Volume 6, Number 4  Friday, February 4, 2005

Super Random

T.O., or not T.O., that is the question:
Whether 'tis wiser for the man to risk
The slings and arrows of outrageous cornerbacks,
Or to take refuge amidst a sea of fans,
And by resting, anger them. To play: to risk --
No more; and by a risk to say we might end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That fans are heir to with each loss. To play, to risk --
To risk, perchance to dream -- ay, there's the rub,
For in that risk of play what dreams may come true
When we have shuffled off this monkey on our backs
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long losing;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The opponent's wrong, the proud man's contumely --

Ah, hell, I can't do it -- frankly, I'm undone by contumely every time, and don't even get me started on the bare bodkin -- I just can't bring myself to go there. But reading those lines, Shakespeare had to be an Eagles fan, didn't he?

If you haven't figured out what's going on here, my hometown Philadelphia Eagles are playing in the Super Bowl Sunday. That T.O. fella Hamlet's talking about is Terrell Owens, the loudmouthed wide receiver for the aforementioned Eagles who severely sprained his ankle on December 19; the status of his ankle and whether or not he'll play Sunday, and play effectively, has been the subject of more debate about a single body part since ... wait, why am I telling you this? If you don't know all this already, the rest of what's coming isn't going to interest you. And if you do know all this already ... well, let's then let's get on with it. Let's get random, Super-Bowl style ...

If the T.O.-or-not-T.O. story has been so overdone you've been tempted to turn off the PTI (and I know that in this space I have declared that The West Wing was the best show on television, but I'm changing my story -- Pardon The Interruption is the best show on television. Seriously. It's 30 minutes of pure bliss, punctuated by Guinness commercials, every single day), surely your heart has been warmed by the Jeff Thomason story (which, if you capitalized it, and put it in italics, as in, The Jeff Thomason Story, sounds kind of like a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, and in fact may be one by the time you read this). Eagles tight end Chad Lewis managed to get himself a Lisfranc sprain in his foot when he scored his second of two touchdowns in the NFC Championship (a Lisfranc sprain, named for Jacque Lisfranc de St. Martin, a surgeon in Napoleon's army, is much more common among equestrians -- who get this particular booboo from getting their feet caught in the stirrup when they're thrown from a horse -- than football players, but, randomly enough, Lewis is the third Eagle in the Andy Reid era, joining Duce Staley and Brian Dawkins, to suffer from one of these sprains. Must be something in the Gatorade.), which will keep him out of the Super Bowl. With Lewis out, the Eagles needed another tight end to fill in, so with Lewis' blessing, Reid called on Jeff Thomason. Thomason is an assistant project manager with Toll Brothers, a construction company in New Jersey. Of course, he's not just any assistant project manager -- he did play NFL tight end for 10 years, three of them with the Eagles, and he played in two Super Bowls for the Packers, so when he gets in the game Sunday, it won't be as if they'd called me up and asked me to take a few snaps at tight end. Still, though, this has got to be the best guy-with-an-average-job-gets-tabbed-to-play-for-the-Eagles-in-the-big-game story since The Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon ...

And yes, if you were wondering, that was the second reference I have made to The Garbage Picking Field Goal Kicking Philadelphia Phenomenon in the last 22 days ...

A few of my favorite headlines from the Philadelphia papers the last week or so: "Eagles green is the only color in Philadelphia" (white people and black people agree -- yay Eagles!); "Immigrants have rooting interest" (plus, you can root for the Eagles even if you weren't born in South Philly -- yay!); "Yo, who you calling a loser now?" (Philadelphia has a self-esteem problem -- boo!); "Women are lovin' Eagles pink!"' (ladies in the Philadelphia area are "scooping up pink Eagles hats and babydoll T's faster than manufacturers can make them" -- yay!); "Invoking a higher authority at life's goalposts" (Philly Bishop Alden A. Gaines says it's okay to pray for victory in the Super Bowl -- hallelujah!); "Super Bowl parade an issue for schools" (if the Eagles win Sunday, nobody's coming to school on Monday -- yay!); "Class will do its rooting in Latin" (sixth-grade Latin class learns to sing "Fly, Eagles, Fly" in Latin -- yay in Latin!). Yes, these are all actual headlines ...

Speaking of headlines, here's another: "Jacksonville worries about too many Eagles fans." Now, one could make the argument that Philadelphia fans have something of an unsavory reputation. We may have earned this because we: a) booed Santa Claus (this was many, many years ago), b) booed arguably the greatest third baseman of all time, Phillies Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt (also many years ago), and c) threw batteries at J.D. Drew (he deserved it). The upside of this, of course, is that when I walk down the street in my Donovan McNabb jersey, most people give me a pretty wide berth. The downside is that the good people of Jacksonville are scared. This would include Laurie-Ellen Smith, the public-information officer for the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. She asked Frank Fitzpatrick of the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, "Is it true that a lot of fans from Philadelphia might just drive down here for the heck of it even if they don't have a room or a ticket?" He told her yes. She responded, "Oh, my." But Fitzpatrick put things in perspective: "Despite her question, Smith said Jacksonville police were not overly concerned about the football fans. There are, of course, more serious issues in this post-9/11 world than young men vomiting" ...

At the intersection of technology and insanity lies the Eagles fan with ProTools. Take three drunken voicemails, some Eagles play-by-play, the theme from Rocky, "Eye of the Tiger," some Boz Scaggs, and a slightly obsessed Eagles fan, toss them all together, and you get the NFC 2K5 Eagles Mix. This must be heard to be fully appreciated ...

Speaking of Eagles songs, if you want to learn all the words to "Fly, Eagles, Fly" (and possibly memorize them) before Sunday, who better to learn them from than the Birds themselves? Also must be heard (and seen) to be fully appreciated ...

And, still speaking of song, a story in the Philadelphia Daily News reported on Monday that "At the Conservative Synagogue Har Zion in Penn Valley, toward the conclusion of services Saturday morning, the cantor chanted in Hebrew -- and in correct tune -- 'Fly Eagles Fly.'" Are you starting to get an appreciation for how people in Philadelphia feel about the Eagles? ...

And, speaking of headlines again, on Tuesday, the day after T.O.'s first practice, the Philadelphia Daily News ran a story about T.O.'s ankle under the headline "T.O.'s leg speaks." The byline read, "By T.O.'s Fibula." I am not making this up ...

I used to be addicted to solitaire, before I quit cold turkey a few years back. Now my preferred procrastination drug of choice is ESPN.com. I can waste hours there. I'm actually not too bad during the summer -- if you were to equate this to a smoking habit, I'm a few-cigarettes-a-day kind of guy. Once football season begins, though, I'm up to a pack a day. And since the Eagles won the NFC championship, and now there are endless stories about them all over ESPN.com, not to mention all over the rest of the web, I'm like a crack addict. Win or lose, I think I'm going to have to check into some sort of halfway house on Monday ...

I have one, final, random thought for you, and it goes a little something like this:

E! A! G! L! E! S! EAGLES! ...