The Enemies List, Vol. 11

Welcome back, NESWers, to your weekly burst of rancor from your old pal DMtShooter, moonlighting from Five Tool Tool. Every week you can chew on some tasty dislike; we call it the Enemies List. And with that, let?s go straight to the hate. (And please note that we have never duplicated an Enemy. That?s craftsmanship in hate!)

5) The Fox Tony Romo Media Conspiracy. In the season-ending loss to the Vikings, Dallas QB Tony Romo fumbled the ball twice, threw a terrible pick, and led an offense that only scored three points, despite a running game that produced 92 yards, and a defense that gave him the ball in good field position for much of the game, especially in the first half. It lowered his all-time playoff record to 1-3, and it’s not just that they lost, it’s the way they did it: with a fourth quarter that consisted entirely of safe throws to security blanket TE Jason Witten, and handoff draws that seemed designed to limit hits to the QB, rather than give his team any chance to win.

On television, Fox Heads and Cowboy Lovahs Troy Aikman and Jimmy Johnson… put the blame squarely on the shoulders of the offensive line. And sure, Romo hit the ground six times from the Viking rush, and ran for his life a dozen other times or more. But, um… doesn’t the QB share some of the blame here, especially when he never made a play in the red zone, and his offense kept picking up first downs and giving them opportunities, especially early on in the game? Doesn’t the QB share some of the blame for not taking an early lead, especially before tackle Flozell Adams goes down, and the pass blocking gets much worse?

Whenever there is a gap between what the media reports and reality, we suffer as a society. It’s been such an endemic issue in our news coverage that a wide swath of the population now refuses to believe just about anything. In sports, maybe I shouldn’t complain, since it’s a big reason why Blogfrica gets traffic. But it does rankle, in each and every way, especially when a network decides to triple up on the alumni from one piece of laundry, and fellate people even when they’ve done nothing to deserve the service. Ah, the joy of Fox…

4) Keith Brooking. After ten years of relatively anonymous toil in Atlanta, Brooking went over to Dallas to take the Zach Thomas role as over-the-hill stopgap MLB non-solution… only to discover that network football coverage just can’t get enough of the each team’s pre-game hype specialist.

But unlike the other people who get this run — Ray Lewis, Drew Brees, Brian Dawkins — Brooking (a) really isn’t all that good, and (b) looks like he’s just been given the role by the media because he’s, um, rhymes with white.

Then in the playoff game, as the Vikings ended the Cowboys season and punked them with a late touchdown pass just to put salt in the wound, Brooking goes to pule at the Vikings coaching staff for the play call. Rather than, say, preventing the score, or hitting someone before or even after the whistle, or doing anything else that might have cost him an endorsement dollar or a league fine… he cried. And cried, and cried. What a sorry waste of sperm and dignity this is. But that’s not what gets him on the list.

Brooking played well enough this year, and the Cowboys finished high enough so that their draft pick won’t be golden, that he’ll probably get the job again next year… and will also wind up making all of the pre-game shows for the jump around. Maybe he’ll also inspire another four to six brickheads to have their own jump around media moment. And we’ll all wind up with more and more coverage about the NFL that has nothing to do with the actual game, and more about the pop psychology involved that hasn’t changed since Pop Warner. Yay, more coverage that has nothing to do with the game!

3) Mark Morris. Morris is the high school player who hit a game-winning three pointer, then sprinted over to the opposing team and taunted the bench as to his greatness… leading to the refs calling a technical to force overtime, which his team lost.

Now, I don’t much care about the wins and losses of some high school team, but the fact that Morris just gave an object lesson to every sports moralist in the country, many of whom can’t wait to take a potshot at hoop? Not so good. Or that he gave every power-mad zebra a clear path to get whistle-happy to reward those who were less, how shall we say, uppity? Also less than thrilling.

Look, sports is not life and death, and it is not a moral war for the soul of the nation. It’s fun, and games, and it should be something where people catch a little slack, because they are generally too young and amped up on adrenalin and God knows what else to know any better. No one has seen the tape of what Morris did, or whether it’s truly worthy of the draconian ref solution of changing the outcome of the game. But short of a full-scale Artestian rioit, I’m guessing it wasn’t really worthy of post-game technicals.

2) St. Louis Cardinals Fan. OK, let’s get this straight. Jack Clark, a first basemen from an era of unsullied baseball, whose records and memories are untarnished and unconflicted, speaks truth to power and says what everyone outside of the zip code has been thinking for years — that Steroid Achiever Mark McGwire is a phony. Given that the man has finally admitted, after years of lying and avoidance, to cheating in the way that he steadfastly denied — and that he’s still saying the dope did him no good, which means he must have been taking it for the fine people you meet — well, really, Clark has done nothing more here than speak the truth.

Cardinal Fan, of course, greeted Clark at a recent public appearance with boos, and McGwire with cheers.

Is anyone else thinking that they’ve kind of got this whole thing bass-ackwards, and maybe, just maybe, need to move on from living in a comfortable fantasy land brought to them by pharmaceuticals and a lax media? Or is it just that more people remember McGwire’s efforts, because they happened more recently, and Clark’s just fair game now that he’s in the media?

Here’s how low this is, Cards Fan: it’s Cub-esque. You just go and think about that a while, and see if that’s really how you want to go.

1) Lane Kiffin. Here’s how big of a pooch screw this guy did to the people of Tennessee; he made me think about the people of Tennessee. (Let alone college football.) Having spent some time in this bit of flyover heaven, I can tell you the following: the women are loose before they are women, the weather comes in all versions of hot and humid, Nashville is a fine place to eat but a bad place to stay, and Memphis really needs to get more going for it than an old pop star who is buried like a hamster in his backyard.

But in the domino run that led Kiffy to Los Angeles, Kiffy single-handedly got the nation’s sports fans to reconsider one single, telling, and amazing thought…

Maybe Al Davis was right when he called the man a congenital liar.

And for undermining the narrative that has stayed with us, even as the rest of the world has turned upside down in the last decade — that being that anything Davis says is at best senility and at worst the lying ravings of a demented prince of the undead — Kiffin is the #1 Enemy of the Week. Our minds just can’t take the surrealism, really.

Fellow haters, that?s all I got. See you next week.