Tuesday, September 28, 2004 :::
 
Bootless.

That is the word to describe the efforts of a harried news reporter who had parked himself in the 1000 block of Connecticut Avenue in NorthWest Washington. He was seeking comment on the chances of the Washington Redskins to have a winning season under returned UberCoach Joe Gibbs. Now, as it happens, a certain pudgy, balding English teacher is perfectly happy to have Mr. Gibbs back in the saddle, as he is an admirable man and has provided the world with many superlative hours of football, one of three sports which said English teacher cannot live without. (The other two being soccer and water polo, the latter being a whole other story to itself.) However, he cannot say that he really cares one way or another how Mr. Gibbs does, as the Redskins are not his team. His team plays--these days, not so well--in the City by the Bay.

And this was exactly this reporter's problem. He shouted "Redskin fan?" at A Mind That Suits, who mumbled "not really," glad that he could so easily say "no" to appearing on TV. "Oh, man," cursed the reporter, but it was his own fault. The 1000 block of Connecticut Ave NW is more commonly called "Connecticut and K," and is the very heart of "Gucci Gulch," where all the lobbyists hang out. Well, most of them. Recent development has taken some of them further down Pennsylvannia Ave toward the Capitol Building, but you can still find the well-heeled sort in a abundance trapsing around Ye Olde CN and K.

And Washington Operatives are simply not from Washington. The reporter would have been better off at a mall, cornering people who actually live here. "No one," Allen Drury wrote in a famous passage in Advise and Consent, really lives in Washington. They may work there, he observed, marry there, raise children there, and die there, but they are always passing through. Anyone can observe how dead downtown DC is when a major holiday approaches, as the powerful head back to the place where, in the back of their minds, they all "really" live. That much has not changed about DC. A Mind That Suits, of course, is right at the heart of all that, a real power broker. "No one" in the Nation's Capital makes a move without him, and where he comes from, no one really cares about the Red Skins. The Niners, of course, and The Rams, in a negative way, but the reporter was not asking about the Niners or the Rams. And there were similar thoughts in the mind of everyone who refused to answer.

The guy should have gone to a mall.

And speaking of sports, did anyone out there know that the NHL was in the midst of a lock-out? Neither did a certain pudgy, balding, football-soccer-water-polo-loving English teacher. It was a major hockey fan at Ye Olde Neighborhood Pool Club who pointed out last year or the year before that the final game of the Stanley Cup got lower ratings than the lowest rated football game, but this is not America's fault. The good ol' US of A is unique in having so many major sports, or as a young friend, a professional water polo player in Italy, commented in some frustration, "You have three television sports. We have only soccer." There isn't room for much concern over hockey, nor, one suspects, water polo, though you all do not know what you are missing. Still, there is a lock-out, and the indispensible Wall Street Journal reports that this is hitting sportswear manufacturers where it hurts. They would be hurting a lot more if Stanford padlocked the gates at the Avery Aquatic Center, make no mistake. Their business would really be going south then.

Okay, hockey is not boring. It's just not water polo. One day, A Mind That Suits wandered over to the hockey rink at the Naval Academy after a water polo tournament, and he will say that it was a lot of fun. You stand on a level with the players, protected only by some very strong plexiglass, and pucks sail over your head with considerable frequency. If the play comes your way, you get a very clear shot of some Really Big Kid's face being smashed into the wall by some other Really Big Kid. You can even count their crowns if you're fast.

You know, those boys just do not play nice.

A certain pudgy, balding English teacher told his good friend, Navy's legendary water polo coach, Mike Schofield, that they should rename the hockey rink the "Testasterone Dome."


::: posted by A Mind That Suits at 1:37 PM


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What doesn't kill me, makes me laugh... usually.