Friday, December 07, 2007

25 Years of Philly Sports Hell: The Worst Moments, Part I

The latest in a series of of soul-cleansing moments for Philadelphia sports fans as we complete a 25 year cycle of unmatched sports futility. For a full explanation of this series, look here.

Bryce-friggin-Paup.

A lot of moments on this list can be summed up with short phrases, so it's appropriate to open with one. Who is Bryce Paup, you might ask? If you're asking, then you're either not an Eagles fan, or you've opted to bury this moment and block it from your memory.

Bryce Paup is currently the head football coach at Green Bay Southwest High School. He is also on the Board of Directors for the Green Bay Packers. But it's what he did in his earlier career that earned him the lasting enmity of Eagles fans.

Put it this way - I mentioned Paup's name to two Philly sports fans this week. Both responded with obscenities, with one using language that I would normally reserve for describing somebody like Hugo Chavez. Heck, in a bar fight between Hugo Chavez and Bryce Paup, I would probably root for Hugo Chavez (although I wouldn't object if both of them somehow lost).

Why the hatred? September 1, 1991. Eagles v. Packers on the not-yet-frozen tundra of Lambaeu Field in the season opener. Late first quarter. Eagles QB Randall Cunningham, one of the best players in the game, drops back to pass. Bryce Paup, a second-year linebacker for the Packers, comes in and hits Randall on the knee as he releases a pass.

Diagnosis: Torn ACL. Cunningham is out for the season.

With time, I've come to realize that this Eagles team may not have won the Super Bowl. Granted, the defense was historically great, finishing first against the rush, first against the pass and first overall. Granted, the team somehow overcame a four game mid-season losing streak where snaps at quarterback would be taken by Pat Ryan, who began the season as a construction worker, and Brad Goebel, an undrafted rookie from Baylor, to finish 10-6. Granted, the team's defense brutalized Troy Aikman for 11 sacks in one game, gave up 300 yards just once all season, and only lost 6 games because the offense turned the ball over 26 times in those games. Granted, that offense would have been much better with Randall at the helm -- potentially even great.

But the Redskins were a great team that year. And we were coached by a complete idiot in Rich Kotite (and I'm being kind with that description), while the Skins were coached by Joe Gibbs, in his first iteration, when he was a Hall of Famer. And as good as the Eagles might have been with Randall, the NFC was murderously tough that year. Eight teams finished with records of 10-6 or better. Randall's playoff struggles were legendary. There's no guarantee the Birds run the table and make it to Super Bowl XXVI against Buffalo.

But Bryce Paup didn't even let us find out if it could have happened. The 1995 Cowboys were coached by a moron (Barry Switzer) and won a Super Bowl; there's a chance we could have overcome Kotite's idiocy and done the same. We would have played the Redskins well, even though Randall had struggled against them; we friggin owned Dallas until we had to play them without Randall at home. We damn sure were better than the rest of the NFC playoff field -- the Lions(!), Bears(?), Saints(!) and Falcons(!!). Hell, the Lions and Falcons were coached by bigger morons (Fontes and Glanville) than Kotite. When Randall made the playoffs in 1992, he put up a brilliant performance against the Saints (right before nose-diving against a superior Dallas team, but that's another tale). If that same QB is there a year earlier, that could have been our title.

But all of that went to hell when Paup popped Randall.

The 1988-1992 Eagles were one of the most popular collections of athletes in any town ever. For some reason, many of us had hoped that the firing of Buddy Ryan meant the Eagles, who had lost multiple playoff games in crazy ways, could get over the hump with the goofy Kotite leading the way. Hey, call it the triumph of hope over logic (it was the only triumph we ever really got from Kotite). Paup ended that chance, and the Eagles' window closed the following year when Dallas got really good, Jerome Brown died, and the Eagles defense started to get old and/or departed en masse with the onset of free agency (because Norman Braman was a cheap SOB).

By the way, I found this loss particularly galling. I was a high school kid who lived and died with that team (yes, I was a loser... maybe "am" might be a better verb there). Three years later, when Nancy Kerrigan got knee-capped by goons, I remember somebody in Philly wondering whether those guys might stop by Wisconsin and take a pipe to Paup's knee. I'm still not sure they were joking.

The great irony in all of this is that Green Bay, about a year later, would find a QB who would start over 200 games in a row without getting hurt. Yes, I'm pretty sure this means God hates us.

Bryce-friggin-Paup. Maybe we can all let it go. Or at least just hope his high school team loses 50 straight games.

Take a deep breath, fellow Philly fans. Let this one go, and let's move on to the next. Only 24 more to go.

Labels:

Philly's Horrible 25th Anniversary

25 years. That's a long time.

And yet, it's seemed even longer.

No, I'm not talking about the last time I blogged regularly. What I'm referring to is a soon to be infamous historic sports anniversary.

Come May 31, 2008, the city of Philadelphia will have gone 25 years without a major professional sports team winning a title (sorry, Phantoms and Wings and Stars and Kixx and Barrage fans). And barring some sort of miracle from the professional football franchise, there's no stopping the event, since the Sixers ain't winning anything, the Flyers can't complete a Cup run before that, and the current best team in Philly, the Phillies (words I never thought I'd type), will be about a third of the way through their season at that point.

If you're not familiar with the Curse of Billy Penn, you may consider this to be a minor event. Serious sports fans know better. Philly is the only city that has a professional team in each of the four major team sports to have gone this long without a title. By May, they will have 100 sports seasons without a championship. There's plenty of heartbreak in other towns, like Cleveland and Buffalo, but no one gets it four different times a year.

There are also sorts of explanations. Among them: the aforementioned curse of Billy Penn, the fact that nobody's won a title since WIP became the town's first sports radio station in 1987, Wilson Goode fire-bombing MOVE, Pennsylvania's failure to execute Mumia abu-Jamal (okay, I'm making the last one up... I think).

In the end, the explanations don't help. One thing would -- a title. The town went ape for Smarty Jones a few years back, just because he was from Bensalem. Hell, we're so desperate I think we'd adopt a NASCAR driver if we could.

But we're not getting one of those before the 25th anniversary passes. And it hit me today while discussing our sports futility -- we're 25 weeks from the 25th anniversary of the Sixers' title, of "fo, fo, fo" and Doc and Moses and Mo and Andrew and Billy and all the rest.

So what to do? Well, it's time to run down the 25 worst Philly sports moments of the past 25 years. One per week, for 25 weeks, until it's all over. These will be in no particular order, because I have no way of ordering these. For the record, these are moments we in the Philly Sports Legion recall with deep pain, not merely moments of regret (for example, the list won't include people cheering Michael Irvin's injury -- we may decry it, but it ain't causing me any pain today). I will miss a few moments that others will recall, I am sure. But I'm sure most Philly fans will find the items on this list to be the heartbreaking crap we all recall.

What's my aim here? Maybe part of it's a desire to wallow in the pain. But to tell the truth, I need to cleanse my soul of this stuff. It's all back there, surging back into my consciousness every time something bad happens to one of my teams. I've mentioned much of it before, but now I need to make a clean break from it. What I said before about being an Eagles fan applies on the whole to being a Philly sports fan:

We die a little death every year, but next year, we come back looking for more. We don't know any better, and frankly what we would do otherwise? I mean, what else can you do on a Sunday in the fall? And so we march forward once again, blindly following our team, waiting for that crucial moment when someone or some team rips our heart away, spits on it, stomps on it, sets fire to it and urinates on it before running it over with a steamroller. And what's truly frightening?

We still believe.

We may believe, but we carry the accumulated pain around with us. We need to get away from it, and the therapy is discussing it and getting past it. The Phillies suffered their 10,000th loss during the 2007 season... but capped the season with the greatest stretch drive in team history, allowing them to sprint past the Mets to a division title. Maybe cleansing ourselves of this crap means Marty Biron drinks from Lord Stanley's Cup next summer, or Jimmy Rollins dances with the World Series trophy next fall, or Kevin Kolb holds up the Lombardi Trophy next year.

Or maybe not. But we're used to it. The first one goes up later today.

Labels: