Nope, it’s not more trouble in the Animal Kingdom, just College Football’s last gasp of the 2014-15 season. Coach Urban Meyer’s fourth-ranked Buckeyes, who barely sneaked into the four-team playoffs, pummeled Oregon’s jazzy Ducks 42-20 at the Shangri-La Football Palace (also known as A.T.&T. Stadium) in Arlington, Texas to capture the collegiate National Championship. This is the third national title for Meyer, who won two of them here at Florida before falling out of bed with some Mystery Disease after losing the Southeastern Conference championship game to Alabama in 2009.
The nature of Urban’s illness was vague but some thought it might be Lackaquarterbackitis, a dreaded scourge which causes previously successful college teams to fall on hard times when their star field generals graduate, as megastar Tim Tebow did following that game. His replacement, Cam Newton, had earlier been dispatched by UF officials when somebody else’s computer was found residing in Cam’s apartment. He said he bought it from a wandering purveyor of damaged goods who had passed through campus in a horse-drawn wagon full of rags and newspapers but administrators raised a wary eyebrow. Next QB in line was John Brantley, a high-school hero from nearby Ocala who possessed a good enough football pedigree but turned out to be an unmitigated disaster. Meyer must have been prescient about the matter, citing his illness as a cause for his sudden retirement from coaching. Shocked to the core, Florida Athletic Director Jeremy Foley rushed over to Urban’s posh estate with strawberries and cream, asking his pal to do nothing rash. Meyer reconsidered, then coached the Gators to a miserable 8-5 season before quitting again. Nobody cared this time.
Though the sick and weary coach said he would now be “spending a lot more time with family,” he immediately took a job with ESPN, zipping around the country talking about college football. When the Ohio State job opened up a year later, Meyer, a native of Ashtabula, Ohio jumped on it, reinforcing Florida fans’ suspicions that he bailed out on a bad situation. They now root for anyone OSU plays, not that it seems to help those opponents much. Meyer’s 13-1 team won the game with its third-string quarterback, the other two having been sidelined by injuries, and despite a raft of turnovers. Oregon, meanwhile, had not scored less than 38 points all year except in its only loss, 31-24 to Arizona in early October. Cad or not, Urban Meyer has ascended to become the best college football coach in the country. His Buckeye team is young and talented and will be right back for more next year. Ah, well, the world turns and its inhabitants ponder what might have been. What if that ragman had steered his horse down a different street? What if Mom had given Cam a new computer for Christmas? What have they done to the rain?
Meanwhile, sympathetic Gator hearts go out to Deb Peterson and her Oregon Ducks, a colorful crew, fast-paced, high-scoring, possessed of a Heisman-Trophy-winning quarterback. Just not all they’re quacked up to be.
2014 Again
But we were talking about the Old Year before we were so rudely interrupted, even if it was last week. In 2014, thoroughbred racing had another Triple Crown contender. And yeah, even you rookies know that nobody ever wins the thing, but it’s fun speculating. California Chrome certainly looked the part, a gleaming chestnut colt, named for his abundance of white markings. He promptly made off with the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on the First Saturday In May and then Pimlico’s Preakness, before faltering in the mile-and-one-half Belmont Stakes in New York, won by Tonalist. The three-year-old who finished the season strongest, however, was Bayern (named for his owner’s favorite soccer club), who annexed the Pennsylvania Derby and the Haskell Stakes before winning the prestigious Breeders’ Cup Classic.
If you want to get your bets down for the 2015 Derby while the odds are silly good, here is a list of the likely contenders along with the current odds (and the column remains crooked no matter what I do):
American Pharoah 13-1
Calculator 19-1
Carpe Diem 18-1
Daredevil 30-1
Dortmund 5-1
El Kabeir 30-1
International Star 80-1
Mr. Z 45-1
Ocho Ocho Ocho 30-1
Texas Red 12-1
Something to remember: either by dint of injury, insufficient earnings or disappointing performance on the track in upcoming races, many of these characters will not actually run on the First Saturday in May. And several others not mentioned will be there with bells on. If you’re inclined to shoot for the really big bucks, the longest odds posted on any horse in the 2015 Derby is the impolite 400-1 number they hung on a poor fellow named Patterson Hill. Maybe they’re trying to tell him something. On the other hand, odds of 300-1 have been placed on a huge number of horses we consider promising and likely to improve. It only takes one good performance to radically alter perceptions. For instance, the well-named Sky Hero dropped from 250-1 all the way down to 85-1 after winning an allowance race at Churchill Downs in November. There may even be a Derby contender or two who has not run yet.
We haven’t seen all these horses run, but we have seen Texas Red demolish a nice field in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. 12-1 looks like a sprightly proposition right now. Look for Red to show up in the San Vincente in California on February 1. If he wins that, he could wind up the Derby favorite in Louisville. Either him or Patterson Hill.
Soccer Again
Every four years, soccer maniacs gear up for the hallowed World Cup, and last year was no different. We didn’t have the usual plethora of street brawls and automobile inversion since the thing was held in Brazil, too far away for the European Soccer Hooligans to show up en masse and display their shoddy wares. Brazil was close enough for Americans to visit, of course, and a truckload of young Yankees turned up to root on the U.S.A. team, getting a little too excited, if you ask us, when their heroes accumulated one win, one tie and two losses. If that was your football record, the fans would be placing empty suitcases on the coach’s lawn and snubbing his wife at the Costco. During this spectacular display of the world’s favorite game, the United States team once went 215 (count ‘em—TWO HUNDRED FIFTEEN) minutes without scoring, which almost matches the relative record of the Salutatorian of your high-school senior class. What are they doing out there, reflecting on the Meaning of Life? The Mayflower took less time to cross the Atlantic.
Then there’s the flopping. If you think American basketball players exaggerate an insult, you should see these soccer sissies. They couldn’t hit the ground harder if they were struck by lightning. Remember those giant tunneling worms in the Tremors movies? Somebody would be standing around having a smoke, not paying attention to their surroundings and ZAPPO!—the giant tunneling worm would suck them under before you could blink. Well, these soccer players make those worms look pokey. And then, some of them begin to actually weep! I’m sorry, but I’m not subscribing to any sport festering with a bunch of crybabies, even if they are faking. It’s downright undignified.
Me and my pal Allen Morgan, 85, went to a soccer game at UF once. I talked him into it. It was very cold and if there was one thing Allen liked less than soccer it was freezing weather. He had a big coat on and a scarf over the lower half of his face, exposing only his eyes. Just before halftime, he raised the scarf to cover his entire face, eyes included, his own little commentary on the proceedings.
“My whole body is numb,” complained Allen. “And now my brain is getting numb. I’m not sure whether it’s the cold or the soccer.”
We left at halftime. Never to return.
Year Of The Pie
This column had a successful annum, to say the least, breaking all records for viewers and presenting a few of our better pieces. The California Vacation blogs, a four-week extravaganza, were very popular, as are all the vacation columns, crammed as they are with happy photos of pretty places. This year, however, that group was outdone in numbers (if barely) by the adolescence-in-Austin feature 1962, another quadrilogy, this one aided and abetted by the Facebook promotions of Harry Edwards, Bob Follett and Jay Lynch. Facebook also came to the fore when Marty Jourard advertised Camelot, an extremely well-read tale of the early days of the Subterranean Circus and our old employee Mike (Jagger) Hatcherson.
No one column had more viewers, however, than The Land That Time Forgot, an article about the Horse Country surrounding Lexington, Kentucky, which included a day in the life of itinerant horseman Bill Mauk. Everybody in Fayette and surrounding counties read that one and it remains the only column in the four-plus years of this enterprise which approached 800 readers, though most settle around 100 fewer. Who knew? While we’ve come to expect big numbers from the travelogues and the Kentucky Derby specials, every so often a column rises up and surprises us with its strength and longevity. The writing in this one was kindly assisted by my own feelings for and appreciation of the beauty and bustle and professionalism of the Lexington area horse community.
Other pleasant surprises over time have included Boy Howdy, now the fifth most-read column, an effort discussing romance on the farm with the blossoming of Farmers.com, The Incredible Lightness Of Being, describing the late days of the Charlatan magazine and the coming of the Subterranean Circus, all of it involving the stunning death of old pal Newt Simmons, and Schmuck Dynasty: Television For Morons, about….well, you know. We don’t plan these things, they just come to us in technicolor visions which appear when we’re bored on the treadmill or bored while we’re driving or bored watching the Gators’ offense, so we could be hampered by expected improvements on the gridiron. Nonetheless, we’ll keep plugging away, even after all possible subjects have been exhausted. Which, if I’m correct, could be as soon as next week.
New And Improved: No Huff, No Puff
The Death Of Pain
Well, maybe physical pain, anyway. My old friend, Irana Zisser in Boca has come up with a wonderful new discovery, although you have to be careful with Irana. You may recall that while a Subterranean Circus employee, she called me from the First Annual National Boutique Show in The Big Apple and told me about some exotic pipes we just had to purchase. She said they were sure to sell and we’d be fools to neglect them. When they arrived, I was somewhat taken aback. These pipes looked like they had been constructed by a ceramicist on acid, though one with a considerable sense of humor. They were strange, misshapen creatures; sometimes, you needed a map to find the bowls. But Irana was right about one thing—they did sell out, and it only took about 17 years. We kept them around that long to see what kind of people would purchase such monstrosities. Whenever we sold one, somebody would go to the rear of the store and loudly bong the ship’s bell we had installed for just such occasions.
Anyway, Irana is at it again. Now, she has discovered some kind of CBD Oil, a product which relieves all pain. And Irana should know from pain. She remains the single inhabitant of Earth who has had ALL of her body parts replaced. No, we’re not kidding. Okay, there are a couple of things they couldn’t replace, like skwushed rotator cuffs and skrunched discs in her back. Irana has automobile accidents, see, although none of them are her fault. Up until recently, she was taking FOURTEEN Oxycodone tablets a day, which barely put a dent in her miseries. “I thought I might as well off myself,” confessed the poor thing. And then, just as she was looking for the tallest building in town, she discovered this magic Cannabidiol product, which has made her (almost) pain-free and restored her to the ranks of the living, although she’s not yet accepting tennis dates. She says she’s going to start selling the stuff and I should tell people about it in The Flying Pie. Well….
I don’t recommend anything in here that I haven’t used myself. I told Irana to send up enough doses to try the stuff on three people. She’s thinking about it. I haven’t seen any CBD oil yet but I did begin to read about it. Seems the oil Irana uses is not to be confused with other types of medical marijuana or hemp products; for one thing, users don’t get high from it. We’re not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, we’re just reporting here. Anyway, we have no doubt there has been a remarkable change in Irana, as well as a few others she has sold her product to. If she ever gets around to sending us any, we’ll try it on Siobhan (frozen shoulders), Jennie Hollis (lower back issues) and Lila, the dog (painful snoring). Since most of our audience has one compromised body part of another, this could be a boon to Piekind. We’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, don’t throw away your Tylenol.
That’s all, folks….
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