lost sunday
11 September 2007
I won’t talk about the Eagles’ loss on Sunday. Not ready to. Maybe never will be – at least without wanting to stick my erect penis into my desk fan or other bladed (but dull) moving object. So I will talk about a different kind of loss, one that leaves me feeling only slightly less rageful.
[I would like to point out, however, that while the special teams was atrocious, the offense looked pretty fucking bad, too. I don't know if I believe the hype about Green Bay having a "great" defense, but I know I'd like to see less dropped balls and a higher completion rate for Donovan McNabb. Two more games like 15 for 33 for 184 yards with one TD and one INT and things are going to get really uncomfortable in Philly. I mean, fuck.]
[Also, Washington is a terrible matchup for the Birds. The reason why they only gave up 40 or so yards on the ground to Green Bay is because someone only slightly more athletic than me was running the ball and Green Bay does not have a good o-line. The reverse is true for the run-happy Redskins with Clinton Portis, who looked very good in the Miami game, and Ladell Betts, who also looked pretty good. That being said, the Eagles home opener, on Monday night, in Philly...c'mon: Eagles 38, Redskins 20.]
Part of the joy of football season, and really part of the joy of many seasons (holiday, wedding, etc) is the perfect excuse it affords for getting drunk. Drinking and sport go hand and hand and back to time immemorial. Classical pottery depicts scenes of Roman men drinking wine while watching chariot races, Etruscan men drinking wine while watching others wrestle, and Greek men drinking zima while watching other men make love to each other’s genitals, mouths and hands. The precedent for drinking while watching sports goes back thousands, if not millions, of years.
My first two or three years in NYC, I watched Eagles games in my apartment with my otherwise apathetic roommates. I had some buddies who were Eagles fans and occasionally we would get together for a big night game or playoff game at each others’ apartments, but for the most part I caught all the games at my place. This was fine with me, in large part I was able to have a few beers during the game and possibly even attempt the Sunday 50, which long-time readers know is the competition to consume any combination of 50 beers and wings on a Sunday during football season (i.e. 35 wings and 15 beers, etc). Overeating and overdrinking on the Lord’s day is what makes football awesome.
A few years ago, I realized that I knew quite a bit of Eagles fans that lived in NYC. One of these fans, my buddy Pat, told me that he and a bunch of guys got together to watch Eagles games at a bar in Murray Hill called Red Sky. I cringed when I heard this, because I had been to Red Sky on a few weekends in my younger days and knew it was an incredibly douchy bar; it catered to an equal mix of the young Banana Republic Murray Hill crowd and the standard Long Island guido type. At the very least, it was not a sports bar. I relayed my concerns to Pat but he assured me that the fact that Red Sky was a douchy bar actually worked to our advantage. The bar was well-equipped with TVs, had good food, and cheap beer on Sundays. But because it was a weekend douche bar, no one went in there on Sundays. Another friend knew the manager of the place and he basically opened the bar just for these guys to watch the Eagles game on Sunday. The result was that there were 20 or so Eagles fans, most of whom I went to high school with, in their own private bar for Eagles games. My fears allayed, I told Pat I’d see them all on Sunday.
Thus began a glorious run for my Eagles fan friends and I at Red Sky. Like Pat said, the bar was completely empty except for my friends, and the Eagles would be on the large projection TV (with full sound) as well as numerous other TVs throughout the bar. Every Sunday during football season, I followed the same wonderful routine: wake up at noon with a crushing hangover and be at the bar by 12:30pm; gather with friends and make our bets for the day; cringe when drinking the first beer; smile when drinking the third beer, as it tasted like Love; eat a shitload of chicken fingers and/or nachos during halftime; get solidly buzzed throughout the second half; celebrate/cry over Eagles game and bets; make bets for 4pm games; poop; get serious about drinking during 4pm game; go to Upper East Side for Irish music after second game; poop; return home around midnight and try to eat couch and/or kiss roommate; kinda poop but nothing comes out. I could do these things ever Sunday for the rest of my life and I would be the happiest girl in the world.
Therefore, I was greatly looking forward to this season’s football watching with my friends. I sent an email early last week to my friends Pat and Mike to make sure that we were set for Red Sky for the season, as we never had an official arrangement with them. They assured me that we’d be fine, that we’ve been going there for years, etc. So I was ok with this.
Then it all fell apart on Saturday night.
I was out with Pat and my buddy Mike and a bunch of other friends on that night, drinking WAY too much at a pretty cool, rather unknown bar in the LES. We spent the night pounding beers, talking about the upcoming season, and telling our best bar pooping stories. Around 2am, Mike’s friend Matt, who was to bartend at Red Sky for the Eagles game the next game, came into the bar. As soon as Mike saw him, he said, "Are you ready for tomorrow?" Matt said, "Oh yeah – I have to tell you something about that…"
Apparently, the owner of Red Sky had made some sort of deal with the Washington Redskins Club of New York, wherein they’d bring 100+ people to the bar in exchange for drink specials. Just like that, we lost our Eagles bar of the past four seasons.
As Pat, Mike and I freaked out, Matt tried to calm us down, assuring us that there probably wouldn’t be that many people there, that’d he said the say the sound was broken for the Skins game and would put the sound on for our Eagles game (how we would do this or explain it to the Skins’ fans, he wouldn’t say), that everything would be fine and we should just come anyway.
As I was drunk, and as I am wont to do when I’m drunk, I got fired up and didn’t want to hear any of this. For one, I am kind of an anal person who likes things planned out. That I emailed my buds nearly a week in advance to make sure things were ok and to learn at 2am the night before the game that they were not, well, that did not sit well with me. Secondly, only the following things are important to me: boobies, onion rings, the Eagles. Really, that’s it. I don’t even include blowjobs on that list, because it is those three and everything else is a distant fourth (also, I have great difficulty getting off to blowjobs and can count the number of times I’ve done so on one hand, I think). If you fuck with one of these three things, we are going to have serious problems.
[And we lost the bar to Redskins fans, no less! I have a particular problem with Redskins fans, and not just because DC is the worst city in America. Skins fans are a passionate but incredibly uninformed bunch. Of course, I only know two Redskins fans - my agent and my old college roommate. I remember in college how nuts my roommate was about the Redskins, but when I asked him who their starting running back was, he'd stare at me blankly for a few seconds, then say, "Redskins rule, dude" and spit his dip into a solo cup. A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my agent's office and he was talking about how the Skins have a legit shot at the playoffs. I said no way and suggested we go game-by-game on their schedule and each write down what we thought would be a win and what would be a loss. So he brought up their schedule on his computer and read each game aloud, him jotting down W's and L's from behind his desk and me doing the same from his couch. When he finished reading, I told him that at best case I had them at 7-9 and asked what he had. His reply: 14-2. My biggest regret in life is that I will never again have those three minutes back that I wasted trying to have a reasonable discussion about football with him.]
The next morning I woke up and made my phone calls to my Iggles fan friends. The plan was to go to Red Sky to see what it looked like, but I decided to get a back up plan in place. I called Third and Long, a fratish but divey bar near Red Sky and asked if they were affiliated with any football team. When they said they weren’t, I asked if they were willing to put on the Eagles game for 20 or so Eagles fans. They said they would. That, my friends, is how you take care of business.
But you can guess how the rest goes: I got a call from Mike while I was still in the cab en route to Red Sky saying that the bar was packed with Skins fans, that it wasn’t even worth going to. So myself and my 20 Eagles fan friends watched the game from Third and Long. It was not ideal, since there were no seats, no food, and no sound for the game (sweet). But at least it was on the projection screen and they had beer. At that point, I would have watched the game projected onto a dead dog’s back. And of course, I got to see the Eagles suck like the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked, thus concluding a terrible Sunday.
My previous sole goal in life was to create a bionic child with a woman with reproductive organs made of steel and hair that smells like cinnamon. But that goal has been pushed aside, for I have a new purpose in life: to find a new suitable Eagles bar. I’m not sure how I’m going to go about this, but I aim to find a bar somewhere in the 20’s or 30’s that is not affiliated with any team, has a room to give us or is generally slow on Sundays, and has food for me and my Eagles fan friends (yes, I’m aware that Town Tavern is a big Eagles bar, but that place is too packed). If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Because considering our lack of a home base, how bad the Eagles played, and how much money I lost on Sunday, it might be a long, long season.
[I would like to point out, however, that while the special teams was atrocious, the offense looked pretty fucking bad, too. I don't know if I believe the hype about Green Bay having a "great" defense, but I know I'd like to see less dropped balls and a higher completion rate for Donovan McNabb. Two more games like 15 for 33 for 184 yards with one TD and one INT and things are going to get really uncomfortable in Philly. I mean, fuck.]
[Also, Washington is a terrible matchup for the Birds. The reason why they only gave up 40 or so yards on the ground to Green Bay is because someone only slightly more athletic than me was running the ball and Green Bay does not have a good o-line. The reverse is true for the run-happy Redskins with Clinton Portis, who looked very good in the Miami game, and Ladell Betts, who also looked pretty good. That being said, the Eagles home opener, on Monday night, in Philly...c'mon: Eagles 38, Redskins 20.]
Part of the joy of football season, and really part of the joy of many seasons (holiday, wedding, etc) is the perfect excuse it affords for getting drunk. Drinking and sport go hand and hand and back to time immemorial. Classical pottery depicts scenes of Roman men drinking wine while watching chariot races, Etruscan men drinking wine while watching others wrestle, and Greek men drinking zima while watching other men make love to each other’s genitals, mouths and hands. The precedent for drinking while watching sports goes back thousands, if not millions, of years.
My first two or three years in NYC, I watched Eagles games in my apartment with my otherwise apathetic roommates. I had some buddies who were Eagles fans and occasionally we would get together for a big night game or playoff game at each others’ apartments, but for the most part I caught all the games at my place. This was fine with me, in large part I was able to have a few beers during the game and possibly even attempt the Sunday 50, which long-time readers know is the competition to consume any combination of 50 beers and wings on a Sunday during football season (i.e. 35 wings and 15 beers, etc). Overeating and overdrinking on the Lord’s day is what makes football awesome.
A few years ago, I realized that I knew quite a bit of Eagles fans that lived in NYC. One of these fans, my buddy Pat, told me that he and a bunch of guys got together to watch Eagles games at a bar in Murray Hill called Red Sky. I cringed when I heard this, because I had been to Red Sky on a few weekends in my younger days and knew it was an incredibly douchy bar; it catered to an equal mix of the young Banana Republic Murray Hill crowd and the standard Long Island guido type. At the very least, it was not a sports bar. I relayed my concerns to Pat but he assured me that the fact that Red Sky was a douchy bar actually worked to our advantage. The bar was well-equipped with TVs, had good food, and cheap beer on Sundays. But because it was a weekend douche bar, no one went in there on Sundays. Another friend knew the manager of the place and he basically opened the bar just for these guys to watch the Eagles game on Sunday. The result was that there were 20 or so Eagles fans, most of whom I went to high school with, in their own private bar for Eagles games. My fears allayed, I told Pat I’d see them all on Sunday.
Thus began a glorious run for my Eagles fan friends and I at Red Sky. Like Pat said, the bar was completely empty except for my friends, and the Eagles would be on the large projection TV (with full sound) as well as numerous other TVs throughout the bar. Every Sunday during football season, I followed the same wonderful routine: wake up at noon with a crushing hangover and be at the bar by 12:30pm; gather with friends and make our bets for the day; cringe when drinking the first beer; smile when drinking the third beer, as it tasted like Love; eat a shitload of chicken fingers and/or nachos during halftime; get solidly buzzed throughout the second half; celebrate/cry over Eagles game and bets; make bets for 4pm games; poop; get serious about drinking during 4pm game; go to Upper East Side for Irish music after second game; poop; return home around midnight and try to eat couch and/or kiss roommate; kinda poop but nothing comes out. I could do these things ever Sunday for the rest of my life and I would be the happiest girl in the world.
Therefore, I was greatly looking forward to this season’s football watching with my friends. I sent an email early last week to my friends Pat and Mike to make sure that we were set for Red Sky for the season, as we never had an official arrangement with them. They assured me that we’d be fine, that we’ve been going there for years, etc. So I was ok with this.
Then it all fell apart on Saturday night.
I was out with Pat and my buddy Mike and a bunch of other friends on that night, drinking WAY too much at a pretty cool, rather unknown bar in the LES. We spent the night pounding beers, talking about the upcoming season, and telling our best bar pooping stories. Around 2am, Mike’s friend Matt, who was to bartend at Red Sky for the Eagles game the next game, came into the bar. As soon as Mike saw him, he said, "Are you ready for tomorrow?" Matt said, "Oh yeah – I have to tell you something about that…"
Apparently, the owner of Red Sky had made some sort of deal with the Washington Redskins Club of New York, wherein they’d bring 100+ people to the bar in exchange for drink specials. Just like that, we lost our Eagles bar of the past four seasons.
As Pat, Mike and I freaked out, Matt tried to calm us down, assuring us that there probably wouldn’t be that many people there, that’d he said the say the sound was broken for the Skins game and would put the sound on for our Eagles game (how we would do this or explain it to the Skins’ fans, he wouldn’t say), that everything would be fine and we should just come anyway.
As I was drunk, and as I am wont to do when I’m drunk, I got fired up and didn’t want to hear any of this. For one, I am kind of an anal person who likes things planned out. That I emailed my buds nearly a week in advance to make sure things were ok and to learn at 2am the night before the game that they were not, well, that did not sit well with me. Secondly, only the following things are important to me: boobies, onion rings, the Eagles. Really, that’s it. I don’t even include blowjobs on that list, because it is those three and everything else is a distant fourth (also, I have great difficulty getting off to blowjobs and can count the number of times I’ve done so on one hand, I think). If you fuck with one of these three things, we are going to have serious problems.
[And we lost the bar to Redskins fans, no less! I have a particular problem with Redskins fans, and not just because DC is the worst city in America. Skins fans are a passionate but incredibly uninformed bunch. Of course, I only know two Redskins fans - my agent and my old college roommate. I remember in college how nuts my roommate was about the Redskins, but when I asked him who their starting running back was, he'd stare at me blankly for a few seconds, then say, "Redskins rule, dude" and spit his dip into a solo cup. A few weeks ago, I was sitting in my agent's office and he was talking about how the Skins have a legit shot at the playoffs. I said no way and suggested we go game-by-game on their schedule and each write down what we thought would be a win and what would be a loss. So he brought up their schedule on his computer and read each game aloud, him jotting down W's and L's from behind his desk and me doing the same from his couch. When he finished reading, I told him that at best case I had them at 7-9 and asked what he had. His reply: 14-2. My biggest regret in life is that I will never again have those three minutes back that I wasted trying to have a reasonable discussion about football with him.]
The next morning I woke up and made my phone calls to my Iggles fan friends. The plan was to go to Red Sky to see what it looked like, but I decided to get a back up plan in place. I called Third and Long, a fratish but divey bar near Red Sky and asked if they were affiliated with any football team. When they said they weren’t, I asked if they were willing to put on the Eagles game for 20 or so Eagles fans. They said they would. That, my friends, is how you take care of business.
But you can guess how the rest goes: I got a call from Mike while I was still in the cab en route to Red Sky saying that the bar was packed with Skins fans, that it wasn’t even worth going to. So myself and my 20 Eagles fan friends watched the game from Third and Long. It was not ideal, since there were no seats, no food, and no sound for the game (sweet). But at least it was on the projection screen and they had beer. At that point, I would have watched the game projected onto a dead dog’s back. And of course, I got to see the Eagles suck like the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked, thus concluding a terrible Sunday.
My previous sole goal in life was to create a bionic child with a woman with reproductive organs made of steel and hair that smells like cinnamon. But that goal has been pushed aside, for I have a new purpose in life: to find a new suitable Eagles bar. I’m not sure how I’m going to go about this, but I aim to find a bar somewhere in the 20’s or 30’s that is not affiliated with any team, has a room to give us or is generally slow on Sundays, and has food for me and my Eagles fan friends (yes, I’m aware that Town Tavern is a big Eagles bar, but that place is too packed). If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Because considering our lack of a home base, how bad the Eagles played, and how much money I lost on Sunday, it might be a long, long season.
