The Cure for the Post-Holiday Blues

It turns out that there is a cure for that nasty little depression that usually settles over your head right after the holidays.  You know how it goes.  You have all of that happiness, manufactured or not, and activity between the end of October and the end of December.  Those last three months of the year always seem to fly by so quickly.  You have parties to prepare for.  You have to make travel plans.  You have to buy gifts.  You get drunk.  You stagger home.  You take time off from work and work has actual time scheduled to be off.  It’s great and then January comes and there’s nothing. 

Seriously, the human race needs to come up with some kind of additional holiday between January and April.  Even when April comes, and with it Easter, it isn’t really the same as those other holidays.  In my family Easter was not a big deal.  We didn’t get gifts on Easter.  You generally don’t even get day off for Easter.  Getting worked up about a giant rabbit hiding hard-boiled eggs just wasn’t the same as anxiously awaiting presents and a fat man in a red suit. 

So, really, there isn’t much to look forward to until the next October.  I guess some people look forward to Memorial Day and Independence Day and maybe Labor Day but they aren’t real holidays.  At least you get a day off for Independence Day, though, which is nice.  Really, when it comes to holidays Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years really have the monopoly on things. 

So, there is that kind of funk that falls over people when January comes around.  It almost can’t be helped.  Then, I watched football this weekend and, suddenly, I discovered that there was a cure.  There is a way to beat that depression and funk and feel really good about the remainder of the winter.  So, without further ado, here is my cure. 

Step One:  Get yourself and NFL franchise.  Now, this will likely involve billions of dollars.  Technically step one would be the acquisition of billions upon billions of dollars.  It would also help to build some kind of facility for this team to play in.  I would suggest spending those billions on some sort of stadium.  If you have tremendous persuasive powers you might be able to convince the NFL that your team can play at a local college or high school field until the billions for the stadium can be built. 

I know what you are saying.  Sure, it may be very difficult for the NFL to consider putting an NFL franchise in ever town and city in the country.  I never said this was an easy plan.  Of course considering how difficult it will be to raise the billions of dollars by the time you have done that your particular town may be as big as a city and convincing the NFL might be much easier.  If need be, co-opt a much larger city in relative proximity to the town you happen to live in.  

Do whatever you need to do just get a franchise.  Bribe and borrow and steal and perhaps grant sexual favors you may not even like but all of it will be worth it in the end. 

Step Two:  Get yourself some players.  This too will take and accumulation of billions of dollars.  To get the truly good players you need to offer them multi-million dollar contracts.  I suggest you go the George Steinbrenner route and gather as much money as you can and use it to buy any and every player who is any good.  Before you know it the Bemidji Bobcats will have the best quarterback, running-backs, defensive players, coaches and kickers the world has ever seen. 

Step Three:  If you have not already sold tickets I would suggest selling some.  You need to recoup those losses from the billions of dollars you have spent on acquiring a team, building a stadium and getting all of the best players and coaches.  I suggest you build a stadium that has about eight hundred luxury boxes and about twelve regular seats.  A lot of teams make most of their money by renting out these luxury suites to the point that most stadiums really look like some kind of reversed aquariums or something.   

Step Four:  Now your team needs to play really well.  This may be the most difficult part and it may not always work out the way you think.  The Chicago Bears played a very up and down season.  At times they played brilliantly like the last team that won it all.  At other times Rex Grossman looked as lost as a child in a department store who has lost his mommy.  You half-expected to see him on the sidelines holding Lovie Smith’s hand with a thumb in his mouth hand snot running down his nose.  Still, they have managed to end up at this late point in the season still playing.  The key, then, is to keep winning enough key games to eventually get to Step Five. 

Step Five:  Win the divisions until you make it to the Super Bowl.  This should be done shortly after the first of the year, right around playoff time.  You will soon find yourself so overjoyed and happy that the depression of the upcoming Valentines Day won’t even bother you.  If you are lucky enough to have a spouse who enjoys football then you might even be lucky enough to have a spouse who forgets all about Valentines Day as well.   

That’s really all you need to do.  I have to tell you, from personal experience, it really does make all of the doldrums of work and gray skies and cold wind disappear.  The weatherman may be predicting eighteen feet of snow will fall in one giant lump and cover your entire city and you fill find you do not care.  Newscasters will start wearing your team’s jerseys and joking with each other on television. 

Of course, the only thing that could make this better would be to take weasely, annoying, shrimpy, make-up-wearing, smirking, know-it-all, talentless newspaper sports columnists who constantly predict doom and gloom and losses for your home town team and run them out of town nude but covered with tar and feathers.  If this particular sports columnist happens to work for the Chicago Sun-Times, well, all the better.  Of course, you should try not to let the fact that the smirking dwarf is now walking around acting like he predicted the team would win all along or using the term “we” as if the entire city agreed with his miserable doom and gloom predictions all along. 

Now, granted, you can’t have everything.  Those meteors never fall out of the sky and hit the people you want them to when you ask them to, do they?  No, you should really just be glad your team is in the Super Bowl.  Just having that, and only that, can really make a lot of other annoying things seem a whole lot more positive and easier to live with.   

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.

Someone Else’s Epic

Have you ever had the feeling you were just a bit character or had been cast in some way in someone else’s epic story?  Have you ever felt that you have been cast in a role that you would not normally want to have in this particular story?  For example, have you ever felt like maybe you are being cast as the villain in some kind of epic story?  Well, I am not entirely sure I have felt that way personally but I think the city of
Chicago and the Chicago Bears team may very much feel that way when it comes to this week’s game. 

Of course, the Bears are poised to make their second trip to the Super Bowl.  People in other cities may not realize just how spoiled they are.  If you live anywhere in the nebulous region commonly referred to as
New England you probably don’t think of yourself as spoiled.  Yet, every year, no matter how poorly the Patriots have played throughout the regular season that team manages to get into the playoffs.  The city of
Pittsburgh has numerous Super Bowl visits and victories under its belt. 
San Francisco sure looks terrible now but it wasn’t all that long ago that the 49ers were winning everything and anything all the time.  Sports fans have very short memories. 

In
Chicago we have the opposite thing happening, at least when it comes to the Bears.  In this town if you happen to have once been affiliated in any way with the Chicago Bears of 1985 you do not have to buy a drink in any bar in town provided you let everyone know you had some affiliation with the ’85 Bears.  This was the team that should have been the start of a dynasty before the team made a bunch of dunder-headed moves that broke up that team and prevented it from going on to win countless championships.  Instead we had one glorious, delirious season where the Bears managed to lose only one game and then soundly trounced those aforementioned Patriots in the Super Bowl.  This is a collective great memory for the city because we only have one football team so that means it is the one sports thing pretty much everyone in the city can agree on. 

See, for me the White Sox World Series Championship eclipses the Bears championship because I am more of a baseball fan than I am a football fan.  However, the city’s loyalty with baseball is notoriously divided between the Sox and the Cubs and that divide gets deeper every season.  So, while for me that win was greater and sweeter, for much of this city it only added more bitterness to the baseball season. 

So, right now the entire city is poised to play a game that might take them to the Super Bowl.  Even if we don’t win the Super Bowl the fact that we would be there again would be pretty sweet.  I have only seen the Bears play in one Super Bowl in my life and that was the year they won.  You see, we don’t make it into the playoffs every season and we definitely don’t make it into the championship game very often.  

In any other year this would be the huge story.  The Bears in ’85 were national celebrities for a while.  They were such a mish-mosh of talent.  We had the “Fridge” for crying out loud.  My family went on a vacation to Hawaii the year following the win and everyone, when they found out my family was from
Chicago, wanted to know if I knew the Fridge.  So, the Bears of ’85 had an endearing quality that kind of made them the darlings for just a little while.   

This year, however, the team they are facing is the New Orleans Saints.  Of course we all know what happened to New
Orleans a couple of years ago.  This has become a magical epic year for the Saints.  They came roaring back into
New Orleans and they have a superstar in Reggie Bush and they have managed to dazzle the NFL all season long.  They are explosive.  They are winning.  They are a powerful team.  Considering the heartbreak and death and destruction that has befallen
New Orleans in the recent past they are bringing a simple but amazing spark of hope to a city that needs it. 

You can see what I mean about being cast in someone else’s epic story, can’t you? 

Suddenly it seems wrong to want the Bears to win.  Sure, I am going to be rooting for Urlacher to smash into Reggie Bush and strip the ball from him.  I want the Bears’ defense to wake up from its recent stupor to smash the hell out of the Saints offense.  However, I feel bad wanting that.  It seems as if the Bears are the villains in this story. 

It’s all you hear about now.  How great it is that the Saints are winning, you hear the sportscasters say.  You hear them talk about how wonderful it would be for the city of
New Orleans if the Saints were to make it to the Super Bowl.  They have overcome such adversity and such a horrible season last year.  They have defied every expectation and climbed mountain after mountain to finally be one small step from the pinnacle.  They only have to get past evil
Chicago,  home of Al Capone, John Wayne Gacy and Richard Speck, to achieve what will be a glorious moment for a city in such pain. 

Only an ogre would not want that scenario to happen right?  You don’t sit through all fifty-three hours of the “Lord of the Rings” movies hoping that the hobbits all end up in the fiery pits of Mordor at the end, do you?  Well, maybe you do, and I could understand that, but most people don’t.  Generally you root for the underdog hero in the epic tale and hope he or she comes through the winner at the end.  Everyone likes the underdog.  I love the underdog.  I even loved the cartoon “Underdog.” 

It’s just that, most of the time, Chicago IS the underdog when it comes to sports.  In fact, in some ways, we still are.  People wonder why Chicagoans often have this chip on their shoulders, especially when it comes to their sports teams.  Well, you try living in a place known as the “

Second
City” all of your life and not have some issues with your ego.  We are a fly-over city.  People all over the world think of Chicago as being a frozen wasteland much in the same way people in Chicago think
Green Bay is all year around.  I have had people express shock at the fact that
Chicago has beaches and that temperatures here in July often reach triple digits.   

So,
Chicago is now the villain in this epic story of a city coming back from tragedy.  In the end, I guess it’s fantastic that the Bears have made it this far and have made it further this year than they did last year.  Still, as game time draws near I can’t help but want them to win and to watch them in the Super Bowl.  I guess that makes me a villain.  Oh well, the villains are generally more exciting and memorable than the heroes anyway. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.

Let’s Hear it for the Kickers

So it all came down to that final moment in overtime for the Chicago Bears.  They had been battling the Seattle Seahawks up and down the field and, essentially, it had come to a stand-still.  The game was tied and that meant sudden-death overtime as is always the case in the NFL.  No matter how you score, you are the team that wins.  If you tackle the other team’s quarterback in the endzone and get a safety you win the damn thing.   

Rex Grossman had done all right.  He made several rather bone-headed plays.  It still seems like the young quarterback needs to have all of the time in the world to make a play.  If you rush sexy Rexy then you can probably get him scrambling and when he scrambles he is just as likely to throw it to the referee or Lovie Smith on the sidelines as he is to a receiver down field.  The man is no running threat at all.  I think the only way to maybe get Rex to run would be to release an actual bear on the field while outfitting him with raw meat underpants.   

Of course there were many in this city, including a certain blog writer that you may or may not be reading right now and you may or may not read regularly, who thought that this was the last game of the season.  People always tell me to have hope but this is
Chicago.  You develop a certain kind of hopelessness when it comes to sports teams in
Chicago.  The strange thing is that this hopelessness never leaves no matter how many teams win championships.  Somehow, no matter what, it always seems like a fluke.  As if the governing board of whichever sport the team has just won the championship of will suddenly realize a horrible mistake has been made and make us take the trophy back and pretend the parade never happened. 

I have lived through six Bulls NBA Championships.  Rather than bask in the glow of the fact that this team which had such a miserable record for so long won six championships I am like most people in this town and despairing over the fact the team has stunk since Michael Jordan left.  Of course they have made it to the playoffs for two years in a row but I really don’t think anyone seriously thought the Chicago Bulls would make it make to the finals. 

I have also seen the White Sox magically win the World Series.  It still seems like some kind of dream I had a few years ago and I have a hard time remembering that it actually happened.  I have all of the newspapers and memorabilia tucked away in a drawer to remind me but after their horrific fall in this past season it almost seems like 2005 never happened.  Once more they were back in mediocrity mode in 2006 and it made all of 2005 seem like some kind of bizarre mistake. 

So, it was with some trepidation that I watched the Bears playoff game this past weekend.  While there were many who were hopeful and convinced they could beat the Seahawks, I will admit that I am not one of them.  When it comes to
Chicago sports I am always the naysayer.  You can ask my fellow White Sox fans that I was predicting their doom every step of the way.  Of course the more I screamed they would be defeated the more they won.  As such, maybe the same will happen to the Bears. 

Of course it all came down to the kicker.  It’s funny how NFL teams treat kickers.  Most of them act like they are those annoying little brothers or kids from down the block who come and want to hang out with you even though you don’t actually want them around.  A lot of times kickers are foreigners who seem like they would be much more comfortable on a soccer field rather than kicking an oblong ball through uprights.   

The thing is it often comes down to the kickers.  I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen a game where if a field goal had just been made the game would have been won.  Or perhaps the number of times I saw a game where the key was staying ahead of the opponents because of a made field goal.  

Quarterbacks get all of the glory.  A lot of times they are handsome.  They have strong and muscular arms.  They are supposed to the leader of the team on the field.  They get much of the credit and the blame when the game goes well or not.  They are the ones on television the most. 

Still, it is the kicker who often comes up in the clutch.  They stand there, separated from everyone else, the stadium often silent, judging the wind and visualizing the kick.  Then the snap comes.  The kicker moves, oblivious to all of the on-rushing players and noise and focusing just on the ball.  Hopefully the holder has gotten the ball and put it down just right.  Then the kicker kicks and off that ball goes.  It’s like time is suspended as that ball tumbles end over end over end.  Hopefully it goes right through the uprights and everyone is happy.  If it doesn’t work then everyone talks about how the kicker isn’t really part of the team and isn’t really a football player. 

Ever team during the off-season spends buckets of money on quarterbacks and receivers and defensive people.  Yeah, sure, they are always important.  However, many only think of the kicker as an afterthought.  Strange considering the name of the game is “foot” ball and the only time a foot actually touches the ball is when someone kicks it.  They are treated like the red-headed step-children and patted on the head and told to go back to the sidelines and keep kicking balls into nets.  It’s rather unfair really. 

How many times does a quarterback just totally blow a run down the field and fail to get the ball into the endzone.  Who always then has to come through and at least try to make sure the entire effort wasn’t for naught?  That’s right, the kicker is the one.  He has to come on the field and try like mad to kick that ball and hopefully come away with three points to at least the drive down-field isn’t for nothing. 

In many ways they are the unsung heroes.  Maybe they have the build of a dancer instead of the muscles of a quarterback but they sure do things I couldn’t do.  How on earth does someone kick a pall over fifty yard down a very narrow-looking corridor and keep the whole wind thing in mind?  I couldn’t do it.  I couldn’t kick the damn ball ten yards.  To me that means they deserve respect.  They win games.  It was the kicker who extended the Bears season one more week at least.  It was the kicker who should get the credit if the Bears ultimately get to the Super Bowl.   

Then again, we’ll see how he does against the Saints next week.  He may turn from hero to goat just that quickly. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.