Man-Crush

From time to time, I have been known to develop some man-crushes, but there are 2 dudes that I am swooning over like a teenager right now. One of which has been an on-and-off 3 year relationship, and the other has just kind of snuck up on me recently. The man-crush that just recently surfaced is LaRon Landry, safety for the Washington Redskins. Landry had an up-and-down 1st couple of years in the league. He suffered through the typical period of adjustment that NFL rookies who crack the starting line-up go through, and for much of the last couple of years he played out of position a lot at free safety. That was mostly the cause of the tragic death of Sean Taylor, who was only already the best young safety in the whole league at the time. If Landry and Taylor had been able to play alongside each other for four, five, eight, or however many seasons, they might have been eventually regarded as one of the best safety tandems of all time. Lofty praise, but how many great safety combos can you think of in NFL history? Great cornerback duos maybe, but I don’t ever remember a team having two All-Pro caliber safeties. I’m too lazy to do any actual research, but somebody correct me if way off base here. Anyway, Landry’s 1st few years were memorable for some big plays and huge hits, but mostly for costly missed tackles and blown coverage assignments. This year, Landry has been moved back to his more natural position at strong safety, where he has more freedom to roam the field, blitz the quarterback, and play downhill around the line of scrimmage, and it has really paid dividends up to this point. Through 5 weeks of the NFL season, the Skins defense is ranked last in the league in yards given up per game, but that’s through no fault of Landry, who seems like he is all over the field knocking down quarterbacks, blowing up runners and receivers, and causing turnovers. Tackles are not an official statistic in the NFL, but Landry is the unofficial league leader in that category at this point in the year, and he also has a sack, a forced fumble, and a pick. He looks like a supersized Troy Polamalu…which brings me to the other reason for my man-crush. The dude is friggin’ ripped. Everyone has their own personal workout goals. Mine are not to get so huge that I look like a beached whale. I have said before that I would like to look something like an NFL safety…but trying for Landry’s physique might be asking for too much. The guy is listed as my height (6-0), but he weighs 220 pounds, and he looks like he could be 240, easy.

I mean, come on, man…that is ridiculous. Nevermind that poor excuse for a dishcloth that Landry is using as a shirt here. Show me the workout plan to get guns like that. He’s one of those guys (like Julius Peppers and Andre Johnson) that are so jacked that you can practically see their pecs and delts through their freaking shoulder pads.

And as big as he is, he seems like he’s usually the fastest guy on the field. I’m sure even at whatever weight he’s at that he runs like a 4.4 forty yard dash, and if you got him on a basketball court he can probably throw down pretty easily as well. Landry is apparently a workout legend, as he has gained notoriety for his obsessive weight lifting routines as of late. Landry has confessed that he even sneaks training sessions in on the nights before and after gamedays, when even the most dedicated gym rats are trying to catch some extra shut-eye and nurse injuries…hard not to like a guy like that. If I wasn’t in my anti-jersey phase, Landry would be the one current Redskin whose jersey I would wear.

Speaking of jerseys, a couple of months ago my one brother-in-law, Franky, got someone to hook him up with authentic jerseys for like 20% of what their retail value is. Franky copped himself and everyone else whatever they wanted…some wanted Yankees jerseys. Others wanted a Wade or LeBron jersey (from the Heat of course). What did I want? A Los Angelos Clippers Blake Griffin jersey (hence, my other man-crush). I’ve wrote about Griffin before, but he was one of my favorite players coming out of college ever. In fact, he is probably my favorite college player who isn’t a local kid of all time. For example, I root for all the former Terps – Dixon, Blake, Wilcox, etc. – to have successful NBA careers, but I usually don’t care much about anyone else. Every once in a blue moon somebody from a team that I have no rooting interest in catches my attention, but after watching Griffin play a couple of times at Oklahoma I was immediately hooked. Yea, he has great ball-handling skills and great touch on his shot for a guy his size, but Griffin is no Euro-style big guy or AAU big guy, who really just want to shoot jumpers and play like a guard…no, no, no, Blake Griffin is a true power forward, a rare bread in modern basketball. He’s a solid 6-10 and 260 pounds. He looks as if he could break your fingers if you shook hands with him. He runs the court like a deer, and he explodes off the floor like a young Shawn Kemp. And with all that athletic ability he still has great touch and footwork around the basket. He also possesses other intangibles that make it hard not to like him. He seems like he is 1st class work ethic, has a good head on his shoulders, and doesn’t seem like he has much of an ego. In college, he was obviously the centerpiece of those Oklahoma teams, but he looks like the type of guy who can average 20+ points per game without having a single play called for him just by running the floor and crashing the boards…hard not to like that in a world full of “me 1st” guys.

When he had to miss all of last year with a knee injury, I was legitimately bummed-out. I will always be a college hoops fan 1st anyway, but I don’t remember ever being depressed over anything NBA-related quite like that. I was actually looking forward to seeing this guy play in “The League.” When he was drafted, my thoughts were that even the Clippers couldn’t screw this one up…Griffin was a lock to be a multi-time All-Star…after he got hurt I thought we were going to be robbed of watching Griffin’s career progress the way it should, and instead he was going to be just another entry on the list of many careers gone South because of the most cursed franchise in sports. This year, he looks like he’s back to 100%. I know that no predictions should be based on summer league and preseason games, but by all accounts Griffin is on a mission. In games that don’t even matter, he’s playing like a man possessed. Check out his box score from the other night in a preseason game against Denver: 36 minutes, 7 for 13 from the field, 10 for 12 from the free throw line, 24 points, 14 boards, and 4 blocks. The one question mark on Griffin as he was coming out of college was his defense, but he appears to be a stud on the defensive end as well. My explanation is this: if you look at Griffin’s college teams, he was not only the most important player on those teams by far, but he was also one of their lone big guys. Griffin couldn’t afford to get himself into foul trouble stupidly trying to block shots and jump over people’s backs for rebounds. Without Griffin on the floor, those were some very average Oklahoma teams. People mistakenly wondered about his defensive intensity when really he was just smartly doing what he had to do to make sure he was able to stay on the floor.

Anyway, this year everyone’s eyes will be on the “super friends” in Miami or on the Lakers or the Celtics…but I’m going to keep an eye on Griffin and the Clips. If he stays healthy, he at worst puts up an 18 point per game, 8 rebound per game kind of season…but I could also see him putting up some monster numbers in the neighborhood of 22 and 12. John Wall has superstar written all over him, but I think Griffin (while flying somewhat under the radar because of missing all of last year) has to be the odds-on favorite for rookie of the year. I’m also wondering if Griffin is one of those players that comes along once every 5 years that is just so good that he alone is worth 15 or 20 wins for a team. The Clippers only won 29 games a year ago, but with Griffin and an improved Eric Gordon could they bump that number up close to 50? That might be tough to do in the ultra-deep Western Conference, but take Duncan or Durant or Kobe out of the their respective lineups for an entire season…how many games do those teams win without them? I think (and hope) Griffin is that kind of player.

Ladies and Gentlemen...I'm Baaaccckkk

It’s time…time for a couple things. 1st, it’s time to start doing this whole blog thing again. As corny as it is, I have to say that I’ve missed it a little bit. It’s been a couple months since I have posted a blog on MySpace, when that one fateful day after hitting “submit” a notification appeared saying that my work had blocked people from making MySpace posts of any kind. I never bothered to logon at home because…well, just because. When I did post things, it was almost always around lunchtime at work, around a time when I needed a break and a distraction from what I was doing. Doing it at home just seemed like a waste of time…but I liked having a forum to jot down my random thoughts every once in awhile. I can still email. I will still email. But I always felt bad for some of my boys (Pat, Mac, Allen, etc.) when they would email me trying to stir up a short-and-sweet conversation, and I would reply back with what looked like a 5,000 word essay. They probably thought I was a little off my rocker, not to mention long-winded. If I have some other outlet to write every now and again, maybe that will curb my need to expound on various subjects for hours on end in other places…like a Bill Simmons wannabe or something.

Why am I switching websites altogether? Why not just stick with MySpace? I mean, I have some history with that site (I think I 1st created my account in 2005), and I probably have 3 or 4 years of blogs in there as well. But it’s MySpace for Pete’s sake. Almost no one still has their MySpace. Everyone has switched over to Facebook or Twitter or something else entirely. I mean, Krissy and I are 2 of the only people I know who deleted their Facebook accounts, but we kept MySpace? How does that make any sense? MySpace is a virtual wasteland. At this point, it is almost entirely made up of musical acts, spam-bots, and people who just forgot their account existed. One time a few months ago I got bored, and I actually logged on to just **gasp** look at my friends’ pages. It was a pretty sad and pathetic experience…like if you went back to visit a house you used to live in, and when you got there the place was abandoned and falling apart…and there were hookers living in it…and dealing crack. The page layouts were dated, everyone’s info wasn’t current, no one’s pictures had changed in years, and most people hadn’t even logged in for over 2 or 3 months. To be honest, I couldn’t even remember what my page looked like, and when I saw it I asked myself, “What were you thinking?!?” For the last three years, I only logged on for 2 purposes: to check it in the rare once-every-6-months occurrence of someone actually leaving me a comment and to blog. Honestly, the only reasons I kept it at all were for nastolgia’s sake (same reason Krissy was keeping hers) and to write. Once I couldn’t get on it to post a blog every now and again, what was the point? I copy and pasted all of Krissy and my old messages back-and-forth to each from when we were still just dating (basically 21st century love letters), saved the pictures that I wanted that I knew I didn’t have already saved somewhere at home, and deleted my account. It’s time to start fresh. I give it like a few months before anyone even notices my page no longer exists.

How I wound up picking BlogSpot (or “Blogger” or “Google Blog”) for my new page is kind of funny actually. I was looking at Mark Titus’ “Club Trillion” blog, and I noticed that was what he was using. I already like a lot of Google’s stuff, I use Gmail as my main email account, and the way his page was set up was simple and effective…so I go to create an account, and apparently I already had one!! Whhhaaaa…??? Turns out back in May of 2008 I had created a Blogger account. I wrote 1, count ‘em, 1 post. I had titled the blog “Post-It Notes,” and my URL was http://kristinasboy4ever.blogspot.com. Wow…not only is “Post-It Notes” incredibly cheesy and not all that clever, but “kristinasboy4ever?” I mean, I’m all for giving shoutouts to my wifey, but that was pretty weak. And writing “forever” as “4ever”…my gosh, what was I thinking? Curiously, I glanced at how many times my page had been viewed in the 2+ years of its existence, and mercifully that number was “0.” So, I thought of maybe editing that existing blog, but seeing as how I had 1 post from May of 2008, I figured why not just start over. (Also, I now vaguely remember being blocked from MySpace at work before, only to have it get unblocked soon after…that must have been the reason for me creating that account.)

Anyway, I chose the name “B-Court All Star” as a kind of homage back to my college pickup basketball days. Back at the RAC at UMBC, there were (and still are) 3 courts on the recreational side of the building. They are all-purpose courts, but you can play full-length hoops games on all 3. We (as in the RAC regulars) nicknamed the 1st court the “A-Court” because that’s usually where the higher skill level, more competitive pickup games took place. The “B-Court,” which was the middle court, was a step down from there. The skill level and competition was still decent, and if the A-Court was too crowded you could probably still get a decent run on the B-Court, but if you were an A-Court player playing on the B-Court you were usually the best player there by far…hence the name “B-Court All Star.” (I know that if you have to explain a joke that probably means it’s not funny to begin with, but oh well…) Today, I still consider myself a B-Court All Star in a way…do with that what you will. The C-Court was a place that a good basketball player would never want to find themselves. Located at the far end of the building, it was usually filled with random people, like stray cats that had just wondered into a dark alley. Professors, kids wearing jeans and skater shoes, hipsters with their weird hipster girlfriends…it was a scary place. Sometimes, we would call the C-Court the “Asian Court” or the “Middle Eastern Court.” That probably sounds incredibly racist, but hear me out…sometimes, usually on a slow Friday night, a group of 10 to 15 Asian or Middle Eastern dudes would stroll into the RAC all at once and get a game going. These games were filled with tons of unintentional comedy, ranging from the incredibly bad level of play to the same guy wearing the same full-on Tracy McGrady outfit every week (the matching Houston Rockets jersey, shorts, T-Mac headband, socks, wristbands, and shoes). This isn’t to say that there aren’t any good basketball players who are Asian or Middle Eastern (or professors for that matter) because I knew plenty of really good players from all different backgrounds, but it was hard to miss these congregations of really bad basketball players.

There was always an interesting hierarchy to the RAC courts as well. My friends and I talked about the court dynamics because we were there all the time, and it was like observing animals in a zoo, but I think to everyone else the hierarchy was more of an unspoken code of the court. Generally, most players naturally gravitated to the courts of their appropriate skill level. Every once in awhile you would get an “outlier,” but for the most part people knew the natural order of things. Depending on how crowded it would get, sometimes a trickle-down effect would occur where the A-Court players would spill onto the B-Court, causing the true B-Court to be the C-Court, and then maybe the Asian Court would get bounced to the main gym…or if it wasn’t crowded the opposite would happen, and the Asian Court would become the B-Court, for example. This “phenomenon” is probably only remotely interesting to me and a small handful of people, but to us it was like sociology class in real life…and it also explains the story behind “B-Court All Star,” so there you go…

I’m dragging on, so I will end on what I think is an appropriate B-Court All Star topic. In the coed touch football league Krissy and I play in, the website for the league creates like this mock magazine cover with an action shot from the previous week’s games. We have been playing in this league for like 2 years, and no one from our team ever even being snapped in a picture before, but Krissy actually made the cover on the homepage. If that’s not B-Court All Star, then I’m not sure what is.


My baby’s going out for a pass there, but she looks like a safety breaking on a receiver as she’s about to take their head off! Talk about “utilizing strength!” And I love the fake bar code at the bottom…classic. Almost as good, but not quite, I had a picture in like the 20-pic slideshow they made for the week. Welcome to the gun show, everybody.

I would love to say that I sped around that dude and raced off to the end zone like Chris Johnson…but that would be a lie.