Tuesday, January 2, 2007

Pass the Herm, We Be Chiefing: The Hater's Guide to the Postseason

If, like myself, you find yourself confronted with an NFL postseason without a rooting interest and unmoved by Don Cheadle soliloquies, you must draw from the well of that most powerful of human emotions. Ok, well, lust probably won't do here. But the second most powerful, hate, will serve as a fine proxy. This is one in a series of posts filled with bile, spleen, vitriol and all-around nastiness toward all the teams involved with the sordid roundelay we know as the NFL Playoffs.

AFC 6th seed -- Kansas City Chiefs (9-7)

As a connoissieur of hatred, it pleases me greatly to watch players like Larry Johnson. LJ hates white people. So much so that he refuses to listen to Handsome Boy Modeling School's last album, and not only because it's mediocre. That rock 'n' roll could never have a racism like this. Okay, maybe it has.

Anyway, I know, I am given to exaggeration. What LJ really said is that because Chiefs head coach Herm Edwards is black, he can better identify with LJ as a person, and therefore is better equipped to handle him as a coach. That makes some sense. I mean, who is blacker than Herm Edwards? Most white coaches might wonder why Johnson left the Knicks in the first place, because, hell, they can't tell them apart. I don't much understand Larry Johnson either, but not as much as I don't understand how a team that lost to the Steelers 45-7 is in the playoffs.

Of course, little does LJ realize, one of the three black head coaches in the playoffs will be eliminated because of the Chiefs/Colts Wild Card matchup. Is it a matter of the cutthroat nature of being a minority coach in the NFL or is the league purposefully grouping the black coaches into a playoff ghetto from which they know they have reduced chances of survival? Clearly it's another Machiavellian plan hatched by HNIC Roger Goodell.

Herewith we welcome, in the comments section, to engage in a reasoned discussion of these and other matters pertaining to race are noted academics Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Mark Anthony Neal, associate professor of black popular culture at Duke University, and, as always, thebigo.

23 comments:

  1. Instead of going into OT - this game should come down to a Stare Off between Edwards and Dungy - and see which one looks the most unenthusiastic about the play of their team that day.

    It would be a match up of epic proportions.

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  2. KC took the Titans spot in the playoffs and for that I hate them. I also hate stupid dreamboat™ for beating the Titans on Sunday. Fuck the Patriots.

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  3. First person with a "blank hates black people" joke loses.

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  4. Just in case y'all want some real awards, the nominations are open for the 2007 Bloggies.

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  5. Herm Edwards is about as black as Tony Dungy.

    And if Larry Johnson cared to look closely, he'd know that the absence of Chris Elliot totally sucked all the white out of 'White People'.

    P.S. Gimmick bands shouldn't make second albums.

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  6. I think black people's hair feels funny.

    HA!

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  7. I think Dungy is Van Damme and Edwards is the other Van Damme in the Van Damme movie with two Van Dammes.

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  8. I hates black people.

    Oh damn, I lose.

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  9. I saw the one with the two black male leads being violent and/or on a mission of revenge. I think it was called "News at 11:00".

    wah-wah-wah.

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  10. Two male black leads? Ever see Bad Boys?

    I'm sorry that I did....

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  11. Hellooo?! Does it have to be an action movie? What about all of the movies with black male and female leads? Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got her Groove Back, Ray, Dreamgirls, any Eddie Murphy film where he talks to animals or dresses in drag... Oh, I get it, you guys only get worked up about race and MEN.

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  12. What about Friday? That movie was seen by more white people than Gone With the Wind.
    Did Mississippi Burning have 2 black leads?
    What about Rush Hour?

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  13. believe it or not, sir charles gets samuel L. pontificating on precisely this in one of his books...

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  14. I would again offer up Ray and Dreamgirls, but their "period" nature might undercut their relevance to this discussion. What about a movie carried solely by a black man and aimed at a mass audience? I'm thinking of The Pursuit of Happyness (Will Smith). Commence arguing over whether he is too "white"...

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  15. Hotel Rwanda just came to mind, too.

    Of course, the leads HR and TPOH were portraying black characters. I'm trying to think of films where the character could have been any race, but the role went to a black person. Movies with Denzel come to mind immediately, like Man on Fire. He can open a movie on his name alone, along with Will Smith. But, yeah, there aren't too many other actors of color in Hollywood who can do that now, and even fewer women of color who can do it.

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  16. Herm and Dungy is a faceoff of which mustache will win: Herm's scraggly pornstache or Dungy's whup-broom.

    I think I hate Peyton Manning more than I hate the Chiefs of late, and so we'll say Chiefs win, 31-27.

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  17. Does anyone who has LJ in a keeper league remotely concerned that he has run the ball over 400 times this year?

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  18. yeah, UM, I know. That's public access material.

    But hey, look how the comments went rolling afterward.

    Its also kind of lame I'm typing this so much later than the last comment. Not a good start to the New Year.

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  19. And who can forget Louis Gossett, Jr.'s leading-man turn in Gus Van Sant's interracial, shot-by-shot remake of "The Jade Pussycat"?

    I got the new DVD version of Blazing Saddles for Christmas, and it includes the pilot episode of a TV spinoff, called "Black Bart." It starred none other than Lou Gossett, Jr. Who, believe it or not, once had hair.

    No matter how bad that sounds to you, multiply its imagined awfulness by twelve and divide by Tony Danza. Painful.

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  20. Larry Johnson grew up in State College PA and is the son of a Penn State football coach. Larry is whiter than Donny fucking Osmond.

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