Monthly Archives: February 2012

February 29, 2012

So This Is What Misery Feels Like …

By atlswami

The Braves epic September 2011 swoon helped propel Atlanta to the top if Forbes' Most Miserable Sports Cities

This is a blog that basks in the misery that underachieving sports franchises inflict on their respective fan bases, from the rabid, rust-belted Dawg Pound inhabitants of Cleveland to the new moneyed, good ol’ boy transients who fein to support Atlanta teams. The authors, which include a Seattle native still so distraught at losing the Sonics to OKC that he’s yet to post anything, are constantly quibbling about which of their hometowns is in fact the sorriest of sports cities.

On Leap Day 2012, it is I who can claim the title, as an independent arbiter, Forbes magazine has declared that the loss of the NHL Thrashers (honestly, no one cares) and the epic September collapse of the Braves (don’t really want to talk about it) makes Atlanta more pitiable than Sonics-less Seattle. Yay! (I guess.)

Here’s how the Coming Up Small team took the news:

ATLSwami: CAME up small!

ValmiCLE: You can have it. Totally impossible to take that list remotely seriously. Puts Denver ahead of Cleveland. DENVER! With this: “A great run from 1996 to 2001 (four titles) doesn’t quite mitigate a long bridesmaid history for the Mile High City.” Four fucking titles in the last 15 years gets less weight than 0 for 45? Blech. Worst one of these lists I’ve ever seen. Buffalo? Seattle? No problem. But putting Phoenix and Denver up there?

ATLS: Phoenix? They had the one Dbacks series. Anything else?

VCLE: Years and years of the Suns being good. Went to a Super Bowl. Dbags more recent than Atlanta’s.

ATLS: So, y’all have been to multiple World Series and an NBA Finals.

VCLE: This is a zero sum game. Been to 3 championship rounds in my lifetime and lost each in a horrible way. Can’t argue with zero titles in over 40 years. Who cares if the hockey team leaves Atlanta? No one in Atlanta clearly. Let’s not go over what happened when Cleveland lost its most popular team. In that time, ATL’s been to a Super Bowl and as many World Series [5, actually, to the Indians’ 2] and managed to win one. Winning matters. No comparison. Winning before 1964 doesn’t matter unless you’re old enough to remember it. And even then.

ATLS: It’s not about you, dude. It’s about the city.

VCLE: Shut your word hole

ATLS: Cleveland was there before you, and, this might be a stretch, it will outlast you.

GreggySEA (in his first appearance on the blog): Damn, swiped first place from us.

ATLS: If it makes you feel better, I don’t value the loss of the Thrashers as even being in the same ballpark as the loss of the Sonics.

GSEA: It does make me feel better.  And we just lost out next best hope with Sacramento staying put.

ATLS: Did KJ ever frustrate you back in the day? Cause he’s certainly doing it from Sacto’s mayor’s office.

GSEA: Yeah, fuck that guy.

VCLE: Drafted by the Cavs and traded for Larry Nance, if I recall.

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Atlanta, Cleveland, General Sports, Seattle

February 15, 2012

Posterized!

By valmicle

My guess is kids today (holy shit I sound old, which is fitting since I’m in the space between being younger than Steve Nash but old enough to be Kyrie Irving’s father) are still high on the posters, right? When I was a teenager, there wasn’t an inch of the gray wood paneling in my bedroom that wasn’t covered in them. This was abetted by both my brother and I working in music stores, where we got loads and loads of promo posters and such. Hell, my brother even had his ceiling covered. But I did supplement those with a couple of sports-related ones. At some point early on, I wanted, but never actually purchased, a few of the posters made by John and Tock Costacos, a couple of T-shirt guys that had the idea of making these bizarrely themed sports posters that sometimes used athletes’ nicknames and sometimes just made em up, so far as I can tell.

“We wanted to make the athletes into comic book heroes. They’re larger than life. They’re Superman. They’re Batman,” one of the Costacos said (Kevin Mitchell literally being Batman in one of them). “They’re Hollywood action stars that kick the shit out of 20 bad guys always living to fight another day.”

Riiiiight. I know that’s what I always thought of Lester Hayes and Steve Largent.

At any rate, there’s an exhibition of these curious abominations that’s about to close at the Country Club and Mondrian in Los Angeles, and Sports Illustrated put up a slideshow of a bunch. More can be seen here. The Costacos are apparently still in the poster business, but not with the same batshit level of dementia that you can find in these. There’s about a million baffling details to parse in each one–from the overall theme (Kirk Gibson as a hunter, James Worthy as an attorney) to tiny things (Chuck Person’s too-small chaps, or the intimate caress between Jim Everett and one of his linemen).

So I naturally gravitated toward the two Cleveland posters: Bob Golic as some kind of greased hair metal canine fetishist with an exploding doghouse, and Cory Snyder as a gunslinger with smoking balls, more tiny balls on his belt, and a general look of confusion about where he is (is it all about his ability to throw out runners—I spent far too long trying to figure it out).

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , | posted in Cleveland Browns, Cleveland Indians, General Sports

February 7, 2012

Has the Hawks Tailspin Begun?

By atlswami
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Have J-Smoove and the Horford-less Hawks hit their ceiling?

In journalism, there’s a rule for writing stories about emerging patterns: 1, 2, trend. If that holds in basketball, then the Atlanta Hawks are well on their way turning their playoff-caliber record into an invite to the draft lottery. Hate to say I told you so.

The Hawks have dropped three games in a row. It gets worse: All three games were at home. And none of them occurred on consecutive nights. They were down 20-plus points in all three games. None of the teams that defeated the Hawks (the Grizzlies, Sixers, nor Suns) had a better record coming into the games.

The wheels are coming off of the clown car full of dwarves (at least when judged by NBA standards). Horford is out. His understudy, Jason Collins, who basically hacks other teams’ centers for his dinner, is out, as well. Things don’t look good.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jeff Schultz says not to panic just yet. Too late. I’m panicking, realizing that the Hawks will not be able to once again properly illustrate the dictionary definition of mediocrity for another year. Instead, they’re speeding toward just shit.

Says Schultz: “The Hawks are a fragile team even when they’re at full strength. Now they’re fragile and teetering on the edge of the top shelf.”

Allow me to be the first to say, “Look out below!!”

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Atlanta, Atlanta Hawks

February 7, 2012

Super Bowl in Four Words

By atlswami

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Sports Guy Bill Simmons encapsulates the Super Bowl with brilliant concision on his Twitter feed. (Posts were roughly four hours apart.)

Leave a comment   |  tags: , | posted in General Sports