The Wild, the Innocent, and the Ickey Shuffle

On Nov. 18, 1973, after catching a touchdown pass thrown by Len Dawson in a 38-14 win over the Houston Oilers, Elmo Wright of the Kansas City Chiefs ran in place, frantically pumping his knees and his arms, stopping just long enough to spike the football. The modern touchdown celebration was born. The following season, a young rookie for the Houston Oilers delighted fans with his "Funky Chicken" end zone dance. While only nine years before New York Giants receiver Homer Jones delivered the league's first spike, Billy "White Shoes" Johnson made the recognizable, exuberant expression de rigeur for playmakers.



From Gerald Wilhite's flips to Ernest Givins implacably smooth electric slide, Billy Johnson's influence stretches through the present. By 1988, Elbert L. "Ickey" Woods and his eponymous shuffle became a nationwide craze, mimicked even by Darrel Waltrip after winning the 1989 Daytona 500. The shuffle has even been incorporated into a now standard conditioning exercise. The popularity of the celebratory dance sparked a renewed interest and, consequently, derision for the spectacle.



In 1984, largely because of the choreographed routines of the Washington Redskins' so-called Fun Bunch, the NFL rules committee wrote an excessive celebration amendment. This measure tolerated little more than a simple spike. Then, in 1991, commissioner Paul Tagliabue amended the amendment, relaxing it to target only "The use of baiting or taunting acts or words that engender ill will between teams." But in 1999, led by the efforts of Dennis Green, the rules committee co-chairman, the NFL banned group celebrations. Green said "youthful exuberance" is acceptable, but he added that celebrations or actions that incite the opposition cannot be tolerated.



"How about a ten-year-old doing the 'Icky Shuffle' [sic] if he won a spelling bee?" asks Dr. Jim Taylor in his lighthearted missive Your Children are Under Attack. Although a number of other studies like this one do not cite the Ickey Shuffle as the single greatest threat to America's youth, it seems that the same staid conversations about proper conduct and proper expression recycle themselves every time Terrell Owens pulls a Sharpie from his sock, Joe Horn pulls a cell phone from the uprights, or Chad Johnson pulls out his putter and lines up a thirty-five foot eagle putt.

Wonderlic My Balls!

ESPN has posted an excerpt from the Wonderlic test, given to all players entering the NFL draft to assess their general intelligence. It also proves, beyond any reasonable doubt, that I am smarter than Vince Young. According to ESPN:

E.F. "Al" Wonderlic invented the test as a Northwestern grad student in the psychology department in the 1930s. The test was first given to potential NFL draft picks by a handful of teams in 1970, and it quickly became a popular combine tool because, like everything else at the predraft workout, it put a number on performance, and it did it quickly.

Some teams consider the test results critical. Others say they dismiss the results, except for players who score at the extremes. What's an extreme? Well, former Bengals punter and Harvard grad Pat McInally scored a perfect 50 -- the only NFL player known to do so -- while at least one player, it is rumored, scored a 1.


Each year, about 2.5 million job applicants, in every line of work, take the Wonderlic. The average NFL combiner scores about the same as the average applicant for any other job, a 21. A 20 indicates the test-taker has an IQ of 100, which is average.

New Trends in Green Building: The Endor Aesthetic

These prefab villages conceived by Studio Force4 are surprisingly reminiscent of Ewok architecture. Apparently, these structures can be installed in oak, alders, willows and poplars that are planted on toxic soil, and which gradually purify the tainted ground.

National Archives Footage from Google Video

103 historic films from the US National Archives were just indexed by Google Video. While the Apollo moon landing footage has been linked elsewhere, the heart and soul of the National Archives are WWII newsreels and the standard classroom propaghanda pieces like these, produced by the Ministry of the Interior.



Rebuilding Indian Country, 1933

Children of the City, 1970

What Do These Men Have in Common?

Well, there is one thing.

Don Mossi, Lamb of God

Click the ugly to embiggen it.

Ramblin' Wreck, Golden Hurricane, or Thundering Herd?

College mascots tend to be plural. Any team consists of a group of people, and a college or university as a whole imagines itself as an association of different groups: alumni, the faculty, the student body. Even more curious, then, that there exist a number of exceptions to this plurality of the plural. Included below are the major college mascots whose common name does not end with an “S.”

Color seems to be popular among the S-less set. The Dartmouth Big Green, the North Texas Mean Green, and the Cornell Big Red slightly modify their color of choice, while the Stanford Cardinal and Harvard Crimson dance around varying shades of red.



The forces of nature get equal attention, and this time it is they who are colored, as with the Alabama Crimson Tide, the St. Johns Red Storm, the Tulane Green Wave, and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane. That last one sounds far too dirty to be repeated in public, but I imagine that the Golden Hurricane faithful take great pride in their moniker nonetheless.



Animal names are by far the most common college mascots, and they are equally well represented with out a trailing S. Although there are the Bison of Bucknell and Howard and the Wolfpack of Nevada and North Carolina State, a number of animals whose groupings are referenced without Mr. S are without major college representation. Lions without pride, birds without flock, and, perhaps not surprisingly, neither geese nor gander. And, lest we forget about the trend of descriptive intervention, there is the Marshall Thundering Herd, a personal favorite.

Mascot names involving the human animal tend to be culturally or geographically specific, as is the case with the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, the Fighting Illini of Illinois, the Minutemen of Massachusetts, the Statesmen of Hobart, or the Flying Dutchmen of Hofstra. Actually, I don’t understand the last one at all. It is culturally specific, but what Dutch culture has to do with Hofstra is anyone’s guess. Anyway, after an occupational nod to the Navy Midshipmen and human-color hybrid wave to the Syracuse Orangemen, we’re left with nothing. Nothing except for Georgia Tech. Yellow Jackets ends with an S you say? True, but by as early as 1885 Georgia Tech had been known as the Ramblin’ Wreck, an identifier that predates the Yellow Jacket by at least twenty years. And with a such a sweet ride to accompany the name, who needs Buzz or his pluralism?

Are Catchers the Drummers of Baseball?

We used no mattress on our hands, No cage upon our face;
We stood right up and caught the ball, With courage and with grace.

-George Ellard, catcher on the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, Baseball's first professional team.

Lovingly dubbed "the tools of ignorance" by Herold "Muddy" Ruel—a lawyer turned backstop who caught for greats like Walter Johnson with the Washington Senators in the 1920s—the protective gear worn by the catcher has always struck me as the most distinguishing equipment in sport. Simply put, only in baseball is one player so dramatically differentiated from his teammates. In football, with the exception of the occasional neck roll, variously sized facemasks, and the now extinct shoeless place kicker, every player wears roughly the same thing. For the most part, the differences in equipment are just variations. Hockey diverges a bit more, but again, all of the players are heavily protected and equipped, thus making the goalie's robust padding seem less an anomaly on the ice.

To me, catchers have always stood out, aside from being the sole carriers of the tools of ignorance on the diamond. Literally, they see the game in a different way. Their point of view on the field is shared only by the home plate umpire. They interact with the umpire, the pitcher, and opposing hitters more than anyone else. They are the field generals, responsible for calling the game, aligning the defense, watching baserunners, and directing cut-off throws.

My father was a catcher, and at an early age I began to understand that he saw baseball differently. My father is also a musician and imparted a similarly unique perspective whenever we'd see live music. In either context, it seemed to be the subtleties that interested him: a catcher's footwork when fielding a bunt or a drummer signaling changes. Not that this stopped my father from making jokes at the expense of the drummer. His band churns through them at a Spinal Tapish rate. The stereotypes, he has found, are generally true: they are a bizarre bunch, often showing up late or not at all for practice with embarassingly implausable excuses. A good drummer, like a good catcher, is hard to find.

Like the catcher with all his conspicuous gear, the drummer is always set apart from the rest of the band. He sits as they stand, a gesture that physically resembles the catcher's crouch. Generally, the drummer is placed at the back of the stage, the only performer who can see the performance unfold in its entirety, a point of view analogous to the catcher's. Just as the catcher controls the pace of the game through pitch selection, mound visits, and the ubiquitous palms down "calm down" gesture to the pitcher, the drummer drives the tempo. In general, the contributions of both catchers and drummers are generally underrated and underdiscussed, at least in any sort of popular discourse on baseball or music. The battery and the engine are essential. So, to paraphrase James Brown, give the catcher some! Or, at the very least, start referring to drum sticks and cowbells as the tools of ignorance.