in Your America. The De La Salle High School football team lost its first game since the First Bush Administration, a 39-20 defeat at the richly capable hands of Bellevue (Wash.) High in Seattle, and because this is Short-Attention Span America, the logical next question must therefore be who replaces Ladouceur as head coach.
I mean, he's now lost 15 games in 16 years, and one of his last one. Does he really think we're going to tolerate this kind of persistently shabby result?
God, it makes your blood boil just to think about it.
After all, the U.S. Olympic basketball team just shamed its citizens, its league and David Stern's ongoing plan for global domination by winning the bronze medal in Athens. And America has decided to hate that team and all its individual components with a fine blue-hot hatred.
The Yankees have been in freefall all summer, going from first by a lot to first by a weekend, and George Steinbrenner is ready for some October blood-letting.
Tiger Woods is No. 2, and is as close to Jack Nicklaus' majors record as he was three years ago. That's not gonna move product out of the Nike outlets very well now, is it Skippy?
And Tyrone Willingham is killing the University of Notre Dame singlehandedly, demanding the sternest administrative measures.
Now, we know that this is how the game is played in America. Successful streaks happen all the time, and are properly celebrated as the absolute zenith of human endeavor, reducing the moon landing, the polio cure and the development of the Internet as the mildly intriguing conversation starters they are. Won, and the world wins with you, Jack.
Streaks end all the time, too, because athletes get old, coaches get even more self-involved than they were when they started, and owners get heat from their investors to spend a little money on the investors and a little less on the general manager's talent fetishes. Stop winning, and the world lines up to put a steel-capped boot in your nethers.
It's bloodsport, only without quite as much blood as some people would hope. The end of a streak means that the vengeful customers and dead-air-must-be-filled-at-the-top-of-our-lungs media require a head on a stick (a delectable ballpark treat at only $7.50, $11 with the souvenir stick) must be mollified.
So why, given this cultural imperative, should the high school guys be sliced off a hunk of bread? I mean, you cannot just turn mindless knee-jerk psychoses on and off just because the objects of your affection-turned-scorn happen to be below the legal drinking age?
Thus, it's Bob Ladouceur's turn in the barrel. Yeah, yeah, his winning percentage of .950 is pure Globetrotter stuff, but it's also 0-1 since Saturday.
Yes, he had a heart attack this past spring, but there were newspaper people who thought Joe Montana should have timed his wife's second pregnancy better, so how hard is it to stretch the bounds of sense and propriety one more foot or so?
Yes, his team returned only three starters, a sure sign of incipient instability, but the fact remains he has lost 15 games with a Bush in the White House, and Larry Coker has only lost three, so why is it so unreasonable to suggest (in proper "insiders say" form) that Coker would leave the University of Miami to fix the De La Salle program before it's too late?
Hey, if that's the way the expectation game is played, then that's the way the expectation game is played.
After all, nearly everyone who follows high school football, give or take about 99.999999983 percent, has come to know and believe in De La Salle as the double platinum standard in football. These people require an explanation beyond Ladouceur's, "Bellevue just shoved it down our throats," "They put on a real good game plan," and "If our level of play helped Bellevue prepare and raise their plan, that's great. I think there should be lots of kings of the mountain, not just one."
Communist.
This kind of sensible, rational perspective is diametrically opposed to what we have been raised on for the past 20 years or so, and as anyone who listens to sports talk radio will tell you, it is way better to curse the darkness than to light a candle. That's why they gave us darkness in the first place, right?
So that's the deal. De La Salle's 12-year run of unremitting joy and glory is over, and now they're just like the rest of us -- week-to-week. Now you can honor the accomplishment and marvel at the work it took to achieve it, or you can do what we do with every other athlete and every other team.
You can start scaping goats and measuring pikes for heads. It is our way.
Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com