A Whole Lotta Nothin Goin On

OK, so I have an excuse. My PC is on the Fritz, and I’m in the process of backing up and synching up all of my files. With that being said, I apologize for the late entry. It’s been pretty crazy week at home all the way around.

Fortunately, not a damn thing is going on sports wise. In fact, this is probably the slowest I can ever remember in terms of Husker hatred. Myopic baseball bandwagoners haven’t risen from their winter slumber. Husker basketball wallows in the misery of yet another bottom 3 finish in the Big 12. No Husker coaches or players have quit, nor has anybody been arrested for assaulting a woman. (Give it time.)

That pretty much leaves us with Husker recruiting.

I don’t have to tell you my feelings on the boom in recruiting with the dawn of the internet. I don’t have to tell you that the guy who started all of this is an absolute GENIUS for bilking 20 bucks a month from college sports fans, so they can go out and stalk high school kids. (Which isn’t that hard, because any high school athlete worth a shit is going to LOVE the attention.) So it’s actually the perfect setup for the nerdiest/classiest fans in college football to wet themselves over their possible future.

There’s only so many ways to go with this, and I’ve said it all before anyway. Seriously…I’d love to go into some long tirade about how stupid it is to follow the every move of a 17 year old kid (who may or may not even play for your team…let alone star)….but a good many of you probably agree with me anyway. Jeez, how sad does a situation have to be for me to not even WANT to comment on it? Meh..pretty bad.

* Is it just me, or does Creighton have the same season over and over and over again. Let me tell you what happens to Creighton basketball every single year….
- Team starts out beating good mid-level team. Fans become more myopic
- Team loses to crappy mid-major on the road. Myopic fans panic.
- Team goes through mid-year swoon, losing a couple of games. Fans put on Husker gear.
- Team gets hot, beating overrated Missouri Valley teams along the way.
- Team wins MVC tourney in St. Louis. Fans falling out of their skin with arrogance.
- Team plays tough BCS conference team in first round, loses by 5-10 points. Fans point out their greatness.

Over and over and over again. It’s like Groundhog’s day…with some interchangeable white kid with floppy blonde hair as the star. Am I the only one who has noticed this? Same damn thing…different year.

* I saw more Colts and Bears jerseys at the hockey game last night than I’ve seen in the past 20 years. I’m all for representing your favorite team. Why do I want to punch these people in the face so badly? What is it about bandwagon fans that just irritates me so much? I’m all for sporting a new sweatshirt because your team finally made it to the biggest football game on earth…but do you have to deck yourself out like a walking billboard, just to show the world that you’ve “followed them the whole time?” I can’t think of too many things more annoying than that.

* We had this conversation on one of the other boards I frequent, and I think I want to touch on this in a bit more detail. The discussion centered around Tara Conner. Apparently the reigning Miss USA (Don’t get me started with pageants) has spilled her guts on TV lately, talking about how she’s a victim of a “bad environment”, and somehow it wasn’t her fault that she found herself snorting coke or playing mattress test-pilot with ½ of the second fleet. The discussion centered around how young women today have zero role models and pretty much no hope at all of becoming the strong components of American society that many great women are today.

Personally..and this is just me…I don’t blame her at all. It’s a nearly impossible task to keep kids (and she’s only 22…so to me she’s still almost a kid) of drugs and drinking and the like. While people are all over this girl…I have but one question here: Where the hell is the outrage at her parents (or parent?) in all of this? People get all over the Brittany Spears’ of the world, the Tara Conners and the Paris Hilton, yet nobody wants to go back and look at why these skanks are acting the way they do…which of course causes them to be a bad role model.

Charles Barkley had it dead fucking on when he stated that “I am not a role model.” Of course he’s not. Behavior starts at home and it starts early. Now that I have kids, I see it every single day. Bad parents create environments where their kids have no chance. People ask me all the time, “Aren’t you going to be scared when your son or daughter gets old enough to be tempted to do drugs and screw around?” The answer of course is no. Well, of course I’ll have fears for their safety, but I’m smart enough to know that what I do as a parent affects them for the rest of their lives. By being a good role model now, I’m hoping to instill the sense of right or wrong that will help carry them through life. It’s called “good parenting” and it’s not that fucking hard.

Look, having kids changes your life. It changes your focus and changes the way you see your own life. But at some point, you have to look beyond changing diapers and going to birthday parties, and realize that what you tell them now will affect them later. I won’t worry as much as most people, because I know by the time my kids get to that point, they’ll know…(with my wife and I’s help) the difference between right or wrong. Does that mean they won’t be tempted by friends and outside influences? Does that mean Paris Hilton being a two bit, coked-up whore won’t have some sort of influence on the society they’re trying to fit into? Of course not, but if I tell them right now the difference between real life and what they see on TV, they’ll have a hell of a lot better chance of making it through OK.

In the meantime, I’ve got to keep on telling them it’s not nice to call people stupid, and that Steve Pederson is a complete buffoon, who couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper bag. Hey, just because I think I’m a good parent doesn’t mean I can’t pass along the family business does it?

God help us by having something interesting go on during the Super Bowl, so I don’t have to turn this into a column plucked right out of Parenting Magazine.

Yeesh.

Enjoy the Super Bowl