Idiots Write About Sports

Something you probably don’t know about me: I have four… oh for lack of a better word, let’s call them superpowers.

1. I can, through the power of suggestion, plant any song in any person’s head. Say you’re walking past me, and I suddenly start singing softly, “I am a lineman for the county…” Well, the rest of the day at inopportune, you’re going to discover that Wichita Lineman is rattling around in your brain. In fact, it probably is right now. Sing it with me: “And the Wichita lineman is still on the liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine…” Enjoy having Glen Campbell echoing through your skull for the next 12 hours.

2. My voice apparently makes pregnant women go into labor. No joke: in the last couple years, we’ve had maybe a half-dozen expecting friends blow past their due date with no baby in sight, only to start having contraction pains immediately after hearing the dulcet tones of my stirring tenor. I don’t know how it happens; I just know that I have pregnant women lined up three-deep to talk to me in hopes that I will hasten their delivery.

3. I cook a very tasty duck. What? That is too a superpower.

4. I have the power to doom teams to ignoble defeats when their fans have done something to offend my delicate sensibilities. Jason has dubbed this “The Power of the Whammy.”

Some background is in order.

• On October 14, 2000, I was standing at the Fruitvale BART station awaiting the Richmond-bound train that would take me to Berkeley for that day’s UCLA-California football match-up. Also waiting at the station were a gaggle of UCLA students, apparently having traveled north to watch their No. 15-ranked Bruins in action. And as we waited, the tanned, well-coifed UCLA students told me in no uncertain terms how Cal — and by extension, me — was going to get its ass kicked and that only obvious choads like myself would willingly attend Cal-Berkeley.

I should point out that I was wearing a UC San Diego sweatshirt. They grow ‘em sharp down there in Westwood.

Anyhow, this struck me not only as dimwitted — the UC San Diego sweatshirt might be a tipoff that I’m not really affiliated with Cal and, thus, have no dog in this hunt — but as particularly ungallant and unsportsmanlike. I wasn’t planning on suiting up for the game that day, and from the look of their wispy bodies, the mouthy UCLA students didn’t appear to be, either. So why the especially heated trash talk? Has hassling passersby become as essential to the experience of attending a game as buying a program and standing for the National Anthem?

Right then and there, I decided that it would be the perfect galactic comeuppance if UCLA were to lose to lowly Cal. Then, perhaps, the mouthy UCLA students would think twice before smarting off to alumni from other UC campuses. So I put The Whammy on UCLA.

Your final score: Cal 46, UCLA 38, in triple overtime. And these are not the highly-ranked Cal Bears of today, but the pathetic Pac-10 bottom-feeders of yesteryear, limping their way through the tyrannically incompetent reign of Tom Holmoe.

Naturally, I concluded, my Whammy was the reason for Cal’s unexpected success.

• One year later, UCLA was undefeated and about to face Stanford. I was strolling around the Stanford campus in a Virginia Tech sweatshirt that my wife — a proud Hokie alum — had purchased for me.

“You lost today,” a morbidly obese UCLA student shouted at me as I walked past him. And it’s true — Virginia Tech, which had gone into the day undefeated, had lost to someone… Miami, maybe, or Syracuse or some other school. I don’t know because I don’t really care. But that didn’t stop the UCLA fan from thinking he had struck a fatal rhetorical blow.

“You lost,” he sneered again. “Your season is ruined.”

Well. What can I say to that display of sportsmanship? Other than… Whammy!

Final score: Stanford 38, UCLA 28. Whose season is ruined now, tubby?

• In 2002, UCLA returned to Cal. And since I figured the student body probably had not learned their lesson from the previous two years, I Whammied them again. Cal 17, UCLA 12.

• Last year, of course, I attended the Cal-USC game and sat behind a Trojan alum who spent the entire game behaving in various degrees of jackassery. Again, we trotted out The Whammy. Let’s go to the videotape to see how that turned out:

The prosecution rests, your honor.

• I have already recounted the tale of the Boston Red Sox fan who wronged me at last year’s playoffs by celebrating his team’s victory not with unbridled joy, but with taunts and insults. What I did not mention: in the immediate aftermath, I used my Whammy powers against Boston. Doubtlessly, The Whammy clouded Grady Little’s mind in Game Seven, convincing him to leave a clearly spent Pedro Martinez in to pitch the eighth.

I think this spate of incidents proves a couple of things: 1) Do not doubt the power of The Whammy; and 2) I am not a man to be trifled with.

“Uh, OK, Kreskin,” you’re probably saying. “You’ve got freaky mind powers. Sure. So why don’t you just slap your so-called Whammy on whoever’s playing the A’s that day, if you’re so all powerful?”

Because the rules don’t permit that. I mean, duh.

1. I cannot use The Whammy in any game I have an emotional or monetary stake in. So no going to Vegas and laying 10 large on the Patriots if I happen to slap The Whammy on Miami.
2. Only one Whammy per sport per season. So use the Whammy wisely.
3. I can only invoke one Whammy at a time.
4. The Whammy must serve a greater purpose, usually to teach obnoxiously boastful fans humility and to remind them that all glory is fleeting.

There are other rules, mostly involving incantations and what kind of chicken liver I’m supposed to use in the ceremony, but that’s Whammy etiquette in a nutshell. And maybe this all seems silly to you, but it’s certainly no more ridiculous than trusting to your fate to a Rally Monkey.

Which brings me to the Anaheim Angels.

I bear no particular ill will toward the Angel franchise, even after they beat out Oakland for the AL West title this season. Anaheim had a better season. Vladimir Guerrero is on the short list of players I enjoy watching, and the rest of the roster is remarkably jerk-free. Well, maybe not Brendan Donnelly, but only because he hates Oakland, A’s fans, and, if we may delve into some pyschoanalyis here, most likely himself, too. (Then again, who cares what Scabby Scaberson thinks?) I’ve got no beef with Angels fans — most of them seem quite pleasant and enthusiastic, even if I get the sinking suspcion that at least half think the Angels were an expansion team that suddenly appeared on the scene in 2002. But on the whole, nice folks whose good fortune I shouldn’t begrudge.

Except for one guy.

There’s this Angel fan out there — we ain’t linking to him because he doesn’t even deserve any of our pathetically small traffic — who celebrated the 10-0 Anaheim over Oakland that all but clinched the AL West title by dumping on A’s fans. There was no praise for his team, or gratitude that the players he pulls for came up big when it counted — all he had to offer was taunting, abuse and jeers for fans of the team it took Anaheim 161 games to subdue.

Graceless winning — that’s the express Do-Not-Pass-Go-Do-Not-Collect-$200 way to my Vengeance List. In my book, a fan who takes more pleasure in his opponents’ losses than his own team’s success is not much of a fan and deserves a steady stream of galling losses in order to appreciate the proper way of savoring victory. So when I stumbled across the infantile taunting in this guy’s blog last week, it became clear to me what I had to do.

Whammy on Anaheim.

I’m sorry, Angels fans. As I said above, many of you appear cool and knowledgeable, and I hate to rain hellfire down on your post-season parade. I especially hate to do it to the benefit of Red Sox fans, whose Woe-Is-Me-No-One-But-Us-Understands-the-Pain-of-Defeat attitude rankles, and merits the steady stream of playoff losses they seemingly crave.

But a lack of graciousness in victory bothers me more. And as much as I hate to do it, I have to unleash the power of The Whammy because of that one Angel fan who ruined it for the rest of you. Hopefully, this will teach him the value of not kicking the opposition when they’re down or, at the very least, to go a couple of blog entries without using “fuck” or one of its variants.

So when Chone Figgins tosses a ball to the leeward side of home plate allowing a big Red Sox inning or Jerry Meals’ strike zone isn’t to your liking or Mike Sciosia seemingly forgets how to manage, don’t blame the players or the umpires or the cruel fates. Blame it all on The Whammy. And I’m sorry I had no choice but to sic it on you.

[Edited to fix more typos than I can possibly detail in this space.]

Why waste your Whammy on a team that's already on the brink of elimination, down 0-2 and going on the road? That's like pushing an 102-year-old man down the steps.

I put the Whammy on the Angels earlier this week. See my predictions from Tuesday:

"The Sox rotation just seems more reliable than what the Angels are throwing out there. It’s hard for that great Anaheim bullpen to protect a lead if they’re never handed one. Besides, all season-long, I’ve had the sinking suspicion that the guy who should be closing out Angel wins is pitching in the eighth inning; the loyalty to Troy Percival, while laudable, could come back to haunt Anaheim. Plus, I think this is where all the injuries begin to catch up with the Angels.

And, as I’ll explain later today, I’ve placed a horrible vodoo curse upon Anaheim."

This is the long-promised explanation of said vodoo curse.

Also, the way the Whammy works, the Angels could well come back to win today and tomorrow, forcing a Game Five, which they'll lose in dramatic and heart-breaking fashion. Hell, they could even come back to win this series to suffer an even more inglorious defeat in the ALCS. I don't pretend to understand how The Whammy works; I only know it does.

This may explain some things with me.
a) I've been mocked by some Yankee fans I've been going to school with while wearing a Cubs jersey to the effect that the Cubs suck (this had happened in particular while the Cubs were in the NLCS last year. Early in the NLCS, before the Bartman saga. But it had happened for three seasons.) They must have slapped a Whammy on the Cubs, though they seemed to have no greater purpose. It's infuriating to ear that your team sucks while you're in the Final Four at that very moment. So in essence, I Whammied them right back.
b) The Yankees went on to lose to the Marlins, who had gotten us during our Whammy. Whether I count the losses to the Twins and Diamondbacks as additional Whammies is up for debate.

Indeed, the mathematics of life do seem much easier when the Whammy enters into the equation.

Phil, what Braves fan got on your nerves? Point him out and I'll kick his ass in time for '05.

I got no beef with any Braves fan, Jessica; I can't claim any Whammy-induced credit for Atlanta's run of post-season bad luck. In fact, as a fan of a team that's had problems of its own in the divisional series, I fully sympathize with Braves fans.

Though, just between you and me, I wouldn't be that upset if the Tomahawk Chop got sent to the same wing of the Retired Gimmick Home that currently houses Chief Noc-A-Homa.

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