… Isn’t it just like those Wuffies trying to copy Carolina’s recent “Hang The Sorry Sumbitch & The AD That Pays Him”. The parallels between NCSU’s current Hate Herb A Whole Lot and UNC’s very recent Bunting Must Go NOW! campaigns are eerily similar. The angry villagers storming Dr Frankenstein’s laboratory were eerily similar to the torch bearers outside Dracula castle too. As with Frank and Dracula, even their henchmen Lee “Igor” Fowler and Dickie “Renfield” Baddour are targets of extreme hostility.
While many have chosen to erase their pre-October 9 consternation, the war-torn scarred landscape of UNC’s past football season has not quite blossomed into a Tar Heel version of Augusta’s Amen Corner. It may be a while before anything of beauty can grow where such harshness prevailed for oh soooo long. When two men, John Bunting and Dickie Baddour, are hauled out and publically flogged in the town “Quad” every day for 6 months some of that blood and gore is going to stain the pavement.
Now the exact same scenario is replicating itself in NC State’s “Brickyard”. Braveheart’s torture only lasted about 10 minutes on the silver screen. But for Herb Sendek and Lee Fowler the bamboo shoots under the fingernails and waterboarding is going on 24/7 in this, the latest,Wolfpack Winter of Much Discontent. The Case Center is being renamed Abu Ghraib.
I can’t help but note the similarity in how the basic character assassination always begins … “OK, Sendek/Bunting is a good guy and a fine man and I know he loves the University BUT the no-good stupid jackass moron is the sorriest recruiter, game coach, staff manager, administrator, excuse for a human being that I’ve ever seen and I’ve followed State/Carolina basketball/football for EVER. … but I don’t blame him as much as I do THAT ATHLETIC DIRECTOR!”
I am not under the usual censorship guidelines of most columnists but my keyboard simply won’t type what State/Carolina fans have called Lee Fowler and Dickie Baddour. The current vicious attacks on Lee Fowler have dispelled key theories about Dickie-Hate.
Baddour: His diminutive physical stature and chipmonk-esque appearance.
Fowler: A statuesque figure at 6’5”, arguably distinguished depending upon how one ranks gray mustaches. He bears no resemblances to any puffy cheeked furry animals ever featured in a cartoon.
Baddour: The widely held belief that he has never seen another man naked (meaning never been in a locker room as either an athlete or a coach).
Fowler: He was a Div 1-A basketball player as well as a coach. It’s pretty much a given that he did over those 20 years, see other men naked. Scratch that one.
Baddour: His “worldly experience” stretches from Mebane to Morrisville. His “world” for the past 40 years has been Orange County. The one with Carrboro’s human menagerie, not “The O.C.” with Newport Beach’s self absorbed beautiful people. There are aplenty of self-absorbed people in Dickie’s OC too.
Fowler: His worldly view includes multiple addresses in two states Tennessee and North Carolina which makes him Marco Polo compared to home boy Baddour.
Going back to the recent Autumn tempestuous days of Bunting Hate, there were indeed daily lotteries guessing day, hour, and minute that colored smoke would emerge from South Building indicating a Bowles Room blood letting was scheduled. These “death watches” began at halftime of the William & Mary game and continued until Referee Jim Knight signaled TA’s knee might have possibly touched the ground around 10 PM on October 9. At that point chaos became the order of the day and, except for an alleged malfeasance in some far-off place called “Utah” the storm clouds went away. It got a bit “overcast” in the 4th quarter of the Tire Bowl and the recent “Signing Day” was not exactly “hats & horns” but the John Bunting effigies (supply your own hanging tree) are no longer hot items on ebay. The Dickie Baddour toilet paper is still available in certain markets.
The actual possibility of John Bunting ever being “zapped, fired, let go, terminated, dragged down Franklin Street behind a team of angry horses” during the past season may have never been eminent but it kept a lot of goggle-eyed fans from interfering with the real world that the rest of us operate in. One apocryphal myth has Dickie pulling a pink slip out of his official Lash LaRue backpack when that cross-eyed line judge initially signaled TD for TA. Fortunately he dropped it, bent down to pick it up, and, when he finally stood on a chair to see what happened, John was doing his Hark The Sound singalong accompanied by a now-jubilant vigilante lynch mob.
This in-season beheading possibility is now apparently all the rage in WuffWorld. Eleven months ago Herb has guided his team to 2nd place, was COY, had the ACC MVP coming back, and visions of V-esque glory was dancing in Lupine minds for the ’04-’05 season. That Herb Sendek began this season as NCSU’s basketball coach was not to anyone’s surprise or dismay. He had bobbed and weaved somehow to survive 7 prior years of lukewarm results but ’03-‘04 had erased those memories … sort of.
That the current season has now taken on the rosy glow of Morticia Addams at midnight is being kind. About the only thing that hasn’t gone wrong is … … well, actually everything has gone wrong. It’s hard to pinpoint a low light so far. Going into Madison Square Garden and scoring fewer points in a half than a blind crippled soccer team is “high” on most lists. Losing to Miami and VaTech was scary but the RBC loss to Pitiful Pete Gillen’s woeful “Hoos” trumped those. Now there is some contrived internal feud between Herb and Julius The Bronx Bomber Hodge in which Julius supposedly opted for attending class over practice. Somewhere on the outskirts of Hickory a Mr. C. Washburn is throwing up a hairball.
USC’s Matt Lienhart might want to study Julius’ “stay in school” decision.
Being at Ground Zero for all this “We Hate Herb … but We Really Hate Lee Because He’s The AD and Everybody Hates ADs” has been fascinating. It has tested the basic State fan’s ability to multi-task.
A State fan’s basic diet is composed of “the media especially the N&O hates us”, served with a side of “all referees hate us too” and topped off with a fancy dessert called “Johnny Swofford conspires against us all the time too”. But, now that the WuffNation has gone on this Hate Herb & Lee diet they are limiting their media – refs – Swofford conspiracy complaining to one night/week and holidays. Even storm clouds of hate have a silver lining.
Because Herb Sendek is State’s coach today, Lupine logic (yes, I know, oxymoron!) says he will be their coach forever. That is quite possibly not true. It would be interesting indeed if Lee Fowler moved his desk into the middle of The Brickyard and broadcast every conversation he has on personnel issues over a loud speaker system linked to the Wolfpack fan boards. Baring that, I suspect we’ll just have to wait and see what happens in the next 6-8 weeks. Ya just never know!
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FINALLY … A Well Officiated Game!
Local ACC BB fans almost all agreed that “those sorry ACC refs” finally called a good game. Well, almost all fans EXCEPT the ones in West Derm. When Duke ended their overtime loss at Maryland playing with three skinny white kids none of whom are majoring in Sociology you know their fabled ferret coach was a most unhappy rodent. The new litmus test for “calling a good game” = foul out at least 6 Duke players. The over-under for total F-bombs in a Krzyzewski v G Williams cuss-fest is 167.
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Swagger’s Stumper
What was Klinger’s favorite baseball team?
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The N&O did a GIANT spread on how misunderstood Rashad McCants is with in-depth analysis of what he writes on his shoes. The only apparent reason for the story was to remind already disconsolate Wuffies how much the N&O loves UNC.
How overblown was this story? It was 3,752 more words than the N&O’s daily recounting of what John Edwards had for breakfast. If you haven’t heard, the one-term Senator is now employed by UNC Law School expressly to Stamp Out Poverty. In his first official act he established a Starbucks scholarship providing a “Venti Skim Peppermint Mocha with No Whip” for any homeless guy or gal with a Kerry-Edwards sticker on their shopping cart. Limit one per vagrant.
Most readers did remember Dana “McMurphy” Delany was stationed on China Beach. Many recalled Marg The Unhappy Hooker of China Beach before she joined Las Vegas’ CSI unit.
Martin Short is THE oddest character on television today.
Classifying the NHL season as “on the brink” is like calling Rick Majerus “kinda chubby” .
