Month: October 2000

Categories
News News Feature

Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Imagine the Gnome scientists tinkering with N’Sync.

Picturing a hundred waxed, puny pecked, faked tanned, lisping wussy boys with strategically mussed hair? A group of duh-faced designer clothes wearing pin-ups with the intellectual depth of a Madonna chapbook?

After halftime, if you went to the bathroom to vomit as I did, you might have missed the Proposal competition in which contestants got down on one knee and described how they would pop the question. How tempting it must have been for the host, a tepidly funny Caroline Rhea, not to pop them in their whitened teeth. Virginia Beach skyrocketed to first place at that point by holding Rhea’s mascara caked gaze with his stalker glare. But those scoring at home knew all along that this smoothy had the edge. He consistently scored high with the judges: two soap opera actresses, two models, and Nicole Eggert, the slut daughter from Charles in Charge and washed up Baywatch uniboob. Models and actresses know a well-executed image when they see it. Providing skybox commentary was a couple of blow up dolls wearing more make-up than Leeza Gibbons. They sputtered witticisms throughout the evening such as “That’s beefcake good enough to eat.”

Though it was a challenge to tell the beefcake apart at times, the most shameful denunciation of traditional– and obsolete?– manliness came from a guy who incessantly winked and pistol shot the audience. This misled fellow whose hair was gelled, sprayed, dried, and then apparently curled to one side, sang a line from a boy band hit. Look for his album in the fall of 2000 and never. One could just sense the other guys holding their breath as if their fellow contestant might impulsively confess to loving Bette Midler and blow his cover. True, some women swooned over this Backstreet display, but most probably were reminded of that ass who was voted Prom King but is now assistant manager at their hometown Target.

The remaining eight simply fit a stereotype. And what network does a better stereotype than Fox? There was David from Jersey, a guy dressed like a gay Miami housekeeper in capris, a tight pastel T and leather flip flops. Winner of the highest hair award, Mr. Jersey tried to explain that the greatest achievement of his life was being the first person in his family to graduate from college. He punctuated that sentimental confession with “Exactamundo.” Rocky almost walked away with Congenial Genital honors when during the swimsuit competition, he pranced around the stage in testicle hugging hot pants.

Taking home honors for originality was a floppy-eared Illinois cop who cashed in the “Long Walk on the Beach” scenario during the Proposal Talent division when he brilliantly promised to write, “Will You Marry Me?” in the sand on a secluded beach. One can only imagine the beta bitch who would swim upstream for that.

There was a 10-way-tie for Greatest Liar of All Time, but special recognition went to Reed Randoy (not his Playgirl name) for saying that the best part of a woman’s body is her eyes. The only contestant brave enough to forgo hair gel, this sloppily shaven ex-baseball player from Arizona paused before stepping deeper in it. “The soul is what you can see in eyes that you’re looking into. Eyes can be looked into to see the soul.” Amazingly, Reed then ripped his latex mask off to reveal, gasp!, George W. Bush.

Fox could have saved itself a good hour if they just would have jumped to the penis comparison and tongue agility contest. I’m assuming that the word “sex,” was mentioned at the Sexiest Bachelor concept meeting. But maybe that’s unfair. Obviously, the American woman’s idea of what’s desirable is morphing into something that looks and acts just as dainty as them. Gone are the real cowboys with calluses. In their place are men who apply bronzer and wear ten gallons of cologne. According to Fox, the millennial woman needs a man’s commitment, yet the last time I met my girlfriends for Sunday breakfast, they weren’t talking about how big their Saturday night date’s dowry is.

But that’s not to say that the network is totally off-base. They kicked off a season of quality trash that, unlike last night, I don’t hear anyone yelling, “Take it off!”

(You can write Ashley Fantz at ashley@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

Politics for Commoners

Now that the two major presidential candidates are appearing regularly on such venues as Oprah and MTV and Larry King Live, we–and they– are being treated to endless moral strictures from the cognoscenti as to just why this isn’t proper.

George Bush and Al Gore are talking down to us, we are told. They are trivializing the election. They have brought the business of politics down to the lowest common denominator of taste.

Just why finding a broad common denominator in a democracy should be a bad thing is never quite explained. I suppose we just have to take it on faith that there are superior specimens among us whose severe standards on public issues are good for us in the same way that unpalatable fish oils were thought to be at an earlier stage of society.

The idea seems to be that if something is enjoyed by enough people there has to be something wrong with it. And that’s why, in the judgment of our betters, a presidential candidate should stay away from anything so vulgar as a TV show that has its own built-in audience– that is, one that isn’t hectored to watch or listen in for purposes of self-improvement.

The source of this attitude, of course, is a conviction– not terribly well disguised– that if a large enough number of people like something or pay attention to it, it can’t be much good. This is a profoundly anti-Democratic bias, and it exists in the realm of morality and science and aesthetics as much as it does in political thought.

There is the occasional virtuoso of virtue who knows what is good for us in all spheres. I think of William Bennett, whose disregard for prevailing mass behavior is so enormous and charged with emergency that he will even deign to appear on television in prime time himself in order to more effectively denounce the times and the mores.

At a time when most televangelists have learned to modulate their tone and limit their didacticism for fear of limiting the size of their followings, Bennett is virtually the last person left who can publicly harrumph with absolute certainty of his right to sit in judgment on others. His voice is full of sounding brass, but hath not charity.

I confess to an unguilty pleasure in watching Bill Bennett wriggle with discomfort as he tries these days to disavow his friend and former fellow moralist, Joe Lieberman, who has displayed an uncommon warmth and capacity for tolerance of diverse points of view in his new role as a candidate for national office.

Oh, Bill Bennett is not the only offender. There is a slew of them, ranging from George Will, who can at least be elegant in his statements disapproving the commonplace, to the unfortunate Steve Allen, the once-hip cabaret comic and musician who has degenerated (or lost his audience) to the point that in his old age he begs us in full-page ads to help him combat the Sodoms and Gomorrahs that the entertainment industry has caused to be teeming all about us.

To my mind, the most inadvertently telling commentary about the distrust which elitists have for popular phenomena occurred more than a decade ago, when Ronald Reagan was still president and somebody published a tell-all book which included the information that his wife Nancy had for decades been guiding his career by consulting an astrologer who in turn consulted the stars. (The celestial kind, not the Hollywood variety.)

How laughable, how outre, how vulgar, the accepted organs of opinion all chorused at once. Not a one of them was open-minded enough to consider the possibility that if Reagan’s wife had been telling him how to get ahead all those years because of what some astrologer had been telling her, then she and her husband had, all things considered, ended up more than a little bit ahead of the game for it. More so, it would seem, than most of those superior sorts howling with derision.

And, truth to tell, Oprah and Larry and Dave and Regis and Jay and all the rest of them have been taking the public pulse long enough that maybe they ought to be telling Al and Dubyah some things, too, rather than merely being kind enough to listen to them.

(You can write Jackson Baker at baker@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

Tigers’ Lack of Firepower is Offensive

If Rip Scherer thought University of Memphis fans would praise his team’s effort in a 24-3 loss at number-21 Southern Mississippi on Saturday he was mistaken. Almost every caller to “The Point After,” the U of M post-game radio show on WMC (AM-790) was critical of Scherer. It seems the fans are fed up with an offense that has been AWOL for seven seasons.

Not since Steve Matthews was playing catch with Isaac Bruce has Memphis had anything remotely resembling a high-powered offense. In 1994, a lack of points cost Chuck Stobart his job, despite three consecutive 6-5 seasons. When a small crowd showed up for an important game to close out the 1994 season, former president Lane Rawlins made a change. He brought in Scherer who had been an offensive coach his entire career.

Ironically that last game Stobart coached came against East Carolina, Memphis’ opponent Saturday at the Liberty Bowl. If the Tigers draw more than the 23,000 that came out to see Memphis and East Carolina play for an invitation to the Liberty Bowl in 1994 it will be the biggest upset since UAB beat LSU in Baton Rouge.

For all the positive work Scherer has accomplished in Memphis, and he has done a lot of good things, he has not been able to build an offense. And that is inexcusable after five-and-a-half years on the job.

The Tiger offense currently ranks 104th out of 115 Division I teams. The statistics do not lie: Memphis is 100th in passing, 98th in scoring, and 75th in rushing. And only two of the first five opponents on the schedule played any defense at all.

This is familiar territory for the Tiger offense. Memphis has finishing near the bottom of the NCAA offensive statistics every year since Scherer arrived. The quarterbacks can change, the offensive coordinator can change but the bottom-line has not changed in five plus seasons: the Memphis offense cannot run and cannot throw. In a word it sucks.

And that is what the callers to the post-game show were saying. Forrest Goodman and Matt Dillon, the show’s hosts, did their best to defend Scherer, but how could they? There is not one excuse for the offensive ineptitude that does not involve Scherer. He is the reason that there is not speed at wide receiver. He is the reason that Memphis doesn’t have a quarterback who can throw the ball consistently. He is the reason that every opponent the Tigers face knows what play Memphis is going to run when they come out of the huddle. The offense is boring and predictable and it is Scherer’s fault. After five-and-a-half seasons, this is his program. The blame stops at his desk.

A 3-1 start did not fool anyone. The wins came against three of the sorriest football teams in the country. With a loss to Richmond Saturday, Arkansas State is 0-5. Louisiana-Monroe gave up 70 points to Tennessee and was shutout by Southwest Texas. Army is winless and going nowhere fast. The three teams Memphis has beaten are a combined 1-13.

Yet Memphis still has a chance to win seven games and go to a bowl. They have to get four wins in their final six games to finish with seven victories for the first time since 1976. If one counts East Carolina and Tennessee as losses, there is no room for error. UAB, Houston, Cincinnati, and Tulane are must wins. If the Tigers stub their toes once against that crew, they can still finish with a winning season. Anything less will put athletic director R.C. Johnson in the tough spot of having to fire Scherer just one year after granting him a contract extension.

Tiger fans have grown impatient with their head coach. Playing Southern Miss close for 57 minutes is not good enough. If Scherer thought it was, he should have heard the post-game show. Tiger fans are sick of losing. More than that they are sick of being unable to score points. They will cast their votes with their feet, staying away in droves Saturday. Poor attendance cost Stobart and basketball coach Larry Finch their jobs. Whether it will do the same for Scherer remains to be seen.

(You can write Dennis Freeland at freeland@memphisflyer.com)

Categories
Sports Sports Feature

It’s Time, Troy

Troy Aikman should retire. Now. Not at the end of the Dallas Cowboys’ season. Not after the next concussion. Now.

To fully appreciate my stance on this much-debated issue, you need to know with how heavy a heart it’s taken. I’ve been a Cowboy fan since I could tell the difference between a football and a frisbee. And my loyalties to “America’s Team” are due largely to the man whose career Aikman’s has so uniquely paralleled, up to and including his current physical crisis: Roger Staubach.

In 1980 Roger Staubach was no different from Spiderman or Han Solo in the heroic pantheon of my 11-year-old consciousness. Spidey beat up the Green Goblin, Han commanded the Millennium Falcon, and Roger the Dodger hurled touchdown passes for the mighty Cowboys. Then on an otherwise drab afternoon shortly after the ’79 NFL season had come to pass, I learned about the word “concussion.”

Mortality is a helluva thing when it comes to your heroes. My dad explained– as best he could– that Staubach had announced his retirement because of a series (pattern?) of head injuries that threatened far more than his football career. It didn’t stop my tears, but it forced me to see my quarterback hero for the first time as a human being. One with a loving family and a future beyond Texas Stadium. I also had the first profound sports-related thought of my young life, that there would never again be a player like Roger Staubach. Then along came Troy Aikman.

We Cowboy fans take a lot of grief, much of it deserved. There is a swagger to all things Cowboy that tends to rub the legions of Cowboy haters in an especially sensitive area. And considering the number of legal transgressions by Cowboy players– from Bob Hayes to Michael Irvin– the vitriol is accepted by fans like myself as part of the package. But even ignoring the five Super Bowl wins, find me a franchise that, merely a decade apart, fielded a pair of quarterbacks as special as Staubach and Aikman.

Which brings me to the lump in my throat as I argue for Aikman’s retirement. It’s simply an issue of risk versus reward. What might the rewards be should Aikman keep playing? As clearly exemplified in the whipping they took in their season-opening loss to Philadelphia, the Dallas Cowboys are on their way down (way down), not up. Furthermore, with an aging offensive line, they appear to be a team for whom a quarterback will have to be mobile to stay alive, let alone move the team down the field. Even in his best years mobility wasn’t one of Aikman’s strengths.

Does Aikman need to cement his standing in NFL history? Please. Start with three Super Bowl victories, a club whose membership counts three (here’s to Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana). He has broken every Cowboy passing record (standards originally established by Staubach). And despite the series of concussions, Aikman has remained a remarkably durable quarterback. Few men lead their team in passing, as Aikman has, for 11 consecutive years.

A Hall of Famer? You decide.

As for the risks, you don’t need a medical degree to understand when the injured part of one’s body is the brain, it’s time to take pause. That nasty word I learned 20 years ago has been in the headlines of late, as his own concussions led to San Francisco 49er Steve Young’s retirement earlier this year. Hockey superstar Eric Lindros is on his way to a liquid diet after a series of on-ice collisions benched the Philadelphia Flyer center. However horrific a knee or shoulder injury might seem, imagine the pain when it’s between your ears? Every day. When the act of thinking itself is hindered.

My old hero Roger Staubach now runs an extraordinarily successful real estate firm headquartered in Dallas. Closing in on 60, he’s as sharp as ever, and still looks like he could thread the needle on a slant pattern. Aikman needs to recognize his career’s parallel to Staubach’s . . . and to take it one more step. He’s newly married, articulate, good in front of the camera. Who knows what adventures remain?

This gallant Cowboy needs to ride off into the sunset, before he finds his horse replaced with a gurney.

(Frank Murtaugh is the managing editor of Memphis Magazine. You can write him at murtaugh@memphismagazine.com)