Nothing But Iron: New Material August 26, 2005 by Steven R. Lagman, M.D., C.A.S.W. A young Billy Crystal once told this joke: A tall guy and a short guy were walking over a bridge. When they reached the other side, the tall guy noticed the full moon. "Hey, Shorty," he said pointing to the sky, "there’s a full moon." There is good reason you are hearing this joke for the first time. Crystal told it to a very small audience in the summer of 1993, two weeks before the start of the regular stand-up comedy season. He never told it again because nobody laughed. It was just not funny. That’s how Crystal became such a success–he tried out new material at Fred’s Propane Supply and Insignificant Comedy Club long before he used it on HBO. If a joke didn’t draw laughs at Fred’s, he buried it, never to be discovered until a certain vegetable gardener/sportswriter unearthed it while transplanting heirloom rutabagas. (Someday I’ll share some of Crystal’s other lame stuff.) The point of this story is that we Packers fans should not read too much into tonight’s home preseason thrashing by the World Champion New England Patriots. We should not despair over Brett Favre’s interceptions, Ahman Green’s early and often encounters with Patriots tacklers, the defense’s inability to defend, special teams blundering which redefined the word special, or the compost pile of momentum-deflating penalties. It was all new material. Like Crystals full moon joke, Green Bay’s new material was not funny either. Consequently, come Sept 11, the coaches will instruct players to abandon pretty much everything used in this particular preseason game. The players will comply because it’s in their contracts. Nineteen games later the Packers will avenge this embarrassment in Super Bowl XXX-something, and we will all live happily ever after. O.K. you’re not buying it. Me either. Would you believe that I desperately wanted to be in Lambeau to see if there was any way I could help, as in, I know CPR, can I help? O.K., you’re seeing right through me. I suppose I might have to resort to truth. Truth: I was on call tonight, thus bound by the boundaries of beeper range, so son Connor and wife Kelly made the trip north to attend this game. Truth: it was a relief to me that Connor had my ticket. He is a Broncos fan (due to a rare chromosomal abnormality), so he came as close as anyone there to getting his money’s worth. Truth: Being on call means I came close to satisfying my first goal of the 2005 season: completely ignore the preseason. Truth: I look at the preseason, with its full price tickets as one of the worst values in professional sports. Without reading too much into a preseason game, I will allude to what I saw on television, while praying for a call for a labor epidural that would have put both patient and me out of our respective miseries. The epidural call never came, so I suffered. The biggest negative was that I did not see anything positive. That’s only 94% true, but it was a clever sentence, so I had to use it. Change sportswriting channels immediately if you want me to rip Brett Favre for trying to do too much. Even if that were true–and we have no idea where his receivers are supposed to be–he has earned the right to make decisions on where and when to throw the ball, and, frankly I pay to see Favre try to do too much. It is a thing of beauty when he succeeds. The real positives of the game: no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no war. Truth: I have not given up hope. We have seen enough weirdness over the years to know that a slow start converted into a successful season is no longer all that weird. Let’s not forget that our team remains undefeated. I won’t elaborate further on the implications of this or any other preseason event. There will be plenty to write about in a couple weeks when football games count. Before I go, I want to point out that no column about professional football is complete without a discussion of Randy Moss and Terrell Owens, but this one is. Quick Movie Review: Million Dollar Baby II. No, it’s not a sequel. Denzel Washington stars as a ridiculously-high-paid NFL wide receiver who exposes his loyalty (to himself) by sitting out the preseason despite having a full year left on his contract. Rated PG-13.2 million (immaturity, vulgar gesturing, spreadsheet references). ____________________ Nothing But Iron is an amateur sports column that sometimes really is about sports. The part about Billy Crystal was entirely made up. Billy Crystal, as used in this context, is not a registered trademark. It was a reference to another famous guy or guys with the same name. Photo caption: The tomato in the picture shown above was grown by the author. It was a third-round draft pick of the Atlanta Falcons. ©2005 DrTM Enterprises. All rights reserved.