Friday, May 1, 2020

Tree(s) Today/#Stamps/The Freakin' Weekend (2020/1974)



First, it's almost Saturday in 2020, and you know what that means: It's about time to get our stamps on!™



Second, my YouTube Watch Later queue is working again, and that makes everything better. 



Third, I've got some 1974 media (pictured with Ella) backed up and ready for consumption, and so what I'm saying is this weekend is about to blow up!


42 comments:

  1. Here's the office in Evanston, Illinois, where Football Digest was published. I wonder if there are some old John Hadl photographs tucked away on a closet shelf.

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  2. It's a fun magazine, with short articles and lots of little notes tucked here and there. "Football Quick Quiz" and "Football Crossword Puzzle" are among the regular departments (I should really go back and add a couple of the crosswords and quizzes as pictures in the root post here to help you better enjoy your quarantines). There's a kind of letters-to-the-editor section, "The Fans Speak Out," that reads like Twitter comments. Here's an unabridged #hottake from Bill Hart of Falmouth, Kentucky, in the February issue: "The St. Louis Cardinals are the most under-rated team in the NFL."

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  3. Unlike Sports Illustrated, with its Jack Nicklaus golf shirts and cigarettes and liquors for aspiring young sophisticates, Football Digest seems to attract advertisers targeting 15-to-25-year-old sports geeks like me who weren't going on dates:

    -- Sports Action Watches for $14.95 ("Yogi Berra Says: 'I wear the Sportstime Baseball Watch and it's great Select your own favorite sport and watch the action!'")

    -- Fleetwood "Instant Replay" record albums ($3.98 each or three for $10) such as Holzman's Heroes about the 1971-72 New York Knicks, The New Red Machine about the 1972 Cincinnati Reds, and, of course, Hail to the Chiefs

    -- Lots of posters, pennants, magnetic standings boards, mugs, jewelry and Super-8 and Standard 8 film reels

    I want them all.

    The lone appeal to boys and young men who are hoping to cross over from the clammy Football Digest crowd to the go-go Sports Illustrated playboys is for a product called the "Powered isokinetic exerciser," which promises "a muscular body and dynamic power!"

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  4. The editor, John Kuenster, opens the February issue with a column on, "5 BIGGEST SURPRISES OF THE 1973 SEASON." Now, you have to understand that Football Digest's press schedule was such that Jan. 13 Super Bowl VIII did not make the cover until the April edition, but here are Kuenster's five eyebrow raisers from NFL73:

    -- Minnesota's return to power in the NFC Central

    -- Green Bay's regression

    -- Rams revival with Hadl and a rebuilt defense

    -- O.J. Simpson's rushing total (not quantified or even marked as an NFL record, which probably means the regular season wasn't yet over)

    -- "Gritty showing of the Denver Broncos in the AFC's Western Division"
    --

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  5. (Programming note: These comments come to you as I have the Jan. 26, 1974, made-for-ABC movie, Heatwave!, flickering on the living-room TV set. I love it when the ladies sleep in on Saturday mornings, and it is great to have YouTube Watch Later back.)

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  6. I was guessing the editor, John Kuenster, must've known as much about the NFL as anyone in 1974, given that his job was presumably to scour the daily newspapers from around the league's cities for interesting articles or items to reprint--and that still could be true. But it turns out he was known more as a baseball guy (and he edited Baseball Digest, too).

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  7. He lived in Evergreen Park, on Chicago's north side, and Century Publishing's Football Digest, Baseball Digest, Auto Racing Digest, etc. were put together in that office building in Evanston, way south of Chicago. That would've been a heck of a daily commute, so this might've been something he did mostly from home.

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  8. I could've gone on a lot longer about Mr. Kuenster. I certainly don't want to creep anyone out, but I'm pretty sure I found a picture of his old house. So nice. This isn't envy or anything--I have a nice house, too. I'm just so happy for him and his family. It looks like (and sounds like from the pretty stuff written about him) they had a lot of fun together. Thank God for that.

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  9. (And, by the way, when that Heatwave! movie turned more to about whether a baby was going to survive--the baby does survive--I gave up on it and moved to a sneak peek of a Lucille Ball/Art Carney/Arnold Schwarzenegger thing coming out this fall 1974. It looks truly fantastic.)

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  10. The May 6, 1974, Sports Illustrated for Dolphins fans is like January newspaper reports on COVID-19 for humans in the United States. After the fact, it all seems so clear, but, in the moment, we had no idea what was about to hit us.

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  11. There's that little World Football League item (with its glancing mention of Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield's pending departure from the Dolphins after the upcoming NFL74), and there's this giant thing from Tex Maule on "The Pro Football Revolution." I'm sure Ed Yong wrote this same basic piece for The Atlantic in January, but our dog was sick--I was focused on that.

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  12. Maule's article is about "nine new playing rules aimed at reanimating" the NFL, "the most sweeping series of changes since 1933." Don Shula, coach of the NFL72- and NFL73-champion Dolphins and only two years away from the first of the only two losing seasons of his head-coaching career, is quoted as saying, "I disapprove of the entire package."

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  13. I'm sure Nate Silver or Bill James or Bill Barnwell or somebody has done a great analysis of what this all ultimately meant to the game. I just want to make one point, and I don't want to hear any clever back talk or counter points or criticism of my shoddy logic on this because I'm edgy and in grief over the death of Don Shula this week, and humans in grief almost never let you know when they get mad about the inoccuous things that set them off unreasonably, but they almost never forget or let go of the grudge.

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  14. Nobody loves the Sabols more than I do, but the Sabols loved Al Davis because he was a reality-TV star before there was reality TV, and they loved the Raiders because those uniforms really popped in the northern California sunsets. NFL Films gave the Raiders a platform to put out this garbage notion that the reason the Raiders were the most-penalized team in the NFL and the Dolphins were the least- was because Don Shula wrote all the rules and owned the officials.

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  15. If the ladies weren't asleep when I was first reading that paragraph this morning, I might've exploded into the kind of profanity-laced rage that I usually reserve for driving by the headquarters of big insurance companies. But you better bet it would've been a doozy, invoking the names of Warfield, Otto Stowe, Cliff Branch, Bobby Moore/Ahmad Rashad, Isaac Curtis, Golden Richards and Nat Moore at least.

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  16. Freddie Solomon and Duriel Harris!

    Elmer Bailey. Sam Greene.

    Argh.

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  17. The Raiders--as well as the Bengals, Cowboys and Vikings--are going to do pretty OK for themselves here in the next few seasons of revolutionized pro football. Shula, though, is going to have to rethink and remake the Dolphins. It's going to take a while. 1974 me doesn't get it at all.

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  18. MLB74 is off and running, and Graig Nettles of the Yankees is rolling, writes Ron Reid: "Those who dote on projections pointed out that if Nettles continued at his current home-run pace he would surpass Babe Ruth's 60 for 1927 by exactly 31, which may be a trifle much to expect.

    Meanwhile, "Yankee players were stunned by a trade that sent almost half the pitching staff—Fred Beene, Fritz Peterson, Steve Kline and Tom Buskey—to the Indians for First Baseman Chris Chambliss and Pitchers Dick Tidrow and Cecil Upshaw."

    Real me started watching dialing in to the NFL games for real in 1974 and '75, the NBA games in '75 and '76 and then MLB in '76 and '77. I collected baseball cards starting in '75 and picked the A's as my team because I liked the colors and that they were World Series champs on those cards. But I didn't actually start watching games on Channel 3 and Channel 6 and looking at boxscores in The Sun-Democrat until 1976 and '77. And because of that timing, Graig Nettles and Chris Chambliss have always kind of been in my personal, felt-sense hall of fame.

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  19. But I'm burying the lede of the May 6, 1974, edition of SI.

    Dateline: Barlow!

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  20. My guess is that William Johnson got every word of that right, save for Maude's Nielsens in Ballard County.

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  21. William Johnson's delightful road-trip text is punctuated with several Neil Leifer photographs. My favorite is of the Red Heads' giant car. But there are also several action shots from inside a gym, and I would guess these are from the game at Ballard Memorial, where Johnson appears to have gotten most of his material. But they also might be from the next game, in Morristown, Tennessee. I wish I knew Ballard's gym well enough so that I could recognize it (or not) from the backgrounds. Didn't that school have its green plane logo painted on its center-court jump circle?

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