Andy Boyer

Month: July 2011

  • Mariners Make Us Remember What We Loved About the Sonics

    Last Friday, a Major League Baseball team did an unprecedented thing.  They celebrated another sports franchise.  Even odder, in this case, it was a former franchise.

    The Seattle Mariners didn’t make any new friends in David Stern’s office by providing the city it’s first chance to collect 16 legends from a team that no longer exists, and get them together for a tribute.  And odd as it may seem, the Mariners may have been the most logical host for this type of party.

    The Mariners were just entering Major League Baseball while the Sonics were having their first glory days in the late 1970’s.  And then the two teams shared the job of electrifying the sports community in the mid 1990’s.

    So for 30 brief minutes, a baseball stadium full of Green and Gold celebrated what we miss about the Sonics.  We miss the people, the characters.  We miss guys with nicknames like The Glove, The Reign Man, Slick, X-Man, Sleepy Sam, the Hawk, and Downtown.  Guys who were recognizable by first name only – Nate, Lenny, Detlef, Dale, Bernie, Vincent and Desmond.  We miss Michael Cage’s giant afro, Jack Sikma’s freakishly large frame, and George Karl’s Space Needle tie.

    I appreciate what Jack Zurencik and Pete Carroll are doing by flipping over the entire rosters of the M’s and Hawks.  But a team achieves cult status and hero worship when there’s a core group of players that you root for.  You wanted Gary to get a ring.  You knew that Hersey Hawkins could score 6 more points a night if he played somewhere else, but you loved he was bombing three’s for us.  There was something about George and Nate that made you think you could ask them to dinner and they’d say yes.

    The Schultz led Sonics never quite got that.  And tellingly, no one from the last 5 years of the franchise were represented as a Sonics legend.  It’s true, we didn’t adore the 2003-2008 versions of the Sonics that got rid of Gary.  Ray Allen is the best 3 point shooter of all time, but he wasn’t Det.  Nene, Robert Swift, Jermoe James, insert big stiff here….. none of them were Cage, Brickowski, Sikma, Lister or Perkins.  When they left for OKC, we mourned the loss of the guys who didn’t actually play anymore.

    I still don’t think we care all that much about bringing back a generic NBA Sonics club that looks like any other NBA club.  But that doesn’t make us miss “Our Sonics” any less.  Ask any sports fan in Seattle, and they can tell you where they watched Game 5 vs Denver, Game 7 vs Houston, Game 7 vs Phoenix and Game 7 vs Utah. You don’t even have to say the year.  We all just know what games you’re referring to.  There was a connection to those guys – not to the franchise, but to the guys – that made you happy when they won, hurt when you lost, and want to fight anyone from Phoenix.

    So good for the Mariners for bringing back those guys.  I hope their front office took note.  It’s not about rally fires or a moose.  Bring in players who are also great characters, let us connect with them over a long period, and we’ll come back to Safeco.

  • Willkommen Jurgen Klinsmann

    At last count, there have been roughly 32,342 signings in the NFL in the last 3 days.  However, in the soccer community, there was just one signing – and it was bigger than all of those combined.

    Why the magnitude? While these NFL signings are all designed to make a team better this year, and maybe next year, the USA just put pen to paper on a plan to make their soccer program not just relevant, but highly competitive in the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

    2018, you ask? How does that work?

    After years of trying, the U.S. finally convinced Jürgen Klinsman to come take over the entire US National Program.  This is the guy the U.S. wanted in 2006 after he led the German team to the World Cup semifinals.  But the U.S. Soccer Federation only wanted to let him run the Men’s National Team, while reportedly he wanted to overhaul the entire way we teach soccer in this country.  His point was simple – I can’t be successful coaching the top level team if you give me a system that doesn’t produce elite players.

    So, it took 5 years, but someone at US Soccer finally figured out something that we all have known for years.  Our current system of developing the suburban rich kids who don’t play football and basketball, putting them in a system where you have to pay to play for elite coaching, and then grooming them into an army full of hustle and grind midfielders with no striking ability, makes it hard to beat teams with players like Messi and Ronaldo.

    So Klinsman is here to teach us the German Way of soccer.  This is better than trying to install the Barcelona Way, or the Brazilian Way.  The U.S. youth soccer system is full of kids that look like German kids.  So the German Way should be teachable.

    It will be unfair to grade Klinsman on his performance in the 2014 World Cup.  But keep on eye on how the US Under 20 team does in the next 4 years.  Then let’s get excited and have high hopes for 2018.

    Check out SoccerByIves for a detailed story.

  • Nobody asked me but, here are a few thoughts about the Sounders, Manchester United & the MLS

    Nobody asked me but…

    If you spent $150 on two tickets to see Manchester United play the Sounders, and were disappointed or surprised at a 7-0 score, you shouldn’t be.  You SHOULD have been surprised and delighted that the Sounders first team held one of the most expensive and well coached teams in the world to a single goal in 45 minutes.

    Manchester United has one of the world’s top 5 strikers, Wayne Rooney.  They have possibly the greatest center back duo in all of soccer, Ferdinand and Vidic.  Just about every player on their team is a starter on their country’s national team.  They have one of the world’s greatest coaches. And amongst all their superstars, they have a bench full of players who happily share time supporting the studs.  It’s a football factory, and really only rivaled by Barcelona.  For Montero, Keller and company to play those guys 0-1 was a real surprise.

    Now unfortunately, the 2nd half happened.  I understand Sigi Schmid’s dilemma.  In all reality, no Sounder is ever going to make the English Premier League.  This is the only chance anyone on the roster has to play against guys like Rooney, Carrick, Ferdinand, Nani, etc… So as a coach, you gotta let your guys enjoy the moment, even if they are totally overmatched.  And what you saw  in the 2nd half was a situation where players who can’t start in the MLS got turned into mincemeat by a vastly superior group of athletes.

    But there was much to appreciate about the game, even the 2nd half.  For one thing, you should have been amazed by how fast all of the Man Utd players were.  They weren’t just better soccer players.  They would have won a track meet, basketball game and frisbee toss.  Also, it was a blast to watch Rooney.  It’s easy to ask, “How was he so open for those goals.” It was actually simple.  He was guarded.  Then he quietly snuck away about 40 yards from goal.  He’d get the ball an dmake a pass.  And suddenly, in the blink of an eye, he’d have made a 30 yard run, gotten a pass, and put the ball in the back of the net.  That’s not just one player doing his job.  It’s a gifted athlete being on the same page with 10 other players and orchestrating a “play” without the benefit of a huddle.

    So was the MLS embarrassed by this? I say no.  People need to get it.  The MLS does not and never will compete with the English, Italian, French, German or Spanish Leagues.  It can, and should someday, compete with the Mexican, Swedish, Norwegian, and maybe even someday the Dutch league.  It would be a perfectly reasonable goal that the MLS becomes the best league in North America, and the top feeder from this hemisphere for players to European Leagues.  It would be great if the hardcore soccer enthusiasts followed the MLS to see which young studs from Columbia, Panama, etc… were going to end up in Europe.  And it would be great for MLS fans if you knew that your best players were going to end up playing on top teams someday.

    Part 2 on this topic to come in a follow up post.

  • Tesco: Homeplus Subway Virtual Store

    I don’t usually like when people post the same thing in all their channels.  It seems pointless and a little lazy to me.  But in this case, I think this story is interesting enough that I’m embedding the video I previously posted on Twitter. (And yes, I know the story is old and you’ve all probably seen it 100 times already.)

    Also, here’s the full story from Adverblog.

     

  • Unbelievable 3D Street Art

    So 3,000+ people have already liked this blog post on Facebook, so it makes me think this has been around awhile.  But it’s the first time I saw it, so who knows, maybe my faithful readers will view this kind of street art with the same kind of amazement.  Warning – make sure your jaw isn’t too close to a hard surface.

    https://plus.google.com/photos/106526452034734966566/albums/5626567803379889857

     

    Now, if you can’t view that because you aren’t in Google Plus, this link is pretty good too.

    http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/absolutely-stunning-3d-street-art-paintings/

    Here’s a teaser:

  • Happy Independence Day

    Sure, I know we all equate July 4th with a nice 3 day weekend in the middle of the summer.  But I want to take 2 minutes to reflect on exactly what we are celebrating.  Now, I don’t know what really happened 200-300 years ago, but I’ll try to remember what my history teachers told me.  

    Sometime in the 1600’s, we were all living in England.  And then some of our friends and neighbors decided they had had enough of religious oppression.  So they hopped on boats like the Mayflower and headed to the new “colonies” in America.  

    Eventually, enough of us moved over here that we developed some sort of free market up and down the Eastern seaboard.  And we must have been doing pretty well developing new products, exporting new crops and creating a nice sustainable economy that didn’t require subsidies or loans.  Because the guys back in England said, “You guys are really showing success.  We need to raise taxes on you so we can spread that money around over here.”

    Eventually, we got tired of a bunch of professional politicians and lifelong royalty-types telling us what to do.  We were sick of a government that reached out too far, who taxed us too much, and who got involved with things they had no expertise or knowledge about, passing arcane laws that made no sense.

    So, as one big group we denounced our relationship with the oppressors.  We announced independence, and developed a loose government in which the colonies – now called states – would govern themselves.  The national government would pretty much be in charge of monitoring interstate commerce and running a national defense made up of all the state militias.  But at the core of the idea, was that we would govern ourselves in a manageable, state by state way.  We’d be responsible for our own welfare, and only rely on the federal government to arbitrate disputes and manage a defense – where if you attacked one of us, you attacked all of us.

    Obviously times have changed and we’re in a more complex world now.  But every Independence Day, I like to reflect back and remember what our whole country was based on.  I wonder how many ways we’ve deviated from the original plan, and whether that’s a good or bad thing.