Duck-Fondlers, Highlighter Shortages, and Acid Flashbacks: Why Your Team Sucks
November 19th, 2009 by Evan Lisull of the Arizona Desert LampThe following is an arranged cross-posting of trash talk between the Oregon Commentator and the Arizona Desert Lamp in preparation for Saturday’s football game vs. Arizona. Don’t like what’s being said? Feel free to trash talk back, and look for our rebuttal posting on the Desert Lamp website, www.desertlamp.com later today. Go Ducks!
At some point between reading the Wikipedia article on “Pete DeFazio” and the UODPS Security Report, I realized that Oregon is absolutely useless and boring and a waste of anyone’s time. The state is known for “mail-in voting” and Portland, which makes Idaho’s “We got dem potatoes!” marketing campaign sound almost appealing.
But the deal was already set. A submission was due! Cry “Havoc!,” and let slip the hounds of gin.
1.PIRG-loving schmucks
Oh, I can already hear the Commentariat whining in protest – “We’ve fought them for years! We exposed them for what they really were! We gave you all of the background material so that you could stop them in Arizona!” Whatever. Somebody had to give them a sense of legitimacy when they were still babes suckling on Nader’s sagging teat, and that somebody is the state of Oregon.
Speaking of taking shit from the worst entities on the face of the earth. . .
2.You gave the world Joey Harrington
As a Lions fan and Detroit-area native, there’s a lot to hate, generally. But Joey Harrington is definitely up on the list.
3.Sartorial “Shma-shmortion”
“Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.” ~University of Oregon Athletic Director Mike Bellotti Oscar Wilde
Stupid people on the internet say, “OMG rly originall making fun of Oregon’s jerseyz.” And of course, being the Internet, this comment is supposed to be sarcastic, and is made in Mom’s basement while wearing battery-acid-colored pajamas.
But look: this is not a matter of originality, or trying to be cute. This is a serious issue that needs addressing. If Congress is having a commission on the BCS , it sure as shit needs to have a commission on this Ralph Lauren fever dream. Where is the FCC when you need them? (Protip: Finding strangers in the Alps .)
4.Duck-Tape
“So, dude, for Halloween, I duct-taped fucking wings on my shirt sleeves!”
“Uh, why’d you do that?”
“My mom made me. She thought I might get hit by a car at night.”
This is the college football equivalent of this shirt:
Minus, of course, the whole “bad-ass” aspect. In other news, Nike is in the process of designing a duck-beak shaped mouth guard.
5.Back-Brain Stimulants
Something about these uniforms reminded me of this quote:
In the control room the Technician mixes a bicarbonate of soda and belches into his hand: “God damned tenor’s a brown artist!” he mutters sourly. “Mike! rumph,” the shout ends in a belch. “Cut that swish fart off the air and give him his purple slip. He’s through as of right now . . . Put in that sex-changed Liz athlete . . . She’s a full-time tenor at least . . . Costume? How in the fuck should I know? I’m no dress designer swish department from the costume department! What’s that ? The entire costume department occluded as a security risk? What am I, an octopus?
OK, not really. I just got this from flipping to a random page in Naked Lunch . Works though, doesn’t it?
This is what happens to the Notre Dame helmets after Charlie Weis is done with them.
6.Make your own offense-to-all-that-is-decent-in-this-world!
This is a good idea, if potentially dangerous.
Seriously: what the fuck is wrong with your state? Washington has the purple-gold Huskies, and the scarlet-gray Cougars. Kinda butch-femme, but whatever. Meanwhile, fucking Oregon has to go out and have the Chernobyl-yellow-green Ducks play the construction-worker-orange Beavers. Shit like this is why health care is so expensive in this country.
The one thing that hasn’t been said, though, is the fact that UO has only adopted the all-white get-up (white unis, white helmets) on games before Labor Day. Which means that they actually care about shit like this.
Oh, you sad, sad shards of existence.
7.You bastards legitimized Boise State
Everything you needed to know about politics, you learned playing backyard football. And everybody knows that there’s that kinda obnoxious kid, who’s kinda big and probably pretty good. But the kid’s a real fuck – it doesn’t matter why, he’s probably Mormon or something – and nobody wants to hang out with him.
So one day you’re playing football and he says, “Hey, you mind if I play?” You don’t say, “Gosh, gee, sure thing Jimbo! Line up on the left side.” You say, “Fuck you, asshole, we’ve got even teams.” If he plays, and he’s good, you’ll never be able to get rid of him. Ever.
Boise State is that kid of the college football world. They wanted to play with the big kids, and the rest of the country said, “Fuck you, you’re from Idaho.” But not Oregon – nooooooo. So goddamn special. They just had to give the blue-fielded coxswains of the football universe a chance to prove themselves against a “real” team, and they did it – twice.
They were already yesterday’s news – after all the hooplah about beating Oklahoma, they lost to TCU in the fucking Poinsetta Bowl . But like that asshole Brendan Fraser, you just had to bring this national nightmare back from the crypt. (No, it’s not quite as shitty as the Mummy . But it’s close.)
And plus, Jesus Fucking Christ:
This is worse than what Keith Jackson sees in his ketamine binges. (You thought he just ‘retired’? Please.)
8.And you know keeping water fowl, for uh, domestic, you know, within the stadium. . .
Arizona might have taken away our mascot’s guns , but at least they didn’t cut his balls off and turn him into a Chinese knockoff of a second-rate cartoon:
The nickname for Oregon’s first sports teams was “Webfoots,” coined by longtime Oregonian sports editor L. H. Gregory. The name originated from a group of fishermen from the coast of Massachusetts whose descendants settled in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. When the University of Oregon was founded in 1876, Webfoots was the natural choice for the school’s nickname, because of Oregon’s reputation for wet weather.
Sports reporters later changed the nickname to “Ducks,” and by the 1930s, a small white duck named “Puddles” began to appear to sports events. Beginning in 1940, cartoon drawings of Puddles in student publications began to resemble Donald Duck, and by 1947, Walt Disney was aware of the issue. Capitalizing on his friendship with a Disney cartoonist, Oregon athletic director Leo Harris met Disney and reached an informal handshake agreement that granted the University of Oregon permission to use Donald as its sports mascot.
When Disney lawyers later questioned the agreement in the 1970s, the University produced a photo showing Harris and Disney wearing matching jackets with an Oregon Donald logo. Relying on the photo as evidence of Disney’s wishes, in 1973, both parties signed a formal agreement granting the University the right to use Donald’s likeness as a symbol for (and restricted to) Oregon sports.
‘Webfoots’? ‘Puddles’? Fucking adorable. Too adorable, apparently, for the psilocybin-addled Nike “scientists,” who had to bring in “Mandrake”:
As the story goes, the idea behind the new mascot, which Bartko and other athletics officials call “Mandrake,” spawned from a spring basketball game. When Oregon was in Sacramento, Calif., playing Montana in the NCAA Tournament, athletic officials noticed advantages of having an agile mascot.
Creeps. Apparently, “Mandrake” looked like this.
I was hoping that it’d look more like this.
9.They’re gonna kill that poor woman!
Look, I appreciate a good rivalry like any beer-blooded American. But I also understand that there is a certain line in those rivalries. Where that line is depends on what sort of hard liquor is on hand, but no matter what, “kidnapping of women” is on the other side of the line. Apparently, no such line exists in the state of Oregon:
Maybe the most ingenious stunt of all took place in 1957 when four Oregon student athletes, all members of Theta Xi fraternity, decided one night (when they were all bored out of their minds) that wouldn’t it be clever if they could show up at Oregon State’s Homecoming game with Washington State and actually kidnap their Homecoming court.
Which is exactly what they did. Posing as reporters from the Seattle Post Intelligencer, allegedly sent to Corvallis on assignment to do a story on OSC’s game with a Washington school, the three ladies of the court accompanied the “reporters” for a short car ride to Avery Park south of town to shoot photos. Almost right away, the car began heading north toward Salem.
For the next 12 hours the group stayed tucked away at the home of the parents of one of the kidnappers, enjoying a large meal and delighting at how much national publicity the whole story was beginning to generate, including reports that the entire Oregon State football team was out looking for the court. Because Homecoming Queen Pearl Friel was native Hawaiian, it was also rumored that football players from the University of Hawaii were threatening to travel to Oregon to deal with the situation.
This, mind you, is from the Oregon State write-up – topped only by this OSU Alumni summary:
However, the prank of all pranks took place just before OSU’s Homecoming game with Washington State in 1957. Posing as journalists from the Seattle Post Intelligencer, four UO athletes “kidnapped” Oregon State’s Homecoming court members and took them to Salem, where the home of one of the “nappers” was used to entertain the three coeds (the parents of the student had dinner waiting) for over 12 hours.
Because it happened in the ’50s, kidnapping is OK? Actual quote from one of the kidnappers: “We phoned our president’s office and were told that the prank was OK, provided we didn’t break any laws and if nothing ‘physical’ happened.”
You fucking people. Stay the hell away from our women.
10.Your bullshit trail killed Kenny
You bastards!
