Category Archives: Sports

Has it been 12 years since the Canadiens have won a Stanley Cup?  My goodness, I’m starting to know what it’s like to be a Maple Leafs fan.  This could be the year that Montreal surprises everyone and wins it all!  Not so for the Leafs, I don’t think.  Their team is, right now, as good as it’s going to get this year, and that’s not good enough.
Anyway, I’m pretty pleased with the new NHL.  The rules, and enforcing those rules, seems to be making a difference.  It’s a much more offensively oriented game now, it seems, and that’s always fun to watch.  Especially after a decade of The Trap.
Has there been a more exciting team to follow than the Canadiens?  Every game, it seems, comes down to the wire, with the Habs pulling out another tough win after another.  Last night they lost to the Penguins in a shootout, but I can’t be too upset when Crosby is the guy who scored the winning goal.  The difference I notice between the Canadiens and the teams they play against is the hustle.  Game after game, shift after shift, play after play, the Montreal players seem to be simply beating the opponents to the puck.  They have a very fast, agressive style that seems to work in this new NHL.

I’ll say it now, Dewey-like:

Habs Win Cup in ’06

Was watching a bit of the RedWings v. Kings game last night on TSN.  At the end of each hockey broadcast, they offer their TSN Turning Point.  The moment in the game where the momentum switches from one team to the other, I suppose.  Last night’s Turning Point, they decided, was the winning goal.  Okay, except the winning goal was scored in overtime.
Now, I may be wrong, but I don’t think the sudden-death winning goal can be considered the turning point in a game.  Wouldn’t that be the Ending Point?

The Dolphins won, so I don’t really care about the pool.

Still,
I did pretty bad in week one of The Annekenstein Monster pool (where a huge 4 players are participating), going 6-10.  Good enough only for (a distant) second place behind jweale.  Right behind me sits Graham the conquerer at 5-11, and the "I don’t want to play anymore" award goes to reverseflash with a paltry 2-14 record.

The first week is always pretty much a coin-toss (in a system where a coin toss can pretty much do better than me every week anyway), and now is the week where legitimate teams will begin to show themselves, and the fakers will fade.
I vow at least a 9-7 this week, or my name isn’t Rob MacD.

If you’d like to join the fun (it’s not too late – you’re only two correct picks behind reverseflash), sign up at The Weekly NFL Picks Page and search for The Annekenstein Monster pool. Password is sketch22

Or, are you chicken?  Bwawk Bwawk Bwawk

It’s stupid, really.
20+ some odd years ago, I became interested in NFL football. Because Dan Marino was a young phenom at the time, his rookie season, I decided to root for the Miami Dolphins.  Really, for no other reason than Dan Marino looked like a great qb and the Dolphins looked like they were ready to create a dynasty.
The choice stuck, and I’ve been a devout DolFan ever since.  Sometimes I rue that decision.
Sometimes I wish I could cheer for the New England Patriots.  It would make so much more sense for me.  All their games are televised on Boston tv stations, which I receive, so that’d be great.  I’d never have the dilemna of deciding whether or not to pay for NFL Sunday Ticket.  But I can’t.  I can’t cheer for the Pats.  For one, they’re hated division rivals of the Dolphins.  For two, they’re hated division rivals.
They’d be a great team to root for, though.  They’ve had their terrible seasons. Dreadful seasons.  And now, for the past 4 years, they’ve been on top of the world.  Oh how great it’d have been to be a Pats fan for the past 20 years.  Even to be on the opposite side of that sickening snowplow incident.  Oh how I’d love to be able to laugh at DolFans about that.  But I can’t. I wasn’t a Pats fan, and I won’t be.  I’m a Dolphins fan.
But it’s stupid, really.  What’s happened to my brain, my phsyiology, that makes it impossible for me to root, really root, for any other team than the Dolphins?   It was such an arbitrary decision all those years ago, how can it have imbedded itself so deeply into me?
Now, I’m stuck with the NFL Sunday Ticket decision.  Pay money (much needed money) to watch the Dolphins lose probably 12 of 16 games this year?  That’s a tough call.  I’ll likely have to go upstairs to the booth (where my wife makes the final decision) on that one.  But what if they’re the surprise team of the season?  How sweet would it be if Gus Frerotte gets injured in game one and Sage Rosenfels becomes the next Tom Brady?  Shouldn’t I be there, watching and waiting for that highly improbable scenario.  Isn’t 20+ years as a disillusioned and disappointed DolFan worth it?  I don’t know.

Last night, the Pats played the Raiders.  The Raiders are a team I’ve hated (sorry Dylan) since in my mother’s womb, I think.  I still hate them.  Last night, watching the parts of the game I watched, I really found it hard to pick a team to root for.  I think that’s why I ultimately stopped watching it.  Friggin’ Pats win it, of course.  I really thought Randy Moss, with that touchdown pass he caught, was gonna lead the Raiders to victory.  I suppose that’s the outcome I was really wishing for, only because that outcome has a positive affect on my Sage Rosenfels wins the Super Bowl fantasy scenario.

Please forgive me.  I’m a Dolphins Fan. 
I don’t know why.

The NFL season begins this Thursday night.
Just a reminder to anyone who wants to join The Annekenstein Monster pick’em pool at The Weekly NFL Picks Page can do so.
You’ll have to register (it’s free, and there’s no annoying email cultivation or anything like that), then once you do, search for The Annekenstein Monster pool and sign up.  The password is sketch22

For the past few years, I’ve been making NFL picks at a fantastic free NFL Picks pool site.

Visit it here.

I’ve just created a new pool for the upcoming NFL season.  If you’d like to join my pool, and try to challenge my uncanny ability to prognosticate the weekly winners and loser of the Football League they call National, then why not sign up and join my pool.  You should be warned, though, I got almost 55% of my picks right one season.  That’s, like, one better than flipping a coin… Remember, picks are made based on the point spread between teams for each game.

It’s free to sign up.
Once you register, then look for the pool called "The Annekenstein Monster"
The password to join The Annekenstein Monster pool is:   sketch22

Ah, the madness in South Florida continues.  Last year, about this time, as I was trying to convince myself that the Miami Dolphins had a reasonable chance to make the playoffs and then who knows what might happen, the star of the team, the man the whole offense was built around, Ricky Williams, the guy whose doll I have sitting in my living room, left the team.
His reasons were many, mostly depending on what mood he was in… tired of football… needs to find himself… didn’t want to be penalized by the NFL’s drug policy… the Taco Bell dog told him to quit…  Anyway, his departure caused the Dolphins to have their worst season since the 1960s.

And now, after a year of living in a tent in Australia, learning meditation techniques in a holistic univeristy in northern California, after travelling to the oddest places (both geographically and personally it seems), after learning that he owes the Dolphins 8 million dollars because he broke his contract with them… after all that…

Ricky has returned.  Yes, Ricky Williams is back as a Dolphin.  He is at training camp, right now, as I type (I just checked the NFL football sites online and no reports of him leaving, so that’s a pretty safe sentence).
He’ll miss the first four games of the season because he’s a dope smoker (or was a dope smoker, he claims to have given it up), but I cannot wait to see him back in action.  Yes, I fully expect that he’ll never make it onto the field in a regular season game, that he’ll hear a bird tell him to become an astronaut or he’ll be caught with illegal substances in his system, but I also fully expect him to make a glorious return to the game and be the star of the entire season (except those first four suspended games, of course).
Who knows whether his return is motivated by the desire to play the game, or the desire to rid himself of the debt he owes the Dolphins – – okay, we all know it’s the monetary reason that brings him back – – I’m just glad to have him back.

So, Ricky, welcome back, you flaky nut, you.  All I ask from you is to run hard as a Dolphin until this season is over.  With you, that is a lot to ask, perhaps.

It’s not often that the people/teams that I cheer for in any sport win.  Sunday it was victory, victory, victory.  All in sports that non-sports fans would probably find incredibly boring.

First up was Men’s World Curling.  Canada won gold and won it fairly decisively.  I actually stoppes watching this game after about 6 ends, when it was clear they would win.  The really interesting game for Canada came during Saturday’s semi-final against Germany.  Right down to the second last rock of the game.  I enjoy watching curling.  The 4-Rock rule has been great for increasing offense and increasing viewing interest.

Then I switched over to NASCAR.  I always cheer for Jeff Gordon.  Yesterday he won, after coming back from 3 laps down.  I have yet to sit through an entire NASCAR race.  Too many laps that take too much time out of a day.  Usually I’ll watch a bit at the first, check in periodically over the next three hours, then try to tune in the final hour or so.  That’s what I did yesterday.

I ended the sports-day marathon with The Masters, watching Tiger Woods win his 4th green jacket.  It was a pretty exciting final round.  Chris DeMarco just wouldn’t give up, and kept pressure on Tiger who bogeyed his final two regular round holes, forcing a playoff.  Tiger won that.  He’s a pretty intense guy, that Tiger.  I doubt I’d like to hang out with him for any length of time, but he’s a pretty exciting golfer to be a fan of.

Also watched on Sunday:  Arrested Development, which continues to make me laugh out loud several times an episode.  And Deadwood, which I am enjoying more and more each week.

Early on in the season, I gave up posting my NFL picks on this site because I figured it’d be pretty boring to most people.  That doesn’t mean, though, that I stopped trying to pick which teams would win each week.  I submitted my picks each week to The Weekly NFL Picks Page.  In my opinion, it’s the best free pick’em site around.

Rather than a straight-ahead "pick who you think will win the game" approach, The Weekly NFL Picks Page prefers having people pick against the spread (for instance, in the SuperBowl, the spread was the Patriots by 6 1/2.  So, to pick the Patriots correctly, they’d have to score 7 points more than the Eagles.  They didn’t, so even though the Patriots won the game, the people who picked the Pats in this game would have lost).  This makes it much more difficult to pick correctly.

My record for the season:  129-122 which is 51.4%.  I think I was somewhere in the 49% last year (and my career record at the site is 48.8%).  So, basically,  I am about as successful using my method (which is mostly gut-feeling mixed with my limited knowledge of the teams) as I would be flipping a coin.  This would indicate that the spread that the odds-makers come up with for each game are pretty accurate.

For the record, the winner of the season on The Weekly NFL Picks Page had a winning percentage of 58.4.

As a Miami Dolphins fan, with the New England Patriots in the same division, I have always *hated* the Patriots (and the Buffalo Bills, and NY Jets, and even the Indianapolis Colts [who have since moved out of the division]).  It is my duty to hate these teams and I do hate them with all my ability.  Yet, if the Dolphins ceased to exist, I’d likely become a fan of one of those division rivals.  Probably the Patriots, since they’re on free TV every weekend here in the Maritimes.
It used to be easy to hate the Patriots, especially that time they used the snowplow to remove snow from the field so they could kick a field-goal against the Dolphins.  It is really hard to dislike this current crop of  Patriots, though.  More than any other sports team I’ve seen, they are the epitome of "Team".  They win every way they can.  They win easy, they win hard, win pretty and ugly.  They just win.  Normally, such a team would be easy to hate because they’d appear so full of themselves.  But not this Team.  They are dignified and humble in victory.
They are the greatest football team I’ve ever seen.  Not necessarily the best ever, but the greatest.
And I hate them.

Some SuperBowl thoughts:
During the pre-show entertainment, some woman (who on closeups looked much older than she appeared from a distance) sang some song (just before Charlie Daniels, who performed "Devil Went Down To Georgia" way-too-fast).  I found it odd that the "fans" that they assembled on the field around the stage were all women/girls.  Many of them were screaming (instructed to, I’m sure) at her like girls screamed at John and Paul during the height of Beatlemania.  Just found that odd.
SuperBowl XXXIX – I’m not an authority on Roman Numerals, but can a Roman Numeral have more X’s in it than the number 39?
Was Alicia Keys lip syncing "America The Beautiful"?  While the lips were actually well-synced with the vocals, It kinda sounded like the emotion and quality in the vocals didn’t quite match the physical effort.  If she was lipsyncing, well, that’s a shame.
The plate that the vegetables get scooped onto in the Cunard Restaurant plate is exactly the same style of plate my mother had for years and years when I was growing up.  Cheap Corelle plates.  Also, I miss how the voice-over used to (a couple of years ago) say:  "reck-anized in Where To Eat in Canada".
The game was pretty good, I guess.  I enjoyed the defensive performances in the first half, but as soon as the Pats took the lead, I figured that was it.  It was good (but not really exciting) that the Eagles were able to come back to within 3 points.  But, from midway in the third quarter, the game was over.  With four minutes or so left, the Eagles looked spent.
Paul McCartney sounded better than I’ve heard him sound in the last decade.  It’s such a shame that he’s such an innocuous performer now.  While his songs are better than their comedy, I see him as the musical equivalent of the Royal Canadian Air Farce.  Actually, I take that back, the Air Farce is never enjoyable to watch and he can be.  He’s more like Saturday Night Live.  Long past prime and only occasionally shows flashes of past ability.