Le Tour de Fitz

Coach Fitz is set to be enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame this weekend, capping off his remarkable run as the heart and soul of the defense for the 15-1 1995 and 1996 Rose and Citrus Bowl teams that took Northwestern from the dregs of the college football landscape and put them on the map in much the same way that Peter the Great's Russia rose from a comical European losing streak and defeated Sweden in the Great Northern War.

Sweden's Charles XII conducted the Great
Northern War in an intensely vengeful, personal
way, sacrificing advantages in an attempt to raise
the volume on the lamentations of his enemies'
women after being enraged by Northern Alliance
diplomacy focusing on resolving the question
"why the long face?"

The enshrinement takes place in South Bend Indiana, where fans can take advantage of an entire weekend of activities including a celebrity golf tournament and ladies' fashion show and brunch, all listed on a web page designed to make readers wish they never see the word "enshrinement" or any other variation of "enshrine" again. The schedule of events also includes an Enshrinement Corn Hole Tournament hosted by Indy Custom Cornhole and the Young Professionals Network.

A young Fitz extends his fist over a vanquished
opponent.

Fitz was the first two-time winner of the Bednarik and Nagurski trophies in 1995 and 1996. He'll be joined by charismatic television personalities Troy Aikman and Lou Holtz.

Lou Holz emphasizes a point in the ESPN studios, a lazy, meanspirited, and
obvious joke from your friends right here at Bring Your Champions, They're
Our Meat

LE TOUR

We're right in the middle of the Tour de France, one of the world's greatest feats of endurance by a group of men who are three mysterious vials away from turning into comic book superhenchmen.

Bane from Batman and Robin prepares to climb the
Ballon d'Alsace, right after setting up a bunch of bombs
in the Gotham Observatory. My favorite thing about
that part of the movie is that every time he places a bomb,
he says the word "bomb." Somebody wrote that,
hopefully not the person who I imagine was thrown into
a locked, stuffy trailer and ordered not to leave until he
or she came up with at least four dozen terrible ice puns
as part of the settlement of a mob-related blood debt. Of
course nothing in that movie can ever top this
classic batman moment.

The hand-wringing over cheating and drug use at the Tour has always been overblown, mainly because the Tour seemed to have been designed with cheating, doping, and any other sort of Wacky Races-style skulduggery clearly in mind. In 1904, the second Tour de France saw the disqualification of its top four riders including inaugural Tour winner Maurice Garin. Two of these men were banned for life: Lucien Pothier for drafting behind a car, and Chevalier of Moulins for hitching a ride in one. Garin received a two-year ban for blackmailing a sponsor for food.

These anecdotes come from the excellent Blazing Saddles: The Cruel and Unusual History of the Tour de France by Matt Rendell, which provides a short history of each of the Tour's races through 2007 with a properly reverent tone:

Whatever else the Tour was-- and it would become many things--it was also an undeclared congress of Europe's hardest scrota. Maurice Garin, at five foot three, a pocket-sized Charles Bronson look alike with a handlebar moustache, might have had the hardest-wearing crotch of all.

Maurice Garin, winner of the inaugural 1903 Tour de
France and possessor of a Matt Rendell-approved crotch

In French Revolutions: Cycling the Tour de France, Tim Moore, a British writer and fan of brief cycling jaunts in the park, sets off to do the Tour de France himself by following the race route and allowing himself approximately twice as much time as the pros. Quickly, he succumbs to the suffering: downing hay fever pills for a pick-me-up, cutting corners, and ruthlessly drafting behind an erstwhile friend, exploiting his lack of knowledge of bicycling physics. Yet, despite his manifold sufferings, Moore had it easy compared to the early tour riders.

Early Tour riders used heavy, cumbersome bicycles on dirt paths without gears or even freewheels, which had been banned by the evidently sadistic tour founder Henri Desgrange (this webpage helpfully lists technological innovations in tour bikes along with innovations in drugs-- for example 1910 saw the development of derailleur gears and the use of chloroform by cyclists and dastardly counts). Rendell notes that cyclists at the time faced other hazards, such as tacks thrown by the opposition and, in the famous 1904 race, angry mobs that would show up and beat the cyclists with sticks until being dispersed by Desgrange firing a gun into the air. The hazards did not end with the race; 1905 Tour winner Louis Trousselier was immediately seized by military police (he was due to start his duty sometime around stage three), which soured his successful fending off of the astoundingly-named Hyppolite Aucouturier.

Hyppolite Aucouturier lost the race, but got
his revenge by absconding with the tour's
hamburger supply

Rapscallionship, scoundrality, and underhandery are built into the very fabric of the tour, and not just its early years. In 1935, for example, Julien Moineau lured the peloton into a free beer oasis, sneaking ahead while they guzzled away at their depridations.

Of course, the early Tour is fantastic for another reason: it may be, with the potential exception of triangular weight lifting, the most mustachioed sport in modern history. For ten years, every winner of the tour sported an epic mustache, from the tiny Garin, to the gigantic François Faber and the Lucien Petit-Bretons and René Pottiers in between. The streak became broken when a Belgian, Philippe Thys, won the race clean shaven, and the sport would never recover.

Notes:

1. Henri Cornet (top, second from left) was awarded the Tour in 1904 after the
disqualification of the top four finishers: Garin (top, first from left), Pothier
(not pictured), and Aucouturier all had mustaches; the other finisher, Chevalier
left behind no known first name nor picture, but we can assume that his mustache
was so grand that he used it to float on air currents above his opponents or braided
it into a crude whipping device like a Ben Hur charioteer.

2. Trousellier (third from left) eerily resembles a cross between a young Stalin
and Punch-Out villain Von Kaiser

3. Pottier, (fourth from left) pioneered the racing bonnet

4. Lucien Petit-Breton(top right), officially the first back-to-back tour winner
due to Garin's disqualification, appears to be sponsored by chicken consortium.
I prefer to think that it's from an individual famer, who stenciled the exact
silhouette of a particular chicken onto Petit-Breton's jersey.

5. 1912 winner Odile Defraye's light-colored mustache combined with low-res
photographs found on the internet and in the Rendell book have cast some
doubts on his mustache credentials, but it seems present enough to warrant
consideration

6. Thys's 1913 and 1914 wins herald the end of the golden age of cycling.
The 1914 tour began on the day of Franz Ferdiand's assassination and
marked the end of the tour until 1919.

So for those of you planning on cycling to South Bend to catch an enshrinement and a cornholing, I recommend you do it the proper way: hopped up on strychnine and baguettes on a fixed gear bike with a completely unironic mustache and a canvas sack full of tacks for any Notre Dame fans behind you. And in doing so, you may find out once and for all who is more grizzled.

Spring Pro Football

Northwestern has extended Coach Fitz through 2015 in an effort to extend the fist pump gap against Big Ten opponents. The deal is a no-brainer; Northwestern fans cannot think of anyone else in the country they want in charge of the program, and Fitzgerald says he does not want to go anywhere. That Wildcat fans believe him when most college football coaches are a combination of treacherous snake oil salesman, glad-handing, corrupt good ol' boy state congressperson, and poet/warlord speaks volumes to what he means to the program. Things did get a bit convoluted late last year with swirling Fitz to Notre Dame rumors no doubt cooked up by the Sun-Times and the sort of conniving papist agents that Dan Brown really wants to exist, but those have dissipated.

Coach Fitz gets his ceaseless energy from NU fan enthusiasm and by traveling
around the country decapitating lesser coaches who stand in his way

In other Northwestern news, three former NU players have been drafted by the new USFL league tentatively scheduled to begin play in February 2010 and fold sometime in March. C.J. Bachér has been drafted by the as-yet-unnamed New York team, and Prince Kwateng was chosen by San Francisco. Tim McGarigle has evidently turned in his badge to St. Louis after growing disgusted with the due process involved with their special teams and decided to tackle ball carriers himself after the brutal stiff-arming of his partner just one week from retirement, but failing that, he has been drafted by the Orlando USFL team.

"You're a loose cannon, McGarigle"

Look also for the return of Dennis Green, who coached the Wildcats in the 1980s and has evidently been punching at the microphone to return to coaching. Other notable players include Michigan's Chris Perry, Wisconsin's Brooks Bollinger, and someone named "Fred Bledsoe."

SPRING PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUES

There are few things more prone to a tragic romantic failure than an attempt to start an alternative spring football league. These operations fail for a number of reasons: for one, the sports landscape becomes crowded in the spring, with basketball and hockey playoff races heating up, March Madness, and the childlike joy of the first images of corpulent relief pitchers waddling around some complex in Florida or Arizona practicing a nineteenth century stretching regimen followed by the arrival of new players and the first sweet crack of the bat heralding the beginning of baseball season that will inevitably end with disappointment or searing heartbreak because your team hasn't won anything since the Kaiser menaced Europe and Yugoslavia was born and collapsed and never will for some mystifying cosmic reason.

Planning the next professional spring football league

The other reason is because these spring leagues are inevitably bereft of solid franchise ownership and constantly plagued by teams moving, bad management, and comically bad ideas. For example, the World Football League, as shoddy a fly-by-night sports organization as any that had ever existed, where players feared visits by both the Turk and the repo man, nearly implemented a special color-coded system for players' pants based on position including featuring stars on the pants for quarterbacks. The World Football League did become a pioneer in ridiculous team names including the Birmingham Vulcans, the Memphis Southmen, and the Shreveport Steamer, which will escape further comment.

The original USFL lasted from 1983-1985 and managed to lose $163 million. Few teams lasted from season to season, and at one point Arizona and Chicago somehow traded franchises. According to the widipedia page, the San Antonio Gunslingers simply stopped paying players, some of whom "were forced to move in with sympathetic fans." The UFL did attract NFL-caliber talent including MVPs Jim Kelly and Herschel Walker as well as the venerable Doug Flutie, but, much like the World Football League, it could not remain stable enough get a grip on fans and ended up inevitably pursuing an anti-trust suit against the NFL.

The most spectacular bust in recent memory is Vince McMahon's XFL, that sought to bring the understated sophistication of professional wrestling broadcasts to football.

Vince McMahon

On paper, the XFL had many advantages: it owned all of the franchises, preventing the squirrelly management that hurt the WFL and USFL, it secured the participation of Dick Butkus, snagging him from the set of "Hang Time," and it promised the type of tawdry gimmicks that inevitably come from using the letter X to stand for "extreme."

The X-treme phenomenon taken well past its logical limit. My
review of xXx: State of the Union can be summed up by the
sentence "Xibit has lines."

The XFL did debut to massive hype and made a number of small contributions to sporting lore: Rod Smart's inexplicably brilliant "He Hate Me" jersey, the return of Rashaan Salaam, the questions raised about the duties and responsibilities of a sitting Minnesota governor, and the possibility that Maniax might be the most inane name of any sports team ever, including the Paraguayan soccer team named after Rutherford B. Hayes.

Even a spring league officially sanctioned by the NFL was destined for failure. Granted, NFL Europa was designed to foster interest in football in Europe as well as develop talent, but American fans largely dismissed it as a curious punchline, and as its existence facilitated a chain of events that led to Jonathan Quinn starting games for the Chicago Bears, I am forced to agree.

NFL Europa employed some minor stylistic differences from NFL
football to make it more palatable in Europe

The financial chaos of the WFL and USFL are actually seductive; that is, owners think that if they can get a business model that does not involve moving teams in the manner of military commanders pushing tanks around those giant table maps with those special tank pushing croupier devices, actually pay players to play, and maintain stable leadership, the leagues could succeed. Instead, the new USFL should consider whether there is a natural saturation point in interest in football and if it is possible to create fan interest in teams after they have already invested so much attention in college football and the NFL. It's impossible to see any spring league rising above the level of niche league beyond appealing to absolute football fanatics and fans of novelty sports leagues.

The odds are against the success of the new USFL, but it is in the hands of Commissioner Michael Huyghue, who boasts an mystifyingly unpronounceable name, but also an uncanny ability to manipulate the shape of his head.

These are two images of Huyghue taken from the USFL site, from his blog index
and then an actual post. I refuse to support the USFL until it resolves this
crucial issue of the exact grade of Mr. Huyghue's head pointiness

BASEBALL AND GOGGLES

Earlier this evening, Cubs closer Kevin Gregg served up a walk-off two run homer after a fantastic shot by Micah Hoffpauir off of Joel Zumaya put the Cubs ahead. Gregg has an above-average ERA+ of 110, a fairly average WHIP of 1.33, and 11 saves, which conventionally means that he's not a terrible pitcher (although Fangraphs calculates a more damning Fielder Independent Pitching stat of 4.59 on an ERA scale). A rational person might argue that it is his tendency to walk batters and occasionally melt down that creates an anti-Gregg furor among Cubs fans; the fact that he replaced Kerry Wood does not hurt although Wood's recent performance has mollified those feelings. Instead, I argue that the invective against Gregg has as much to do with his stupid goggles as his occasional incompetence on the mound.

The Kevin Gregg experience

In fact, I posit that goggled relief pitchers inspire a unique ire in baseball. In other sports, especially basketball, Rec Specs added a certain charm: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Horace Grant, BYCTOM favorite Antoine "Big Dog, damn your eyes Glen Robinson" Carr all were accepted with their goggles. Basketball fans even embrace those face protector masks that Rip Hamilton wore that make it look like they are the only things preventing them from launching into a Lecter-esque cannibal frenzy.

Goggled relief pitchers, however, tend to have sordid reputations-- Francisco Rodriguez, whose wild gesticulations recall the spasmodic reaction to an unexpected encounter with a Portuguese Man o'war or the celebration of a lesser Gramatica, Eric Gagné, the portly department store Santa implicated in the Mitchell Report for all but writing "steroids" on a check memo, and Kyle Farnsworth, baseball's greatest brawling pitcher who started wearing goggles most likely as a way to conceal a shiv and is guaranteed a job in the majors for fear of a Shawn Chacon incident that would turn an executive into a crater and a damp wingtip.

The Legion of Goggled Relievers

By donning the goggles, Kevin Gregg willingly joins this evil legion. I imagine that they gather in a bullpen in a hollowed out volcano, coming up with plots to blackmail the UN into forcing umpires to enforce a looser strike zone, owners to increase the dimensions of their parks, and someone else to give them a card promising a lifetime supply of Chicken McNuggets. Unfortunately, their plan, developed by Farnsworth, involves writing the words "Space Lazer" on a giant sheet of cardboard covered in tissue paper and festive streamers. Gagné prepares the "Good afternoon, gentlemen" speech in front a rasterized portrait of Ricky Vaughn, while Rodriguez practices a series of enraged fistpumps to show the depth of his seriousness and Kevin Gregg, I'd imagine, merely runs back and forth after accidentally setting himself on fire.

The Legion of Goggled Receivers is less
effective than other master criminal legion
organizations

The new USFL presumably has a more competent organizational structure behind it than a set of rogue goggled relief pitchers. It, however, faces a long struggle to become a relevant sports institution, stepping over the bloated corpses of myriad failed opportunities to extend the football cash cow into the spring. Even if it does not work out, perhaps it can keep Bachér, Kwateng, and McGarigle in the football limelight long enough for them to catch on with an NFL team. In the meantime, the USFL owners will leave Commissioner Huyghue tilting at the windmills, dreaming the impossible dream, and somehow adjusting his head.

Sports Update for a Sports Website

It's a slow time for Northwestern football news. If you are really desperate, you can follow Coach Fitz on Twitter, although it doesn't give me the Coach Fitz news I really need such as him getting fired up about an optimal oat to water ratio in a bowl of instant oatmeal or whether or not he chest-bumps his barber after another successful crew cut.

Coach Fitz successfully comes in under the
140-character limit

In other NU football news, The Bears signed linebacker Pisa Tinoisamoa. While this is potentially good news for the Bears' linebacker depth, Tinoisamoa will probably get the starting nod over NU alumn Nick Roach who will compete with Hunter Hillenmeyer for a roster spot. Meanwhile, Tyrell Sutton, John Gill, and Eric Peterman are all competing to secure roster spots for NFL teams.

Peterman tries on a Bears helmet while Sutton dons the hated green
and gold

CHICAGO CUBS MELTDOWN UPDATE PART 1

The Cubs are just starting to crawl out of a disastrous eight-game slide where the entire team has been beset by injuries and the complete inability to hit. Fortunately, the Cubs have responded not with complacency or quiet determination, but demonstrative tantrums and the occasionally brouhaha with umpires. Milton Bradley has been, as expected, a clubhouse leader in arguing balls and strikes and getting ejected and suspended. In this article, Bradley claims that the umpires have it out for him, summing the umps' dastardly plan up as "let's try to ruin Milton Bradley." By dipping into the third person when describing a league-wide umpire vendetta, Bradley has gained BYCTOM Most Favored Cub status. The pitching staff, however, has gone above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to mixing it up with umpires and punching inanimate objects.

The stage was already set for the Cubs' Memorial Day Massacre with the MLB-wide mandated wearing of red hats and the fact that this actually happened:

The presence of Mr. T ensured the prediction
of pain for the Cubs and their gatorade
dispenser

Mr. T actually joined the broadcast booth for the bottom of the seventh inning (MLB.TV users are not only encouraged but divinely mandated to watch the broadcast available here) during which Mr. T rambled on about being a Dean's List scholar at Prairie View A&M, growled at the Pirates, displayed a surprising amount of expertise on the Cubs' disabled list, shockingly declined to use the phrase "I pity the fool" for upwards of ten minutes, and, most surprisingly, laughed, a hoarse throaty chuckle reminiscent of Muttley from "Wacky Races" and a completely unexpected development from a man who spent his entire career, choosing only to express the emotion "I ain't gettin' on no plane, sucka."

Mr. T displays his range

Earlier in the game, Ryan Dempster erupted after lasting only 4 innings and giving up six earned runs and promptly pummeled the Gatorade dispenser with his left non-pitching hand in a savvy veteran move. In the fifth, Ted Lilly came sprinting out of the dugout like Mel Gibson going over the top at the end of Gallipoli in order to protest Bob Davidson's strike zone, needing to be restrained by two Cubs coaches. This was perhaps most surprising because Lilly usually has the placid composure and painted-on eyebrows of a bored action figure.

Firebrand Theodore Roosevelt Lilly in action

The Cubs ended up losing 10-8 to the Pirates, cementing an eight game losing streak. In response, the Trib wonders: is it time for Lou Piniella to do something drastic? The article recalls his great dirt and hat kicking exhibition from 2007. There are few things in baseball more satisfying than a Lou Piniella ejection largely because of his build resembling a spindly man that is inexplicably carrying a fetal hippopotamus to term, and the sight of a manager getting in an umps' face is always hilarious because he tends to jerk his head in a way that normal people never do, giving the effect of the slightly sped-up footage of old newsreels.

CHICAGO CUBS MELTDOWN UPDATE PART 2

On Wednesday, a wild pitch from Carlos Zambrano got away from Geovany Soto. Zambrano rushed to cover the plate and seemed to get Nyjer Morgan speeding in from third apparently on the way to check his birth certificate and confirm that he's actually named "Nyjer Morgan." Then, fireworks. You have all probably seen the video by now, but here's the blow-by-blow as part of a BYCTOM official Zambrano meltdown recap:

Zambrano immediately rushes over to the ump to protest the call in a dignified manner by standing less than three inches from the ump's face and showering him with a mixture of spittle, sunflower seed casings, and miscellaneous eyebrow detritus. The umpire takes in the tirade for upwards of seven seconds and then, after making some sort of barely perceptible incidental contact, tosses Zambrano with the "you're outta here" gesture. Zambrano whirls around. "No YOU'RE out of here," yells Zambrano who then throws the ump out; this gesture is unsuccessful, largely because of a little-known baseball rule that rampaging players cannot under any circumstances eject umpires from games. If Zambrano was a detective, he would have at this point turned in his badge and service revolver in order to get to the bottom of the case by playing by his own rules because he'll be damned if lets another killer slip through the system because his unorthodox and violent investigative techniques caused the case to get thrown out of court. Piniella gets between the ump and Zambrano, who is visibly restrained by Lou's superhuman belly, a force so powerful that he occasionally lends it out to third world nations in order to quell corruption riots. Zambrano picks up the ball and hurls it towards the bleachers, displaying his warning track power, and then stalks over towards the dugout, escorted by an embarrassed Larry Rothschild who has the look of someone either escorting a screaming child or an agitated senile relative from a place of business. Zambrano rips off his glove and spikes it into the ground before alighting into the dugout. Immediately upon entering the dugout steps, he grabs a bat, which means that at some point before entering the dugout, probably just after throwing his glove but possibly from the very minute he got tossed from the game, Zambrano had made the premeditated decision to whale on the Gatorade dispenser in the a display of berserker rage. He hits the machine a couple of times then appears to either stumble or be carried by his angry momentum down a series of stairs towards the clubhouse. Undaunted, he regains his footing and finishes the dispenser off, as Rothschild half-heartedly attempts to stop him while cautiously deciding to not get in between a bat-wielding Zambrano and a gatorade-dispensing product. Zambrano exits.

This is not the first time Zambrano's temper has flared, which is why instead of the insipid and uninspired "Big Z" nickname (he's big and his last name starts with Z, how appropriate), he should be known as "El Bombástico" or at the very least, "El Toro," which is apparently what he calls himself in calmer moments. The Trib's Paul Sullivan, their Cubs beat writer, prepared a surprisingly amusing Five Greatest Big Z Explosions, including him throwing at the contemptible Cardinal Jim Edmonds twice ("This is not a baby's game. This is a man's game," yells Zambrano while wearing his pajama-like baseball uniform), destroying water coolers by hoisting them over his head and throwing them like Donkey Kong as his teammates adopt the blank stares into the distance favored by figures on Soviet socialist-realist posters, and memorably beating up catcher Michael Barrett in the dugout and in the clubhouse. I had actually forgotten about the Michael Barrett incident, but Barrett had the distinction of having a Forrest Gump-like presence in Major League face punching incidents over his career.

Michael Barrett's career makes me really disappointed that I used up a Kumite joke
in the last post

ENTER THE KUMITE

The movie Bloodsport starring Jean-Claude van Damme, that bearded guy from Revenge of the Nerds, and that enormous Chinese guy with pecs the size of dinner plates (Bolo Yeong, who evidently has played characters named Thunder, Moon, and Ice) is both likely to be on Spike TV sometime within the next 3 hours and based on the supposed true story of Frank Dux (as was The Quest, another Kumite movie starring Van Damme that was basically the same as Bloodsport, except that Van Damme for some reason spent the beginning of the movie as some sort of French clown) .

Bloodsport: practically a documentary

Dux claimed that he entered the Kumite, a secret no-holds-barred fighting tournament sometime in the late 1970s and won it. He is a controversial figure in the martial arts world, claiming to be a Kumite champ, an expert in ninjitsu, and a CIA operative.

Frank Dux, self-proclaimed superspy
and Van Damme muse, phrases that often
appear on my personal resumé.

Since the 1980s, however, a number of publications have questioned the veracity of his claims, setting off a long chain of questions about his age, military record, and ability to break through bulletproof glass with his bare hands. One of the most bizarre accusations came from the L.A. Times, which alleged that he had purchased his Kumite trophy from a trophy shop in Southern California. The allegations go back and forth between Dux and his detractors; Dux is evidently not shy about suing people or writing interminable rebuttals to websites questioning or supporting his claims and the amount of nonsense generated by a shady character like Dux, and the martial arts enthusiast/soldier of fortune types that go after him is grimly tiresome enough to take the fun out of a guy living out some sort of Ninja Gaiden fantasy. All that matters is that hopefully, somewhere there is a secret underground fighting tournament where people shake money, and some guy adopts a monkey fighting style, and Chong Li has secreted some secret powder in his shorts that allows him to blind an opponent but does absolutely no harm to his sweaty genitals.

And if somewhere there is a Kumite involving gatorade dispensers, the CIA needs to get on the Cubs' bullpen phone immediately.