NFL Week 8 - Getting' My Hate On

Like a golem arising from a mound of clay, the football season has taken shape. I first realized this when I saw Crocodile Dundee 2. Have you ever seen it? It is totally inept, even for a fourth-rate sequel of a third-rate film. It's also borderline racist, but it's Australian so there you go. I have seen 15-minute snippets of Crocodile Dundee 2 probably thirty times. You are flipping channels — because the only game the network slate is a blowout between a 5-8 team and a 2-11 team, and the announcing crew is a trio of quasi-literate, cliché-spewing dolts — and you inevitably stumble across Crocodile Dundee 2 on USA or Spike and it just kind of sucks you in... for about 15 minutes, then you realize you are what you are watching and you have to start flipping again or else face-up to what a wasted, soulless life you are leading.

There's this one scene where Paul Hogan needs some help to rescue his girlfriend from stock-footage Columbian drug dealers, so he asks his shucking-and-jiving, street-smart, token black friend, Bad Leroy Brown, to find some people who can help. Bad Leroy Brown leads him to a group of light-in-the-loafers white punks who are the self-styled "coolest gang in New York." Well, ol' Mick Dundee sees right through their little charade. He asks, "If you're so cool, what do you do last night?" The response is a defensive, "We didn't do nuthin'!" Now the viewers see the truth: these guys are all about their reputation. If you pose like tough guys and talk like tough guys, even though you are a crowd of re-costumed Broadway dancers, you can be the coolest gang in New York. The scene is stunning in its poignancy.

I immediately thought of the Tennessee Titans. Not that they are a pack of poofters, but they are clearly all about the pose. All the reports about them always seem to include a reference to how they want to be hard guys because it's the hard guys that win. So they take pride in their training camp scuffles which, quite frankly, is not appropriate for Albert Haynesworth since he is one minor frustration away from going all Michael Flatley on some poor lineman. And their QB self-consciously preens and trash talks and flaunts the chip on his shoulder, despite the fact that he throws like Dan Quisenberry. And let's not forget the specter of Pacman, looming in the distance, waving around his TNA Impact Tag Team Championship belt while trying to fend off multiple lawsuits from his rain-making episode in Vegas. They may be winning, but they are also a contrived drama.

Article Author: David Mazzotta

David Mazzotta is author of the comic novels Apple Pie and Business as Usual.

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