WTF?

[lederhosen]

Via Jesus' General, this story:

A five-game suspension hardly seems adequate punishment for a private high school six-man league football coach who brought in college-age players during an October game without telling anyone.

Herc Palmquist, head administrator and a coach at Texas Christian School near Houston, not only misled his opponents, he lied to his own team telling them the game was cancelled because of team injuries and they had the night off, the Houston Chronicle reported...

The ruse was uncovered when the parent of a former Texas Christian player found a score on the Internet for the game he thought had been cancelled and contacted the Web master...

Palmquist's squad of guys with tattoos and full beards weren't even good players. They lost 28-18 to the younger team.

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Welcome to Texas: the coach will get stomped not because he cheated, but because he dared malign the name of the Great God Fuh-boh. (You think I'm kidding: it's literally dangerous merely to state that you have no interest in catching the local game in some areas.)

[lederhosen.livejournal.com]

Sadly, Australia's about as footy-mad as Texas. One of my weekly entertainments at school was reading the enthusiastic writeups of the week's matches on the front page of the newsletter, and comparing them to the raw scores on the back. "Strong tackling held our defensive line intact" turned out to mean "we lost 22-0" and "it was a close game throughout" = "we lost 27 to 3".

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

The moment you get crosses burned in your front yard for daring to write about your football antipathy, let me know, because at that moment Australia will have Become As Bad As Texas. (It was only a small cross, made from dumped gasoline on the front lawn, but it taught me exactly how popular my high school newspaper columns were, and I went on that delusion as a wannabe muckraker for another nineteen years.)

[drzero.livejournal.com]

I remember a comedy sketch (from Fast Forward I think) where someone translated the football cliches in a post-game interview. "We're showing some real consistency now" became "We've won one game in a row now". Love that double speak.

[drzero.livejournal.com]

My apologies if this sounds like a stupid question, but do american football fans really get that unruly? I read an article about this recently, the author really had a go in particular at Philedelphia Jets fans and I wasn't sure if he had an axe to grind or things were really as bad as he said.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Well, it depends upon where you are in the States. We generally don't get anything like English football hooligans, but certain locales have a tendency to concentrate a near-religious obsession with American football and a decided lack of social skills. One of the worst locales is North Texas, particularly around Dallas: after all, this is a city where people tell the joke "Why does Texas Stadium have a hole in the roof? It's so God can watch His team play"...and in Dallas, it isn't a joke. (Philadelphia fans are just as bad as Dallas Cowboy fans, and I do not exaggerate: seeing as how Philly has a lot in common with Dallas, in that General Philip Sheridan comment of "If I owned Texas and Hell, I'd rent out Texas and live in Hell" sort of way, there's not a whole lot else to focus upon. And don't get me going about Green Bay Packers obsession: Wisconsin is the place you move to if McMurdo Sound is too warm for you, which is why I left my parents to their Green Bay games and moved back to Dallas.)