Monday, September 23, 2003

I AM THE PREACHER MAN

At times I preach. For me it is a big part of how I coach. I just need one tangent to go off on, and I can get bye-bye in a hurry. I’m big on philosophical metaphors, too. I think they (players) are right there with me most of the time, but I wonder at times how much of a lunatic they think I am, or worse, if they are listening at all. Either way, I am the Preacher Man.

These days I feel like I should do more preaching to the mirror while in a room by myself. I need to have a long talk with me.

FALL BALL BLUES

I am not happy with where we are team-wise. I am not exactly where I want to be as a coach at this point either. I think at times that I don’t listen to myself. As much as I "preach" on about the fact that we have to rebuild "it" every single year, I have been doing some bad things myself like mistakenly projecting how things would, should, or worse, could be in the year to come. My desire for us to improve over last year somehow led me to believe that we could just pick up where we left off last May. We never got as far as we wanted as a team last spring, so it somehow seemed logical to think like that. It was and is a big lie. To think that I don’t have to start completely from scratch every single year is stupid, because we do.

PHILOSOPHICAL INTERLUDE HAVING NOTHING TO DO WITH LAX
READ AT OWN RISK IF BORN AFTER 1960

MY LIFE AS A DISHead

I had a TV satellite dish back in the late ‘70’s when the actual dishes you could buy were about the size of a Volkswagen. Every time it snowed the piston arm that moved the dish would give way under the weight of the snow on the dish, and the dish would fall onto the ground so all I could get was snow on the TV, too. You had to have the dish move on an axis in order to get the different satellites, which carried different stations. I lived in the absolute boonies in the mountains of New Mexico at the time. It snowed plenty. So then I would be out there in a blizzard propping up this stupid monstrosity with 2x4’s. Then, I'm on a ladder sweeping snow off the massive surface area of the dish with a push broom and a handle "extension". Meanwhile someone was inside looking at the Sony TV (which I actually still have), talking to me on the walkie-talkie, telling me if we were lined up with Satcom 3 or whatever. What a crack it is to think of it now. It sure ticked me off then.

The early days of home satellite TV were a riot, literally. It was a total free-for-all, something not unlike a hundred different takes on the "Wayne's World" format.

Thinking about preaching, and how much I like to do it under the right circumstances reminded me of how fascinated I became with the power of the Reverend Jimmy Swggart and his "Worldwide Ministry" emanating from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and on dishes everywhere. This was before Jimmy’s hooker habit "de-winged" this self-proclaimed messenger of God.

I had the dish, and that’s how I got Jimmy, but compared to now there really wasn’t much "up" there. HBO was the only movie channel. Here was a movie channel with no commercials, and an occasional pay-per-view boxing match. What a novel idea. It wasn’t yet "scrambled", so it was free to those dish pirates like me, and that was cool.

Readily available things up there like stock car wrecks and the WWF didn’t do much for me, but I did like having the Braves and the Cubs beamed down to me on these so-called super-stations so I could occasionally catch a Phillies game. I think this whole cable TV thing started because Ted Turner wanted to watch his Braves while on vacation in Crested Butte, Colorado or whatever.

Not long thereafter along came this brand new thing called Music Television (MTV), with a library of like 2 music videos, and one of them I recall was Madonna’s "Like a Virgin". Yeah, she sure seemed virgin-like in that one. I enjoyed very much watching her be Madonna, though. ESPN came on air while I still had "the dish". I remember thinking the letters, which mean Entertainment and Sports Programming Network were way off base. The network included Sportscenter and tractor pulls and that was pretty much it. Who could have envisioned things like the ESPN produced movie "The Junction Boys" for example. Having seen it I also ask why they envisioned it at all, but that's another story. The Bobby Knight thing sucked, too.

CNN did already exist when I first "dished" myself up, but it was clearly the golden age of television ministries. For the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakers of the world it was heaven on earth, at least until that whole Jessica Hahn thing. The Baker's particular religious "Let’s Make a Deal" set up was somewhat interesting to me in a soap opera sort of way. I suppose Tammy’s "make-up choices" changed the "face" of some parts of America. Mascara tears were in.

There were tons of preachers and "world-wide Ministries" in those early dish days. Lots of free or cheap air time must have been there for the taking and the "non-profit" profiteers went nuts. I suppose to a degree they still do. For me, none of them had Swaggart’s charisma, though.

I also enjoyed watching other weird stuff that was beaming around, like pure station "feeds". These were images of things like Peter Jennings adjusting his tie and clearing his throat, and asking if he looked alright for a half-hour before the live nightly news program would begin.

EVERYTHING SEEMED PERFECTLY CLEAR TO HIM

Watching the Reverend Swaggart became a bit of a hobby for me in those younger days, and he was much more interesting than most things available on the dish.

The Reverend could sing and play the gospel on the piano, and he could get off on a scripture tangent and just RAVE ON as well as anyone I had ever seen or heard, with the possible exception of Martin Luther King. Jimmy carried that bible of his around like a football, and he strutted the stage, getting the huge congregation worked into an absolute frenzy. Unlike Dr. King, I didn’t believe one word of what he said, but still I wanted to jump up and shout "Hallelujah". His wife was cute and blond, and backed him the way that Ed Mcmahon championed Johnny Carson. Jimmy could cry crocodile tears and prophesize about the glory of it all at the same time. His peak to valley capabilities absolutely mesmerized me. He could make you believe that he was just an "every man", as he loosened the tie on his $2000 silk suit. I imagine that his phone lines, unlike other similar "shows", were always lit up.

Also, Jerry Lee Lewis, the 50's Rock and Roll star (Great Balls of Fire) was and is Swaggart's cousin. Jerry Lee was called, "Killer" back then because he liked to marry underage girls who might have possibly been his cousin and then apparently accidentally kill them off. By the way, there was nothing called "rock music" in Jerry Lee's early days, only "rock and roll music", otherwise known as the "Devil's Music". Even so, to me Jimmy seemed even more insane than Jerry Lee, and his following was huge, which was all the more intriguing. I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen with this guy. In the end he drifted away pretty quickly after he was caught in a seedy motel with a crack-head hooker or two. Jerry Lee Lewis is probably still playing small clubs and marrying teenagers as he approaches 70 years old.

Tomorrow I will write about this past Sunday's scrimmage, which is much more important, or at least relevant.

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