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The Thrilling Texans Are Underappreciated Because Their Quarterback Is Bald

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Houston, the explosive team of Andre Johnson, J.J. Watt, and Arian Foster, has a Matt Schaub problem.

Image by Dave Einsel / AP

The Houston Texans are 10-1. Wide receiver Andre Johnson is playing like his legs have been replaced by rockets and his hands by fishing nets. Running back Arian Foster leads the league in rushing touchdowns, has the second-most yards, and appears to be made of adamantium. J.J. Watt is trailblazing a new way for defensive ends to impact games — he's batted down 13 passes and is basically the football equivalent of a surface-to-air missile. The Texans are fun and dangerous in a way that very few football teams are this year, and they're the rare squad that scores (second-most points of any team) as well as they defend (fifth-fewest).

But when you think of the NFL's marquee franchises, Houston still lurks in the background, obscured by teams like the Patriots, the Giants, the Packers, and the 49ers. Part of this has to do with the fact that we're still not used to a good Texans squad being part of the NFL landscape; before last year, Houston had only had one winning season in nine years, dating back to their start as a franchise. Hell, we're still not used to the Texans being a part of the NFL landscape at all, considering that this is only their 11th season. Houston's anonymity can't solely be blamed on circumstance, though. There's one other big factor: their quarterback is bald.

Well, balding. (If he were totally bald, he might be cool in a biker-gang kind of way — right now he looks like a bank manager.) His name is Matt Schaub. In a sport with 52 players on every team, one of whom touches the ball way more than the others, the quarterback makes for an easy way to slap a squad with an identity, a cliff-notes idea of how good that team is and what they're about. Mark Sanchez is impotent and runs into people's butts, the Jets are impotent and can't keep their heads out of their/others' butts. Jay Cutler is tough but boneheaded, the Bears are tough but boneheaded. Aaron Rodgers is a fighter jet, the Packers are a fighter jet.

Unfortunately for the Texans, this means that the average-humanness of Matt Schaub has given them the tint of anonymity. He's a good-to-very-good player, but if I ask you to tell me something about Matt Schaub, you'll probably come up with some boring anecdote about fantasy football. His most prominent moment in football so far was an anti-moment; he was injured during the playoffs last year, costing him the type of stage that might have helped raise his profile in the Texans' first-ever playoff appearance.

Schaub is actually made for the stage in a kind of character-actor way. His eyes are sunken into his skull, and his forehead is huge. He looks sort of marsupial. Balding, marsupial — not words that Americans have typically used to describe their star quarterbacks. Can this change? Sure. But the only way for it to change is for the Texans to win big — i.e. at least make it to the Super Bowl. "Goofy" wasn't a word used to describe star QBs until Eli Manning made it so by bringing the Lombardi trophy to the Meadowlands twice. If the Texans keep winning, maybe Schaub's lack of hair will start becoming a signifier of his reliability in the clutch, his rugged Everyman spirit. You could see him in a commercial, tossing a sack of concrete into the back of a pickup truck. For Matt Schaub, it's not quittin' time til' the job is done. That kind of thing. For now, though, a receding hairline is just a receding hairline, and the Texans will have to just keep humming along in their place one step outside the spotlight.


Nets Owner Mikhail Prokhorov Gave Shaq A Furry Russian Hat

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The other Inside the NBA guys got them too. Mikhail Prokhorov is a kind and generous billionaire.

Jay-Z is the face of the Brooklyn Nets, and until now the real man behind the team, Mikhail Prokhorov, has come off as cold, distant, and somewhat shady. He's the stereotypical Russian billionaire dabbling in sports ownership as a fun diversion from the rigors of being a billionaire, right? WRONG! As it turns out, Mikhail is a nice guy! And he loves the Nets! He sent gifts to the crew of TNT's "Inside the NBA," which we assume are authentic шaпкa (pronounced "shapka," but go ahead and say "wanka" anyway), which is Russian for those fur caps with flappy ears.

Shaq, who says his Russian name is Vladimir Mandingo, looks great in a шaпкa.

Shaq, who says his Russian name is Vladimir Mandingo, looks great in a шaпкa.

If you can't buy these hats inside the Barclays Center yet, the Nets are missing out on a huge marketing opportunity.

(h/t Trey Kerby at The Basketball Jones)


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Referee Joey Crawford Makes A Terrible Call Then Dances

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Joey's got moves.

If it was anything, it was a charge, but referee Joey Crawford thought otherwise.

Crawford calls a block and the Pacers go ahead by one. But in case you think the Lakers losing at home was all because of the ref, they then went on to miss FOUR CONSECUTIVE FREE THROWS.

Here's Joey's jig, in GIF form.

Here's Joey's jig, in GIF form.

Via: @bubbaprog


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How Not To Make A Sports T-Shirt

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“I have a great idea. Let's make a T-shirt for Oklahoma City Thunder fans that reminds them of one of the few painful moments in franchise history.” (This is something someone must have said in a real-life business meeting.)

This shirt has showed up in Oklahoma City stores, but rather than being amusing or cool (the primary job requirements of any graphic T-shirt), it just raises all sorts of questions. Why would any Thunder fan purchase one? Do Thunder fans hate James Harden? Why would Kevin Durant and Russ Westbrook be pissed at His Beardness? Why is James Harden sad on the shirt? Do the people that made the shirt know that James Harden signed an $80 million deal after being traded to Houston? Also, is there a giant overlap between Thunder fans and Taylor Swift fans? And if there is, wouldn't a shirt with "You Belong with Me" be a more fitting expression of Oklahoma City's collective feeling toward Harden? Come on, OKC merchants. I know you're relatively new to the whole "having a pro sports team" thing, but let me give you a piece of advice: NO ONE WANTS TO BUY A SHIRT THAT REMINDS THEM OF TERRIBLE MOMENTS IN FRANCHISE HISTORY!

Source: facebook.com

Would Browns fans ever buy this?

Would Browns fans ever buy this?

Nope.

Would Bills fans ever buy this?

Would Bills fans ever buy this?

Nope.

Would blimp fans ever buy THIS?!?!?!?!

Would blimp fans ever buy THIS?!?!?!?!

Probably not. But maybe. There aren't many blimp-centric T-shirts, so they may just take what they can get.


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Omer Asik Scores On The Wrong Hoop

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The most consistently funny accident in sports.

Omer Asik is an awesome defensive big man, but this play is pretty indicative of his offensive skills: accidental and humiliating.

Source: youtube.com

Watch it in GIF form:

Watch it in GIF form:

How do you feel about it, Omer?

How do you feel about it, Omer?

The Rockets did get the win, so it's not all bad, Omer. It's not all bad.

H/T Trey Kerby at The Basketball Jones.

Connor Barwin Is The NFL's Biggest Hipster

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The Instagram account of the Houston Texan linebacker reveals a very dirty secret. He goes to hip indie-rock concerts, has a progressive haircut, and wears deep V-necks.

Connor's brothers are hipsters:

Connor's brothers are hipsters:

Source: gramfeed.com

He wears jorts:

He wears jorts:

Source: gramfeed.com

He does whatever this is:

He does whatever this is:

Source: gramfeed.com

He rides a bike...in a tank top, no less (does not appear to be fixed gear, though):

He rides a bike...in a tank top, no less (does not appear to be fixed gear, though):

Source: gramfeed.com


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Underage Detroit Red Wings Prospect Arrested For Driving With A 0.30 BAC While Wearing A Purple Teletubby Costume

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As if drunk driving weren't embarrassing enough without costumes.

Artist's rendering of the arrest.

Riley Sheahan knows how to party. Last month, the minor league hockey player and former top pick of the Detroit Red Wings was arrested for driving with a blood alcohol content of nearly four times the legal limit: 0.30. That's so drunk it's almost double the level required in Michigan to violate the Super Drunk law (which is an actual thing laying out stiffer penalites for DUIs where the driver is...well...super drunk).

But that's not the best part of the story. According to MLive, Sheahan was arrested while wearing a purple Teletubby costume. That's right, for Halloween this year Sheahan went topical: Tinky Winky.

Sheahan is also in hot water over the fact that he was using his teammate Brendan Smith's ID, since Sheahan himself is under 21.

But according to the police report the young hockey prospect couldn't stick to his story.

Riley had a Michigan driver’s license in the license window in his wallet, which is what Officer Dyer used as his ID. Deputies found Riley’s Canadian license in the wallet after it was turned in with his property and he kept telling them his name was Riley.

Riley is only 20 and I asked him if he had Branden’s (sic) ID so he could get in the bars. He shook his head yes and stated "yea."

Somehow Sheahan still plead not guilty. Should he be convicted, the "super drunk" charge could net him to 180 days in jail and get him deported.

HOCKEY!

Here's a photo of Sheahan from that night.

Here's a photo of Sheahan from that night.

Source: sports.yahoo.com

H/T Peter J. Wallner at MLive.com


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A Middle Aged Woman's Tribute To A 19-Year-Old Football Player Will Make You Wildly Uncomfortable

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“Johnny Football, how we love him… how we tingle when the football flies!”

This is Johnny Football. He's only a redshirt freshman at Texas A&M, but he has a chance of winning the Heisman this season after slaying Alabama a few weeks ago.

This is Johnny Football. He's only a redshirt freshman at Texas A&M, but he has a chance of winning the Heisman this season after slaying Alabama a few weeks ago.

Image by Dave Einsel / AP

Johnny Football is so good, he makes women tingle when the football flies. He even inspired a very well done but terrifyingly creepy tribute song.

Going to go try and re-attach the skin that crawled off my body now.

H/T Samer Kalaf at Deadspin.


This Is The NBA's Best Supporting Actor

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Harrison Barnes is the star of the NBA's best dunk so far this year. But if we're doing this Oscars-style, Carl Landry wins Best Supporting.

By now, you've probably seen it: Harrison Barnes threw down a Godzilla dunk in the face of Timberwolves big man Nikola Pekovic.

By now, you've probably seen it: Harrison Barnes threw down a Godzilla dunk in the face of Timberwolves big man Nikola Pekovic.

But watching the dunk, something else stands out apart from Barnes' ferocity, and that's Carl Landry,

But watching the dunk, something else stands out apart from Barnes' ferocity, and that's Carl Landry,

After the NBA released a video of the slam from five different angles, it becomes even more apparent: Landry is the NBA's Best Supporting Actor, a peerleader in the vein of Robert Sacre.

See a collection of Sacre's finest peerleading moments here.

Source: youtube.com

Let's take a closer look. From behind, you can clearly see Landry giving Pek a little lip after Barnes put him on a poster.

Let's take a closer look. From behind, you can clearly see Landry giving Pek a little lip after Barnes put him on a poster.


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NFL Players Use Viagra As A (Football) Performance Enhancer

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Now we know what's going on in those fumble pileups! I mean, actually, we knew that already: ball-grabbing.

Is that the Viagra you're taking for blood oxygenation purposes, or are you just happy to see me?

Image by Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images

OK! Bet you didn't see that coming. In the hubbub over Adderall, the trendy new Performance Enhancing Drug sweeping through the NFL, Brandon Marshall dropped a revelation that, at first glance, seems completely bizarre and incomprehensible. Viagra? At first, you might think, "What good is a raging erection when you're playing professional football?" The answer may surprise you. The answer is... actually, no, there's no surprise here. An erection does you zero good when playing professional football.

However, Sports Illustrated dug up a couple-years-old New York Times story that explained how the effects of Viagra that could be beneficial for an athlete. Essentially, what Viagra does is improve the transportation of oxygenated blood around the body — obviously a positive for athletes whose bodies are in constant, desperate want of more oxygen than they can take in just by breathing. (Hence the use of oxygen on the bench.)

And, contrary to popular belief — I think? at least my belief? what do people actually believe about Viagra? — Viagra only causes an erection if a man is sexually stimulated. (I learned this via the Google search "how does viagra work.") So, unless the player finds football sexually stimulating — any sadists and masochists out there? — then he should be exempt from the possibility of having to play with a pitched tent. Instead, he can benefit from the increasingly efficient flow of blood to his body, helping him fend off fatigue and the other tolls on a body that a high-intensity sport like football tends to take. (Except for concussions. Guessing that Viagra doesn't do much for concussions.)

H/T Chris Burke at Sports Illustrated

Meet Zlatan (Zlatan!), The Folk-Hero Soccer Swede Behind The Year's Best Goal

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A star who marches to his own drummer in an era of slick system players, he's like Jimmer Fredette if Jimmer Fredette had turned out to be the best basketball player in the NBA.

He's all like, "Peace out, y'all! I just scored mad goals!"

Image by Phil Noble / Reuters

From 2004 to 2011, Zlatan Ibrahimovic played for five soccer teams in three different countries. His team — in order, he was on Ajax, Juventus, Inter Milan, Barcelona, and AC Milan — won its league championship every year. Five teams over eight years, all championships. This fact might suggest that 1) Zlatan is really good and 2) Zlatan is adept at learning how to fit in wherever he goes. Number one is true, but number two is emphatically not.

In some ways, Zlatan is the prototypical modern soccer player — big, athletic, strong; skilled, smart, and calculating — but that’s where it ends. If the best modern players are all part of a system, pieces that move and click and make their teams function as efficiently as possible — some, like Messi, more vital than others but still part of an 11-man machine — Zlatan is as old-school as they come. When Zlatan gets the ball, whatever flow or rhythm the game had gets reset to his whim. He played one year at Barcelona — the system of all systems — but was sold after a falling out with then-manager Pep Guardiola for these exact reasons. As Zlatan told Guardiola, “You bought a Ferrari but drive it like a Fiat.”

Some Zlatan facts: he was born in Sweden to a Croatian father and a Bosnian mother. He was bought by Ajax of Amsterdam at age 19, where he came up with Dutch star Rafael Van Der Vaart, who Zlatan purposely injured in a friendly between Sweden and Holland in 2004. He’s kicked enough people in the head while not playing in soccer games to make a multi-minute YouTube video. (He’s a black belt in taekwondo.) He wrote an autobiography, I, Zlatan, which is basically just a long tirade against FC Barcelona (“Guardiola was staring at me...I thought ‘there is my enemy, scratching his bald head!’. I yelled to him: ‘You have no balls!’") He’s the most expensive soccer player ever. He injured three teammates in his first day of practice with his new team, Paris Saint-Germain of the French league. He routinely refers to himself in the third person because of course he does.

Which brings us to that goal. That fucking goal!

The context: he’d already scored three goals to England's zero, and it was injury time of a meaningless friendly. Joe Hart, England’s goalie and one of the best in world at the position, misplayed a ball with his head, which was only “misplayed” in the sense that Zlatan was nearby. In a matter of seconds — before the soft header had come down — Zlatan turned his entire 6’5’’, 210-pound body, took five steps in the opposite direction, launched upward feet first, and then, totally upside down, gravity and basic human perception gone to complete shit — remember, he’s 40-some yards from goal right now — whacked the ball with his foot at the perfect angle and with more than enough power to parabola-launch it precisely into the net.

No one else in the world would think to do a 40-yard bicycle kick. Hart’s clearance would’ve been fine against Brazil or Spain or Germany or any other phenomenal team in the goddamn world, but this was against Sweden, and Zlatan plays for Sweden. It wasn’t possible until he did it. Zlatan is playing a different game — or inventing a new one — when he’s on the field, and therefore so is everyone he’s playing against. Look at some of his other famous goals: on this Ajax smash-slalom, normal defensive tackling stops working. (The first guy gets flipped up like a child.) After this heel flick against Italy, you now have to be ready even if a guy’s back is to goal and the ball’s three feet to his side, four feet off the ground.

With the recent rise of ball-playing, pass-and-move soccer — which, don’t get me wrong, is a great thing for the sport and anyone who watches it — there’s so much value placed on doing the simple things right, and making the most five-yard passes, and playing within the boundaries of the game as well as anyone could ever imagine to. But who can repress the naturally-human desire to do something special — play a note out of rhythm or off-key that ends up sounding even better than what’s on the sheet? This is what makes Zlatan so especially great right now. He plays a game that only really vaguely resembles what soccer has become. He’s a folk hero, like our own college basketball stars who whizz onto the scene but fade away because their games can only work in certain conditions and if enough people are willing to accommodate them. Except his game keeps working. Zlatan’s only condition: Earth. The sport will go back to what it was or what it is whenever Zlatan retires, which makes it all the more great that he's here right now.

When Ibrahimovic moved to PSG this summer for $25 million, his agent Mino Raiola, who, unsurprisingly, is also a madman, said something typically attention-grabbing: “With the arrival of Ibra, Paris now has another reason to be considered a city filled with beauty. Now I think the people in Paris will have something else to see besides the Mona Lisa."

Grandiose, sure. But the thing is, he's right.


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Damian Lillard Is TERRIFIED Of Historic Statues

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Well this is crazy.

But it turns out he's not without weaknesses, as the Internet discovered when Lillard tweeted about his team's road trip to Washington DC.

But it turns out he's not without weaknesses, as the Internet discovered when Lillard tweeted about his team's road trip to Washington DC.

(AP/ Tony Gutierrez)

Source: @Dame_Lillard

But Lillard was quick to clarify the exact nature of his phobia.

But Lillard was quick to clarify the exact nature of his phobia.

(AP/ Rick Bowmer)

Source: @Dame_Lillard


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The Internet And Media Ruthlessly Mock An Overweight College Basketball Player

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UCLA's Josh Smith has been struggling with his weight for years. Today he quit the basketball team, and a bunch of people took the chance to kick a kid while he was down.

This is Joshua Smith. He's a big guy, and he quit UCLA's basketball team today.

This is Joshua Smith. He's a big guy, and he quit UCLA's basketball team today.

Image by Elsa / Getty Images

Smith, a junior center listed at 305 pounds on UCLA's website, left the program due to "personal reasons," just a few years after he was touted as the No. 1 center in his recruiting class. According to the L.A. Times, Smith did not practice on Tuesday due to "weight issues," and met with coach Ben Howland yesterday to discuss his departure from the squad.

Smith has dealt with weight issues since he arrived at UCLA, and his inability to remedy them over the past few years suggests that perhaps the 20-year-old has bigger problems than just an affinity for food. This kid is 20, was projected to be a millionaire NBA sensation from a very young age, and is now withdrawing from his college program due to a longstanding battle with his body. It's really a tragedy, and Smith obviously needs help. Regardless, a wide range of people -- including reporters paid to cover basketball -- took this opportunity to pelt a young college kid with all too predictable fat jokes.

First up, the professional media.

First up, the professional media.


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"Egyptian Popeye" May Be Stripped Of World Record For Biggest Arms

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Oh, how the freakishly body modded have fallen. Following allegations of everything from steroids to synthetic oil injections, Guinness is conducting an investigation into whether or not Moustafa Ismail should keep the title of World's Biggest Arms.

This Is Moustafa Ismail Of Milford, Mass. (By Way Of Alexandria, Egypt), Affectionately Known As "The Egyptian Popeye"

This Is Moustafa Ismail Of Milford, Mass. (By Way Of Alexandria, Egypt), Affectionately Known As "The Egyptian Popeye"

Image by Stephan Savoia / AP

Thanks To Upper Arms That Measure 31 Inches Around, Moustafa This Past September Was Awarded World's Biggest Biceps/Triceps/Arms By Guinness World Records

Thanks To Upper Arms That Measure 31 Inches Around, Moustafa This Past September Was Awarded World's Biggest Biceps/Triceps/Arms By Guinness World Records

Image by Stephan Savoia / AP

Moustafa Attributes His Enormous Arms To A Daily 2-Hour Workout Routine That Includes Lifting As Much As 600 Pounds

Moustafa Attributes His Enormous Arms To A Daily 2-Hour Workout Routine That Includes Lifting As Much As 600 Pounds

Image by Stephan Savoia / AP

He Also Has A Hefty Diet Of Poultry, Seafood And Protein Shakes

He Also Has A Hefty Diet Of Poultry, Seafood And Protein Shakes

Image by Stephan Savoia / AP


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Warwick Rowing Team Strips Down For 2013 Calendar


This Beer Bong Fail Could Only Happen To A Browns Fan

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Browns fan drowning in his sorrows, and his beer.

Big Bob is a Browns fan. Being a Browns fan, Big Bob should know how to bong a beer. But Big Bob botches his bong, because Browns.

Browns fans, what say you?

Browns fans, what say you?

H/T Terez Owens.

This Soccer Star's Face Scored On His Own Team

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Wow, that has to hurt.

During the 71st minute of yesterday's Tottenham-Liverpool game, Liverpool was trailing 2-0 when they took a corner kick.

During the 71st minute of yesterday's Tottenham-Liverpool game, Liverpool was trailing 2-0 when they took a corner kick.

It was a beautifully placed corner that led to a header that perfectly set up Liverpool's Steven Gerrard for a shot on goal.

It was a beautifully placed corner that led to a header that perfectly set up Liverpool's Steven Gerrard for a shot on goal.

Luckily for Tottenham, Aaron Lennon was there to clear the ball. Unluckily for Tottenham, Gareth Bale was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was also unlucky for Bale's face.

Luckily for Tottenham, Aaron Lennon was there to clear the ball. Unluckily for Tottenham, Gareth Bale was in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was also unlucky for Bale's face.


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Atari Teenage Riot: The Inside Story Of Pong And The Video Game Industry's Big Bang

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On Nov. 29, 1972, a crude table-tennis arcade game in a garish orange cabinet was delivered to bars and pizza parlors around California, and a multi-billion-dollar industry was born. Here's how that happened, direct from the freaks and geeks who invented a culture and paved the way for today's tech moguls.

[ INSERT 1 ] [ INSERT 3 ] [ INSERT 2 ] Today, Rooster T. Feathers Comedy Club at 157 West El Camino Real in Sunnyvale, California — slap-bang in the middle of Silicon Valley — faces out to a Chinese restaurant and taqueria across a three-lane road. It’s squeezed between a Goodyear garage and a check-cashing place; on the corner is the California Paint Company. Drive down Route 82, head onto Sunnyvale Saratoga Road, and three or so miles down the street you’re at the Apple campus in Cupertino. In the fall of 1972, Rooster T. Feathers was Andy Capp’s Tavern. “Just a dive bar, nothing special,” says the club’s manager, Beth Schumann. But this dive bar would soon become the video game industry's Plymouth Rock, Mount Sinai, and Cheers, all rolled into one.

This was where Pong — a rudimentary Ping-Pong game featuring two dashes for paddles and a white dot as a ball — became a phenomenon. But its creation was practically an accident, a stroke of luck borne out of failure. The video game industry didn’t really exist, and what its pioneers did “was very seat-of-the-pants stuff,” says Darran Jones, editor of Retro Gamer magazine. “People were making things up as they went along.”

The frontage in 1972 was much the same as it is in 2012 — though Schumann says the building has had a couple of paint jobs since. Inside was a little different: Drinkers walking into Andy Capp's that summer of '72 were presented with beer on tap, pinball machines, a purple-glowing jukebox playing vinyl 45s, and an arcade machine — the world’s first commercially available one — called Computer Space, which let players take the helm of a tiny pixelated rocket ship and try to shoot flying saucers out of the sky. But the game was a tough sell.
[ INSERT 8 ]
“I think for that stage in the life of a coin-op game, it was too difficult,” says its co-creator Nolan Bushnell, 69, pausing between sentences at his home in Los Angeles to take swigs of a drink to ease his hoarse throat. Still, the game racked up $3 million in sales from a couple thousand units. “I wasn’t disappointed with Computer Space’s performance. The idea of doing $3 million in sales was kind of cool.” But a better, more user-friendly game could make more, he thought, if customers kept returning to play.

That better game would be Pong, which was deceptively simple to pick up, but infuriatingly difficult to master (not least because a developmental hiccup meant that your paddle couldn’t defend all your territory in the original coin-operated version). Today it is considered one of the biggest arcade games in the world, responsible for the success of the video game industry, valued at $78.5 billion this year. Pong took video games out of windowless computer labs full of buttoned-up coders and brought it to the masses, and with it, Bushnell's nascent company, Atari.

It would've been hard to imagine then, but games today are bigger than the global film industry, which had a 60-year head start. Pong is the reason that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 can make more than three times as much in its first five days on sale as The Avengers can in its first five days in theaters. But while today’s blockbuster games are largely created by hundred-strong teams at bankrolled developers, the men who created and crafted Pong embodied the bootstrap start-up culture that typifies the most exciting edges of today’s tech landscape. They were knocked back by old men in drab suits who said games weren’t going to be big business. But games were going to be big business, even those started in unassuming surroundings. And nothing was going to stop them.

“Nolan Bushnell's personality established an important paradigm for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: willful, daring, imaginative, hypercompetitive,” says Henry Lowood, curator of the history of science and technology collection and media collection at Stanford. “It's difficult to imagine Steve Jobs without Bushnell before him.”

But before these culture-defining pioneers could establish a paradigm, they had to first be very bored.

[ INSERT 4 ]

In 1969, Bushnell and Ted Dabney, now 75, set up a company, at the time called Syzygy, named for the phenomenon in which the earth, sun, and moon fall in line during an eclipse, to create Computer Space, with $500 placed in Dabney’s bank account. They had met one year earlier, thrown together in a small shared office at Ampex, one of the biggest engineering firms at the time, based in Redwood City, California.

Space in the office was tight, especially when Bushnell, who had reached 6 feet 4 inches by the seventh grade, stretched out his legs. In 1969, Ampex created and maintained the Videofile system, which recorded files and photos to a magnetic videotape system long before the advent of commercial computer hard drives (to this day, Britain’s New Scotland Yard still uses the Videofile system to store perpetrators’ fingerprints).

Bushnell made $12,000 a year as a research design engineer and enjoyed the job, but had long nurtured the idea of a video game arcade — a dream first fostered working summers at the Lagoon, an amusement park north of Salt Lake City. The park, according to a mention in the Beach Boys’ 1965 album filler, “Salt Lake City,” was “full of all kinds of girls/and rides, and we'll be flyin’ there soon, now.” (The lyrics were more likely Mike Love’s doing than Brian Wilson’s). But full of arcade machines it was not — at least yet. “There was pinball, knocking down bottles to win a stuffed animal, things like that,” Bushnell says dismissively. “I knew at the age of 22 that if there was a video game there, it’d earn a lot of money.”

There were such things as video games, but in a form totally unrecognizable today. Bored computer engineers and military polymaths used spare computer time and processing power to code rudimentary games, but they were purely for their own entertainment. To get near them you needed privileged access to a computer lab at a high-ranking university — or the gumption to worm your way into one.

Bushnell spent most of 1964 and 1965 in the lab at the University of Utah, playing a program called Spacewar!, an intergalactic battle game written by MIT student Steve Russell in 1962. I ask Bushnell if he encountered the game through a school computer club. “Not at all,” he says. “It was a fraternity brother and myself sneaking into the lab late at night.” Spacewar! stuck with Bushnell: With a few tweaks, and placed inside a coin-operated arcade cabinet, it became Computer Space.

In spite of the cramped Ampex office, Bushnell and Dabney became close when Bushnell asked Dabney to learn the Japanese board game Go so he would have a playing partner. “We’d only play at lunch,” Bushnell says — the idea of goofing off during the day was anathema to him. The duo graduated from a cheap and flimsy board to one handcrafted from a $6 offcut.

"I carved the board out of an inch-and-a-half-thick board and put a Videofile logo on the other side so it could hang on the wall," Dabney recalls. When the two played, the board sat on top of a trash can, a coincidental foreshadowing of the future: The original Pong prototype in Andy Capp’s would sit squat on top of a barrel, people huddled around it.

Go was useful in another way as the two young men left Ampex to eventually launch their video game venture: When the local authorities told Bushnell and Dabney that a roofing contractor had already claimed the nerd-friendly sobriquet Sygyzy, they used a term from Go that was equivalent to chess’s “check” for their newly incorporated company: アタリ. Anglicized, that spells Atari.

After Bushnell and Dabney left Ampex, many of their colleagues thought they were crazy. “I felt kind of sorry for Nolan and Ted,” says engineer Al Alcorn, who would shortly join them. “They were quitting a good career at Ampex to go off and do this strange thing. That was the conventional wisdom: Where did these guys go wrong?”

[ INSERT 5 ]

Back in the early 1970s, arcade games didn't pay the bills, but servicing pinball machines — battered and bruised from being tilted and slammed by overzealous and over-served bar patrons — did. The potential was there for games to pay their way, though, and Bushnell saw it. Computer Space had been released in cooperation with Nutting Associates, a manufacturing company, in 1971. This time Bushnell wanted to go at it alone, without answering to someone else. So using the profits from Computer Space, he hired Alcorn as chief engineer for $1,000 a month (less than Alcorn was making at his previous job) and 10% of the company’s stock in May 1972.

Alcorn, a Berkeley grad, was pretty talented at computer science and electrical engineering. At the time, both disciplines involved working with relatively large, clunky machinery and required the patience of a saint as the machines calculated their commands and processed messages across room-sized components. Alcorn had been hired by Ampex through Berkeley’s work-study program in 1968 as an engineer and put educational theory into industrial practice.

“I’d been fixing televisions in a repair shop since junior high,” he explains to me at 10 a.m. on a Monday from his cluttered home office in Palo Alto, California. In fact, it paid his way through college, which he completed while working for Ampex, on and off, through to 1972. But he had no experience with game design, and he was taking a risk on Atari. “We were thinly funded,” Alcorn says — the venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital that would eventually transform Silicon Valley were in their embryonic stages in the early '70s, not that bar games would have been considered a sound investment. “Banks wouldn’t talk to us. I did it because I was young, unmarried, and reckless — what the hell. I figured it’d cave in a year or two anyway and I’d go back to Ampex.”

"There was a race to the bank to make sure yours was the first paycheck that cleared,” says Steve Bristow, who turned down offers from big companies like IBM and General Electric to join Atari."

[ INSERT 9 ]Meanwhile, the first TV-based home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, designed by gaming-industry forefather Ralph Baer, was being released. The Odyssey was demonstrated in Burlingame, California, on May 24, 1972. “It turned out that Al started at Atari almost exactly the same day I went up to see the Magnavox game,” says Bushnell. Around the same time, Baer was at Tavern on the Green in Central Park, sitting amongst the 30 or so East Coast retailers to whom his employers were trying to sell his creation. Beaming with pride, Baer could barely sit still. “The entire Magnavox product line for 1972 was displayed there,” he explains. “That included the Odyssey game, which was the hit of the show.” One of the games on the Magnavox console was a version of tennis.

“I thought the game was kind of crappy,” Bushnell says. Yet people were lining up to play it, “and they were kind of having some fun. I thought, If they can have fun with this shite” — Bushnell breaks off into a hearty laugh — “if it can be turned into a real game, that’d be great.” On the drive back from the demonstration, “I got thinking of ways it could be improved.”

Bushnell believed that a game similar to the Magnavox Odyssey tennis title could aptly fulfill a contract with Bally Manufacturing Corporation, which paid Atari $4,000 a month for six months to develop an arcade racing game and a pinball machine. He had a plan: Dabney would handle the creation of the pinball machine for Bally; Alcorn would re-create the tennis game for arcades. All the while the three would regularly grab lunch at a Cupertino diner about a 15-minute drive away from their office at 2962 Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara. “The office was tiny,” Alcorn says, “about 1,000 or 2,000 square feet. We would go into our back room and play a pinball machine — the Bally Fireball — for inspiration.”

Alcorn completed a version of Ralph Baer’s tennis game for home consoles three months later. It saw two bats at either end of the screen hitting a ball from one to the other. Behind the TV screen was a series of around 75 transistor-transistor logic circuits (TTL ICs) that controlled the on-screen components: the two paddles, the ball, and the score counter above the play area. It didn’t need complicated instructions; in fact, the sole in-game instruction to the player was a wry one etched onto the faceplate of the arcade cabinet: “Avoid missing ball for high score.”

“Nolan didn't like the game at all,” Dabney says. “He wanted a driving game, but Al and I liked it so much, especially after Al added some sound. Nolan kept complaining, but we said, ‘No, this is a good game.’”

[ INSERT 11 ]Alcorn headed out to the local Walgreens, picked up a $75 black-and-white television set, hid the Hitachi logo inside a rudimentary orange casing, which housed the logic circuits and a coin box made from an upturned sawed-off plastic milk jug, and dragged it into the corner of Andy Capp's, next to the pinball machines, the jukebox, and the Computer Space machine. “There were seven or eight machines in the back of the bar,” Alcorn says. "Andy Capp’s was one of our favorite places because we knew the owner, and we trusted him. If something went wrong, we knew he’d call us.” It was September 1972.

The Atari designers and engineers decided to linger for a while. “It was really interesting,” Bushnell says. “You put it in place and stand back and watch people play it.” What they saw was encouraging, but not extraordinary. “We watched for a couple of hours, drank a couple of beers, then went home.” Bushnell was catching a flight to Chicago the next day, a portable version of Pong in an aluminum case under his arm.

Within a few days, Bill Gattis, who ran the bar, was on the phone to Atari. “The machine had stopped working; I was told to go fix it,” Alcorn explains. ”I stopped over on my way home from work, and much to my surprise, the coin box was overflowing, gushing with quarters.”

“It’s weird,” Gattis told Alcorn as he counted the impressive bounty. “I’ve got guys at my doorstep at 10 a.m. when the place opens. They’re not drunks. They come in, play the Pong game, and don’t buy any beer.” Alcorn listened, and swapped out the milk jug for something a little bigger — a bread pan.

“Up until that point I was expecting to turn up to work one day and there’d be a padlock on the door,” Alcorn admits. “It was sheer luck that the simplest game you could think of was what the market wanted.” Today, people talk about "social" gaming, but Pong was truly social gaming. There were no personal computers — and certainly no Nintendo Wii Us, no Xboxes, and no FarmVille. To play meant leaving your house and going to a bar and actually interacting with people.

“You had to play against someone,” says semi-official Atari archivist Curt Vendel, whose online Atari History Museum has carefully salvaged machines, documents, and memories of the company. “It made for a great icebreaker at bars, for people to meet one another.”

But Baer, the inventor of the Odyssey, is to this day ambivalent about his competitor. “Mr. B. didn’t ‘invent’ anything,” Baer, now 90, told me via e-mail, “but he started a whole industry, the arcade video game industry. Give the man credit for that achievement. He just simply didn’t invent anything.”

[ INSERT 6 ]

Two thousand miles away in Chicago, Bushnell had just come out of a meeting where he tried to convince Bally to take Pong instead of the contracted racing game. They said no, and eventually canceled the contract. He called the Atari office to tell them about the outcome of the meeting and instead heard the incredible story of the overflowing milk jug: “On the trip back I realized it had probably been a good thing Bally said no.”

“I vividly remember a meeting at Andy Capp’s when Nolan had returned from Chicago,” Alcorn says. “He told me what had gone on there, and I told him about what Bill Gattis had said. He said we wanted to get into manufacturing, and Ted said, ‘Nah,’ and I said, ‘Nah, I don’t want to be a manufacturer.’ It was two against one. And Nolan won. Next thing you know, we’re a manufacturer.”

Except that they weren't, not technically. “It was really, really hectic,” recalls Dabney. “I used my own money to buy 50 TV sets from a distributor in San Francisco and called a manufacturer and said, 'I need 50 cabinets, but I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to pay you.’”

After they quickly cobbled together the first run of 12 arcade units, about 6 feet tall and in the same yellowy-orange color as the prototype’s casing, they placed them in locations around Southern California on Nov. 29, 1972. “We bought a flatbed truck to deliver the machines,” Alcorn says. "It was used, and wasn’t in the best shape, and Ted drove it down. We didn’t hear from him. We thought he’d stolen the truck and hightailed it to Mexico. It turns out the truck had flat tires and he’d been stranded.”

As Atari delivered those first arcade games to places they had previously visited to service pinball machines, patrons were still turning up to Andy Capp’s specifically to play Pong. They would wait in line outside the bar before it opened at 10 a.m. Now there were 12 other locations where they could play Pong. The game spread and grew.

From that first run of 12, Atari eventually ramped up production. Dabney used a saber saw to bust down a connecting wall that allowed the company to take over an adjacent office. When they took an order for 300 cabinets, even the newly enlarged building wasn't big enough — so they moved into an old roller rink. By March 1973, Atari had shipped out 8,000 cabinets that drew in drunks and their petty change. Dabney decided they should charge distributors $936 for each machine, a figure he arrived at with typical precision: “I looked out the window and saw the number 936 on a license plate.”

[ INSERT 10 ]It's difficult to overstate how big Pong became, and how quickly. Atari sold $3.2 million worth of cabinets by the end of 1974, two years after it first took its place in Andy Capp’s Tavern, and then produced Space Race and Tank (created by Bristow) to join its ranks. The company was profiled in breathless terms for porn rag Oui magazine’s September 1974 issue. (“If profitability were water,” writes Robert Wieder, who spent time at the company’s headquarters for the piece, “Atari could hold the Sixth Fleet.”) And in 1975, Al Alcorn asked a 20-year-old college dropout from San Francisco who had just returned from a sabbatical in India to design a new game called Breakout, which became one of Atari’s most enduring hits. That guy’s name was Steve Jobs, and he asked his fellow long-haired dropout pal from Hewlett-Packard, five years his senior, to come in and help him out. His name was Steve Wozniak.

The next year, Warner Communications, which merged with Time Inc. in 1990, bought Atari for $28 million, netting Bushnell $15 million. Dabney, however, was increasingly phased out of the proceedings. “I wasn't involved in running the company at all,” he says. “I was running the shop. Nolan realized he didn't need me anymore. But I really didn't care — money didn't mean that much to me; my belly was full. So I sold out to him.”

Around the same time, Sears Roebuck’s sporting goods buyer, Tom Quinn, came knocking, asking for a home-console version — and gave Atari money to double the production run when they decided the 75,000 units they could muster just weren't going to be enough.

Other developers, big and small, saw the runaway success of the game and brought out their own clones to take a slice of Pong's pie. Allied Leisure released around 20,000 cabinets of Paddle Battle in March 1973. Nutting Associates, the company Bushnell and Dabney had worked with to release Computer Space, ended up releasing Computer Space Ball, which was strikingly similar to Pong. There was Paddle-Ball from Williams Electronics, and Rally from For-Play. Midway Manufacturing, then a pinball machine company, dipped their toe into the waters of arcade games with Winner in 1973.

These manufacturers doubled down on their advantage: Not only could they piggyback on Pong's PR success, they did not have to take into account the cost of developing the game: They could simply lift its internal machinery wholesale. “They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Alcorn says, chuckling. Though he’s quick to add, “I’d rather have the money.”

[ INSERT 7 ]

Even with companies creating Pong-alikes, Atari thrived. Bushnell estimates that in the early ’70s, the official Atari cabinets made $40 per day — which meant that at the end of each week (and after the venue had taken their 50% cut), Steve Bristow, another Ampex alum who followed Bushnell, Dabney, and Alcorn to Atari, had to schlep five pounds of quarters to his car when he collected each machine's earnings. By the end of the collection route, Bristow could be carrying 30-pound bags over his shoulder.

“I’d go around collecting quarters and fixing games,” he explains. “Some of the locations were not in the primest areas. We couldn’t get a concealed-weapons permit, but I had worked a few years before as a roofer, so I had a roofing hatchet. I’d be walking down the streets at midnight, carrying bags of money. My wife would be carrying one bag in one hand, the hatchet in the other.” He pauses. “Nobody bothered us.”

In 1976, Atari took a monetary hit, settling a lawsuit out of court in Chicago with Magnavox. (Alcorn remembers the settlement being $300,000; Bushnell thinks Atari coughed up $500,000; Curt Vendel, who had seen documentation surrounding the suit, notes that $1.5 million in all was paid in installments up to 1983.) The suit concerned a patent held by Baer and Magnavox regarding interaction between machine-controlled and player-controlled elements on the screen, a basic foundation of design “that covered just about every game developed between 1971 and the mid-1980s,” Baer says. He was clear about the lineage of Atari’s product: He told the Computer History Museum in 2006 that “Pong is simply a knockoff of the Odyssey Ping-Pong game,” and that Bushnell “knew he was going to lose and decided to come under contract” with Magnavox as a licensee.

Yet Baer ultimately is sanguine about the similarities between his Magnavox game and Pong: “That’s the business,” he says. “Most inventions are based on some prior history. Al Alcorn knew absolutely nothing about the existence of the Odyssey game — he deserves the major credit for getting Atari started successfully.”

For his part, Bushnell remains certain that they would have won the case, but settling out of court was the less painful solution. “I always thought of things in a strategic sense,” he says. “They offered me such a cheap settlement that it was less than what it’d have cost me to fight it. And I liked the idea of them going out and hassling everyone else.” (Magnavox took other game companies to court and regularly won.) “With me paid up, it felt like a win-win, and it was really a ridiculous amount of money.”

Atari earned more than a billion dollars in 1981, and helped Warner revenues reach $3.2 billion. By this time, Bushnell was gone — a disagreement with management over the pricing of Atari’s 2600 home console was the final straw, but due to a contract clause stating that he’d get no money if he quit, he merely stopped doing any work until he was eventually fired, and then collected $100,000 a year for four years.

“Atari turned out to not be a very successful company,” Dabney says. “Nolan was actually a pretty rotten businessman, but once other people took hold of it, it took off.”

A video game industry crash was just around the corner, but Atari was riding high — and it was fuelled by two dashes and a dot. All told, 100,000 Pong machines were installed into pizza parlors, bars, and bowling alleys — though only a third of those were officially licensed games manufactured by Atari, according to estimates.

[ INSERT 13 ]
[ INSERT 12 ]And while the game is ubiquitous in culture low and high — Frank Black wrote a song about it, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York wants to add it to their collection next year — it ultimately means more than any pop reference can hold. “The main impact of Pong on contemporary culture is that it had an impact on contemporary culture,” says Stanford’s Henry Lowood. “Before this, connecting games and culture wasn't even a question on anyone’s mind.”

To celebrate the game’s 40th anniversary, Atari has licensed a commemorative title, Pong World, to zGames in Houston, winners of a $50,000 Pong Indie Developer Challenge. The game will be available in the app store — although playing on your iPad or iPhone isn't the same as a hulking, whirring, beeping arcade machine. Baer owns an iPad, but doesn’t have the time to play games, even if they “keep challenging me to waste some time.”

The games industry has come a long way from Nolan Bushnell, Ted Dabney, and Al Alcorn crammed into a tiny office in Santa Clara, California. “We worked any hours we could,” explains Alcorn. “We chipped in. It was a start-up company. You swept the floors and everything.” That homespun DIY approach lives on today in the development of tablet and mobile apps.

“Things seem to be coming full circle,” says Darran Jones. “Games are getting made with bigger and bigger budgets…but conversely you’ve got indie developers and Kickstarter,” both contributing to the huge number of games produced on a constant cycle each year for our delectation.

If you told the patrons of Andy Capp's Tavern back in 1972 that people would be playing games on phones, they'd have cut you off and put you in a taxi. But then again, before Nov. 29, 1972, they didn't really know they liked arcade games, either. Forty years and hundreds of billions of dollars on, look what happened to that idea.

“Anyone could play,” Alcorn says. “You didn’t have to know physics or space flight or anything. Pong was designed so you could participate in athletics while maintaining a firm grip on a can of beer. You could literally pick up a girl, drink a beer, and play a video game at the same time. It was wonderful.”
[ INSERT 14 ]


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Clippers Center DeAndre Jordan Scares People Wearing A Horse Mask

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And he takes it a bit too seriously.

What would you do if a 6'11" man in a horse mask jumped out from behind a corner? Soil yourself, probably.

Cheering For Cheaters: An Ohio State Fan Returns To The Fold

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After a decade of scandal, what does it mean to have pride in Ohio State football?

Image by Mark Duncan / AP

Just under ten years ago, on a cool Arizona night, I stood in the first row of the second deck of Sun Devil Stadium and had all my dreams come true. I'm a Cleveland fan, which means, as you're probably aware, that sports heartbreak is my religion, and not one of those progressive Christian religions where they pretend to like gay people — a dark, terrifying, self-flagellating religion. Like some satanic cult you would see in a horror movie. Or Catholicism. But on that January night in Arizona, despite everything sports had ever taught me to expect, I watched running back Maurice Clarett and coach Jim Tressel lead the Ohio State Buckeyes past the Miami Hurricanes. And as all of my nerves and baggage began to slip away, I heard my dad say, in a voice more befitting a cathedral than the bleachers, "We finally won."

But in the years since that undefeated, championship season, The Ohio State University has been accused of countless NCAA violations (including illicit payments to 2002 hero Maurice Clarett), been the subject of multiple investigations, attempted to cover up its players' and boosters' wrongdoing, and been caught covering up its players' and boosters' wrongdoing. It has faced numerous sanctions, including this season's bowl ban. Many Ohio State fans attack the merits of the NCAA rules that were violated, and they're not necessarily wrong — I for one think players should be paid — but this wasn't a case of civil disobedience. Former coach Tressel pretended, quite sanctimoniously, to be following the rules that he was in fact breaking so he could gain a competitive advantage. There's a word for what that made Ohio State: cheaters.

Maurice Clarett was a hero in Columbus. Was.

Image by Associated Press / AP

Since the scandals became public in early 2011, I've watched the Buckeyes from a distance. I still watched every game. I still hated Michigan, but it wasn't quite the same. When you truly love a sports team they become an integral part of your identity. Your fandom says something about you. Yankees fans, for example, see themselves as devotees of excellence. Since Tressel and the tattoos and the cars and the cover-up, whatever identity I had as an Ohio State fan had been torpedoed. What did being a Buckeye mean now, and did I want to be associated with whatever that was? I wasn't sure the team and I were a "we" anymore.

And that's where I was when I sat down at home with my dad last weekend to watch our Buckeyes, our cheating Buckeyes, now led by another seemingly honorable coach in Urban Meyer, play arch-rival Michigan for a shot at Ohio State's first perfect season since 2002. Leading up to the game, I was disgusted by the way Buckeye fans were addressing the bowl ban, a punishment that would prevent them from competing for a national championship regardless of whether they won the game. One friend of mine said, "If we win this game, Gene Smith should be castrated at midfield." This was a sentiment I heard over and over again, if not in such graphic and violent detail: the thinking went that if Ohio State's athletic director Gene Smith had pre-emptively self-imposed a bowl ban last season, the NCAA would never have banned the Buckeyes from the postseason this year. But how, I thought, could Ohio State fans complain about a punishment that the team most certainly deserved? Isn't having to give something up the point of a punishment? Nothing hammers home a lesson more than missing out on a potential title. But my friends and my father still cursed Smith's name as the game began.

Then things began to change. Michigan coach Brady Hoke wore a short-sleeve shirt in the cold, as if he wanted the whole world to talk about what a tough guy he was, triggering my reflexive sports hatred. Hearing the Horseshoe crowd singing the Seven Nation Army riff like Jack White had hypnotized them to be insane, screaming machines reminded me of the sheer and overwhelming power of 100,000 people gathered together. (Of course, Michigan and Penn State home crowds, among many others, do the same chant. Stadium music directors don't actually seem to listen to that much music.) Seeing the defense struggle in the first half and come out in the second as though possessed by the spirits of the 1976 Steelers brought back memories of a 2002 team that often had their biggest moments late when the game seemed to be slipping away.

But the biggest moment was the introduction of Jim Tressel. The man who had driven a stake between me and my beloved football team was allowed special dispensation to come to the game for a ceremony that honored the ten-year anniversary of the 2002 National Championship team. I expected to be angry, but I wasn't. In that moment, I didn't see the scandals. I didn't see the cover-up. I didn't see the hypocrisy. I saw the man who gave me some of the happiest sports memories I ever had. I saw a man humbled by the warm reception he was given. I saw a man who made Michigan fans hate their lives for a decade, and I realized that being a Cleveland fan has always meant being loyal to teams that others might walk away from. I didn't like everything Tressel had done, but I was still on his side. I was on his team.


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