ESPN.com - The Cooler's terrible twos

ESPN.com: Page 2

Monday, November 18, 2002
The Cooler's terrible twos

By Brian Murphy
Special to Page 2

What's a guy to do when he's stuck in the La Jolla Marriott, Room 1009, fresh out of ideas, and staring at a digital alarm clock that reads 11:51 p.m. PST?


	Even Carrot Top mocked the Murph.

Well, if he's this guy -- the man thieving checks from Bristol, Conn., for years on end -- he sits down at a laptop. He churns out a mishmash of half-baked pop culture allusions with quarter-baked sports takes. He calls it a full-baked Cooler and then he hits the hay, wondering: When's ESPN.com going to call and say, "Murph, the jig is up. Hand in your laptop, immediately."

In other words, after two years of Sunday night comedy so forced it makes a square-peg into round-circle look like Montana to Rice, we have come to a crossroads:

The Cooler turns 2 years old this month.

This is not a significant turn of events by any means.

It is, however, an excuse for a lead item when, quite frankly, the Muse is nowhere to be found, AWOL, like Latrell Sprewell at a morning shootaround or Brian Billick at a Hug Your Local Beat Writer breakfast. The Muse -- where did he go? He's not under the room service tray cover, not in the hotel hot tub, and not down at Character's, the Marriott pub where salsa lessons are given free on Saturday nights. I only wish I were kidding about the last point, but it brings up one of our many Anniversary Angles.

Namely, the absurd places in which The Cooler hath been penned on Sunday nights.

Like the freezing-cold midnight press tent at Muirfield in Scotland. Like a rented home in Augusta, Ga. or in Lytham-St. Anne's, England. Like hotels in Tulsa, Los Angeles, Long Island, N.Y., and Atlanta, to name a few. Like my gawd-awful, filthy, media guide-strewn "office" at the Home Base in San Francisco.

Does it almost defy mathematics and human behavioral laws that one man can be so unfunny in so many different places?

Which brings up another Anniversary Angle: How pathologically unfunny this column has been in its glorious two-year run. Believe me. I checked. I somehow found a way to call up the Cooler from two years ago and I wish I hadn't. Not that it was unfunny, but Carrot Top was sending me gloating, heckling e-mails. In that respect, making it to two years is a milestone, a sort of inexplicable phenomenon not unlike Stonehenge, or Jack Haley's NBA career.

What makes it so truly, sadly funny is the shelf life on the Pop Culture references. Back when The Cooler was still finding its way out of the early wilderness, the columns made reference to November 2000 luminaries such as boxer David Tua, Florida elections maven Kathleen Harris and Oklahoma quarterback Josh Heupel. The weekly Cooler, in short, has the shelf life of a banana.

If you enjoy reading these things anywhere past Monday of any given week, you must also be the guy who e-mails ESPN Classic to air reruns of "Battle of the Network Stars," just so you can spend evenings watching Gabe Kaplan take on Robert Conrad in the obstacle course down at Pepperdine.

But you'll have to forgive me. Part of the blame goes to the Boys in Bristol, who came up with this Page 2 idea in November 2000 and only called me because I had a previous relationship with the website, dating to my acquisition of some incriminating Polaroids. Their idea for me: "The Water Cooler," a Monday morning potpourri of the weekend sports. Great. Hunter S. Thompson gets to write abut gambling, drugs and firearms. I get the dead February weekend where I'm forced to conjure up a bit about Frank Lickliter at the Buick Invitational at Torrey Pines.

It hasn't been all bad. I treasure, for example, the day I inexplicably ripped the AFLAC duck of commercial fame. A reader who worked at AFLAC sent me an AFLAC duck headcover for my driver and a stuffed duck that, upon squeezing, says, in the duck voice: "Af-lack!" I gave the headcover to my boy T.C., in appreciation for contributing the only good lines to this column over the past two years; and the talking duck to my dad, who gets an outrageous kick out of it for some reason.

That's pretty much it. On the one hand, I have the Sunday night dread of staving off sleep after some out-of-town newspaper assignment, to write this thing when my brain is as empty a stadium at a midseason XFL game (a winter, 2001 topic of The Cooler, it must be noted.)

On the other hand, I got mail signed by the AFLAC duck. Really.

Call it a fair trade, and let's move on to the Weekend List of Five:

1. Junior Seau: Wouldn't want to pass him In the high school hallway


	Junior Seau shows great timing during a play, but not after one.

Spent Sunday at the 49ers-Chargers game, and took a closer look at Junior Seau's act. After all these years, he's still all hyper and jumpy and kooky. Somebody get this guy a decaf. You'd think the act would tire by now. You know, Chargers in midst of another forgettable year; Seau involved in a gang tackle of a running back; Seau running to midfield to celebrate the fact the Chargers, en route to missing the playoffs again, now have second-and-nine on defense.

But he's still at it after all these years, like Gallagher still crushing watermelons all over this great land.

Over the course of the day, I came to admire the man's persistence. Undoubtedly, a tremendous player, he also carries with him schtick, and not many NFL players these days have schtick. Hell, I just spent 800 words on the intro to this thing explaining how hard it is to have schtick. But Seau has schtick. Say that five times fast.

Watching him do his Deke the Blitz Thing, I had to chuckle high up in the press box. Seau comes rushing to the line and thrusts his head forward once, twice, even three times; or jumps his body in place once, twice, even three times to try and draw illegal motion. I couldn't help but think the guy would have been the ultimate high school hallway bully. You know, the guy who, when you passed him, raised his right fist in quick fashion, as if he was going to drill someone in the shoulder -- only to derive great enjoyment out of the recoiling freshman who cowered at the sight of Seau's arm punch deke.

Is that bit too tortured to explain in print?

It brought back a fond memory of a brief scene in "Dazed and Confused," a throwaway moment early on when a character deked the arm punch, and got the requisite cower. A fine moment, just for its eternal truths.

2. Yao Ming: much maligned


	Yao Ming maligns the Lakers for 20 points Sunday.

Yao Ming is official! This weekend, when he rolled out 20 on the Lakers, it was Rick Fox who issued the postgame quote, "He's been much maligned as a No. 1 draft pick." Yes! Much-Maligned! In fact, Yao Ming has played, what, seven games as an NBA player? Who has maligned him? Who has maligned him to the point where it could only be described as "much" maligned?

Much-maligned is such a buzzword, I once heard Ricky Watters use it as its own descriptive clause. Discussing Steve Young before Super Bowl XXIX, Watters defended his QB by saying, simply, in Young's defense: "Steve Young, much maligned ..." He didn't finish his sentence before moving on. His point was made. We all knew what he was talking about. Somebody says you're "much maligned," you've just kicked somebody else's ass.

3. Al Davis: unplugged


	Nobody close to much-maligned Al Davis has the guts to tell him to update his look.

Some characters in this world still transcend time and place, and Al Davis, with each passing year, scales up the ladder. His recent foray on to ESPN was must-see TV, if only for the act alone. The sweatsuit. The glasses. The voice. The fact that it's 2002, and this guy is still breaking out "greatness of the Raiders" and anti-NFL venom like it's the 1970s. You half-expected him to tell Hank Goldberg on ESPN that he was planning to extend Kenny Stabler's contract and hoped to sign George Atkinson to a long-term deal.

That he has morphed his life into an existence of Hating Paul Tagliabue is disturbing and amusing, but mostly amusing. If ever given a choice between the diabolical Davis and the wax-man Tagliabue, you've got to go with Davis on any given Sunday. With whom would you rather roll into Vegas for a weekend of gambling and drinking? Tags' posse, or Al Davis' posse? That's what I thought.

Sweatsuits for everyone.

4. Two random college football thoughts
Sitting in "Characters," the La Jolla Marriott bar, watching the salsa lessons, the TV behind the bar showed the highlights from the USC-Arizona State game, an outcome of which I was not aware. Slowly, my hopes rose. Then, as each successive highlight showed more and more snaps of Southern Cal on offense, my hopes slowly sank. Do you have a team out there that you dislike to the point that you follow its outcome, just hoping for something negative? The team doesn't necessarily make or break your day, it's just that if that team -- in my case, 'SC -- loses, you get a little smile, sit up a little straighter, and your beer tastes a little colder. Or, as was the case Saturday, if that team wins, you frown for a half-second, you slump down for a bit, and then you order another beer. That's 'SC. That was my Highlight Experience at "Characters" ...


	Justin Fargas and USC drops the Sun Devils and irritates the Murph.

Nice roll by the Iowa fans carting the goal posts off the turf at the Metrodome, up the staircase and out -- out! -- of the stadium. Great stuff, good laugh, and clearly fueled by many lagers. My question: What the hell happens when you get that thing outside? It's Minneapolis in November, the wind chill is probably in the teens, and you and eight pals have a 40-foot long neon yellow pole in your possession. Ah, the downside of the Goal Post Pilfer ...

5. Final Cooler birthday thoughts
Truth told, dwellers, it has been a good run thus far. Looking back over nearly 100 of these stink bombs has brought back a few laughs, like the saga of the Ligue Dynasty -- of the Chicago Ligues -- and their Comiskey ambush; like Cooler Day (NCAA final and baseball's Opening Day); like the time my boy T.C., amid UCLA's stirring run past Cincinnati in the NCAA Tournament, shouted out at Bob Huggins: "Who wears a three-piece suit? He looks like Louie DePalma!"

Of course, we wish nothing but good health and godspeed to Mr. Huggins, but we use him to make our final point. If we learned nothing else from The Cooler for the past two years, we did learn one thing, from the now-legendary surfer-stoner fan at the 1989 UCLA-Michigan game:

We play some ball on the West Coast!

Brian Murphy of the San Francisco Chronicle writes the "Weekend Water Cooler" every Monday for Page 2.