SB Nation User Blog: Bitter Fan

Hating The Rams

Bitter Fan — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:30:48 -0000

"I think the Rams will always be the 49ers' biggest rival. It doesn't matter that they no longer play in Los Angeles. If the Rams played their home games on Mars, it would still be a rivalry." - Roger Craig

I've been thinking whether people still view the Rams as a rival now that it's been 14 years since the Rams left LA. The rivalry's certainly had some of the spice taken out of it by the move to St. Louis, but I see those unis and steam comes out of my ears. The Raiders? Bah, an AFC team will never be a rival. You can't have a rivalry with a team you play once every five years. The Cowboys? OK, we've had our moments, but again, not an intradivisional rival. We still play the Rams twice a year, they still have the same whiny little bitch attitude and they've still got a ton of fans in LA. I hate them with every fiber of my considerable being.

Please sprinkle this thread with stories about how you hated Kevin Greene and his smug grin, how you called Jim Everett "Chris" to his face after his pussy dive in the NFC title game, how you popped champagne corks when the St. Louis Call Girl finally croaked and how Kurt Warner's wife still looks like a man.

RIP Monte Clark

Bitter Fan — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 17:52:57 -0000

AKA the guy Joe Thomas fired. Turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it eventually led to the hiring of Bill Walsh but for a couple years Niners fans were truly in hell. Clark was a highly-touted assistant with the Dolphins and was hired by the 49ers to be their head coach in 1976, returning home to the organization for whom he had started his NFL career as a defensive tackle.

He went on to take a team that wasn't all that talented (a lot of older guys from the Nolan era, some younger guys who would only blossom in the Walsh era) to an 8-6 record, the first winning season since 1972. They'd actually started the season 6-1 and three losses by a combined 11 points kept them from the playoffs. At the end of the season Eddie D. bought the team and bought in Joe Thomas as GM. Clark, who had previously been the GM and had known Thomas's insanity from Thomas's period at the Dolphins, wanted no part of the ordeal and demanded that either Thomas go or he go. Thomas stayed and so he left.

National Football Post article

Vintage/vintagesque jerseys

Bitter Fan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:02:08 -0000

FOOCH'S NOTE 5:55pm: I'm a big fan of throwback jerseys so I thought I'd move this to the front page. Can anybody help with this?
______________________________________________

Does anybody know a website that manufactures or can source retro-style football jerseys? I'm desperately looking for someone who can make a late 50s or early 60s style Niner jersey.

Something like this:

via www.sportscards4all.com

or this:

via storesense1.carrierzone.com

Please don't suggest Mitchell & Ness for three reasons:

1) They're $300 and up. I'm looking more in the 100-175 range.
2) I don't want a specific player's jersey - it could be number 5 or 85, I don't care.
3) They don't sell any 50s/60s Niner jerseys anyway.

I haven't found anything online (it seems if I wanted to do baseball it would be easy, but there seems to be very little market for retro football gear besides helmets), and I'm hoping against hope someone here knows someone who does such a thing.

Something for your iPods

Bitter Fan — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:59:33 -0000

Just thought I'd dump this in your laps. It's the most famous Giants game ever ever. On October 3, 1951, Gordon McLendon's Liberty Broadcasting System was providing the radio call to much of the country, since Russ Hodges and Red Barber were only heard in the Tri-State area. It's the only complete radio account of the game, and the ol' Scotchman himself was filling in as a solid if verbose announcer, moonlighting from his normal day job of inventing Top 40 radio, running for Senator, and possibly conspiring to kill Kennedy (if you believe Warren Hinckle).

His call of Thomson's home run is every bit as hair-raising as Russ Hodges's, more so, in fact.

The Shot Heard 'Round The World

Bitter Fan — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 08:36:03 -0000

I'm a native San Franciscan, but at heart I'm from the East Coast. Most of my family's American roots are in New England, and my parents were frequent bleacher bums at Fenway in the seventies, so I root for the Sox. But other roots are from New York. Like a sizable portion of America, I had family members immigrate through Ellis Island. I had family who lived in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens. A few of my aunts and uncles root for the current New York National League team and partial successor to the Giants, the Mets. My grandfather watched the Giants play at the Polo Grounds.

Combining that with the synergy of being from San Francisco, the fact New York is a fantastic city and a love of baseball history, I eat up everything about the New York Giants. I have books, caps, t-shirts, videos, etc. The next time I go to New York, I'm going to go down the staircase left from the park that took fans from the Harlem River Drive and Coogan's Bluff into the park (yeah, you walked down to get into the Polo Grounds).

Today I listened to the third game of the 1951 National League playoff on my computer, and a friend of mine was stunned to know that a copy of the game exists. As he said, it's the seminal moment in the history of the National League, and I have a feeling that most Giants fans have no idea this game is publicly available. Hopefully this will help.

There is a call of the game that lives on. Russ Hodges's call for WMCA radio is lost with the exception of the famous bottom of the 9th, which was recorded by a guy with a tape recorder in Queens. Red Barber's call is also lost except for, ironically, the bottom of the 9th, which an ad executive in Manhattan also taped. And Ernie Harwell's call for WPIX and NBC television - by the way, these playoff games were the first televised baseball games from coast to coast as the transcontinental coaxial cable had just been completed - has also been lost.

But the call most people actually heard was Gordon McClendon's call for the Liberty Broadcasting Network. McClendon was an experienced recreator of baseball games in his spare time while simultaneously running the Liberty network and inventing Top 40 radio. Occasionally he flew to broadcast live games and with stiff competition this time in the face of television (meaning that McClendon couldn't broadcast games by reading out Western Union wire reports), McClendon hopped on a plane to New York. He loved his verbiage - he created a character for himself as a sage old Scotsman handing down his opinions on sports, and he was capable at it from the days of recreations when he may have had to ad-lib for a good five minutes while Western Union's ball by ball coverage stalled.

The full game is available here
MLB charges 3 bucks for a day pass to listen to it. Hey, it's MLB. They're not going to give it to you for free.

I hope people enjoy finding out about this. It's probably the best game in the history of the National League, and deserves to be listened to.

Oh, and for your viewing pleasure, the following day's NY Daily News front page:

Those are some boss photoshop skills, what with scanning half a page each and putting them together. I rock. Yeah.

The 1954 World Series is on there too, but that's for another diary and abysmal photoshop effort.