Bits & Pieces

By Kim J. Harmon

 

For me, it’s always baseball season. But when I flip the calendar over to August, my mind – always ready to multi-task – puts baseball on a screensaver and then goes into a full-blown football mode.

Oh yeah, it’s time to start scouting for my Fantasy Draft; time to scour the Sporting News and Sports Illustrated for training camp tidbits about my team (the New York Giants); time to dust off the most current video game (NFL 2K3) and see if my thumbs and forefingers are ready for the rigors of a 16-game season.

The Newtown High School football team opened its practices on Monday, August 18; the Newtown Pop Warner football program has been practicing for a couple weeks now (and getting ready for the season-openers on Saturday and Sunday, September 6 and 7); the Division I University of Connecticut Huskies have been practicing for some time and preparing to open new Rentschler Field in Hartford on Saturday, August 30, against Indiana.

And soon – September 7 – the New York Giants will open the 2003 season against the St. Louis Rams.

This is a glorious time of year.

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I always like a good road trip and that road trip I took a couple of years back to Groton (you know, to see Newtown and Fitch in the CIAC state playoffs) was a great one. Let’s hope I get to make another road trip this December.

I’m optimistic.

Or – what if we stayed home and someone else made the road trip?

Now that would be even better.

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The Newtown Babe Ruth baseball teams had such an enormous amount of success over the summer, I wonder if the same karma is going to work for the Newtown Pop Warner football program. Hey, if I have learned anything in the past few months it’s that there are lots and lots and lots of talented young athletes in this town.

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Sports Illustrated named its Top 50 sports movies of all time a few weeks ago and I was stupefied to find The Longest Yard so far down the list. Even with Burt Reynolds (whom I never really liked), The Longest Yard is a GREAT football movie with classic game sequences (especially the one with the winning touchdown).

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, good heavens, you better go rent it now (or, if you’re lazy, wait for it to show up on AMC).

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Getting a chance to shake the hand of former New York Giant running back Joe Morris at Pop Warner practice and thank him for his part in that 1986 Super Bowl win (my first after more than a decade of horrible memories ... like Joe Pisarcik and The Fumble) made my week.

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You know, when it comes to video games, I remember the old days of the Sega Genesis and the one-dimensional figures jerkily moving around the television screen (in truth, I remember the really old days when a friend and I played this football game at the arcade that simply had images of Xs and Os and you had to spin a ball like mad to get your players to move).

But technology has reached a point, now, that if you’re getting bored watching the action (?) in a New Orleans Saints/Dallas Texans game, you can just flip on the Xbox or Playstation 2 or Nintendo Gamecube and make the action happen.

Whether it is Madden 2004, NFL Fever, NFL Gameday or ESPN NFL Football, the experience has become so involved, so all encompassing and – above all – so realistic that you certainly don’t have to wait until Sunday to get your fix.

Like in most games, in ESPN NFL Football (the Sega line that formerly when by the 2k moniker) you get the entire football experience from the field up to the front office. In between games you work over your depth chart and your playbook and at the end of the season you deal with retiring players (maybe coax them out for one more season), free agents (making sure to keep your team under the salary cap), trades and the NFL Combine (where you may find the next great superstar).

And if you wanted to involve someone else in this venture, the new generation football games feature an online option so you can play with (or against) your friends without anyone leaving the comfort of their own couch.

Pretty soon, the gaming experience may be better than watching the real thing.

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Now, some cool quotes about football …

Nobody in football should be called a genius. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.

– Joe Theismann

If my mother put on a helmet and shoulder pads and a uniform that wasn’t the same as the one I was wearing, I’d run over her if she was in my way. And I love my mother.

– Bo Jackson

 

I wouldn’t ever set out to hurt anyone deliberately unless it was, you know, important – like a league game or something.

– Dick Butkus

Gentlemen, it is better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.

– John Heisman

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.

– Archie Griffen

What about football? Is it a sport or a concussion?

– Jim Murray, L.A. Times

Most football players are temperamental. That’s 90 percent temper and 10 percent mental.

– Doug Plank

Football features two of the worst aspects of American life – violence and committee meetings.

– George Will