Enjoy holidays -- one halftime at a time

During this season of giving and reflection and renewal, a man's thoughts naturally turn to football.

'Tis the season for men wearing plastic reindeer antlers and a fine dusting of Doritos crumbs to sprawl on sofas, basking in the TV glow while our plucky families celebrate all around us. It's a season of hope and joy, anticipation and disappointment, the thrill of victory and the agony of sweatsock feet. It's the time of year when grown men ask Santa to please, please grant one wish: a first-and-goal on the two with a minute to go.

While others sing carols and make resolutions and gobble leftovers, we men display as much holiday energy as your average potted poinsettia. Lumps of coal we are, as we watch round-the-clock games, sometimes two or three at once, moving nothing but our eyes and our overdeveloped remote control thumbs.

It's not that we're lazy. We're pouring all our available resources into rooting for our favorite teams, occasionally even jumping up from the La-Z-Boy to shout, "Yes!" and grab another egg nog. Our teams can't do it without us. We're the Twelfth Man, pouring spiritual energy into the television sets of America.

Our families, on the other hand, seem able to soldier on with the decorating and the turkey-basting and the party-throwing without us. Or, with the limited participation that we can offer during halftimes.

The football leagues and the TV networks pander to sports junkies by televising the important games during the holiday season, when the biggest audience is likely to be off work and lying in front of a big-screen TV, naked except for boxers decorated with candy canes and evergreens, eating day-old guacamole directly off its fingers.

This year, men will be distracted from their loved ones by an estimated 137 college bowl games. Plus the NFL playoffs, which take us well into the new year, finally culminating in the Super Bowl, which I believe is sometime in July.

While the rest of the world makes merry and bright, we football fans relish tackles and sacks and crackback blocks. We wallow in the violence and the spirited competition and the mud and the blood and the beer. Nothing says "Happy Holidays" like a crushing blindside tackle in the secondary.

Our preoccupation with football is partly a coping mechanism, a way to deal with the bustle and glow of the holiday season. All that danged JOY. Brrr. It's also a primitive urge. It's winter, so we eat lots of big meals and hibernate in our dark dens, waking only when the crowd noise alerts us to a big play, just in time to watch the slow-motion replay.

We know our football fixation sometimes stresses our spouses, who are forced to use food aromas and actual beer to lure us off the couch long enough to, say, open our Christmas gifts. Our lethargy sets a bad example for our children. Our children. You remember the children. The ones who run screaming in front of the TV screen once in a while? Them.

Our families should not despair. Eventually, the football season will end. Spring will arrive, and we men will rise up from our sofas and shake the crumbs from our pelts and emerge from our caves. We'll stop obsessing on point-spreads and statistics and fantasy leagues and and bad calls and boneheaded coaching. We'll once again gather our families in the warm embrace of our full attention.

Until March Madness.
　

A good day

Here's the definition of a good day for a football fan: Both of my favorite NFL teams won, I've eaten barbecue, chocolate and popcorn (so far), and I'm still in my pajamas as dinnertime approaches.

My AFC team, the mighty Pittsburgh Steelers, beat the Dallas Cowboys with a last-minute interception, causing me to scream and bounce on the couch. My NFC team, the resurgent San Francisco 49ers, upset the NY Jets.

It's funny how little it takes to make a grown man happy.

Gold genes

I saw an America Online headline that said: "Olympic Gold Medalist Pregnant." I thought, man, that Michael Phelps can do anything.

But no, the pregnant superstar is beach volleyball champ Kerri Walsh. She announced that she's expecting her first child, and that the baby likely was conceived at the Beijing Olympics. Walsh's husband of three years, Casey Jennings, is also a beach volleyball player.

I'm already getting money together to bet on this kid in the 2024 Olympics.

Full story here.

Close game

Police in Orchard Park, NY, responded to reports of a disturbance in a stadium bathroom during last Sunday's NFL game between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills. They found a couple having sex in one of the stalls.

The couple was arrested and charged with a variety of offenses for their "inappropriate behavior in public," police said.

Come on, people. Wait until halftime like everyone else.

Full story here.

Sports etiquette

The Rules: You can get drunk at a tailgate party outside of a college football stadium. You can fill the bed of your truck with water and use it as a pool. You can even splash around naked in the truck/pool. But it's bad manners to object when the campus police tell you to cut it out.

It's really, really bad manners to wham your knee into the groin of the arresting officer. Twice.

A 21-year-old man learned these etiquette lessons last weekend. He now faces charges for disorderly conduct, assault on an officer and resisting arrest. Full story here.

Extra points: The fan apparently was excited about the game, which was between football powerhouses Massachusetts and Delaware.

Raiders' revolving door

Guess it was inevitable, but Al "Spawn of Satan" Davis has fired Oakland Raiders coach Lane Kiffin.

Kiffin's record over less than two seasons was a piss-poor 5-15, but I had hopes the Raiders would turn it around behind young quarterback JaMarcus Russell and rookie running back Darren McFadden (who arrived from the Univ. of Arkansas -- Go Hogs!). Unfortunately, the Raiders keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as they say, with fourth-quarter meltdowns.

Kiffin, the youngest coach in the NFL at 31, will no doubt scurry back to the college ranks where he won't have to worry so much about the consequences of flapping his young lips. According to this story, Davis took more exception to what Kiffin said than to how the team performed.

As long as Davis is there, any coach willing to take the Raiders top job should have his head examined.

Ladders, adders and TV cameras

"Extreme" sports are all the rage these days, feeding an ever-growing hunger for fast-paced action, sudden violence and crass "reality."

In case you've been living in a nice safe bomb shelter for the past decade, let me explain: "Extreme" sports (also known as X-sports, X-treme sports, X-tra Crispy sports and various other near-names) are those televised athletic "events" that involve elements of danger.

For example, a show called something like "Real Triple-X-Treme Real Sports Challenge of the All-Stars" might feature real juvenile delinquents on skateboards flying high off a plywood "half-pipe" at breathtaking speeds, performing various twirling moves in the air and almost landing in a pit of irritable vipers before being yanked to safety by a bungee cord attached to their feet. The show's shouted advertising slogan will be something like: "WHO'll still be standing at the END?"

This kind of programming is irresistible to a large, mouth-breathing audience composed entirely of those who wear their baseball caps backward. Since that's the perfect market for Zima, motor oil and other such products, these shows have proven to be commercial gold mines.

Naturally, such a restless audience grows increasingly desensitized to fake suspense and "real" mayhem, which means the shows must keep ratcheting up the level of risk so the goobers will keep tuning in. Before long, extreme sports will feature athletes who, at breathtaking speed, fashion their own bungee cords out of irritable vipers before leaping directly into a pit of bubbling lava.

Extreme sports is changing the whole definition of sports. Many of us remember when a "game" usually involved something called a "ball" and was played by professional athletes with recognizable names. Extreme sports feature athletes you've never heard of doing dangerous, unseemly things with strange combinations of equipment, such as a downhill snowboard race through a forest fire with each participant simultaneously lifting weights and playing the nose flute, all while being pursued by angry National Rifle Association members on snowmobiles.

So far, network producers have overlooked one area of real everyday risk-taking that should be considered an extreme sport -- homeownership.

American homeowners regularly take our lives in our hands, working around the house. We use dangerous, unfamiliar tools to attempt repairs we're not qualified to make. We use whirring blades and whipping plastic line to trim our lawns. We perform complicated aerial maneuvers involving aluminum ladders and overhead power lines.

What's riskier than mowing a yard dotted with hidden metal sprinkler heads? Is anything more dangerous than a power saw in the hands of a klutz? What's more thrilling than a fat man climbing a rickety ladder while wearing sandals and trying not to spill his beer?

Such everyday events may seem catastrophic in real life, responsible for property damage, divorce and overcrowded emergency rooms, but let's face it: They'd make good television.

All it takes is a little organization and a video crew, and we could take TV by storm. We could call the show "The Real Extreme All-Star Homeowners Challenge." Plenty of homeowners would volunteer to play, particularly if free beer is involved. We'd stage the events in the participants' own homes, recording their every move with handheld video cameras. Their critical neighbors would eagerly volunteer to be judges.

Participants would race the clock while facing extreme challenges, such as an overflowing toilet with rusty parts flooding a carpeted bathroom. Each barefoot homeowner would be armed with only a monkey wrench and an electric hair dryer. Imagine the possibilities!

Sure, much of the work could be boring, but careful editing would result in clip after clip of homeowners skinning their knuckles and tripping over live wires and doing backflips off parapets while holding TV antennas. That, folks, is entertainment. If you don't believe it, ask your neighbors.

If such basic competition fails to keep our show's audience loyal, we can always elevate the risk and add to the gear involved. Imagine high-speed ladder-climbing by cigar-smoking men carrying buckets of combustible roofing tar and wearing heavy tool belts and funny hats.

Now that's extreme. If that's still not enough, we can always throw in a few vipers. Particularly if free beer is involved.

Basketball jones

Can they still call it March Madness when the tournament spills over into April? Will we recover from our madness on Tuesday, before the semifinals, etc? Will we watch the finals in a state of perfect sanity?

I'd answer those questions and more, but I'm busy watching televised games.

Pass the cheese dip.