Adrian Russell » American Football

“Barney’s movie had heart but Football In The Groin had a football in the groin”

Adrian — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 17:15:13 +0000

Minnesota Vikings quarter-back, Brett Favre, is currently living under a cloud of controversy due to the alleged sexual harrassment of a Jets PR person some years ago – and the X-rated self-taken images he supposedly ‘sexted’ to her.

On Monday night – despite a record-breaking performance at Meadowlands – he threw a crucial, late interception that cost his side a win over his former employers, the Jets.

And today, in Vikings practice, he endured that great social equaliser – a football to the groin. Within hours, someone had plastered the footage into a famous Simpsons scene. This contest is over, indeed.

The wrong way and the Ryan way

Adrian — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 10:22:40 +0000

At the turn of the last century, as the hem of American society was dampened by wave after wave of European immigrants, the Irish stretched out their legs beneath the table, threw a cap onto the coat hook behind the closing door and made themselves at home.

Conductors swinging off the San Francisco tram as it climbed crooked Lombard Street whistled Irish airs. Miners in Montana sent coal-smudged envelopes home across the Atlantic. And the hard-working criminals who ran the boxing game in New York and New Jersey sang ballads and made threats in distinctly green brogues. Welcome to America.

Around this time, Frank Sinatra’s father, Martin, a “ruddy and tattooed little blue-eyed Sicilian born in Catania” boxed under the name of Marty O’Brien. It was safer than wearing a gum shield.

In fact, in those days, and in those places, with the Irish running the basement-level of city life, it was quite common for Italians – particularly those who clocked on for an evening’s work when the ringside bell was struck – to wind up with such names.

It’s understandable, when you consider that most of those who migrated from Italy around the 1900′s were poor and uneducated, were excluded from the trades unions dominated by the Irish, and felt on their necks the stout-scented breath of the police and politicians.

Across the Hudson, Hoboken, a blue-collar New Jersey town offered the world the black-tied Frank Albert Sinatra. Not a million miles away, in the newly-constructed Meadowlands Stadium in the same state, on Monday night, another Irish name will climb into the ring as the bell rings on another American Football season.

Meet, Rex Ryan, head coach of the New York Jets.

Last year the corpulent Oklahoma native took the long-suffering Jets to within one game of the Superbowl in his first season in the hot seat. But more than that he earned a name as the biggest personality – and physical presence – on an NFL sideline.

Ryan is, according to the New York Times this week as: “An immense man whose thick foothills of neck and haunch swell into a spectacular butte at the midsection, he possesses a personal geography that, from first-and-10 distance, assumes a form that follows his function — Ryan looks like nothing more than an extra-large football.”

Like his GAA cousins, the 47-year-old Ryan is known for naming a side in the match programme and in the media during the build-up to crucial games – before we find the team lines out completely differently.

Frank Sinatra: Jersey boy was possibly a Jets fan.

Brian Cody’s stony, inscrutable facade offers little insight to those watching from the stands or on TV as Tommy Walsh drops into an opposite corner or Henry Shefflin confounds predictions to play. But as the plot unfurls around him on matchday, Ryan will smile widely behind his Madonna-like mic headset, nudge his assistant with a little joke and share in the enjoyment of another stroke pulled. He’s made sport fun again.

The Jets are Ryan’s first head-coaching job, but long before the team hired him last year, he was already known as a ‘defensive auteur’ — a man with “a beautiful football mind.”

Like Donal O’Grady master-minding an original short puck-out strategy or Micky Harte imposing a blanket defence on Gaelic football, Ryan offers a philosophy of innovation. His scheme of “organized chaos,” – an unpredictable approach that keeps the opposition constantly guessing – is unique. And it’s bringing results; the Jets, eternally cold in the shadow of their glamorous neighbours the Giants, haven’t been warmed by a Superbowl success since the famous Joe Namath dragged them to one in 1969. Now they’re closer than ever.

Every year the TV station that brought us Jersey-set The Sopranos follows one NFL side in their pre-season as part of the Hard Knocks programme (Please someone make a GAA version). This year predictably they chose Ryan’s Jets. Where he brings new thinking to the backroom chalkboard, so too he is imaginative in his swearing (fans produce pie charts that detail his penchant for bad language; ‘slapd**k’ made a debut this week).

And his bowel-irritating secret eating habits in ‘Cafe Ryan’ – the area he filled with garden furniture outside his office where he hosts KFC picnics with his defensive staff – have been exposed.

But it’s his relationship with his players that has shone through the haze of a tough preseason.

“I’ll always tell you” is one of his signature phrases, and blunt as he is, his players trust his OCD level of preparation and canny reading of a super-complicated game. In fact, he does see football more acutely than others. After taking routine psychological tests for the league he learned he is dyslexic. The results also showed that he can watch football in real time and grasp what all 22 pawns on the chess board are doing. He doesn’t understand why, but he sees it all.

As the only other team he ever worked for, the Baltimore Ravens, come to New Jersey on Monday night for the first game of their season, Ryan – the Irish name pulling the strings in New York – will stalk the sideline with a smile – probably because the Jets are winning. He’s doing it his way.

Adrian.russell@examiner.ie Twitter: @adrianrussell

Cee Lo Green – ‘Fuck You’

Adrian — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:42:08 +0000

New video for Cee Lo’s latest tune. Dunno how they’re gonna make it look like ‘Forget You’ for TV, which is the plan apparently.

Dude looks like he could play for Baltimore Ravens.

H/T John Riordan

Guess who’s on holidays?

Adrian — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:58:48 +0000

While I’m away, check out the first few episodes of HBO’s Hard Knocks – the documentary series which this year joins the New York Jets’ training camp.

There’s such gems as Rex Ryan’s ready-a-classic motivational talk and Antonio Cromartie tries to remember how many kids he has.

Amazing stuff.

Superbowl lessons for the GAA

Adrian — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:14:38 +0000

The Saints capped a remarkable sporting journey, late on Sunday night, when underdog quarterback Drew Brees drove New Orleans to a stunning victory over the Indianapolis Colts. Among the crowd, we know, in the Sun Life Stadium in southern Miami were a couple of GAA stars; but what can the association learn from the NFL’s greatest show on earth?

1. The game on Sunday night is the last high-wire act in a week-long, multi-ring circus. For the days leading up to the tie former NFL stars make themselves available for workshops with kids; agents and administrators hold public debates and think-ins on the business of their sport while media have access to both teams for a three full days. Why not make the respective All-Ireland finals the culmination to a seven-day festival of the sport. It’s good business.

2. The famous half-time show was merely an exercise in Pete Townsend and Roger Daltry slowly dismantling their hard-earned rock’n'roll reputation with every creaky windmill manoeuvre and missed cue. If The Who offer themselves as half-time entertainment, let’s stick with the Artane Band

3. Peyton Manning is like a super quarter-back built in a lab by the US government using parts from slightly lesser QBs. In other words, just like Henry Shefflin. But not even Manning, with his obsessive-compulsive preparation, laser-like football mind and metronomic arm could lead the Colts to a win that was utterly expected. Fairytales happen, and the GAA world should not expect the Cats to go on winning forever. Right?

4. This year’s broadcast became the most watched event in American TV since the last episode of MASH with 116 million people tuning in. But as much as the on-field action and the half-time show, the commercials that punctuate the play receive as much attention. This year Hollywood starlet Megan Fox in a bath selling mobile phones as well as bitter rivals David Letterman and Jay Leno teaming up for a spot drew the most attention. Perhaps it’s time for the GAA and its sponsors to move away from its top stars hawking cattle feed and Wavin pipes.

5. The Saints won an unlikely victory a mere four years after Hurricane Katrina brought the jazz in New Orleans to a sudden stop. It’s clearly a silly parallel to attempt to draw but there are a collection counties who’ve endured a winter of discontent here – very often under an unwelcome veil of flood water. Like Brees and his inspirational Saints, they’ll be aiming to make hay when the sun shines once again.

First posted this morning to the Irish Examiner sportsblog.

The American way

Adrian — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:16:39 +0000

Many of my readers – perhaps even both of you – will spend this rainy Sunday night in front of the fire, watching the NFL action on Sky.

American Football has now more than a cult following, I would suggest, on this side of the water. The Cork Admirals compete in the Irish American Football League (IAFL). It is some operation, as I saw for myself here.

I received an email from the Admirals, who are again recruiting players for the upcoming season which begins in March. For anyone interested, the details are below and there are plenty of other teams around the country who are no doubt in the same need for players.

[We] are always looking for more to get involved as the sport and its clubs are a big set up from coaching staff to game day crews, club members and of course they the sport is demanding of high numbers for its squad set up. A lot of people think the Admirals have no openings which is quite the opposite and if you are interested in learning more or getting involved look up their website for contacts www.corkadmirals.net and there are plenty of links to other teams around the country

Contact: admiralsironman@hotmail.com Web: www.corkadmirals.info

Booked: the year’s best sports writing

Adrian — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:50:19 +0000

The Irish Examiner sportsdesk chose their favourite books of the year for a piece in last Saturday’s newpaper.

Here’s my two picks:

Boys Will Be Boys: The Bad Boys Won: The Glory Days and Party Nights of the Dallas Cowboy Dynasty
Jeff Pearlman
Harper Collins

When the Dallas Cowboys opened up the sparkling, box-fresh Texas Stadium with a defeat of the New York Giants in September, it was the denouement to the Jerry Jones story. Boys will be Boys explains how it began.

Jones, an oil magnate (predictably) from the Lone Star State purchased America’s Team in the early 90s – a franchise who at that point seemed to have gone to the well once too often. Rising from the smouldering ashes of a car crash 1989 season they went on to win their first Superbowl in four years and produce a swashbuckling, confident dynasty that defined the NFL in the 90s.

But for a team who took care of business on Sundays, they played hard every other day too.
The tale opens with future hall of famer Michael Irvin stabbing a teammate in the neck with a barber’s scissors, and from there spirals out of control.

Massive investment from Jones – along with the expertise of coach Jimmy Johnson – brought unprecedented victories on the pitch. But four Superbowls success in the 90s was paralleled by off-field excess. Drugs, orgies, fights, marital infidelities, and, finally, that stabbing which punctured, at last, the years of wild living in the infamous ‘White House’ – a neighbourhood home the squad rented collectively to facilitate their partying.

Though the tale is punctuated by trips to strip clubs and cocaine arrests, the Shakespearean power struggle at the heart of the Cowboys story is as fascinating. While their team crumbled, owner Jones and manager Jimmy Johnson’s relationship descends into mis-trust, turf-battles and paranoia.

Written by Sports Illustrated writer Jason Pearlman – who previously depicted the beer-soaked tales of the womanising, vandalising ’86 New York Mets who claimed an unlikely World Series win in The Bad Guys Won, he has stuck to a winning formula. With a rainbow of colourful characters, this book is as hard-hitting – and fun- as the team it depicts so well.

The Beckham Experiment
Grant Wahl
Crown Books

A typical football book – particularly one of the game’s superstars – might be cracked open by a reader with some reservations about its journalistic merit. Not this one.

When David Beckham’s LA Galaxy lost the MLS Cup final on penalties to Real Salt Lake City last week a gaggle of reporters hopped open the locker-room door, strode in and asked a half-dressed Beckham for his reaction. This is American sports media.

If Beckham is now used to the underpants-revealing admittance the newspaper men receive in the States, he wasn’t when his LA Story began.

Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl slipped behind the velvet rope to earn unprecedented access to Goldenball’s life and the weird marriage of Hollywood and sport that this deal was.

Beckham’s foray into the United States was engineered by entertainment conglomerate AEG, which owns the Galaxy, and the former English captain’s first season in the US was scarred by disappointment, manipulation and disaster – on the field at least.
Wahl sketches a dressing room full of European journeymen, Californian surf dudes on 25k a year and America’s favourite son Landon Donovan all under the eccentric management of hirsute red-head and US legend Alexi Lalas.

Donovans’s unwavering criticism in this book of the new signing – that Beckham took the skipper’s armband, wouldn’t pick up tabs in restaurants and wasn’t committed to the Galaxy – are said to have produced a new resolve at the Home Depot Arena and sparked this season’s charge for the playoffs.

Though now part of the story, The Beckham Experiment offers the fullest picture yet of the growth of US soccer, the business of sport and Beckham’s role as a Hollywood leading man.

Anyone have their own recommendations?

Earth to college football player?!

Adrian — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:52:54 +0000

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Glasgow Diamonds’ team song

Adrian — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:06:29 +0000

No explanation needed. Via @Glinner

“So just call on me brother, when you need a hand”

Adrian — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:03:31 +0000

If any of you are college football fans who enjoy the soulful grooves of Bill Withers c 1972, then this is the video for you!

The USC Trojans adopted the famous Lean On Me as their team anthem this year. The side’s coach brought in the R&B legend to a squad meeting as a joke. And then they all jammed.