This story about how Detroit will feel better about the recession and local government scandal if the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup is just ridiculous. I love sports, but let us not overestimate their role in society. Your local team winning a championship will have zero effect on the real world and as the fun of winning evaporates, the real world will come back into focus in all of its drudgery.
Now, if the Redskins win the Superbowl that’s an entire other matter. If that happens: PREPARE FOR RAPTURE.
It’s not that I’m against the government’s active role in the auto industry restructuring, but still…
They get our tax money, then I say we get the Stanley Cup. ‘k? ‘k.
LET’S GO PENS!
LET’S GO PENS!
I’m with you there, Eric. I used to live in the Burgh, never one of the years they won the Super Bowl, but I was there the last time they won the Stanley Cup, and there’s nothing like the excitement of a national championship energize the whole city and bring everyone together, no matter what the economic climate.
Jaromir Jagr was only 19 years old that year and was put up with a family on my street after the Pens brought him in from Czechoslovakia, just 4 -5 houses down from ours, and I never knew it until after the Pens won and his limo came down our street with him hoisting the cup up above his head through the sun roof.
Winning tonight will be a tough task, though.
One of my favorite Republican Bush sports/history tidbits was his conning taxpayers into paying to build his baseball stadium as a public works project.
On land grabbed through eminent domain.
Then Bush cashed out, making a small fortune at taxpayer expensive.
The ‘conservative’ Republican President’s fortune was based on his getting government to actively pour tax payer money into his pocket via a sports stadium built on land grabbed through eminent domain.
Bush’s early career as a Cheerleader really paid off.
Sums up conservatism/right-wing/Republicanism. Yup.
And just for giggles: “Libertarians” voted for the guy!-)
Nuts.
News Reference railing against sports stadiums and eminent domain — a closet libertarian?
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2008/05/29/surprise-stadium-predictions-flawed/
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/05/07/911-memorial-good-eminent-domain-abuse-bad/
Bush’s early career as a Cheerleader really paid off. News Moron
Good grief, NI, you really are a mentally stunted psychotic twit. What the heck does this have to do with sports teams and the economic climate of towns hosting national championships? Does any thought not go through your demented synapses that isn’t poisoned by your unhinged hatred for one George W. Bush?
I thought it was Trent Lott that was the cheerleader?
In any event, a Stanley Cup Final Game 7 is one of the great things to watch.
About a team turning a city around: not really when it is expected. Detroit pretty much expected a deep playoff run – so this will be a nice night for them but not a Cinderalla story.
Now the ‘69 Mets on the other hand kept a city in suspense from about July right on through their drubbing of the Orioles. Most of us living through it agree with the conventional wisdom that the city avoided a lot of angst that summer because of the focus on the Mets. But it was the underdog run that did it. Here . . .no suspense and no awe at the surprise of it.
Sure, Republican Trent Lott might have been a Cheerleader.
http://google.com/search?q=Trent+Lott+cheerleader
But Republican George Bush was Head Cheerleader.
http://google.com/search?q=George+Bush+cheerleader
Right winger “Dennis” asks “What the heck does this [cheerleaders] have to do with sports teams…”?
Well, I guess that would depend on which team you play for, “Dennis”…
Honestly, I’m kinda surprised to find News Reference referring to a man filling a traditionally feminine role like it was a negative. I guess NR’s progressive values are suspended when it suits him.
On topic though, yeah, sports rock, but if there is a Red Wing’s Championship it will do very little alleviate the soul-crushing suckitude of being in Detroit.
Maybe the Lions winning the Super Bowl will actually help, but those gains will be offset by the massive losses suffered in the series of earthquakes which swallowed the cities every NFL team.
“SFC B”, since I’m an independent with a conservative streak I don’t feel compelled to be held to “progressive” ‘rules’, especially by right wingers who don’t play by any rules.
And personally, I’m endlessly fascinated that right wingers, who often pride themselves on their (perceived) manliness, will almost always suspend that attitude when it suits them. For Republicans, Rules are Always for Other People.
For instance, the right wing’s dishonorable attacks on Democratic leader John Kerry, who served honorably in combat, and even went up the river during the Viet Nam war, were even more despicable because of the absurd right wing deification of AWOL Republican Bush who was an effete East Coast Ivory Tower Cheerleader who couldn’t even show up for his Alabama ‘get out of combat free card’ duty.
Good progressives might not say such things, but I hold myself to my own very conservative standards.
By my standards, if the right wing is going to mock and slander an honorable combat vet, I’m certainly not going to feel bad pointing out that the right wing’s leader was an East Coast Ivory Tower Cheeer Leader.
Unlike the right wing, I’m not making anything up.
And if you re-read the dry text of what I wrote up above, you might realize that it’s what your attitudes interpreted that made what I wrote seem so bad in your head.
Though you do bring up an interesting point, when you consider how needful right wingers are in creating a fiction of manliness for themselves, especially when right wingers denigrate ‘weakness’ as a coded insult for ‘womanly’, Republican Bush’s traditionally feminine role as a Cheerleader through most of his early life might have been part of what led him to overcompensate for by lying US into war.
For all of the reasons ascribed to Republican Bush’s decision to lie US into war, wouldn’t it be especially tragic if the real reason American soldiers ended up dying in an unnecessary war was so that Republican President Bush could feel, and feel he was perceived as, manly?
We’ve had a team or two come up with championships, not often, but its happened. For a while it becomes the focus of the community as the suspense builds. Baseball is especially good with it’s 3 out of 5 set up. If you win it seems like it lasts a week, but if you lose it’s over before the next commercial. I’ve never been to a championship game live, the euphoria of the crowd winning would be quite a memorable event.
Conrgrats to the Pens.
Yet another Malkin gets it done.
I guess Detroit feels even worse now. Feels pretty good in Pittsburgh at the moment, everyone out on their porches, wooping it up and honking car horns.
Ol’Froth: “I guess Detroit feels even worse now.”
I’m, happy Pittsburgh won, as I’ve been a fan of the team for a long time. (Before Crosby, before Jagr, before even Mario Lemieux.)
But it’s got to suck for Detroit. Winning two in a row without Pittsburgh being much of a challenge, and then losing four out of five?
Ouch.
The Wings’ fans are now singing that Temptations masterwork, “Since We Lost the Stanley…”
Hell, my team beat the Yankees in the World Series 6 weeks after 9/11. Healing national tragedy through sports was never something I really put much stock in.
First: HOOOOOOOOOooooooo!
Anyway,
But it’s got to suck for Detroit. Winning two in a row without Pittsburgh being much of a challenge, and then losing four out of five?
I disagree. Pens worked hard for two games and never caught a bounce. Detroit worked hard and caught all of them. So it goes in hockey. But the bounces even out, and after the first two games I said to most everyone I knew that if the Pens played like they did in the first 2 games for the whole series, we’d win.
We didn’t play every game like that, but we played 4 of them, and that’s how you win a cup.
Sorry, bug giant paragraph just to say: I think the Pens played their game for 2 games and lost. We just ended up being the better team over the whole series/
Either way: HOOoooooooooooooo!
(I became a fan early in the Lemieux era, in 1988 when I moved into the city and was, like 10 years old. It was a good time to discover the sport.)
First: HOOOOOOOOOooooooo!
Anyway,
But it’s got to suck for Detroit. Winning two in a row without Pittsburgh being much of a challenge, and then losing four out of five?
I disagree. Pens worked hard for two games and never caught a bounce. Detroit worked hard and caught all of them. So it goes in hockey. But the bounces even out, and after the first two games I said to most everyone I knew that if the Pens played like they did in the first 2 games for the whole series, we’d win.
We didn’t play every game like that, but we played 4 of them, and that’s how you win a cup.
Sorry, bug giant paragraph just to say: I think the Pens played their game for 2 games and lost. We just ended up being the better team over the whole series/
Either way: HOOoooooooooooooo!
(I became a fan early in the Lemieux era, in 1988 when I moved into the city and was, like 10 years old. It was a good time to discover the sport.)
Thad, I could have sworn that Major League Baseball would tell the D’backs, “Let the
WookieeYankees win…give NYC something to cheer about.” So I was as shocked as hell when I woke up that Monday morning to see AZ with the title. Loved it!