TICK-TOCK

by James Lincoln Warren

All things being equal, baseball is my favorite sport, so naturally this column hinges on … football.1

Having grown up in Texas, I have an abiding love for football. In the Lone Star State, the most important venue for gridiron heroics is the Friday night high school game. When I was in high school, everybody attended the Friday night football game, even the stoners. Of course, they were blowing joints under the bleachers, but what the hell.

Saturdays are for college ball, of great moment for us college boys, there being considerable pride invested in the performance of one’s university’s team. I especially admire Tom Lehrer’s famous fight song for his storied alma mater:

Fight fiercely, Harvard,
Fight, fight, fight!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
Oh, fellows, do not let the crimson down,
Be of stout heart and true.
Come on, chaps, fight for Harvard’s glorious name,
Won’t it be peachy if we win the game?
(Oh, goody!)
Let’s try not to injure them, but
Fight, fight, fight!
And do fight fiercely!
Fight, fight, fight!

Beats the pants off of UT’s “Texas Fight”, I must say:

Yea Orange! Yea White!
Yea Longhorns! Fight! Fight! Fight!
Texas Fight! Texas Fight,
Yea Texas Fight!
Texas Fight! Texas Fight,
Yea Texas Fight!

Reminds me a little of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” for sheer boring redundant stupidity. I’ve only reproduced the fanfare bridge, though—the first verse takes a swipe at Texas A&M and includes a few bars of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here”, while the second incorporates “The Eyes of Texas”, which I first learned as “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” when I was barely three years old, just before the Air Force sent Dad to San Antonio.

“The Sons of Westwood” is slightly more along Lehrer’s lines:

We are Sons of Westwood,
And we hail the Blue and Gold;
True to thee our hearts will be,
Our love will not grow old.

Bruins roam the hills of Westwood,
By the blue Pacific shore;
And when they chance to see
A man from USC,
Ev’ry Bruin starts to roar.

U! (3 claps)
C! (3 claps)
L! (3 claps)
A! (3 claps)

U-C-L-A! Fight! Fight! Fight!

Not to be outdone by Texas in ripping off other songs, though, UCLA swiped the tune from Cal Berkeley.

But Sundays, now.

Sundays, Gentle Reader, are the sole property of the National Football League.2

I’ve always considered pro football, like baseball, to be essentially a working class sport, by which I mean a sport meant to appeal to the working man. Yes, the players are all college-graduate millionaires, but that’s not the point. We college boys have the NCAA—I live in Los Angeles, and believe me, USC alumni care much more about the Trojans than any stinkin’ pro team.3 Face it: you can’t imagine anything like a college fight song applying to, say, the Green Bay Packers (who after all got their name from the meat packing company that first sponsored them in 1919, and you can’t get much more working class than that), even in jest.

So although I am true to my Texican childhood in being a die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan, my favorite teams in the NFL are the most blue-collar ones—the Packers, the Steelers, the Bears, etc. (But in spite of my huge respect for John Madden, not the Oakland Raiders, who aren’t so much working class as they are chronically-unemployed class, and have the weirdest fans in America—not the worst, though: I reserve that distinction for Philadelphia.)

This Sunday I watched one of the best games of the season between the Minnesota Vikings, for whom I have an affection because I was born in Minneapolis and also because of Brett Favre, and the Pittsburgh Steelers, who have commanded my loyalty ever since the Houston Oilers, the team of Gulf roughnecks, pulled chocks and moved to Nashville to become the team of filthy rich country singers.4 (For the benefit of the uninformed, the Steelers won, 27-17, giving the Vikings their first loss of the season.)

And now I see that I’ve written an entire column without coming to the point. I guess I’d better do so without further ado. The Minnesota/ Pittsburgh game, in common with all really exciting games, went down to the wire. Most team sports have timed periods, and the distance to the wire is counted down on a clock. Your team isn’t only battling their putative adversaries, they are also battling against time itself.

And this, Gentle Reader, is one of the primary ingredients of suspense. My friend Gregg Hurwitz once went so far as to say that the clock ticking down is one of the indispensable traits of the thriller. I think he’s right—and particularly in the noir thriller, as in “The Big Clock” (1948) and “D.O.A.” (1950).

But now I’ve run out of space. So I’ll just wrap things up by saying, “Fight, O Criminal Brief! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

1. Especially since the Angels followed the Dodgers’ lead in imploding in their League Championship, leaving the World Series to be decided between the World’s Most Evil Team and the Team With The World’s Most Evil Fans. Nope. Not even gonna watch the Fall Classic this year. [↩]
2. This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL for the private use of our audience. Any other use of this telecast or any pictures, descriptions, or accounts of the game without the NFL’s consent is prohibited. [↩]
3. I, of course, as a UCLA Extension Division alumnus married to a woman with two degrees from UCLA, regard the USC Trojans as the moral equivalent of the New York Yankees, i.e., the Spawn of Satan. But that’s beside the point. [↩]
4. I don’t despise country music at all, mind, but it hasn’t been truly working class in decades, having become as slick and over-produced as, say, Abba. I like Abba, too, but not for the same reasons I like Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bob Wills, or Hank, Senior. [↩]