Heck Of A Guy

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Another Sunday Salmagundi

December 10th, 2006 at 9:24 am · DrHGuy · 1 Comment


Another Countdown


While “X Days Until” countdowns are ubiquitous this time of year, DrHGuy is as susceptible as the next [Generic]Guy to the anticipation of important dates and, consequently, feels it seasonally incumbent to remind one and all that, as of today, it is only

124 Days Until
The Opening Round of The 69th Annual Division I Men’s Basketball Championship

That first round game, by the way, will be held Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at UD Arena (University of Dayton) in Dayton, Ohio


Tick, tick, tick, …

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Another Google Gizmo

Enter a list of ingredients (AKA “What’s in the fridge?”) into the Cookin’ With Google search tool and get back, via Google, a list of recipes using those ingredients.


As a nifty extra, Cookin’ with Google can find recipes in several categories:

  • General
  • Vegan/Vegetarian
  • WorldWide Cuisine
  • Atkins Diet
  • Diabetic
  • Seafood
  • Crockpot
  • Gluten-free

Some Search Tips

    Try searching for both items plural and singular. Searching for avocado apple gives very different results from avocados apples.

    Sometimes if you enter too many items you’ll narrow down your search too much. Try starting your search with just two or three ingredients.

    Try tossing in a cooking-related word, like broil or sauté. Conversely if you want to avoid certain words you can also exclude them; try excluding words like fry or lard.


As a trial run, I entered the first two items I saw in our kitchen: bananas and wonton wrappers (yep, it’s that kind of kitchen). Cookin’ With Google responded admirably with over 100 hits, the first of which was this delectable-sounding Fried Banana Ravioli With Vanilla Custard Sauce.1





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Another Heisman



DrHGuy’s Complete Knowledge Inventory Re The Heisman Memorial Trophy Award – Before Finally Reading Friday’s New York Times

1. The official title, “The Heisman Memorial Trophy Award,” seems a tad redundant and more than a little awkward. DrHGuy concurs with the vernacular preference for “The Heisman.”

2. The actual trophy looks remarkably like its above photo - OK, the inscription might be off just a tad.

3. The trophy was originally awarded by the New York Downtown Athletic Club, which went bankrupt a few years ago. The Manhattan Yale Club now sponsors the award.

4. The Heisman is awarded to the best college football player.2 It is apparently a tragedy, at least to a batch of sportscasters, that although technically any college player at any position is eligible for the award, an offensive player, usually a quarterback or running back, has always won the Heisman. Many years, a debate rages whether the Heisman should be awarded to a great player on a less than great team, especially if that team doesn’t make it to a bowl game.

5. Winning the Heisman increases the monetary value of the player to the NFL team that hires him. It also presages a great NFL career — except when it doesn’t.

6. O.J. won a Heisman.

7. Somebody won it twice.3

8. The guy from Ohio State won this year’s Heisman.4

Pretty pedestrian stuff.


The Heisman Revelation



Then, although I typically don’t read newspaper sports pages except during the NCAA basketball tournament and the day after the Super Bowl, I felicitously happened to peruse John Heisman, the Coach Behind the Trophy by Bill Pennington (New York Times December 8, 2006), an article I recommend, even to those who loathe sports, because Heisman, it turns out, is responsible for many aspects of football that make it an American institution. Highlights from the article follow:

Heisman coached football for 36 years,5 holding positions in Ohio, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia (Heisman’s 1917 Georgia Tech squad became the first Southern team to win the unanimous college football national championship), Penn, Washington & Jefferson, and Rice, finishing in 1927 with a 190-70-16 record.

Heisman was responsible for

  • Dividing the game into quarters
  • The center snap (the ball had previously been rolled on the ground)
  • The “hike” vocal signal
  • The first audible at the line
  • The hidden ball trick
  • Batches of innovations, too technical for brief explanations, in how the game is played

Because Heisman saw the importance of fans to understanding play-calling and being able to follow the downs and yardage needed, he set up something else new at games: a scoreboard.

He may have been the archetype for the Authoritative American Football Coach.

Despite an Ivy League education in law, Heisman never became a lawyer, but he instinctively honed a talent for commanding, melodramatic locker-room oratory. Heisman, standing before his players when he first met them, would hold aloft a football and ask, “What is this?” Answering his own question, Heisman said: “It is a prolate spheroid in which the outer leather casing is drawn tightly over a somewhat smaller rubber tubing.” Heisman would pause and add: “Better to have died as a small boy than to fumble this football.”


Most importantly, “Without John Heisman, there might not be a forward pass in football, and without a forward pass, the game would probably have died from disinterest or been abolished because of its fatal brutality.” As the article describes this accomplishment,

Scouting a North Carolina-Georgia game in 1895, Heisman said he saw the first forward pass in history when a bungled punt attempt led a desperate punter to illegally fling the football over the line to a teammate who ran for a touchdown. Heisman walked away convinced it was the play that would save football from itself. As Heisman wrote, violent scrums based around bruising running plays were “killing the game as well as the players.” In 1904-5, 44 players had been reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries. Heisman said the forward pass “would scatter the mob.” As Wiley Lee Umphlett wrote in his 1992 book, “Creating the Big Game,” Heisman began to forcefully lobby Walter Camp, shepherd of the national rules committee. When Camp did not act swiftly enough, Heisman rallied other coaches and newspaper reporters to pressure Camp and the committee. In 1906, the forward pass was legalized with several constraints that limited its effectiveness. Heisman pressed on, and the restrictions were eventually lifted.

Heck, Heisman is the guy who deserves an award.



Footnotes

  1. Full Disclosure #1: I didn’t know that a dish called Fried Banana Ravioli existed prior to this; Full Disclosure #2: The photo is actually fried banana ravioli in passion fruit sauce.↩
  2. I cheated to check the criterion; the actual wording is that it’s awarded to the “most outstanding” football player.↩
  3. I looked that up too. It was Archie Griffin, the running back for Ohio State, who won the Heisman in 1974 and 1975.↩
  4. OK, I had to check that as well; it was Troy Smith. I would have gotten it right on a multiple choice test.↩
  5. Heisman also played high school football in 1883 Titusville, Pennsylvania and later as a 150-pound lineman for Brown and Pennsylvania universities. His most significant contributions, however, were as a coach.↩

Tags: Aha! Items

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Mrs. Linklater // Dec 10, 2006 at 8:55 pm

    Kewl. I love back stories. This was a great one. I’m surprised the NY Times wrote about Heisman and not Sports Illustrated, my personal bible, something I consult along with my prayer book, People Magazine.