Honkey Ball!

As some of you may know, there is a movement toward forming an Atlanta based semi-professional basketball league called the All American Basketball Allegiance (AABA). The criteria: "Only players that are natural born United States citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the league."

Here are some further comments by their commissioner Don "Moose" Lewis:

"There's nothing hatred about what we're doing," he (Moose) said. "I don't hate anyone of color. But people of white, American-born citizens are in the minority now. Here's a league for white players to play fundamental basketball, which they like."

Upon hearing this news I thought to myself: Please, PLEASE let this happen! Because I am a fan of the NBA.

As a fan of the NBA I have grown so very, very tired of every middle-aged honkey repeating the same complaints: 'I'm sick of the way the play nowadays with their bling and their tattoos and their show-boating and the hip-hop culture and the (blah blah blah)... I liked it when they played more fundamental basketball..."

I'm not even necessarily referring to red-necked racists. I'm speaking of every middle-aged white guy that repeats the same old aforementioned complaints about the state of professional basketball.

Well, here you go, cracker. Try to enjoy a white only league that, by their own rules, couldn't include NBA Allstars Steve Nash, Paul Gasol, and Dirk Nowitzki -- all who happen to be white... but, you know... foreign born.

And when I say 'try' I mean TRY. Seriously, you wouldn't make it past the first half, because it will be so fantastically bad it may just make you shut up and realize that every professional sport goes through an evolution.

But, at least until tip-off, enjoy a league of your own.

The Foxbots.

Here come the 'bots. The Fox robots. The Fox football robots.

I'm not speaking figuratively. I'm talking about the animated robots that appear before and after commercial breaks during Fox's NFL coverage. Though they are small -- about one inch high on your television screen -- they have a demeanor that implies a great size were you to encounter one in 1:1 scale. They are also rather violent, which is fine. They're robots. Unless they're programmed to feel pain, we shouldn't feel bad (although we just kind of do for some reason). They remind me of Cyberball.

Cyberball, for those who don't know or can't remember, was a popular video game in the early nineties. It consisted of football played among robots. The robots had different sizes and different skills. With each victory, the owner (being you, the player) would receive money which you would use to upgrade your team. Rules that reflect actual life. But there were other rules that made the game more fun... and weird.

The ball - which appeared to be made out of some future metal alloy - would grow hotter and hotter the longer your team held it in possession. If the ball got too hot, it would explode, taking out the ball carrier. Sort of a super-harsh 24 second clock. The only ways to stop this from happening were to cross the fifty yard line, and/or get the ball into the end zone.

There were other fun elements. For instance, as the time-bomb-ball got closer to doom, the robot holding it would light on fire. If this were the case, once the defender tackled the robot ball carrier, both would explode (which is kind of awesome). Ultimate sacrifice.

So why has Fox chosen such a character for their football coverage? And why do they place it where and when they do? It's not really a mascot. It's placed in the lower left-hand side of your television screen. It's almost a subtle gesture - as subtle as a destructive football robot can be. Is this a portent of what is to come of football the way they see it? The inevitable taking over of human jobs by robots? Are they tempering us into this future? Are they promoting it? Or are they trying to de-humanize the game by placing the robots as a parallel to actual humans? Maybe the last. This way we don't feel bad when a player gets injured.

Yet, Fox implies that they care (and therefor we should care) by playing the minor-keyed 'concerned' version of the Fox NFL music (BA-DA-NA-BA-DA-NA-BA-DA-NA-BA-DA-NA-DA-NAN-NA-NA-NA), when a player lies out on the field with a concussion only to be rescued by the golf cart.

Or maybe Fox wants the NFL to eventually turn into Cyberball. But with humans. Humans that we view as robots - which we kind of do until they get a concussion and we hear the sad Fox NFL piano.

But why would they want robots? How are they going to fill all the pre-game humanistic bullshit that sports coverage seems to love so much with back stories of robots? What will Terry Bradshaw talk about?

Maybe there's some other agenda. These robots first appeared a few seasons ago when David Hill was the head of Fox Sports. Maybe he's a secret psychotic that would like to see NFL players fused with robots... sort of like terminators, but with emotion, or at least programmed emotion, like the prototype in Terminator Salvation (which was ridiculous, by the way). Not only that, you could use the NFL as a sort of Logan's Run-esk way of getting rid of people in an over-populated planet. Here's how it would work:

Every-one gets drafted. EVERYONE. Everyone has to play professional football. If you don't have what it takes to get the ball in the end zone, obliteration. One must prove themselves on the field. If one can, then they can go ahead and procreate.

Only Fox could come up with such a dystopian system of thinning the herd (although technically I just did).

But, whatever. David Hill, you're a sick fuck!

...more for now.

I'll have some actual content before and after round two of the NFL playoffs, but, for now, here's some more:

'(the Giants) literally put a bullet in Andy Reid's head'. It was Plaxico, wasn't it?

'Adrian Peterson literally exploded to the line of scrimmage'. Have the Minnesota Vikings resorted to suicide bombings? If so, why would they martyr their most valuable offensive asset?

'He literally ate the quarterback alive'. Much to the horror of the fans. Does this make the defender a zombie? And, if so, will the QB re-animate as a zombie? Will they start him? Hard to throw down field with rigor mortis... unless you have some really awesome cortisone.

'He's literally on fire'. Jesus! Somebody put him out!!

'He literally enveloped the quarterback'. I'm still trying to figure out what this means.

Let's start here.

'Jay Cutler is literally turning into Jeff George'. So, Cutler's a shape-shifter that can not only assume the form of an existing human, but actually take over their existence?

'The Cleveland Cavaliers are literally a one man team'. Really? The Cavs have only one player defending five and nobody on the bench?

"He literally steam-rolled that linebacker." Wow! How did they even let him get that large, noisy machine into the stadium, let alone drive it out of the huddle, line it up at the line of scrimmage, and use it to gradually pursue a linebacker? And how come that linebacker couldn't out-run such a cumbersome, slow-moving vehicle?

'He literally killed the team with that last interception.' Damn! So, he's in jail on 52 counts of homicide... with no bail, I assume?

Despite the title of this blog I don't intend on devoting it's entire content toward the misuse of the word 'literally'. It will be more of a release valve for us: us that love sports and devote time toward watching sports but cannot stand the hyperbolic, over-praising, mentioning-of-the-obvious, bipolar, dick-sucking hoo-ha, booya screaming, 'now that's old-time' playing yea-hooism that cancers our watching experience. Perhaps it will even spread toward something else, something bigger. But, for now, let's start here.