Hey Fran: I thought I would point out that at the bottom of this column, you got mocked by Tim Keown of ESPN. And no, you should not be flattered that he reads your stuff. http://espn.go.com/magazine/keown_20020913.html And finally, you know what they say about expansion teams -- the team is always ahead of the folks in the press box: After inhaling the heady air of the inaugural win over the Cowboys, a Houston sportswriter wrote, "The Texans came out like old-time gunslingers, their six-shooters blazing, and served notice there was a new marshal in town." I would like to add my own, and maybe other people would like to add. Before doing one yourself, you might want to read the ESPN column if you are not familiar with the style. It's not that great either, but whatever. let's see... If only ESPN writer Tim Keown knew that it had nothing to do with an expansion victory - Gradma Blinebury always writes like this...: "The Texans came out like old-time gunslingers, their six-shooters blazing, and served notice there was a new marshal in town." Here's the Blinebury article. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/sports/fb/texans/1566962 CBFC
i have to say...i don't understand...i'm not a big blinebury fan...but what's wrong with what he wrote?? am i missing something??
I think CBFC is pointing out that Tim Keown said that the Texans team is ahead of Blinebury plus Blinebury's statement of a "new marshal in town" is very trite and literally not true. Since when have the Cowboys been in Houston?? You could say something like this if the Jets and Giants played each other in football or the Clippers and Lakers in the NBA, but you can't say that about 2 teams from different cities .
i see what you're saying manny...just can't imagine making a big deal over it, though... this kind of article is typical of sports columnists around the country...i don't see anything about what fran wrote that sets it apart as incredibly stupid enough to devote a column to covering it.
I am sorry, I forgot to clarify. I think Fannie represents all that is wrong in the sports media world. Because the Chronicle is the only game in town, his incoherent, alternately asskissing/inflammatory, bandwagoning Billwaltonesque hyperbolic short-paragraphed badly-written totally-devoid-of-substantive-analysis-meaningful-commentary bullcrap goes unchecked in my beloved hometown. He is like a poor man's C.W. Nevius, which is not a compliment. Frannie, your writing is bad, and not in that semi-fresh-1985-Michael-Jackson "Bad" way -- bad in that 'stop doing what you are doing because you are bad at it' way. Link: http://bbs.clutchcity.net/php3/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22773 Some people will disagree. That's fine. CBFC
no...fowler still lives here, but he had a falling out with the sports editor at the chronicle, as i understand it. he wrote that book about the oilers leaving town...and now he hosts a golf show early saturday mornings on sports radio
The book is news to me. I would really love to read it, as a HUGE Houston Oilers fan (and now Tennessee fan)... I looked for it on amazon.com and found it for sale (used) for only $0.95!!! But shipping is $3.50!!! I find it tough to spend over 3x the price of an item I want to buy on shipping... Maybe I'll just find a used bookstore in town.
Excellent, excellent post CBFC. Frannie's completely & totally unreadable 95% of the time, and the other 5% of his columns are only good for their unintentional humor. The man's never met a metaphor he didn't like, or use in a column - appropriety (appropriateness?) be damned. The Chron does have some good sportswriters: McClain is great, Carlton Thompson, Feigen & Murphy are usually worth a read. All their columnists suck though; how in the hell John Lopez has a job at a "major" newspaper is something that's always escaped me.
absolutely! But i'm torn for the Titans v. Texans showdown... I don't think I can let go of those old Oiler ties!
Let it go, man. The world has moved on...turn from the dark side, unless it's too late & you're already pasty & shriveled like Darth Vader.
i was the biggest oiler fan in the world...my dorm room in college was decked out in oiler stuff my freshman year...my father and i had season tickets...but when bud left, everything changed. i realized i was not a fan of the houston oilers because of the oilers part...but because of the houston part. felt a lot like a girl you love breaking up with you or cheating on you...love/hate thing. go texans!
I'm usually not the kind of person to kick a man when he's down, but the siren call of CBFC's leadership was a force too strong to be denied. From this week's Houston Press "News Hostage" column: http://www.houstonpress.com/issues/2002-09-12/hostage.html/1/index.html Burying the Lead It's easy to believe that sports fans missed the Houston Chronicle's latest scoop. After all, sports fans are loutish, beer-drinking, porno-consuming Neanderthals, and the Chron's Houston section has lately looked like a low-rent version of Maxim or Details. There was the Houston Texans cheerleader story August 29, the one that featured "Jessica" lounging seductively on the grass, her head lying softly on the butt of "Jennifer." That story also had a shot of "Tammy" doing stomach crunches, from an angle that her gynecologist could appreciate. The next day's article on "The Lost Art of Doing Nothing" featured an artist's rendition of a Tammy-like pose. A week or so later, an article on yoga had a woman bending over in such a way that a young man's thoughts no doubt turned to subjects other than yoga. So it's not surprising that the Chron's sports scoop didn't get more of a reaction, given its readers' newfound allegiance to the lifestyles section. But for those who missed it, the paper did its annual mammoth football preview August 29, and it included, as always, predictions from staffers on the coming season. Specialists like columnist Fran Blinebury put all their years of accumulated expertise and untold amounts of research into the task. Sure, it would be easy to just pick out the same old tired names to predict the winners of the nation's college conferences, but such half-assedness would not be worthy of the proud Chronicle. So we can only assume it was a buried scoop when Blinebury picked Brigham Young University to win the WAC. BYU used to dominate the Western Athletic Conference, of course, and picking them to win each year was a gimme. Of course, BYU hasn't been part of the WAC since 1999. Until this year, apparently, when they sneaked back in, escaping the notice of everyone but the intrepid Blinebury. houstonpress.com | originally published: September 12, 2002
