I think someday Wolves head coach Κυριάκος Ραμπίδης will figure out a starting line-up and a regular rotation, and I won't go to Wolves games wondering which players will be inexplicably buried at the end of the bench tonight. When the Wolves lose to a Rockets team without Yao Ming or Tracy McGrady on a Wednesday night in front of a few thousand people (and that one guy who totally looks like Szczerbiak has to actually apologize to the sparse crowd for the poor quality of the opposition) it's hard for me to watch a couple journeyman players get heavy minutes while rookies sit. After coming from behind to win their opener, the Wolves have lost 13 straight, with a high degree of correlation between the score and whether or not they remember to rebound. They really desperately need K-Love back, unless this is some really elaborate ploy to get the a #4 overall pick (not a big enough market for a lottery pick) and keep racking up the rights to European players with no apparent ambition to play in the best league in the world.
The highlight of a night out to a Wolves game was ironically finally hitting Black Sheep Pizza for a gigantic calzone nearly a year after my cousins game me a gift certificate to a restaurant three blocks from my house (I was busy, alright?) even though the like, six pounds of ricotta they squeezed in was a little more than the human body was designed to handle. Another highlight (and probably also more than I could handle) is the new cheerleaders they've got, especially the middle eastern looking one... or maybe she's Greek and came up the Mississippi on a barge with coach Kiriakos Rambidis. The creepy burned in tans and general arrhythmia of the Timberwoles dancers in recent years really had me scrutinizing the other team during time-outs, and a bald man squatting with a dry erase board in a forest of sweaty guys tying and retying their shorts really shouldn't be competing on an equal footing with fit women in boots and loincloths.
Since I started writing this (I'm so tired lately get three sentences into everything and then space out) I saw another confrontation of Wolves and Sheep, when the Vikings eviscerated the Seahawks. I would have enjoyed that more a few years ago, but then the only Seahawks fan I knew got a lot less fun to taunt. There certainly was plenty of material in a game where the Vikings had the game so far in the bag they pulled Brett Favre in the 3rd quarter to rest his arm, and the Tardis continued the pummeling of the Seahawks. I'd guess the only person not nursing a giant erection on the Vikings sideline (come on, we all heard about the boat trip, we know how they celebrate) was Sage Rosenfels, who had to be thinking if a quarterback with a dumb name was going to take over for Favre, it should probably be the guy the Vikings lured up here to be their starter before Favre set his mind on chasing Michael Jordan and Sugar Ray Leonard on the list of most pro-sports retirements.
I think the most remarkable thing I've seen in sports in recent weeks was the mascot game at halftime of the Vikings game, featuring the usual line-up of local sports and business characters in suits that allow limited mobility, poor peripheral vision, and really no ability to grip a ball of any kind. At Wolves games this is usually such an epic disaster nobody can look away until its over, which is shortly after it devolves into a cruel game of messing with the least beloved costumed figure: the first one I saw ended in a hogpile on Barney the Lovable Dinosaur, the last one with Captain Morgan repeatedly throwing chest passes at some poor guy in a dolphin suit who couldn't get his flippers up to catch it. At the Vikings game I was just expecting them all to beat the living hell out of Herkey the Hawk as payback for the Hawkeyes win over the Gophers, but they actually played real football against a bunch of 7th graders, and when Sasquatch bolted for the end zone throwing a straight arm into every kids face who dared get in his way (never get between Big Foot and the end zone) I knew I was seeing something I'd never see again.
The weirdest part though was nobody knew what the hell team or business Sasquatch was supposed to be promoting... I think Big Foot just came into town for a rave*, wandered into the Dome after eating the first security guard who tried to frisk him, they gave him a jersey and lined him up between a wolf and a bee and he felt right at home. The proof would be if anybody has any blurry pictures of the event, because as Mitch Hedberg tells us, Big Foot is blurry.
*-Have you booked DJ Big Foot for your next Wedding or Bar Mitzvah? He's got an office above a hookah bar in Queens, I got the phone number around here somewhere...
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