You
In the beginning the innocent athletes of the 20s and 30s didn't know what follies were
They just took weird shots and wore strange clothing and so we laugh at them today
But by the 40s they were actually trying to entertain and amuse as each sport developed its own distinctive follies style
In the 50s giants of the genre emerged and interest in sports humor exploded
The 60s and 70s saw a rogue's gallery of colorful characters humanize the follies
Soon we were plunging headlong into the 80s
Today big league athletes can pull off a sensational stab then make a fabulous faux pas
Somehow that's so reassuring to all the rest of us
Only someone this good can commit the greatest sports follow
Our
Our ground ball back to the mound can't get it out of his club. He's running toward first. He throws the ball out of the club
Don't you be intimidating? I'm not intimidating. Don't you be intimidating? I'm not intimidating. Don't you be intimidating?
You gotta read a different rule book than me. When you look at it, sometimes we're very serious about what we're doing
But when you look back at it, you say boy that was a that was seriously funny
Mr. Borg shot strikes the official knocking his glasses to the ground. How unfortunate
That side challenges block another block Harry another block and they'll score the last one. Hexdahl is so strong in clearing. Here he goes. Pitting for one. Here's the clear. Here it is. He scores. Hexdahl scored a goal on the empty net.
Before you guys say anything, I was aiming for that corner.
Deep to right field. Holy cow. I don't believe it. Home run for George Brett. And Billy Martin now is coming out. He wants to take a look at that bat. And they are about to make a decision. And this could be a momentous decision.
I can't believe that. I can't believe that. I can't believe that.
Myra straight back to path. Looking. Does. Stops. Throws. Complaints it to Kilmer up at the 30 yard line. Kilmer driving for the first down. Loose at the football. It's picked up by Jim Marshall who's running the wrong way. Marshall is running the wrong way. And he's running it into the end zone the wrong way. He thinks he's scored a touchdown. He's scored a safety.
As Jim Marshall knows, strange things happen in the NFL. That's the fun that attracted a child of the 50s named Jerry Glanville.
I've never gotten out of bed where I don't want to run in and go to work. And when you have that feeling that there's no drudgery that you just can't wait to get there. And my philosophy is that you really don't have a job. You have some part of your life that you enjoy doing.
You're catching on. You think so. Where'd you go to school. Where'd you go to school. Iowa State. We got the wrong guy. We were drafted. We won Iowa State quarterback. We took the wrong guy. Coach Sherman. He went to Iowa.
I won the Iowa State quarterback.
We got the wrong guy. That happens in the draft.
We ended up with the wrong guy. Sometimes you get the wrong guy.
Other times you pick the wrong play.
Sometimes the wrong guy picks the wrong play, but it ends up in the right place.
You just never know because that dang ball won't bounce the same way twice.
Really the ball probably originally wasn't designed to do what we're doing with it now.
If the ball was round we wouldn't have all this fun.
The Houston Oilers keep coming up smelling like a rose thanks to their happy-go-lucky coach and a fairly sizable home field advantage.
Probably our biggest advantage in the Dome is we have giant Texas cockroaches.
We have cockroaches in the visitors locker room that I've heard players say they have ridden them out to the bus.
This has to be an advantage because if you're from the north you don't get to see these things. I mean these are the size of alligators.
Each NFL stadium has its own little surprise for visitors.
Magnets in the turf at Seattle.
Old Testament interlopers in Atlanta.
Landfill leftovers in New York.
California's La Brea Tar Pits.
Arctic Circle antics in Green Bay.
Thin Air in Denver.
And Hound of the Baskervilles weather in Chicago.
I say, old chap, did you say a game was being contested at Soldier's Field today?
Without my bifocals I can't quite make out the pitch.
Here's how it looks to us and we're only about 20 yards away from the play.
We can hardly see it. In the stands the fans can't.
They're trying on the play-by-play announcer to keep them abreast of what's going on.
He fires the pass.
It may be intercepted by the Bears.
Sometimes Mother Nature gives these play-by-play types a good excuse for blowing a call.
But what's their problem when the sun's out?
And it's Primus, Primus, 5, 10, 12, 15, 17, 10, 6, 5, touchdown Primus in the corner.
Other times they just don't believe they saw what they saw.
And he's spent over the top, stays on his feet.
To the 40, to the 30, to the 20, to the 10, and he scores. I don't believe it.
Hey yo, all this high flying football makes Jerry Glanville smile.
But you gotta go back about 30 years to make his heart really skip a beat, you know?
To Jerry from Elvis, thanks for the tickets.
He's not dead. He's alive.
Yeah, Jerry still hangs out with Elvis and drives James Dean's car.
James Dean's in the trunk.
Now we can take the mill out of this car and make 150 Toyotas.
You'll never see Coach Glanville on the downbeat.
The Oilers, they play a wide open game.
Whenever it comes time for them to do something, they jump on and go with it.
The King approves of the Oilers' wide open style,
and the players all march to the beat of a different drummer.
And that drummer is a coach who actually enjoys his team's contribution to the volleys.
I was on the ball here, hands that weren't working.
I'm looking for my favorite play. Has this hit the Jets? This is my favorite play of all last year.
In fact, I've asked for the Jet film to make a copy of this for me.
This I love. We call this West Coast Weave.
The New York Jets set an unofficial world record for a number of laterals,
yards traveled, and elapsed time on this play.
But you know what they say.
Those who live by the West Coast Weave die by the West Coast Weave.
You see, record-making, breathtaking, game-breaking plays are always just one, oops, away from a folly.
Fans love them, but for coaches and players, there's only one thing worse.
Way up here. Official. He's up here, sir.
Come on, you see 88 holding out there. God, what you gonna do, stand there and let him hold?
Hey, the ball hadn't been kicked.
And we have a good conversation going on with most of these people,
and I think we look forward to seeing them, and they look forward to having a little conversation with us.
You are a liar. You're a big liar. You are a liar, Earl. You are a liar.
That's those two balls, and all of a sudden you're gonna call the other one.
That other person won the strike. Where's he allowed to go?
He can't act like a man avoiding the tag. Yeah, he can get around him. How far?
That's three holding penalties on one football team and a quarter and a half.
That ain't funny. No, no, no, no.
You gotta use your judgment on it. I understand.
That one, too. Is that it? Oh, yeah.
Hey, Joe. Hey, Jerry. Hey, Jimmy. Hey, Herman. Hey, you over-efficious jerk.
Get out of there. Get out of there.
Well, that's good enough for me, but sometimes get some help on it, too, all right?
All right. I have no confidence in you, buddy.
There's now one answer.
Oh.
Everybody has their own style of communicating with officials.
Head Coach John Chaney of the Temple Owls only has to establish eye contact.
But in the last couple years, the rules have changed.
We're not able to talk to the officials anymore,
so now I'm guilty of just staring at them once in a while.
They've called a couple of my stares the one-eyed jack-stare,
but we can't talk to them, so at least I can stare at you.
John, I wouldn't want to meet an alley
because he comes up and he stares at you with those big eyes,
and I would just drop over and play dead because he would scare the heck out of me.
And he wants a team of domination. That's it.
Not competitiveness, domination. That's John.
The other coaches, they're worse than I am.
At least I think they are.
Especially that Rowley. Rowley and Speedy here, they're bad boys.
My personality is somewhat of a quiet personality.
I mean, I'm an emotional kind of a guy.
Being the nationality that I am, it causes that.
I think I have a pretty good relationship with the officials,
and now they're not supposed to talk,
but we still have a little comradery and a little conversation now and then.
I love to look at him more than I see the game.
In fact, when I'm scouting him, I lose sight of your team and watch Rowley.
He's really something very funny.
Speedy the same way. Speedy Morris, he wrestles with himself.
He tears himself apart.
I mean, he takes off his clothes as he's yelling and screaming.
Speedy's a sight to behold, I think.
There's Speedy Morris. He's going to be losing that tie shortly,
and the sweater's probably in deep trouble, too.
And Speedy Morris, who ripped his pants here two years ago,
they're threatening to rip his sweater off.
This reminds me of two years ago when Speedy ripped his pants right up the back.
I ripped because I was wearing 36 pants, and I got about 39 waist.
I learned since then to get by bigger pants.
I just expanded too much for the pants, and they couldn't take any more.
They had enough, and they just popped.
The fans saw it. I mean, it wasn't just a little tear.
I was just happy I had clean underwear on.
And, of course, when he went in at halftime, his wife was sewing his pants up,
and he was standing there coaching in his underwear.
And he still won the game. That's why I told him, split them every time you play.
I said, you're better off if they give you a W. That's all it takes.
These three coaches all work in the same building.
Philadelphia's Pelestra is the home court of a unique city series called the Big Five.
Each year, Temple, LaSalle, St. Joseph's, Villanova, and Pennsylvania
display Division I college basketball at its best.
So that fire is always burning.
You don't have to come out with any great Newt Rockne speeches.
Not at all. It's always a fire that's already there to win the Big Five.
And here's Gary from Long Range.
Whoa, three-on-one. Williams up again, and it's not going to be blocked.
And there's it comes.
Lencie with him. Oh!
Five minutes left. It's a two-point ballgame.
That's Presley. Three-on-one. Presley from the Glades.
Massey. Oh, my. Here comes a party.
Johnson on the breakaway.
But all this emotion can sometimes backfire.
Oh, he walked. He walked.
The crowd intimidated him, I think.
And he was trying to think of about eight different moves and couldn't get any of them started.
We put all of the time and teaching and coaching to get that ball right to that basket,
and yet it seems to bounce everywhere.
All alone, Williams missed a dunk.
He undunk. So he undunked the ball instead of dunking the ball.
Sometimes we say it's a brick. He shot up a brick.
And it's being kicked around everywhere.
You go to try to pick the ball up, and there's one guy who misses it, and two other guys fall on the floor.
This guy dies at it. He misses it. Another guy ends up with it.
The ball's going that way, and all of a sudden it's going back this way by the other team,
and he goes down and blows the basket. Ball hits him in the face. He falls out.
All these things happen, and it's very funny.
But it just goes to show you that the game is not so far removed
from where life is.
As in life, we sometimes foul up, and a buddy saves us,
or we might get stuck in an awkward situation.
There are days when we run out of room or want to leave early.
But most of all, everybody needs somebody to hold on to when life gets rough,
as it surely will.
Oh!
Oh! Ouch!
Ouch!
Touch it back, buddy!
Ouch!
I've been in hockey for so many years now, and every year's been fun.
To me, when the fun does go out of it, I think it's time to get out of it.
Terry Crisp is a former Broad Street bully from the Philadelphia Flyers,
who now presides over the loosest team in the NHL, the Calgary Flames.
Just don't think. React. You'll be all right.
We all go in with visions of grandeur and doing this and that,
but what it really is, if you jump up on top of Secretariat,
you know you've got a pretty good chance of finishing up in the top money.
You're on a midnight plow horse, you better be gouging pretty good to get down the home stretch.
Terry is the kind of guy that says what he feels and says it loudly and says it right away,
so at times he's very boisterous and sometimes even out of control,
but the bottom line is he wants to win hockey games, and that's what we're all here for.
Well, in the 16 years I've gone through, just about every kind of coach you can imagine,
Coach Crisp is kind of a holler guy. It's his way or the highway sort of deal.
He wants you to play with emotion out there and go that way.
They're all men. They're family men. They're human beings, and we're going to make mistakes.
And if we make mistakes, and you can look at the lighter side of making that mistake,
you don't go bongers. You don't wind the rubber band up and it goes boing.
It's not always serious out here, and if you don't have fun with it, you won't last very long.
Something funny just happened. Dave Mailey put on Manson's helmet as he was skating off the ice.
He did.
He thought he had his own helmet. Tucked it on and was skating off.
After you've had a few days to watch it, and it's not life or death, you do find some humor in it.
If you're not at that given time, it depends on whose bull is being gored, if there's humor or not.
I think that you got to have a sense of humor to play in this game, and there's a lot of funny things that happen during games.
Sometimes it's fun, sometimes it isn't fun.
Fellas, this is hardly the time or the place, you know.
Come on, fellas, please. Just knock it off, okay? Come on. Come on, guys.
Take that, eh, poser?
Steady, poser.
I tell you, that green seat and the white seat, if there happened to have been people sitting there,
well, the people in the first row holding up that gossip glass.
And here Bergeron will be going right now, I can't believe it.
Pucks end up in the darndest places.
It's in the skate of Salmi, it got lodged actually right in the fence.
Now there's the first, Paul Ripley's, I've never seen that one.
Hopefully not too many people get hurt.
A lot of the players you watch in the follies have done something pretty good just to get there.
The skill was just to even get there to make the folly to begin with.
The folly is the end result of trying to make a heck of a play.
All right, here's that last shot. Now you can see how he puts it in the corner.
Now watch this puck hunk the boards.
It looks like it's going to stay there all the way.
It's magnetized. The goalie thinks it's coming back behind, but he's wrong.
It's a score.
Life's not just a bowl of cherries every time.
You just can't have fun every day because sometimes we're going to hit some pitfalls along the way.
But if by and large you're having fun, you're going to have fun every day.
Because sometimes we're going to hit some pitfalls along the way, but if by and large you're having fun,
you're enjoying your sport, you're enjoying your teammates, hang in there.
Keep doing it because the fun days far outnumber the miserable days.
Believe me, they do. And too soon, too fast, they leave us, they're gone, and you can't get them back.
Terry Crisp and his Calgary Flames have demonstrated that the right blend of fun and games can take a team straight to the top.
Lanny McDonald shoots, he scores! The old man has come through!
The Flames are ahead 2-1 in the Stanley Cup Finals!
In 1989, the Flames followed the light-hearted lead of their bushy-faced elder statesmen
and curly-headed coach to the World Championship and a nice little trophy they call the Stanley Cup.
Oh, so you say you don't have the studs to win a championship.
Today, I will teach you how to win with your brain.
Dr. Freud called it a psych job, and it starts with eye contact.
Sometimes, all it takes is a subtle glance, or a little body language will send the message.
Did you get the message, Mookie?
Al Rabowski was my favorite subject of all time.
Here was a man who could communicate his deepest feelings without speaking.
Rabowski was called the Mad Hungarian,
but he was nothing compared to tennis pro Ili Nastase, a Romanian known as Dracula.
Hey, loosen up, Ili!
I don't know, I'll loosen up.
I'll loosen up right now because I'm tense right now.
As a touring professional, Ili Nastase was the loosest player to ever grace a court.
In a game marked by somber intensity, Ili was a child at play.
He was a gifted athlete and brilliant shot-maker who was at one time ranked in the World's Top Ten,
but he simply couldn't resist his natural temptation to have some fun.
Often, he flashed back to boyhood memories of soccer in his native Romania.
His attention span was short, and he frequently lapsed into a fantasy land fueled by his own fervent imagination,
initiating dialogue with the ball, his racket, and himself.
But his mood swings were not always sunny.
He could suddenly turn as dark and menacing as a Bucharest winter.
At these times, he became nasty Nastase.
Intimidating officials, disturbing opponents, and shocking fans.
This talented and temperamental artist was unlike anything the tennis world had ever seen.
Depending on your point of view, that was either good or bad, but never indifferent.
Sure, sometimes I went too far, and I have to admit it, but I don't regret it.
I don't regret it at all, because it was me. I did it my way, like Sinatra did it.
Today, Ili is a touring pro, still teaching his unconventional style at a Paris tennis club,
owned by his old Romanian doubles partner, Jan Teriac.
Did you teach him?
No, not really. I mean, he was so gifted that he was gifted from God.
And then I was the second one, so I never compare myself with God.
But he was probably the most gifted tennis player I saw in my 30 years,
and I don't believe that players like this are coming every generation,
and the man had a merit to change the game of tennis from tennis sport to entertainment.
And that, my young friend was, he's not so young anymore.
Still, unfortunately, he has the bad habits. The pair is as long as he was.
A young Ili emerged on the international scene in the 60s
as a member of the Romanian Davis Cup team, led by his Svengali, Jan Teriac.
The prodigy was taking graduate classes in Intimidation 101 from Professor Teriac.
So when he came along, not really only coaching him, but I was always older.
Now we change, he's older than I am. But at that time, I take him with me,
and we form the first odd couple of the tennis, put it that way.
Impressionable Ili learned his lessons well and graduated with honors.
He was soon taking the Nasty Nastasi Show on the road to tennis clubs all over the world.
The tournament was ruined for me and the tenseness and the problems I had with my friend,
Mr. Nastasi, who caused a lot of trouble in every match that he played this week.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
You know, they talk about Nastasi being the victim of all this.
Think about the guys that lost to him because of it.
So, you say this nasty Nastasi fellow from Bucharest is rude and boorish.
Maybe so, but he's also very entertaining.
So long as you don't have to play him, that is.
Ili even played some head games with his former partner, Jan Terriak,
who was now retired and coaching Guillermo Vilas.
To circumvent rules against coaching during a match, Vilas would look for discreet hand signals from Terriak in the stands.
So Terriak, before the match, was talking to Vilas with the signs, you know,
just saying if I put my finger up in my eye, I don't know.
So I was playing Vilas in the French Open a couple of years ago,
and he was saying from the other side of the court and I was in this, and Terriak was behind me.
So I knew Terriak was going to do something, so I just put my head between my legs and I tell Terriak, no coaching.
For better or worse, Nastase influenced a whole new breed of tennis player who arrived on the scene as he was leaving,
bequeathing the game a personality and sense of humor it had previously lacked.
Nastase never worked. He played the game.
I did have fun. You know, every time I was playing in the court, I had fun.
I mean, losing or winning, I have matches that I like, but I lose the match, and that's the way I was.
In the world of sport, there are precious few originals.
Ili Nastase was one of the greatest.
Well, Nastase's colorful counterparts can be found in every sport.
But baseball breeds more of these odd fellows than anywhere else.
Why? Because they have so much free time on their hands. That's why.
Larry Anderson is a well-traveled middle reliever who keeps assuming new identities.
That's me. I'm Nolan Ryan.
Last year, I gave up a home run to Schmidt in the Dome, and it was pretty much a blast.
When Hal Lanier came out to the mound, he said, he looked at me and kind of shook his head.
He says, anything hit that high and that far ought to have a stewardess in an in-flight movie.
I thought that was comforting.
I'm not about to put baseball above life, and I think that's, you know, the things I do as part of my life.
Even when he was with the Phillies, Anderson has always been strange.
Sort of like Pittsburgh's Andy Van Slyke, whose off-center ideas led to the nickname Norman.
As in Norman Bates of Psycho?
Baseball players, I think, have fun in any condition, no matter what it is,
and especially when it comes to the snow and rain, because when you make a mistake on the field
and 50,000 people see it, you better have a sense of humor,
because if you don't, you're going to end up checking into the base motel pretty soon.
Today is April 8th. We're in Wrigley Field, Chicago.
And this is the pirate trio of the Pittsburgh Pirates, even though there's more than three.
Okay, guys? Ready? Hit it!
Hit it!
One, two, one, two, three.
The weather outside is frightful
And I am so delightful
I don't want a place
So let us go, let us go, let us go
The boys of summer know how to weather the storm,
but their environment is never completely under control.
Blimps blot out the sun.
Runaway rain birds jump the gun.
I'm not a meteorologist. Don't tap my foot and ask me if it's going to rain or not.
Check the wind direction.
We had just taken the lead. We're trying to get the last three outs of the game.
All of a sudden this wind starts picking up. The skies turn black.
Our catcher is being invaded by hot dog papers and cokes and beer cups,
and all of a sudden he's getting plastered.
It was the first time that I've ever had a wind delay in any of my years in baseball.
The animal kingdom is also part of Mother Nature's plan to make each fly ball a safari.
Another breaking ball skied to left.
It hit a bird!
Can you believe that?
I've never seen that.
The bird flying in the air and dropped it. I've never seen a base hit like that in my life.
I don't know what it is about baseball, Major League Baseball,
but there's something about the game that attracts animals.
You've got squirrels running around the field. You've got cats, birds, bugs.
They get down the field and they get in your eyes and they get in your ear.
I was running after the ball one time with my mouth open and bingo.
Here comes a moth flying right into my throat and I end up swallowing it.
I end up almost dropping the ball and nobody knows it.
I'm the only guy who ends up almost being the goat because of a moth.
A ball soars through the night sky.
Mr. Andrew Van Slyke of the Pittsburgh Pirates intersects the hurling sphere
an instant before it plunges to earth.
This skill has earned Mr. Van Slyke a gold glove,
yet he knows at any given moment he can enter another dimension of time and space
known as the Follies Zone.
A lot of things can happen positively, negatively,
and it goes through a player's mind when he has too much time to think.
When he's sitting there camp under a ball,
he knows that there's two outs and the baserunners are running around the bases
trying to get the home, and he's waiting, he's waiting, he's backing up,
he's backing up, he's waiting.
He goes, I got it, I got it, and clank.
It hits his glove and drops it.
In the back of his mind, he almost knows,
I knew that was going to happen, I knew that was going to happen,
why did it have to happen?
He's caught the ball 99 out of 100 times before the ball was hitting,
and he knows that I probably got it, but that one time he's waiting, he's waiting, and clank.
I say, old chap, where does one develop the skill
necessary to join the Order of the Iron Glove?
Why, in spring training, of course.
I don't think this does anything for you at all.
Where's the player?
Hey, healthy boy.
Hey, Norton.
Spring training is the time for suntans.
It's not like we're doing a Jane Fonda tape
and trying to get ourselves our bust line down or up
or our butts up or down or our thighs in or out.
I mean, that's not what we're thinking about.
Every day I would come in and boast about
how well I was catching bats in spring training,
and that's all I thought about when I was on the field in spring training.
Those who survive fishing trips in Florida earn a spot on the traveling squad.
That's smart.
On the surface, this game seems so rudimentary.
We simply proceed to each base in sequence, stopping only when necessary.
That's a good pitch to go on.
Terrible throw.
Must be done to where the throw is.
He's going back to first base.
Is he going to steal first?
He steals first.
Now he's going to steal second again.
I've never seen it before.
There's Abbott and Casello when you need her.
Such a basic task.
Strike a leather-bound ball of twine with a sturdy stick of wood.
Swing and a broken bat fly ball to right field.
This ball is deep.
This ball's out of here.
I can't believe that.
Somebody better check that bat.
Oh, yes, and don't forget to bring along your sense of humor.
I think the players can almost become a fan.
They almost are sitting in the stands themselves with that coke
and watching that happen, and they're laughing along with fans,
which makes it real funny.
It's not a setup.
It just happens, and it happens to be a funny thing.
Swing and a ground ball back at the mound.
Off the glove hits Kipper in the head.
He tries to recover.
He throws safe at first base.
Here it is again.
Deion James hits a ground ball.
It first goes off his glove, then off his head.
In his haste to try to make the play, he loses his cap.
Knowing Andy Van Slyke, Slick will have something to say to Kipper
about this when they look at it again.
Trying to duplicate one half of the poppers off the face
is not an easy thing to do.
It takes a lot of work, practice.
He said the thing I need to work on
is the cap flying off my head a little bit better.
And that's just the way I approach it.
You got to have fun.
To me, I don't know how you cannot have fun at this level.
I mean, you're playing in the big leagues.
It's something that you've always wanted to do.
If you can't have fun here, I'm certainly convinced
you're not going to have fun when you're pumping gas
when you're out of base, if I can tell you that.
Fun and games.
That's what sport is all about at any level.
Perhaps we can sum this all up by paraphrasing
the most famous quote from the Sports Cliche Hall of Fame.
It's not whether you win or lose.
It's how you make the greatest sports follies that counts.