50-48 #39: BEIJING HUSTLE

50-48 #39: BEIJING HUSTLE

Here’s one of the great big pieces of proof that Jesse Owens was better than all of us: “I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.”

We Razorbacks would do well to listen to Jesse’s dulcet tones. Because we have some competing against ourselves to do. First, we’re going to have to play basketball this season without Patrick Beverly, who (probably) got busted for drugs and is off the team. He’ll go try his hand in Europe, before fading swiftly into oblivion, where he will remain obscure to all but the mothers of his illegitimate children. God speed, Patty. We hardly knew ye.

But this is yet another installment in 50-48’s season preview. We’re here for football talk. The Hogs next two games after their mesmerizing defeat of Gus Malzhan’s Tulsa Golden Hurricane (singular, for some idiotic reason) are against Cackilack and State. Two inevitable victories in pressure-packed road games. But how, you might be asking, can 50-48 possibly preview these games in interesting ways? How can it draw in its readers and keep their attention? What sort of hook, narrative arc, dogmatic jive or hustle might it employ to trick me into thinking that the words—inevitably destined to include, “Steve Spurrier can eat a box of baby goats, and those sweet little baby goats will all have special goat herpes, and so then Spurrier will walk around his remaining days through Columbia sporting massive little hairy tin-eating sores all over his mouth and pubic region,” or something to that effect—“matter,” if in fact I can ever really get a solid grasp on the word “matter” in all of its existential (to say nothing of physical) splendor (which of course I can’t)? 50-48’s answer: OLYMPICS!

That’s right, everyone: 50-48 has Olympic fever. It has been following the Hogs’ 10 track athletes with great interest. But even more than that, it recognizes in the spectacle a healthy relation to its college football preview. Originally, 50-48 decided to take little Nastia Liukin and big Michael Phelps, mash them together, then pull them apart to make an Olympic Oulipian formula, with every sentence of the Cackilack and State previews having an Olympic word somewhere embedded within. It was going to taunt Beijing with its austerity and dexterous grammatical fleet feet.

But then it changed its mind, realizing after painful reflection that such an exercise really wasn’t all that interesting at all. So instead, it will just keep the Olympics in the back of its mind as it bangs out the following paragraphs. It realizes, even as it types, that this is a sort of hustle on top of the original hustle, a preternaturally Faustian squaring that only serves to mitigate the trust that it has developed with its dear readers over the past months. But 50-48 would respond that whims are the stuff of whimsy, both grammatically and spiritually, and so anyone seeking the latter would do best to stomach the former with the good grace of a Nervous Nellie at a solemn dinner with the in-laws.

If it makes you feel any better, the Chinese Olympic hosts have plenty of moral faults that these sacred contests are obscuring at every turn. I’m not talking about Tibet or Darfur. I’m talking about pedestrian safety. 50-48 refuses to validate such behavior with Olympic themes.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: The Chinese are also the traditional hated rivals of the Japanese. But, that said, there shall still be no more bizarre Japanese giantess fetish video hyperlinks in this week’s installment. We’re calling a moratorium and keeping them in our private perversion vault. Them’s the breaks.)

(EDITOR’S NOTE AGAIN: You know what? It’s been a long, horrible, lonely day. Fuck it. One more crazy giantess video.)

(EDITOR’S NOTE ONE MORE TIME: I don’t get it either. Weird, huh?)

Anyway: Steve Spurrier can eat a box of baby goats, and those sweet little baby goats will all have special goat herpes, and so then Spurrier will walk around his remaining days through Columbia sporting massive little hairy tin-eating sores all over his mouth and pubic region. Wouldn’t that be great? Well, regardless, when we head to Columbia this season, Ball Coach will be hoping desperately for a win, as his chronically overrated team will again underachieve and be knee-deep in trying to salvage its coach’s reputation. Cackilack is our perpetual SEC East opponent, coming into the league as they did in 1992, with us, the Maine to our Missouri, so to speak (if I might be so free as to drop a Jacksonian-era slave compromise reference on you). We see them every year. We usually beat them, and we’ll do it again. Riding high the wave of our gloriously unexpected undefeated season, in which we’ve scored triple digits in every game, had a naked space alien dance party, and managed to win five games in hundred-point reduction declensions, Cackilack and their ardent yet patient supporters will be no match for the new Petrino juggernaut. Besides: you know Cackilack: PRETTY BUT DUMB. Their uniforms (and cheerleaders) are spectacular, but they couldn’t find our offense with a map (so to speak). Arkansas wins, 750,000 to 0.

Then it’s off to Starkville, where it’s all about MAROON. State is getting some national attention because they reached and won a bowl game last season, but those down south realize that they are probably overrated and should retain their general station at or near the back of the pack. But remember, though Starkville might be the most desolate place on earth, and their head coach can sometimes be a cartoon of a real human being, this is the same school that castrated a fucking longhorn before going out and whipping Texas back in 1992. For that, they will have 50-48’s undying eternal devotion. (For an in depth discussion of Mississippi State bull castration, including its various forms and outcomes, CLICK HERE.) Still, there can’t be any mercy when you’re working on an undefeated season. The Hogs will use the banding method in place of the traditional knife to castrate the Dogs in fantastical style. Final score, Hogs 1,000,000, newly-deballed Dogs 0.

Here’s one of the great big pieces of proof that Pierre de Coubertin---creator of the modern Olympics—was smarter than all of us: “Olympism is not a system - it is a state of mind. This state of mind has emerged from a double cult: that of effort and that of Eurythmy - a taste of excess and a taste of measure combined.” Excess and measure, indeed. We will need talent in excess and confidence in measure if we are to bring about the football results we all hope for this year. We want more than anything else to WIN. But Coubertin has a message for that, as well: “The important thing in life is not victory but combat; it is not to have vanquished but to have fought well.”

True enough, Pierre, and we’d all do well to remember it. But 50-48 would like to briefly defend its veritable blood-lust for victory by reminding everyone that Pierre de Coubertin died in 1937, before the Nazis marched in and set up shop in Vichy, the Hot Springs of southern France. Would he have been so cavalier with the victory/combat metaphor after watching his countrymen fold like so many metaphorical houses of cards? Texas is RIGHT THERE! Staring over the Rhineland of Texarkana, gritting their pseudo-fascist teeth. We could, at the same time, very well be a Poland or Czechoslovakia, sitting ducks waiting patently for the rest of the SEC to move in and take us. Meanwhile, Oklahoma just looks on, contemplating its next move and appeasing the southeast every step of the way, a pot-shaped state of Chamberlainesque Indians passing the peace pipe and looking the other way. I love competition as much as the next guy, and I understand the good fight mentality, but is it really worth GENOCIDE!?

WAKE UP, ARKANSAS! We must step down from the lofty pedestal of Olympic idealism and get back into the sloppy gutter that is Southern Fried Football. Playing for the love of the game makes you Vanderbilt. (Sorry, Pete.) And it is not good enough.

And here it’s only taken me two paragraphs to fall off the Olympic beam. Shit! Jesse Owens would be pissing himself were he not resting peacefully in the sweet ether of death. Let me see if I can’t climb back up and give us a flawless dismount. I started with an Olympic champion, and I’ll end with one.

Here’s one of the great big pieces of proof that Wilma Rudolph was better than all of us: “When I was going through my transition of being famous, I tried to ask God why was I here? What was my purpose? Surely, it wasn't just to win three gold medals. There has to be more to this life than that.”

There. That’s better. And you know what she’s talking about there? That thing—that one simple, shining thing—that makes up the constitution of that ethereal realm hovering above three gold medals, serving as the shining beacon that would be the founding document of the rest of Wilma’s life? Of all of our lives? The answer to that great quest for meaning that we all strive to achieve in our 76.45 years on the planet?

Yep. You guessed it. The ethnic cleansing of Texas.

Enjoy the rest of the Olympics, 50-48ians. Go Hogs. Go World.

Ahem.

50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS