John Lackey Admits He Is Just An "Ok" Pitcher (bonus blog on how the 1986 Red Sox starting pitchers are like a box of Flavor-Ice)

I like John Lackey. I like that he has a hot wife. I like that he looks like Haywire from Prison Break. I also  like that, like yours truly, he appears to have no hair on his shins. And to boot, he is refreshingly candid about his mediocrity (again, like yours truly). He's also this spring's "expect big things because he lost weight" poster boy. It's tough to find a pre-season analysis of pitching that isn't filled with caveats like "if so and so's shoulder stays healthy" and "if he returns to form from 2 years ago" and "if he doesn't step on a broken mayonnaise jar". It's true, though, there's too many variables for anyone to act like they really know anything. But, would anybody be surprised if Beckett, Lester and Buchholz are all lights out this year? And Lackey and that crazy Asian motherfucker Dice-K are nothing to sneeze at in the 4&5 holes. No reason to worry, probably...maybe. Anyway, the only reason I'm even talking about the Sox pitchers right now is so I can finally share what I feel is the greatest analogy of all time.

Click below to find out why the 1986 Red Sox pitchers were like a box of Flavor-Ice.

Is That a Maybe?

Let's assume that a) this is real and b) these two met at a food court. I can't imagine any girl wants to be proposed to so openly in public...maybe, MAYBE if it is in front of all her closest friends and family at like her birthday party or something..but not in front of 40,000 drunks at a baseball game and definitely not in front of 200 slobs at a mall food court. I'm not counting if there just happen to be other people around like at a nice, quiet restaurant or Central Park in fall or something. Anyway, this chick could have handle it better. My man gets all dolled up, he snatches up the guitar guy from South Station and all she can do is run away? At least smile and give him a big hug so people think you're saying yes. Then whisper something into his ear like, "Not on your life, you fucking psycho. And why did you pick that song? My name is Megan." And is this guy going after her at the end? Dude, let her go. It's not happening. Just belly up to the bar at Johnny Rockets, grab a milkshake and think about what you just did.

Does JP Arencibia Got Game?

It's easy to read this tweet and say, "Fuck off, JP Arencibia. Take your grade school antics and have fun in 4th place this year." But I say, "Bravo, JP." I'm sure Heidi will laugh this off in public but in her heart of hearts she can't wait til the Jays come to Fenway in April. She must be bored breaking up the marriages of the local boys by now. It's time for some strange strange.

The Grammy Award Sucks

The actual Grammy award itself is a joke. It's the Gold Glove of the entertainment industry. Good thing the Grammy people realized this and decided to make the show heavy on performances and personalities, light on the awards. Most of the who-gives-a-shit awards were handed out prior to the telecast. Fuck, every time a performer/presenter was introduced tonight the announcer said they had already won 3 Grammy awards earlier in the evening. So while all the shitheads are up in arms about Bieber losing out to Esperanza Spalding, I'm just gonna ramble on about my impressions from tonight's festivities.

Countdown to Katy Perry and Russell Brand's Divorce Begins

So Katy Perry brings her grammy to the Grammys and her asshat of a husband, Russell Brand, bides his time until finding the perfect opportunity to humiliate her 90 year old ass. Shit, this guy can't be any less interested in this red carpet interview until he sees nana pretending to know who Seacrest is. Now I'm sure Katy Perry was just an innocent player in the assassination of her nana's heart and soul but she served her up pretty good here. If this were any other marriage it would be a no-brainer that Russell wasn't getting laid tonight. But I'm sure as soon as these two psychos were off-camera Katy passed grandma off to her publicist and dragged Russell into the nearest limo for a pre-show beanjob. Of course this still doesn't change the fact that these guys will be divorced by this time next year. I mean, when two celebrities get married do they realize that they are the only two people in the world who don't think they're getting divorced?

Here's the link to it. I don't know why this fucking site refuses to locate my YouTubes.

French Bulldog Breeders Can Go Straight to Hell

Aww..French Bulldogs. So cute. Wait, what's that you say? They can't fuck on their own?? They can't naturally reproduce? So everytime an NYC socialite wants to buy a Frenchie someone has to jerk off a boy Frenchie and pour it into a girl Frenchie. Then a little Frenchie is born and condemned to a life where they can't breathe, can't run in the sun for 5 minutes without having a  heart attack, can't fuck, are prone to spinal disease and oh yeah, for good measure, they're selfish. Folks, can God be any clearer? He doesn't want anymore fucking French Bulldogs terrorizing Earth with their scary snorting and weak hind legs. Where is PETA when you need them? French Bulldog breeders are no better than Mike Vick. But wait, there is an upside to offset their miserable existence; adorable face wrinkles!

It should come as no surprise that these things are related to the equally ugly and chronically ill Pug. Did you know if you pull on a Pug's collar too tight his eye might pop out? No biggie though. Just quickly push it back in.

We All Stink

Farts are like shooting stars. There's literally millions of them going off at all times but only the really big ones get noticed. That's all well and good for most people. But when you work in a bar with a capacity of 600, every weekend night is like that August meteor shower. Just a never-ending sea of ass stench. It's a stark reminder that we're all just walking waste containers. All the showers, smiles and small-C titties in the world can't change the fact that we're filled with piss, shit and snot and it's fucking disgusting.

Bill Simmons reviews "The Fighter"

I stopped reading Bill Simmons right around the same time I stopped reading most online sports columns; after the Pats' Superbowl loss to the Giants in SB XLII. But last week when I heard he wrote a review of "The Fighter" I figured I would take a look. Boy, was it some of the most indulgent, self-serving piles of shit I've stumbled across in some time. I decided to dissect it in the signature style of the boys over at the late, great FireJoeMorgan.

Sports movies continue to evolve

By Bill Simmons

 

"But you don't understand … it took Mark Wahlberg years to make this movie! It was a labor of love! He remained in boxing shape since 2005, woke up at 4 in the morning to keep training, sparred for thousands of hours, never gave up even after watching the project fall through multiple times. … IT WAS A LABOR OF LOVE!!!!!!!!!"

Ok, what’s your point? I smell something sarcastically fishy here.

That's been this month's media spin for "The Fighter," an impeccably acted drama about two brothers -- a boxer and his addict trainer -- that will be remembered as the best sports movie of 2010 by default. The film was marketed so brilliantly that nobody ever asked, "Wait a second, why did such a successful actor have so much trouble getting a relatively inexpensive movie made?"

Spin? Who is spinning anything? YOU started off saying “ But you don’t understand”. YOU just created an air of negativity surrounding the movie that would warrant spin. I don’t know how much of the rest of that opening was hyperbole, but it did take Marky Mark a while to get this film made. Pop quiz, hot shot; What is remembered as the best sports movie of 2009? By default or otherwise. 2008? 2007? And who the fuck ever says to themselves before going to a movie; “Wait…this movie stars an A-List actor, why didn’t this take 18 months from start to finish instead of 4 years? It must suck.” Also, thank you for using the term “impeccably acted” so we know you’re a qualified to review this movie.

The easy answer: Since "Rocky" captured the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1976, Hollywood has churned out an average of one boxing movie per year. That's astonishing, especially when the average American sports fan can name only four active boxers right now: Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather and the Klitschko brothers, whom nobody can identify individually beyond, "I think one of them dates Hayden Panettiere." The complete roll call since 1976: "Rocky"; "The Greatest"; "Rocky II"; "The Champ"; "The Main Event"; "Penitentiary"; "Raging Bull"; "Body and Soul"; "Penitentiary II"; "Rocky III"; "Tough Enough"; "Rocky IV"; "Teen Wolf II"; "Penitentiary III"; "Rocky V"; "Play It to the Bone"; "Gladiator"; "Diggstown"; "When We Were Kings"; "The Great White Hype"; "The Hurricane"; "The Boxer"; "Rocky Marciano"; "Girlfight"; "Ali"; "Undisputed"; "Million Dollar Baby"; "Against the Ropes"; "Cinderella Man"; "Undisputed II"; "Rocky Balboa"; "Resurrecting the Champ"; "The Hammer"; "Fighting"; "The Fighter."

I will admit that I giggled audibly when I read “Teen Wolf II”, but then I immediately got pissed again when I remembered that the actual title is “Teen Wolf Too” with the play on words being that Jason Bateman was, in fact, ALSO a teen wolf (a teen wolf too!). Easy answer? The easy answer is to type out 30 movies in quotation marks separated by semi-colons? Ok, so since Rocky there has been one “boxing movie” per year. Doesn’t Hollywood realize how ridiculous that is since today, in 2010, the average American can only name 4 active boxers? Never mind the fact that he made up that stat, but it sounds like he’s arguing that there should have been less than one “boxing movie” per year for the past 30. Considering there are hundreds of movies made each year (rather than making up the number I will broadly estimate) how can one “boxing movie” each year be considered an over-saturation of the market. Also, why would the relevance of boxing in today’s society be any reason to indict the production of “boxing movies” over the past 30 years. Simmons, you’re so fucking lazy. In case you’re wondering why I keep putting “boxing movie” in quotes it’s because I find it difficult to classify any movie as a boxing movie, baseball movie, sports movie, etc. “The Hurricane” is a boxing movie the same way that “Driving Miss Daisy” is about NASCAR. Well, maybe not, but you get my point. Simmons is an idiot. Is “The Pursuit of Happyness” a “business movie”?

Best part of that list: Hollywood giving up and calling its last two efforts "Fighting" and "The Fighter." Get ready for "Fight," "Punch" and "Ow" in the next few years.

Who laughed at this? Who? If you laughed at this just stick a knife in your neck right now. All the way through until you drop the knife from being dead. If you closed your eyes and read this would you not think it was Shaughnessy? Or maybe Reilly? And how did Hollywood give up, you sniveling dickhead? Should the producers of "The Fighter" have called an urgent meeting because a recent movie was called "Fighting" and decided to change the name to "Mickey and Dicky"? Calling it "The Fighter" isn't quite mailing it in either. It's pretty poignant. 

Most interesting part of that list: All the big-name actors who caught the boxing bug in the primes of their respective careers. Ryan O'Neal. Jon Voight. Robert De Niro. Denzel Washington. Daniel Day-Lewis. Will Smith. Wesley Snipes. Russell Crowe. Adam Carolla. And now, Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Those are 11 of the most successful actors of the past 40 years. (I know, I know, I have Carolla ranked higher than most.) Why boxing? Because it's the easiest sport to film -- all you need are two fighters, a ring, a referee and a crowd of extras

I have no problem with the Carolla wink-wink. But “Why boxing? Because it’s the easiest sport to film”. Don’t just ask questions that no one else is asking and then make up the answers to them. Yeah? Boxing is the easiest sport to film?…just two actors a ring and a crowd. The actors don’t need months of training to look authentic, it doesn’t take several hundred takes to get all the right angles and hundreds of hours of editing to piece together the perfect cinematic rendering. Never mind the fact that in your hilarious opening paragraph you highlight several difficulties of making such a movie. With the exception of Carolla and maybe Marky Mark, I bet if you asked any of those other actors to make a “pros” list as to why they made those movies, the word “boxing” wouldn’t appear on any of them. (See the PS video at the end of this blog for why I am awesome).

(Note: It's mildly incredible that Tom Cruise never made a boxing movie for all of these reasons -- and, no, "Far and Away" doesn't count. Can't you see him sitting on Leno's sofa as Leno says "Tom, you've always kept yourself in good shape, but in this movie … wow!" as Cruise overlaughs, then makes some self-serving joke about how Katie Holmes was the big winner because of all the great sex they had thanks to his extra stamina and physical prowess. Yuck. The fact that Cruise never turned Frank Deford's legendary "The Boxer and the Blonde" feature into a movie and played Billy Conn ranks right up there with "USA 4, USSR 3" and Super Bowl 36 as one of the biggest upsets of the past 40 years.)

Bill Simmons, how do you sleep at night? Mildly incredible. Ever remember hearing in school that something can’t be partially destroyed? The definition of destroyed precludes it from having any partial element. Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with, mildly incredible. And the whole Leno bit, so fucking contrived. Frank Deford, blah blah…how many more ways can I link sports history and pop culture? Don’t even get me started on how “Far and Away” is probably more of a “boxing movie” than most of the others he deemed as such.

We're so accustomed to seeing every boxing movie end the same way -- with our hero winning the big fight -- that even though we love having curveballs thrown at us in the theater, it always feels disconcerting if a boxing movie ends unhappily. Well, unless Hilary Swank is paralyzed and subsequently suffocated to death by Clint Eastwood.

Whoever is accustomed to seeing every boxing movie ending the same way – with our hero winning the big fight - has only seen Rocky II thru Drago. To the best of my recollection; Raging Bull ended up fat, broke and charged with statutory rape, The Hurricane ended up in jail, The Champ ended up dead, Gladiator ended up dishonorably discharged from the United States Marines for his role in the accidental death of William Santiago, Ali ended up with Parkinson’s, Cinderella Man ended up turning into a pumpkin, and the rest of those movies ended up being seen by nobody. Not because they were “boxing movies” but because they just didn’t appeal to the masses. The American public is a funny lady that way.

But when you can see a 30-second trailer and say to yourself, "I can guess pretty much exactly how this movie will end," what's the impetus to drag yourself to the theater? Why not wait until the DVD or HBO debut?

Great point. This is a problem exclusive to boxing-themed movies. Every other movie to come out in the past 30 years has been seen in theaters by every able-bodied, of age person in our country. Currently there is a 3-way tie atop the all-time U.S. Box Office list; Avatar, Mr. Mom, and The Secret of Nimh.

Your best-case scenario for a boxing flick? The "Million Dollar Baby" route -- fantastic reviews, multiple award nominations and enough buzz that you churn an unexpected profit as one of the *adult* choices during holiday season. ("Baby" had a $30 million budget and grossed $100 million domestically.)

(A fourth grade student afflicted with head lice approaches)
Student: Mr. Sports Guy, what’s the best-case scenario for a boxing flick?
Simmons: Well, I’d have to say it would be fantastic reviews, multiple award nominations and enough buzz that you churn an unexpected profit as one of the *adult* choices during holiday season.
Student: Interesting. But couldn’t you say that about any movie no matter what genre or what season it is released during? And why did you surround adult with asterisks?
Simmons: Are you prepared to be the God-Focker? Double-dose.
Student: Huh?
Simmons: Scram kid, ya bother me.

And you can't take your eyes off Bale in any scene. He dropped 30 pounds, crushed the accent, nailed the sparring scenes, managed to be likable and unlikable at the same time, and pulled off the single hardest task as a famous actor: making us feel as though we're watching a character instead of a famous person playing a character. (That was my biggest issue with Justin Timberlake in "The Social Network" -- I never felt as if he was anyone other than Justin Timberlake.)


This is just a smidgeon of a large part of the piece in which Simmons sprouts his “I’m a legitimate critic” wings. Anyway, I totally agree here. Do you know how many fights I have gotten into with my friends about whether a character was played by an actor or not. I’ll never forget walking out of Jurassic Park saying how great Ian Malcolm was in the movie. One of my friends said, “Dude, that was Jeff Goldblum playing Ian Malcolm.” I refused to give him a ride and when he chased after my car I opened my door and backed up giving him a vicious auto-clothesline. Okay, back to the really reals world.  A movie sucks because it sucks. Not because you didn’t believe that Anthony Hopkins was the real Richard Nixon. And then that bullshit about JT in the facebook movie. So the whole time Simmons just sat there with his arms crossed saying, “Uh-uh, THAT’s Justin Timberlake. I know him. He sings “Cry Me a River”’. Come to think of it, why do so many movies have credits before the movie starts? Just letting the cat out of the bag I say.

With Crowe's star fading, Bale might be first in the "Talented actor/difficult perfectionist/hothead who can play everything from a leading man to a barely recognizable indie character" power rankings. As for Wahlberg, we've seen him thrive as the "endearing, soft-spoken, lower-class underdog who maintains his dignity and resolve in the bleakest times" character before, but his performance as Ward was good enough that I'm finally ready to forgive him for "The Happening."

I mean he has to be attempting humor here with the severely overly-worded and needlessly narrow categories, but I’m still very confused. Does he want us to believe that these are quantifiable categories for an actor? Or was this all just a big set-up for that sweet zinger on "The Happening"?

My biggest gripe: A Micky Ward movie that didn't include one fight from the Gatti trilogy? Huh? (Isn't that like "Secretariat" ending before the Triple Crown races?)

I’m nit-picking here, but so is he. The movie stands on its own or it doesn’t. I bet someone could make a pretty good movie about Abe Lincoln that didn’t have his assassination in it or the time that he felched Mary Todd.

If there's been an interesting trend in the past decade, it's the "conventional sports movie" genre slowing to a crawl and the "quality movie that happens to include sports" genre gaining steam. My friend Dan Silver, the single biggest movie dork I know and someone who once sent me a 4,500-word e-mail on how he would cast a "Jaws" remake, believes this conventional-to-quality movement was spawned by television, where character-driven dramas such as "The Sopranos," "The Wire" and "Mad Men" raised the storytelling bar to extraordinary heights (and, in turn, raised our own expectations for what we were watching).

The notion of an era of conventional sports movies yielding to the new age of quality movies that happen to include sports is just fucking horseshit. Firstly, and I realize I sound like a movie snob here but I contend that any sports movie is really just a movie that happens to include sports. Sports is the backdrop. Secondly, there will always be shitty movies and there will always be quality movies. Whether or not sports is featured in them will almost always be irrelevant. It might be relevant to its box office success, but it won’t matter to the quality. I believe that there is a morsel of truth to the idea that shows like Mad Men and The Wire are spoiling viewers, but to an undetermined extent. Viewers appreciate the authenticity of those shows. It’s truly something we’ve never seen before so the jury is still out on its overall impact on the medium. To declare a “conventional-to-quality” movement is to say that something can’t be both conventional and quality. Bullshit.

I love this theory. And there might be some truth to it. The last wave of old-school sports movies crested from 1998 to 2006, highlighted (and lowlighted) by "The Replacements," "Varsity Blues," "Ali," "For Love of the Game," "Remember the Titans," "He Got Game," "Rebound," "Seabiscuit," "Without Limits," "Any Given Sunday," "Invincible," "Play It to the Bone," "BASEketball," "Like Mike," "Love and Basketball," "Dreamer," "The Legend of Bagger Vance," "Bend It Like Beckham," "The Waterboy," "Driven," "Wimbledon," "We Are Marshall," "Friday Night Lights," "Miracle," "Mr. 3000," "Sandlot 2," "Talladega Nights," "The Hurricane," "Radio," "Summer Catch," "Mystery, Alaska," "Undisputed," "Air Bud," "Cinderella Man," "The Greatest Game Ever Played," "Fever Pitch," "Girlfight," "The Rookie," "Dodgeball," "Glory Road," "Hardball," "Gridiron Gang," "The Benchwarmers," "Coach Carter," "Two for the Money, "Rocky Balboa" and the remakes of "The Longest Yard" and "Bad News Bears."

I love this theory! Now let me list off a bunch of movies to prove its merit. I mean, seriously, pretty much the only thing any of these movies have in common is that they feature a sport. But for the purposes of proving his own point, Simmons calls them all “old-school” sports movies. Actually, why isn’t Old School on this list? Vince Vaughn did gymnastics in that movie, it’s totally a sports flick. Fuck. I keep re-reading that list of movies, getting angrier and angrier. Can you ever imagine having a conversation about sports movies and saying “Well, think back to movies like Hardball and Dodgeball..” What would your next words be that could possibly make any sense of that sentence?

The formula during that run: Find a decent script, find one name actor, stick him on the poster, hit all the traditional beats, make sure the costs don't exceed $30-35 million, blitz everyone with promotion before opening weekend, just try to get on base like Ichiro. That formula has been abandoned.

Yup. The new formula is; Find a Champs Sports receipt with at least $200 in purchases, hand it to a homeless guy and ask him to read it, record this on your Sony HandyCam, be sure to photoshop Aviator shades on the homeless guy for the poster, don’t tell anybody about it, and bribe the movie theater cashier to ring up tickets to this film when people ask for one to True Grit.

In 2010, just four sports movies were released: "The Fighter," "Secretariat" (liked it, didn't love it), "The Winning Season" (didn't even know it came out) and "Just Wright" (wouldn't have seen it at gunpoint). Although the conventional-to-quality shift was a factor, I prefer a simpler explanation: Hollywood beat the genre into the ground, squeezed the formula like you'd squeeze the last few drops out of a toothpaste tube … and eventually murdered it altogether. I even predicted this would happen in 2006 with my "Gridiron Gang" review. You could see it coming.

Oh, my bad. He has an explanation supporting that the formula was abandoned. There were just 4 “sports movies” released in ’10 and the genre has been beat into the ground. You heard it here first, folks. Sports movies are dead just like an empty toothpaste tube. And the analogy ends there, no point in hypothesizing that you could just buy another tube of toothpaste; ie: put another batch of sports movies into production. Nope. All your teeth are going to fall out. And just to further illustrate his point (which hasn’t really happened) he cites an article from 2006, written by….him! Yup, WE could see it coming.
By the way, for the first time reading this article I decided to look something up and there are a bunch of 2010 movies classified as “sport” on imdb.com.

An optimist would argue that the movie industry simply tired of making formulaic crap, which is why it's gravitating toward better stories ("The Fighter" and "The Wrestler") or quirkier, cheaply executed ideas (three good ones from 2009: "Sugar," "Big Fan" and "Damned United"). A pessimist would argue, "Come on, you're giving Hollywood waaaaaaaaaaay too much credit. It's just as formulaic and creatively barren as ever. And if you don't believe me, I have two words for you … 'Little Fockers'!"

A sane person not blinded by their own ego would argue, “There is no point to this article because you are arguing a theory or theories you came up with and supporting them with “facts” that are either untrue or as arbitrary as it gets. You are just stating them as if they were indisputable fact and its really fucking crazy.”

Complicating matters, the movie industry is battling the same issue as every professional sports league:

Ah, the obligatory parallel between pop culture and pro sports. Don’t you just love when Simmons asks Chris Connelly, during one of his podcasts, something like, “If Ryan Reynolds were any team in baseball history, what would he be?” The correct answer, by the way, is the Mariners in whatever year they won like 130 games but didn’t make the Series.
There’s like 5 more paragraphs in the article, each the same bullshit as the one before it. Two things I want to point out. First, the closest thing to a true “Boxing Movie” that Simmons mentions is “The Great White Hype”. It’s a satire on the boxing industry, plain and simple. Funny as shit, too. Second, you really do have to hand it to Simmons; he’s not that funny and he hasn’t had an original thought in 5 years but he somehow managed to parlay his passion for the Sox, Celts, Patriots and 90210 into a multi-million dollar empire.

PS - I originally wrote this as an email to friends last week. Then, on Monday, Sylvester Stallone went on Regis and completely validated my point about boxing movies. The creator of the ultimate boxing movie says it's not a boxing movie!

For some reason this blog site sucks at uploading .mov files and at finding YouTubes so here is the link to it.