Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader (65 page)

First pro football team to have emblems on their helmets: The L.A. Rams.

The Bears heard Marshall’s “crybaby” taunts and came out fighting. Under the leadership of their coach and owner, George Halas, the Bears slaughtered the Redskins 73–0, still the most lopsided defeat in the history of the NFL. More than 36,000 people witnessed the carnage at Washington’s Griffith Stadium, including a record 150 sportswriters from all over the country.

George Preston Marshall, the man credited with saving the league in the 1930s by reinventing the game, would also be remembered for the worst loss ever.

ON THE AIR

Thanks to that one championship game, pro football was more popular then ever in 1941, but it still wasn’t the draw that baseball—or even college football—was. Radio helped to spread its appeal, but it was television that solidified it.

TV was a brand-new medium in the late 1940s and NFL owners didn’t care about it—few people owned televisions. By 1950, however, there were an estimated four million TV sets in the United States, reaching some 30 million viewers. At first the NFL was against broadcasting its games, afraid that people would stay home and watch TV for free instead of paying to come to the stadium. What happened in California that year proved them right. The Los Angeles Rams decided to televise their entire season. Result: attendance at Rams games dropped by nearly half from 205,000 in 1949 to 110,000 in 1950. The Rams got the message. The following year they televised only away games, and attendance at home games shot up to 234,000. By the end of 1951, most teams were broadcasting their away games, but
only
away games. If fans wanted to see a home game, they had to watch it in person.

Football and television seemed made for each other. Advancing the ball ten yards to gain a first down gave the game a lot of drama between touchdowns, and the short breaks between plays left plenty of time for analysis and commentary by experts. Even people who were new to football could learn about the game by listening to the announcers.

Duration of the average wink: 1/10 of a second.

Pro football’s fan base began to soar, and spending Sunday afternoon watching football quickly became an American institution. By 1954 an estimated 34 percent of the Sunday afternoon viewing audience was tuned to the NFL. Thanks to television, pro football was finally beginning to eclipse college football as the most-watched, most-important form of the sport. The National Football League—which for so long had been on the brink of failing—was now truly a “national” league. And it was here to stay.

*        *        *

…ONE MORE THING: THE AFL

In 1959 Lamar Hunt, son of Texas oilman H. L. Hunt, applied to the NFL for an expansion franchise…and was turned down. So Hunt and several other spurned suitors formed the American Football League, which was the seventh or eighth league by that name (all the others had collapsed). The NFL responded to this challenge the same way it had all the others—it ignored the AFL and waited for it to die on its own.

Seven years later the AFL was still in business in spite of the fact that CBS, which broadcast NFL games, refused to give AFL scores in its news broadcasts and
Sports Illustrated
printed only black-and-white photos instead of the color shots it used with the NFL. So in 1966 the two leagues agreed that their champion teams would meet in the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game on January 15, 1967. In 1970 the two leagues merged.

“AFL-NFL World Championship Game” was a pretty clunky name, and Lamar Hunt wanted something better. One day he saw his daughter bouncing a rubber ball and asked her what it was. “A Super Ball,” she told him. “Super Bowl” started out as a nickname, but by the third inter-league championship game, played on January 12, 1969, the name was official. Today the Super Bowl is one of the biggest events of the television year, with 40 percent of U.S. homes tuning in to watch the game.

Chance that a pro football player will be injured at least once in his career: 100 percent.

HUT 1…HUT 2…HIKE!

Football: A mindless game of men with helmets running into each other? Or a complex ballet of strategy mixed with speed and brute force?

“Football isn’t a game but a religion, a metaphysical island of fundamental truth in a highly verbalized, disguised society, a throwback of 30,000 generations of anthropological time.”

—Arnold Mandell

“Let’s face it, you have to have a slightly recessive gene that has a little something to do with the brain to go out on the football field and beat your head against other human beings on a daily basis.”

—Tim Green

“The NFL, like life, is full of idiots.”

—Randy Cross

“Football isn’t a contact sport, it’s a collision sport. Dancing is a contact sport.”

—Duffy Daugherty

“Most football teams are temperamental. That’s 90% temper and 10% mental.”

—Doug Plank

“Pro football is like nuclear warfare. There are no winners, only survivors.”

—Frank Gifford

“I’d catch a punt naked, in the snow, in Buffalo, for a chance to play in the NFL.”

—Steve Henderson

“Baseball is what we were. Football is what we have become.”

—Mary McGrory

“If my mother put on a helmet and shoulder pads and a uniform that wasn’t the same as the one I was wearing, I’d run over her if she was in my way. And I love my mother.”

—Bo Jackson

“I like to believe my best hits border on felonious assault.”

—Jack Tatum

“The pads don’t keep you from getting hurt. They just keep you from getting killed.”

—Chad Bratzke

“You’re kind of numb after 50 shots to the head.”

—Jim Harbaugh

“Football is a game of clichés, and I believe in every one of them.”

—Vince Lombardi

A working ballerina goes through an average of three pairs of ballet slippers a week.

13 NAMES FOR A 12-INCH SANDWICH

They’re all basically the same: a long roll filled with layers of meat, cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, and condiments. But what you call them depends on who you ask and where they’re from
.

H
OAGIE
Ingredients:
Italian ham, prosciutto, salami, provolone cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions on a long roll, with oregano-vinegar dressing

Origin:
During World War I, Italian immigrants who worked in the shipyards at Philadelphia’s Hog Island would eat these long sandwiches for lunch. A common meal in Italy, native Philadelphians took to them, first calling the sandwich a “hoggie” in reference to Hog Island, then later “hoagie.” It became the official sandwich of Philadelphia in 1992, beating out the cheesesteak.

ZEP

Ingredients:
Salami, provolone, tomatoes, onions, oregano, and oil
Origin:
The name is short for “zeppelin” (because it’s zeppelin-shaped). True zeps are found only within the city limits of Norristown, Pennsylvania, a small town 20 miles outside of Philadelphia. This sandwich also started with Italian immigrants.

HERO

Ingredients:
Pork and other meats, provolone, usually with roasted peppers, vinegar, olive oil, and lettuce served on crusty Italian bread

Origin:
It was also introduced to locals by Italian immigrants, but “hero” was the New York City name coined sometime late in the 19th century. According to legend, New Yorkers named it a “hero” because “it took a true hero to finish one in a single sitting.”

GRINDER

Ingredients:
Similar to a hoagie or a hero, but usually toasted

By English law, the phrase “time immemorial” means history before the reign of Richard I.

Origin:
Italian immigrants set up sandwich shops near the East Coast shipyards during World War II. Their main customers were “rivet grinders,” the men who ground rivets on warships, and the term passed along to the sandwiches. Today, this term is especially popular in Michigan and the upper Midwest.

SUBMARINE (OR SUB)

Ingredients:
Boiled ham, hard salami, cheeses, lettuce, tomatoes, onion, maybe some garlic and oregano on Italian bread
Origin:
This New Jersey sandwich was named by Dominic Conti, an Italian grocery store owner from the city of Paterson. In 1927 Conti went to see the
Holland I
, a submarine on display in Jersey’s Westside Park. The sub reminded Conti of the biggest sandwich he sold in his store, so he borrowed the name.

ITALIAN

Ingredients:
The same as a submarine

Origin:
The only difference between this and the New York sandwiches is geography; it’s found mainly in the Midwest and upper New England.

ROCKET, TORPEDO, and BOMBER

Ingredients:
Similar to a hoagie or a submarine
Origin:
These are other working-class names for working-class sandwiches. Like the grinder, they were named for the immigrant workers who built the rockets, torpedoes, and bombers during World War II. Also, many WWII-era bombers were erected using a new technique called “Sandwich Construction.”

CUBAN

Ingredients:
Roast pork, ham, cheese, and a pickle on Cuban bread, grilled in a press until the contents are warmed by their own steam

Origin:
In the Ybor City area of Tampa, Florida, this sandwich can be traced back to the 1880s, when many Cubans immigrated there to work in the cigar factories. A real Cuban sandwich is almost impossible to find outside of Tampa or Miami. Why? Because Cuban bread contains lard, it must be made fresh daily, which makes it difficult to distribute.

In St. Louis, Missouri, a woman must be fully clothed to be rescued by firemen.

WEDGE

Ingredients:
Various meats, very thinly sliced, stacked, folded, and cut in half with the halves served at a 90-degree angle

Origin:
Not only the name of a sandwich, it’s also the name of a delimaster’s illusionary trick of manipulating thinly sliced meats to make portion sizes look larger than they really are. This sleight-of-hand has been handed down through generations of deliworkers, primarily in Westchester County, north of New York City.

PO’ BOY

Ingredients:
It can feature crawfish, shrimp, fried oysters, catfish, crab, deli meats, or meatballs on a baguette. Served “dressed” with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise, or “undressed,” meaning plain

Origin:
The po’boy was invented in the Cajun section of New Orleans in 1929. Two brothers, Clovis and Benjamin Martin, took pity on striking transit workers (Benjamin was a former streetcar conductor) and gave these “po’boys” sandwiches made of leftovers from their restaurant. Shellfish was abundant and cheap at the time, and became the main ingredient. Today, any long sandwich served in New Orleans is considered a po’boy, even one with deli meats. However, outside of New Orleans, it usually refers only to sandwiches containing seafood.

DAGWOOD

Ingredients:
Anything and everything readily available that can fit between two slices of bread. A true Dagwood is built to such a humongous size that it is nearly impossible to take a bite

Origin:
The only food that Dagwood Bumstead, husband of Blondie in the popular comic strip, knew how to prepare was a mountainous pile of dissimilar leftovers precariously arranged between two slices of bread. The sandwich became synonymous with the character and took his name.

*        *        *

“It requires a certain kind of mind to see beauty in a hamburger bun.”

—Ray Kroc, chairman of McDonald’s

Although 90% of people in the U.S. say adultery is wrong, the adultery rate is about 70%.

AUNT SHARI’S AMAZING POWERS

Our Aunt Shari loves magic tricks and these classics are some of her favorites. Can you guess how they work? (Answers are on
page 514
.)

P
EEK-A-BOO
“I have X-ray vision,” Aunt Shari told me. “It’s not like Superman’s—I can’t see through walls, or steel, or anything like that—but I
can
see through paper.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “You call out the names of five of your friends. I’ll write each one down on a piece of paper, then fold it up and put it in a bag. Then you reach in and grab one, and I’ll tell you what name is written on it before you even take it out of the bag.”

“You’re on!” I said. Aunt Shari got a paper bag, some paper, and a pencil. I called out the names of five of my friends—Steve, Mike, Lara, Dave, and Marilyn—and she wrote each name down on a separate piece of paper, folded it up, and put it in the bag. Then she handed me the bag. I reached in, grabbed one, and said, “Okay.”

Aunt Shari stared long and hard at the bag, then she looked up at me and said, “The name on the paper is…‘Steve.’”

I pulled out the paper and unfolded it. “It says ‘Steve!’” I said.

“You see? X-ray vision!” she said as she took back the bag.

How’d she do that?