2004 Week 12
November 23, 2004
We're coming off a fairly tumultuous week of college football.
I for one was shocked at ESPN's halftime promo during the Maryland vs. Virginia Tech game last Thursday.
You'll recall that my good friend Jill Arrington appeared on camera, clad only in a towel, then she dropped the towel and leaped into the arms of Maryland's Coach Fridge.
Coach then said a bad word on the air. I'm guessing he was afraid of getting the tar beat out of him by Jill's husband, Lavar Arrington.
After that ESPN cut back to the broadcasters, and my good friend Lee Corso said "I wish I could have been part of that scene." My good friend Mike Tirico said "yeah, I'd love for Jill to drop that towel for me" then started to make some strange grunting noises. Coach Corso replied "no, I wanted to take her place, getting naked and throwing myself at Coach Fridge. He's someone I really look up to".
The whole incident reminded me of how Coach Corso came up with his famous saying "not so fast my friend". Every time he came to visit me in Pittsburgh he insisted on going to Madame Ovary's Rub-A-Dub-Dub Shack.
He'd always order a "massage with a happy ending", which seemed strange. From my experience, most massage people just get to work relaxing the muscles in my chins and don't have any time to tell a story, hell, they don't even speak English anyway.
One day when Lee and my good friend Chris Fowler were visiting, Chris and I heard Lee calling out "NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND! SLOW IT DOWN! YES! Excellent!" After that Chris kept on saying "not so fast my friend" to Lee and laughing, so to get back at him Lee adopted it as his signature saying.
There were a lot of great rivalry games played on Saturday. You had Indiana battling Purdue for the Old Oaken Spittoon. Auburn played Alabama for possession of the Iron Bowel. Utah took on BYU for control of the famous "Fourth Wife" statue.
But somehow I missed the Thomas Jefferson state showdown between Virginia and Western Virginia. That's okay, Pitt takes on Western Virginia in the backyard brawl on Turkey Day, and I'm going to down a couple in honor of the battle.
Perhaps the best intrastate game was the Florida/Florida State tussle, where rehireronzook.com upset Bobby's boys and messed up the SEC South race.
Not all the action was within a state. Iowa defeated Wisconsin to win an interesting new trophy which looked like a Badger lineman on all fours feeding at a trough.
Probably the most embarrassing moment was the intrasectional USC/Clemson game, where a massive brawl broke out. Upon reviewing the tapes, I must admit I saw better fisticuffs from those IU players from last Friday night's basketball fight against those University of Detroit students. Of course the IU guys got better training thanks to Coach Knight.
Brawls between players and the people in the stands have a long history.
Way back in the 1930s coach Bennie Bierman actually deliberately provoked brawls at Minnesota home games. You may think this was strange, but Coach Bierman was being quite innovative.
He would take one of his most ill-tempered players, named Fred, and tell him to go into the student section and hit somebody. Fred wasn't too bright and he was one mean SOB.
So Fred would wander up there and call the students there "sissy-boys", then start wailing on one of them. Usually other students would come to their colleague's defense and pull Fred off. Often one of the bigger students would take on Fred and they'd get into a wrassling match, complete with hair pulling and so forth.
Coach Bierman would watch these fights and identify the roughest toughest students on the Minnesota campus, then he'd invite them to try out for football. That's how he discovered eventual College Football Hall of Famers like Bud Wilkinson and Bronko Nagurski, and Coach Bierman's Gophers because a powerhouse.
As for Fred, he suffered a lot of physical damage in the fights and his personality became more and more abrasive. So, in keeping with the times, he was given a frontal lobotomy.
But that wasn't the end of Fred's career. Without his frontal lobe he calmed down immensely and became famous not for his Minnesota varsity sweater and nasty disposition, but for his cashmere sweaters and his sunny personality.
You see, through the miracle of outdated brain surgery, angry violent young Fred grew up to become personable and calm children's TV personality Fred Rogers of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
And now you know the rest of the story.