Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (27 page)

The year-long publicity stunt had just one flaw: When it was conceived, the idea of buying everything you need online was a novel concept, but by the time DotComGuy moved into his townhouse it was already passé. “The novelty is gone,” Internet analyst Patrick Keane told reporters about six months into DotComGuy’s confinement. “If I’m an advertiser, there are a lot better places to put my message.”

THE AFTERMATH:
At one minute after midnight on January 1, 2001, DotComGuy emerged from his townhouse and announced he was changing his name back to Mitch Maddox. Then he hopped on a scooter and rode off into the darkness, having fulfilled his commitment to live in the house for one year. So what did he have to show for his experience? A dog he bought online (DotComDog), a fiancée he met in an online chatroom (Crystalyn Holubeck, a Dallas TV reporter)…but no $98,289. The banner ads barely raised enough money to keep the company afloat, let alone pay a bonus. According to a company spokesman, “DotComGuy ‘forgave’ his bonus at the end to keep the company’s doors open.”

The average American is exposed to 1,600 commercials and advertisements a day.

Uncle John has always wondered why college football is so popular in the face of the NFL. Answer: tradition. College is where organized football started.

In 1876 representatives from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton met to form the Intercollegiate Football Association and draft a uniform set of rules that all of the colleges would play by.

The game would be essentially rugby, with some modifications. The size of the field was set at at 140 yards by 70 yards (a modern football field is 100 yards long and 160 feet wide). And as in rugby, there would be 15 men on each team. The IFA also decided that one kicked goal counted as much as four touchdowns, and that whichever team scored the most touchdowns was the winner. If a game ended in a tie, a kicked goal counted for more than four touchdowns.

The length of the game was set at 90 minutes, which was divided into two 45-minute halves separated by a 10-minute break (the clock was only stopped for scoring, injuries, and “arguments,” so the games were usually shorter than football games are today). And instead of letting team captains resolve game disputes themselves, the new rules called for one unbiased referee and
two
opposing umpires, one for each team. That’s what led to all the arguments.

“The two umpires discharged their duties like an opposing pair of football lawyers,” gridiron historian Parke Davis wrote in the 1926
Football Guide.
“In fact, they were frequently selected more for their argumentative abilities than for their knowledge of the game.” Arguing with the referee became a common strategy: if an umpire noticed that his team needed a rest, he could pick a fight with the referee and drag it out for 5 or even 10 minutes, until his team was ready to play.

What’s the scientific name for any object that’s shaped like a football? A “prolate spheroid.”

Some more rules:

• Every member of the team played both offense and defense.

• The ball remained in play until it went out of bounds or someone scored a touchdown or goal.

• Forward passes were illegal—the ball carrier could throw the ball to teammates on either side of him or behind him, but not to players ahead of him.

In rugby, at the line of play, the ball went into what was known as “scrum” or “scrummage.” Neither side had possession of the ball; the ball was tossed in between the rushers on both teams, who heaved and butted against each other as they tried to kick it forward toward the goal.

Football guru Walter Camp thought the game would be more interesting if, instead of having the forwards on both teams fighting for the ball, “possession” of the ball would be awarded to one team at a time. The team in possession of the ball would have the exclusive right to attempt a touchdown or goal. One forward, called the “snapperback,” would be the person designated to put the ball in play, “either by kicking the ball or by snapping it back with the foot,” Camp’s proposed rule explained. “The man who received the ball from the snapback shall be called the
quarterback.”

Camp pushed his proposal through in 1880. That same year he succeeded in shrinking the field size to 110 yards by 53 yards and reducing the number of players on a team from 15 to 11. Modern football finally began to diverge from rugby.

The concept of “possession” changed the nature of football considerably. It vastly increased the role of strategy, elevating the importance of the coach in the process. Because the team in possession
knew
that it was getting the ball, the players could arrange themselves on the field in particular ways to execute planned plays.

But at the same time that possession of the ball increased the sophistication of the offensive strategy, it also weakened it. The defending team knew that every play would begin with the center snapping the ball to the quarterback, so the defensive forwards were now free to move in closer toward the center, ready to move in for the tackle as soon as the ball was snapped.

Take a step: You’ve just used 200 muscles.

Football was already a fairly violent sport, but the new rules made it even more so by increasing the concentration of players at the center of the action. “Bodies now bumped together in massed, head-to-head alignments,” Stephen Fox writes in Big
Leagues.
“Instead of glancing tackles in the open field, knots of players butted heads, like locomotives colliding, in more dangerous, full-bore contact.”

There was a delicate balance between the strengths of the offense and defense in football, and the rule changes of 1880 upset that balance in ways the rule makers had not foreseen. Within a year they would enact new rules to restore the balance, establishing a pattern that would continue for years to come: 1) New rules to counteract new tactics; and 2) New tactics to counteract new rules.

The next round of changes was largely the result of outrage over the 1881 Princeton-Yale game. In those days, there was no limit to how long a team could retain possession of the ball and no way the opposing team could force them to give the ball up. A team retained possession until it scored a touchdown, made a field goal attempt, or lost the ball in a fumble. Players quickly realized that if they attempted neither a touchdown nor a field goal, they could retain possession of the ball for the entire half.

In their 1881 game, Princeton and Yale did just that: Princeton, awarded possession of the ball at the start of the first half, scrimmaged back and forth for the entire 45 minutes without attempting to score, and Yale did the same thing in the second half.

The Princeton and Yale players may have felt their do-nothing tactics were fair, but fans were outraged—and so were the newspaper sportswriters who helped whip the controversy into a national story. Within days of the game, football fans all over the country were writing to newspapers to air their disgust. According to football legend, one such fan, who identified himself only as “an Englishman” wrote a letter to the editor proposing a solution: Instead of letting a team have possession of the ball for an entire half, why not limit possession to four consecutive scrimmages?

In the United States, more snow falls in February than in any other month.

The newspaper printed the letter, and someone sent it to Walter Camp. He was intrigued, but he was opposed to the idea of taking the ball away from a team that was putting it to good use. If the team in possession of the ball wasn’t abusing the system, why should they be forced to give it up before they scored?

Camp finally hit upon the idea of giving a team the right to possess the ball beyond three scrimmages, or “downs,” but only if they
earned
that right by advancing the ball at least five yards. If they didn’t, they’d have to give the ball to the other team. As long as a team continued to gain at least five yards every three downs, they were allowed to retain possession of the ball.

Camp proposed this idea when the Intercollegiate Football Association met in 1882. It passed, as did Camp’s proposal that football fields be marked with chalk lines spaced five yards apart, so that it would be easy to tell if a team had gained the yardage in three downs or not. American football moved another giant step away from rugby.

The introduction of the downs system helped to make the game more interesting, and it changed it in another way that perhaps Camp had not intended: Now that teams had to move forward or lose the ball, agility came to be less valued than sheer mass and brawn, as teams sought to find ways to blast through the opposing team’s forward line. Or as Parke Davis puts it, “The passing of the light, agile man of the seventies and the coming of the powerful young giant date from this period.”

Second down. Turn to
page 241
for Part
III
of The History of Football.

Buy American? The Liberty Bell was made in England.

It’s hard to shock anyone with nudity today. But stupidity is always a shock. These characters demonstrate that whether you’re dressed or naked, you can still be dumber than sin.

N
UDE… In April 2000, a state trooper stopped a car in the Houston suburb of Sugarland and discovered that all four passengers—three women and a three-year-old girl—were naked. God, the women claimed, had told them to burn their clothes and drive to Wal-Mart to get some new clothes. “It’s always something,” the state trooper says. “No two days are the same in this job.”

PRUDE…
Police in Brazil arrested a minor league soccer player named William Pereira Farias after he stripped off his uniform and threw it into the crowd to celebrate the scoring of a goal. “He broke the laws of respectful behavior,” police officer Alfredo Faria told reporters. “He offended the townspeople and will likely be suspended from the team.”

NUDE…
Norway’s Radio Tango has become the first radio station to offer live nude weather reports. The reports, billed as “more weather, less clothes,” air on the station’s morning show; listeners can view the naked weather forecasters on the Internet. “This is a world exclusive,” says morning host Michael Reines Oredam. “It has never been done before. It brings a certain atmosphere to the studio which we hope our listeners are able to pick up on.”

PRUDE…
Police in Seremban, a town south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, have raided several cellular phone stores and seized “obscene” plastic cellular phone covers that feature naked images of well-known celebrities. “The phones are modified to light up the private parts of actors or actresses when a user receives or makes a call,” says police superintendent Abdul Razak Ghani.

NUDE…
Portland businessman Mark Dean hopes to expand his topless nightclub business by running it as a topless doughnut shop during breakfast hours, with his strippers doubling as waitresses. What are the odds that his new venture will succeed? Not as good as you might think—a topless doughnut shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, went under after less than a year; a topless car wash operated by the same businessman lasted only a few months.

Fathead: A newborn’s brain will triple in weight during the first year of life.

PRUDE…
The executor of the estate of the late basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain reports that he is having trouble selling the Big Dipper’s Bel Air estate, even after reducing the price from $10 million to $4.3 million and tearing out the “playroom,” which featured a waterbed floor covered with black rabbit fur and a wraparound pink velvet couch. (The retractable mirrored roof over the master bed has been preserved; so has the traffic light in the bedroom that signals either a green light to “Love,” or a red light for “Don’t Love.”) Executor Sy Goldberg admits that Chamberlain’s boasting that he slept with more than 20,000 women in his lifetime may be part of the problem, but he says that holding that against the house is “ridiculous.”

NUDE…
A Dutch telemarketing company has found a novel way around the tight labor market in the Netherlands: they’ve created a special division of the company that allows employees to work in the nude. “We had about 75 applicants in the first four hours,” a spokesman for the company—which did not release its name “for fear of offending existing clients”—told reporters. “With a normal call center, you’d be lucky to get one or two applicants an hour.”

PRUDE…
Officials at Los Angeles International Airport have covered images of “bounding nude men” with brown paper pending a decision on whether to remove them permanently. The naked men, who are supposed to represent the earliest human attempts at flight, are sandblasted into the granite floor of a newly renovated terminal at the airport. American Airlines paid Los Angeles artist Susan Narduli $850,000 to create the work, which was approved by both the airline and the city’s cultural affairs commission. Narduli says the figures’ private parts are “completely obscured.” No matter: “If the city decides it wants the artwork changed,” says an American Airline spokesperson, “we’ll change it.”