Week 13: Clean, Old-Fashioned Hat

There is one week left of Northwestern football and the Wildcats are out of time.  Either beat a putrid Illinois team and qualify for the Wattle Farms Chicken Gizzard Remainder Bowl or fall apart, a hatless husk of a team forced to try to shamefully sneak into the Harvester Combine Injury Bowl with a 5-7 record, only allowed into postseason play by dint of their Academic Progress Rate like Dolph Lundgren sneaking into the lead of a 1990s action movie called Viscount Cop only after Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, Snipes, Willis, Gibson, and even Emilio Estevez have turned it down and it will only be released on special Bulgarian region DVD players.

What is the plot of my fictional Dolph Lundgren Viscount Cop move?  I'm 
glad you asked. Dolph Lundgren stars as a sheltered aristocrat brought up 
with courtly, nineteenth-century manners who joins the police to track down 
a tough, Habsburgh-themed motorcycle gang on the streets of New York City 
where only his knowledge of fencing and post-Metternich diplomacy can 
stop them while his wisecracking partner assimilates him in what the person
writing a Viscount Cop movie would imagine that hip, New York culture is

The 'Cats are reduced to this after a poor showing in Minnesota.  Clayton Thorson spent the entire game in a football version of the Running Man, as various Buzz Saws and Professors Sub-Zero sacked him in a house of bloodthirsty gopher worship.  Pat Fitzgerald decided to abandon his kneejerk football traditionalism and go for it on fourth down repeatedly.  These plays did not work, but we have possibly seen the emergence of a new Fitzgerald, one who goes for it on fourth down, one who occasionally takes it more than one game at a time, and one who joins with other Big Ten coaches in the Society of Slightly Less Punting and shows up with frosted buzzcut tips, BASE jumping anecdotes, and motorcycle jousting injuries.

Kirk Ferentz appears at a press conference to discuss going for it on fourth and two from Iowa's 
36 yardline.

Northwestern caps off a bizarre season.  After the loss to Western Michigan and the demoralizing collapse against Illinois State, the Wildcats seemed on target for a bleak, Purdue-esque tribute to football miserablism.  Instead, Northwestern rallied, developed a prolific and at times unstoppable offense centered on Austin Carr, and started winning games in the Big Ten/ They even managed to give probable division champions Ohio State and Wisconsin a hard time.  The Wildcats could be described as better than you think, although in the given "you" of college football fandom, the baseline seems to be successfully showing up to football games on time and calling at least one recognizable play.  Instead, the tough loss to Minnesota shattered that illusion and the Wildcats have returned to their traditional Thanksgiving position: desperately hoping to keep the Hat and qualify for Amalgamated Bleacher Tarp Bowl located in a floating island in the middle of the Great Lakes accessible only by garbage scow.  After the first two games, this represents a remarkable turnaround and a tribute to the team's resilience.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

The last time these two teams met in America's Greatest Sports Rivalry with bowl eligibility represented the apotheosis of the Northwestern-Illinois game.  Two 5-6 teams met with it all on the line: either a berth in a crappy bowl game against a Conference USA team or football oblivion with no bloated glut of bowl games and 5-7 APR bullshit to bail them out.  That maniac Tim Beck Man was still in charge of the Illini, and he took advantage of an injury to Northwestern's superstar NFL quarterback Trevor Siemian to lead Illinois to an unthinkable victory that still chills Chicago's Big Ten Bones.

(UPDATE: I forgot that last year's titanic Hat Contest involved a five-win Illinois team straining for bowl eligibility, although it is possible that the Illini could have rebranded the game the Victory Auto Wreckers Chicago's Big Ten Quasi-Bowl and then salvaged their season in the wilderness).

The Illini's first season under Lovie Smith has had growing pains.  Illinois's only Big Ten wins are Michigan State in full collapse and a Rutgers team that is offering the exact amount of resistance towards its conference foes as a henchman in the movie Commando.

This henchman meets one of the dozens of gruesome ends he and his comrades all played by 
the same stuntman will meet at the hand of John Matrix

Illinois currently nurses a quarterback controversy between Wes Lunt, who has been in Champaign-Urbana long enough to qualify for tenure, and Literally Jeff George Junior.  Northwestern is favored, at home, and will play in front of a sellout hat-thirsty crowd, many of whom will comes disguised as empty bleachers.  The status of Northwestern's superstar receiver (and Biletnikoff Award finalist) Austin Carr is up in the air; Carr left last week's came after a head-to-head shot ruled targeting and is listed as day to day with an upper-body injury, although Pat Fitzgerald would also describe the National Convention as voting to inflict an upper-body injury upon Louis XVI.

But throw out the record books.  It is Hat Week, it is Big Ten Network Regional Coverage, and nothing would give Lovie Smith and the probably two other Illinois players I can name off the top of my head a better Thanksgiving than to mercilessly yank the hat from the Wildcats' heads and drag it back to Champaign in a bus that Tim Beckman had specially designed to hold the Hat to transport it to and from Beckman family functions.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

It is a sad confession that the Hat Game has lost some its hat luster over the past couple of years.  This is the second consecutive year with a new Illini coach.  Lovie Smith has not had years to marinate in the spectacle of the Land of Lincoln Rivalry: the parades, the endless media attention, the jawing on the state-wide sports talk radio between fanbases whose trash-talking is based on the relative margin of defeat to Western Michigan. 
 
It is also the second year of the post-Beckman era, and if Illinois fans are not going to get on the internet and become as semi-ironically obsessed with the Hat as I am the least they can do is get rid of the frustratingly levelheaded Lovie Smith and hire another insane head coach who looks like he would never appear on television on Thanksgiving weekend unless he was a victim of a deep-fried turkey incident or giant inflatable pilgrim mishap with a pathological obsession with beating Northwestern.

Perhaps Lovie Smith, an icon of unflappable cool in his days with the Bears where he had to be transported around town in a Popemobile to prevent 300-pound mustache guys from screaming at him about Rex Grossman, will snap and become unhinged in the pressure of winning this great College Football Rivalry Game.  Maybe he will become the victim of an insane Face/Off incident where Beckman, now disguised as Smith, attempts to retake the Hat by force before escaping in a blimp while Smith has to feign ignorance of hamstring injuries in order to infiltrate Beckman's gang of rogue, fired football coaches.

Hat/Off

I hope that the rivalry has not already climaxed with a crappy bowl elimination game masterminded by the only coach on the face of the earth capable of caring enough about Northwestern to hate it. Maybe Lovie Smith will bring about an Illini football renaissance which, along with a Northwestern team that has remained semi-respectable in the Fitz era, will allow for a game with Big Ten West implications.  Failing that, the dream remains a game between the two teams when they are decent at the same time, which as far as I can tell has never happened.

Or maybe the Hat Rivalry just needs a bit more egregious dick kicking.

HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT HAT

It all comes down to this.  The pageantry, the rivalry, the all-engrossing spectacle enveloping Chicagoland as these two titans of the Big Ten clash for the 110th time at Ryan Field.  There's a bowl berth on the line for Northwestern.  There's an emergence of hope at stake for the Illini.  And most importantly, there's the Hat, carried off the field by the victorious team, with a giant metal tophat installed on the Art Institute lions and a mysterious light emanating from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library from a secret chamber that is said to be the source of the Hat's mysterious football powers that no one goes into for fear of resurrecting an angry Lincoln ghost that will rampage across the state, destroying all who tries to stop it with heretofore unknown rhetorical flourishes.

Northwestern and Illinois exist in a shared college football obscurity.  They are on national TV only when some Big Ten Football Brand school deigns to flatten them on the way to the Playoff or when they manage a rare upset.  It is safe to say that absolutely no one outside of these tiny, tarp-augmented fanbases cares about the Hat Game; the Big Ten Network could run last year's game at 11AM Saturday and have no one actually notice while changing only the graphics to say "Ryan Field" and dubbing over announcers saying "2015" in the same way that Bruce Willis miraculously discourses on melon farmers in network television airings of Die Hard movies.  But for Northwestern and Illinois fans, this dumb game and its ludicrous trophy that remains molded to a base instead of allowing the coach to wear it is ours.  It is my favorite sporting event of the year.  

-Hat- 

Baseball works blue

Spring training is in full swing, and if anything can salve the pain of yesterday's bludgeoning at the hands of Minnesota, it's another season of Cubs baseball. The picture from above is outdated, since it has a clean-shaven Zambrano, instead of one sporting the sort of mustache that invites a rake to the chest.

Thankfully, Zambrano is in Mesa, Arizona instead of the fictional island
of Val Verde with the same dozen mustachioed stuntmen who get killed by
Schwarzenegger over and over again in some sort of brutal samsara of
poor aim and bad editing. Or impaled on a pipe.

The Trib offers a decent and growing selection of Spring Training photos, although none have surfaced to rival last years' crop, such as this offering of Ryan Dempster and the now-departed Matt Murton.


Kilroy was here

BASE BALL

Baseball has a lot going for it as a game testing skill, mental fortitude, and the ability of really fat guys to excel as athletes, which really irritates Europeans. In his 1867 Haney's Base Ball Book of Reference, baseball statistics pioneer Henry Chadwick (an Englishman who came up with such innovations as the box score, as well as inventing statistics such as batting average and ERA, which are still used today by stone-age luddites who only watch baseball highlights on newsreels where the action is comically sped-up) wrote about the virtues of the game:

But one of the strongest aids to the popularity of Base Ball, lays in the fact that it is a game-- and about the only one by-the-way-- which can be countenanced and patronized by the fairer sex. American ladies have heretofore been shut out of all the pleasures incident to games, in which contests are entered upon for the palm of superiority in courage, activity, nerve, and judgment and manly skill, by the low character of the surroundings of most of the sports and pastimes that men indulge in. In Base Ball, however, we have an exception in favor of the ladies, and one too, that they have not been slow to avail themselves of, as the presence of the fair sex by hundreds at the leading contests of the past five or six seasons fully testifies. If our National Pastime had no other recommendation than this alone would suffice to give it a popularity no other recreation could reach or compete with, in the estimation of Americans.

Of course, baseball's genteel image has reversed since then. A special instruction from 1897, for example, seeks to curb the problem of players cursing out spectators, especially in the presence of said ladies.


The 1897 instructions. Click to
read the full document.

The instructions contain examples of the "brutal language" heard on the fin-de-siècle diamond such as "you cock-sucking son of a bitch," you prick eating bastard,"I'll make you suck my ass," and the nearly unbeatable "I fucked your mother, your sister, your wife," which features the sort of serial commas found mainly in translation books for phrases such as "which way to the hotel, the museum, the jai-alai match" (unless I am the only person who owns translation books that inexplicably and continuously refer to semi-disreputable gambling venues).


I'm sure that jai-alai is just waiting for
a Black Sox -style match-fixing scandal,
which would destroy the sport for
hundreds of bestubbled undershirt
enthusiasts

BARNSTORMING FOR GOD

Of course, baseball could also be a holy pursuit. In 1903, Benjamin Purnell formed the House of David commune in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Purnell encouraged a lifestyle dedicated to vegetarianism, celibacy, and the type of unrestrained hair growth that consistently torments Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. More importantly, the House of David formed a barnstorming baseball team in the 1920s, taking on semi-professional and even Negro League teams and drawing a following of people who wanted to gape at their unorthodox grooming habits.

The House of David's style of long hair and bushy beards is all the
more astounding as it predates the invention of vans

The House of David Museum provides numerous fascinating photos of the team, as well as a video of their famous "pepper game" that involved throwing the ball around which is one step below Ricky Vaughn in defying the some fields' repressive "no pepper" policies. The commune also served as the site of an amusement park, featuring gardens, zoos, and a miniature train.

Everybody rides the trains: marketer's observation or
threat backed by the full-bearded vengeance of
bat-wielding cultists?

The Museum website, however, glosses over the 1926 arrest of Purnell on charges of fraud and indecency. Purnell demanded that members hand their possessions over to him, and he apparently had trouble following his own calls for celibacy, especially with the commune's younger members. As Philip Jenkins has written in Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and Religions in American Society (part of an astoundingly prolific catalogue), Purnell lived in "palatial splendor while his subjects starved." In 1927, the "lascivious prophet," as Jenkins calls him, faced charges of statutory rape involving perhaps twenty members of the commune in what was referred to at the time as the "trial of the century," which should be illegal to do in 1927 as all trials of the century should be labeled retroactively at midnight of the end of the century by a panel of third-rate comedians awkwardly reading stiff one-liners off of a teleprompter.

YOUNG PEOPLE...WITH FACES

The House of David is, of course, best memorialized by drummer Buddy Rich, whose legendary ravings towards his evidently subpar backing band have been immortalized on the internet. He invokes the House in a heated exchange with a bearded trombonist:

Two fuckin' weeks to make up your mind whether you want a beard or you want a job. I'll not have this trouble with this band. This is not the goddamn House of David fuckin' baseball team. This is the Buddy Rich Band; young people...with faces! No more fuckin' beards. That's out! If you decide to do it, you're through. Right now! This is the last time I make this announcement. No more fucking beards.

He continues:

You keep your fuckin' mouth shut, get the fuckin' beard off, or get off the band, right now. Now what do you think of that? Now that's a definite suggestion. When you go to work tonight, if I catch the fuckin' beard on you, i'll throw you off the fuckin' bandstand, O.K.?

I got nothin' for you. I got a right hand to your
fuckin' brain if you want it.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But not at BYCTOM because this post was nothing but vulgar language
And statutory rape trials.