Saw*Kick Media

Dear Sports God (or gods),

Hi, it’s your old pal MoneyMike. How have you been? How are things in Boston, where I’ve heard you recently moved? I’ve been good this year, I’m sure you’ve noticed. I’ve continued to give up my small sliver of social time in order to be alone in front of the television during games so other people don’t hear my offensive advice for Mike Brown and I’ve forced my Resident Lady Friend to alter her Sunday schedule to allow me nine hours of football.

Moreover, I’ve attended baseball games that were snowed out and Cavs games that LeBron James didn’t play in. I’m not bragging, just trying to get what’s coming to me. With that in mind, here is all I want for my Cleveland Christmas.

I want the Browns to embarrass the Bengals next weekend in Cincinnati. I don’t just want a win and a playoff birth, though both would be great, I would like a definitive whooping that would silence the band-wagon jumping kitty fans that popped up out of nowhere in Marvin Lewis’ first season.

I want the resolution to the forthcoming Brady Quinn-Derek Anderson debate to come out in favor of the Browns. Even if they both turn out to be great, I want the better quarterback so that there isn’t another memory of what could have been in Cleveland.

I want the bar behind the cross bar to be named the Phil Dawson Bar. Even if you don’t want to do this one for me, I think Phil deserves as much for kicking away his best years on an often lifeless team.

I want a defensive lineman that can cause enough damage for me to remember what an athletic freak Kamerion Wimbley is.

I want to watch Romeo Crennel do a shuttle run. Come on. Maybe we can set it up for charity or something.

I want a point guard that can hit an open jump shot and play mediocre defense. I’m not asking for the Jason Kidd model, I would happily take an Andre Miller or something more generic from the Western Conference.

I want Drew Gooden’s hair thatch back.

I want Danny Ferry to calmly explain to the Cavs role players that that they are not worth big-market money.

I want those role players to understand him instead of saying, ‘But look how much money you made for playing 15 minutes a night.’

I want someone to be brave enough to pull on Mike Brown’s nose and glasses to see if they come off in one chunk like a Mr. Potato head doll.

I want Travis Hafner to remember how much he hates the baseball. Last year he seemed to think that the air deserved his ire instead, but I wish for the days when his only goal in life was to hit the ball farther than any caveman before him ever had.

I want C.C. Sabathia to learn how to calm down and pitch in big games.

I want Andy Marte to turn into a player before he trade him for two Double-A players and he becomes an all-star for some obscure team like the Washington Nationals.

I want Grady Sizemore, LeBron James and Kellen Winslow II to stay in Cleveland forever. And ever. No three players better sum up my love for their individual teams.

I want sportscasters to do away with the following words or sayings: Unbelievable; he almost intercepted that (you intercept something or you don’t); the first annual anything; phenomenal (few things beyond hurricanes and LeBron James are actually phenomenal); any nickname that is merely the players first initial and then all of or part of their last name (best Cleveland example is J-Mike); and this is a high character guy (yeah, because you know him so well).

I want the Lake Erie Monsters to win a title in whatever league it is they play in. Call it my philanthropic gift this season.

I want the WNBA to hire an ombudsman who will concede that studies show no one actually cares.

I want Rick Reilly from 1998. And back in Sports Illustrated.

I want TMQ to run all year long. And I want him to run for president.

I want ESPN to set up cameras in a city that isn’t Boston or New York.

I also want ESPN to do an ‘Outside the Lines’ story on my life and play that really tragic music while I rehash stories about the 1997 World Series and The Collapse in this year’s ALCS. I want Brian Windhorst to be interviewed.

Finally, you can forget everything else on this list if you get me a championship. I haven’t seen anyone else’s list, but I think you can cover a lot of ground with just one of trophy.

Thanks. And if Bill Simmons stops home for the holidays, tell him I said to go F*ck himself.

———
A game straight from imagination land: We all have imaginations, and I most often use mine to picture what a perfect game for the Browns might look like. Well, yesterday’s 8-0 win against the Buffalo Bills was nearly everything I could have ever hoped for. Anyone who has grown up with the midwesterner’s knowledge of football – that it’s a harsh game meant to be played bullying your opponent in the worst weather conditions – had to feel vindicated by the slip and slide paradise brought to us in the form of controlled runner Jamal Lewis yesterday. With his measured steps, it looked as if we had our own little bowling ball in a game where most defenders looked like overly waxed pins.

Moreover, the brutality of the game was delivered by the Browns on the defensive end. Hellacious hits were wrapped up and given for Buffalo’s end of the 2007 season party by Sean Jones and Chaun Thompson, and the squad controlled the Bills from drive one.

Since the Browns returned in 1999, there have been few times indeed where they have played like anything I could have imagined. Instead, it’s been mostly a nightmare. As always, I will not painfully rehash the details of nearly a decade’s worth of incompetence. Instead, I will just allow you to read the sum-it-all up descriptive adjective that I created for 1999-2006: Couchbrownwarrenbutchruddolinemotorcyclered. That’s going to be in the 2008 Webster’s. Look it up. The point is, that ineptitude has come to an end on so many fronts this year that I can’t even begin to delve into each of them.

Not only have the Browns beaten the stench of offensive lines past, but fortune’s favor seems to have come back to the lakeshore as well. Take a look at yesterday’s game: Buffalo’s punter had a snap go over his head for a safety, our punter fell clean on his backside during a kick but harm was done on the play. In times of less fortune, like, say, the Chris Palmer era, those two outcomes would most certainly be reversed. And we won’t even go into the type of Karma behind a Braylon Edward drop bouncing into Joey J.’s hands for a 25-yard gain.

A brisk note on the Cavaliers: They’re terrible. Just awful.

A brief holiday note: Due to the failure of some online retailers, I had to make an unfortunate trip to shopping hell this past weekend to pick up the last few items for my Resident Lady Friend. MoneyMike has long disapproved of malls in general, what with their teenage hangers out and junk-sale kiosks that can only be avoided through brisk walking and outward rudeness, but the holiday shopping scene is far worse. More and more, Americans are shopping online (as always, I have no numbers to support this, I’m just repeating the general topic of newscasts on holiday shopping), and it would appear as though the stores are acting out in desperation.

While at Great Northern Mall, far and away one of the most unpleasant places in the greater Cleveland area, my hands were filled with fliers on products I would never buy and one saleswoman accosted me to rub down one of my finger nails as part of a pitch for a do-it-all pedicure/manicure set for only $59.99. Nothing makes MoneyMike more uncomfortable than unwarranted touches from strangers, so it goes without saying that no sale was made.

Things were not as bad at Crocker Park, Westlake’s own Yuppy paradise, but the general feeling of selling you something that you don’t want was overbearing. If, indeed, stores are concerned with the number of people who are now shopping online, a good suggestion may be to not hassle the shoppers that are left.

Finally, boos go out to both Barnes&Noble.com and Best Buy.com, which lack the delivery resources to ship items purchased on December 11 to MoneyMike’s Lakewood Mansion before December 24. Most upsetting was that B&N, long a favorite of MoneyMike, could not ship Eric Clapton’s autobiography in that 13 day window, but a visit to the store in Westlake showed that the retailer had so many copies that they were just lined up in piles against the wall. Since I had been willing to pay expedited shipping charges just to avoid the holiday season, couldn’t someone at the local store have just dropped it in the mail? Surely a package weighing less than two pounds could make it from Westlake to Lakewood in under 13 days…

Racism and the Mitchell Report: With the 409-page Mitchell Report a hotter online item than Britney’s crotch shot, I feel it is time that America apologizes to Barry Bonds for the obvious racist undertones in the public trials of the home run king. Long has MoneyMike argued that the public disgracing of Bonds was due solely to his uncanny ability to look like a prick while snubbing the common decency of letting a real hero like Hank Aaron hang on to the game’s most important record. But after finding out that Roger Clemens did the exact same thing, I realize that we have to realize some racial implications must exist.

I know I am not the first to make this point, but it needs to be repeated: why didn’t we bully information about Clemens from insiders and reporters the way we did Bonds? The fact of the matter is that a mathematician would tell you that all the variables are the same except one. Both men are pompous. Both performed better than they ever had previously way after what should have been their prime. Both men have a chip on their shoulder about being viewed as anything except the best of at least a generation. Both men have shown zero class throughout their careers.

I’ll be the first to say it: We’re sorry, Barry, Roger Clemens is also a giant douchebag. There, that should start the path to cleansing our souls.

MoneyMike’s Green with Irony Watch (running item): This week’s item will be brief because I hate to relive a terrible moment. While on my unfortunate trip to Barnes & Nobles, I had to pick up a present for MoneyMike’s Relief Father for Christmas. My step father has long been too good of a man for the likes of a son like me, so I tend to give in each year and buy him whatever presents that MoneyMike’s Mother says he really wants. This year he wanted a copy of Glenn Beck’s ‘An Inconvenient Book.’

Forget for a second that Beck is an awful human being with a show that promotes everything that isn’t working in American politics and focus on the fact that Beck devotes an entire chapter of this book to explaining why we shouldn’t be worried about Global Warming, and why it’s merely a talking point for the liberal platform.

With that in mind, MoneyMike’s Green with Irony Watch is awarded to MoneyMike this week. That I spent more than $20 on this book, which works directly against my cause, makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit. To be frank, spending $20 against the cause does more damage than all the good I do by promoting going green to a bunch of Internet loafers who rarely leave their parents’ basement.

A good link: Zack, The Man Who Knows Sports, sent this link to me late last week. It’s a mathematical look at rap music. It’s absolutely hilarious, but admission to the laugh party is a working knowledge of rap music. If you can’t recite at least two lines from ‘It was a Good Day,’ then don’t bother.

Next week: There will be no MoneyMike appearance on the site next week, so find another way to kill an hour of your time.

In two weeks: You make a resolution to save more money and lose weight while I ponder on how much money you’ll lose and weight you’ll gain.

- MoneyMike has set and broken his own record for longest headline on an S*KM piece three times this year. The mark will undoubtedly earn him extra consideration when S*KM bonus checks are tallied at the end of the holiday season.

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