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Tuesday, September 14
Stadium crowds left waiting

By Mark Kreidler
Special to ESPN.com

It's official: It is now a great thing to be an NFL fan, so long as you never step foot inside a stadium.

This thought occurred to me and about 68,000 other goofs as we sat stupefied in Alltel Stadium in Jacksonville on Sunday while, somewhere nearby, an actual NFL official stood peering into something that looked like a peep-show booth, attempting to ascertain whether his crew's on-field judgment on a certain pass play was indeed the right call.

In the common parlance, this is known as instant replay. Or, as those sitting on the couch at home understand it, time to refill the K.C. Masterpiece Lay's bowl and read Doonesbury for the third time. Hey, anybody, pepperoni or sausage? I'm ordering.

But out there in the stands, this is another of the NFL's little torture devices, the replay. In its new incarnation, they put a timer on the whole process to speed things up. But if you're sitting there in the rain in Alltel, it's like that scene in "Risky Business" where the classroom clock actually ticks backward while Joel's watching it. The water's pounding down, the players are standing around in the middle of the field like they can't decide whether to towel off or lie down, and there's just no relief in sight.

It only happened twice in this game, one challenge by each team. San Francisco won its challenge and the Jaguars lost theirs, which certainly explains how the 49ers held the Jags to just 41 points for the day. But from the in-the-stands perspective, it was absolutely, positively two challenges too many.

"I'd rather see the Super Bowl won and lost on a bad call than sit through another season of replay," said the guy next to me -- a strong comment considering we were both in the press box, warm and dry, and not out there getting hosed by whatever tropical system it was that flogged the Jacksonville area on Sunday. But, even as he munched on his free, fresh-baked cookie, my friend seemed to be on to something.

It's the game experience that is really being tested here, the real, live, bought-and-paid-for game experience. The NFL doesn't make it easy, that's for sure. The average fan plunks down 50 or 60 bucks per seat for tickets, gets whipsawed by a totally egregious parking charge on the way in -- in San Francisco, thousands of 49ers fans pay $20 for the right to park on uneven, unpaved, potentially mud-bogged dirt lots and consider themselves fortunate to get so close to the stadium -- and heaven help you if you didn't hit the ATM before deciding upon a concession-stand foray.

Still, fans have shown a remarkable tolerance for the price of this entertainment, which tells you they love to watch live football. Problem is, they so rarely get to.

Have you been to an NFL game lately? It's absolutely staggering, the amount of down time routinely incorporated into the average Sunday venture. The 49ers-Jaguars game broke out of the gate with a real flow and rhythm despite the offense-impeding weather, and pretty soon you realized why: No commercial timeouts.

In other words, the day's early TV games hadn't ended yet. As soon as they did and the Jags game took over the airwaves, it was like trying to listen to a cassette tape that's fouled -- all fits and starts, with lots of time for in-house ads blaring through the Alltel big screens.

For most folks, of course, television is the NFL experience. A statistic making the rounds lately suggests that 98 percent of the league's fans have never set foot inside a pro stadium, which is at once depressing and totally logical. That's the market; league officials have to cater to it. And if the folks on the couch, with access to half a dozen replays of any key sequence, demand that every call made by human officials be android-like in its perfection, well, I guess that's how it's going to be.

But a note of caution: Time was, that 2 percent of the NFL fan-base actually filling up those great concrete bowls was considered to be the privileged among the football class. On any given Sunday, in any given market, sitting through this stoppage of play or that, you might have a hard time proving that anymore.

Scouting around

Jim "Catfish" Hunter, dead at 53 of Lou Gehrig's disease, was an utterly ordinary person with an extraordinary gift for playing baseball, and in the end that was the simple charm of the gentleman. Hunter was a great, great pitcher, but never a clinically precise one; the average Catfish inning seemed to go strikeout, single, ground out, single, pop-up. He worked well in the nutty den of talent that was the Charlie Finley-era Oakland A's, and he worked well in Yankee pinstripes, and he pretty much worked well everywhere he went. But he is remembered -- by friends, by family, by baseball colleagues -- as a common man, by which was meant that Hunter was funny, compassionate, friendly and loyal, someone not given to making a big deal out of things. It sounds like small potatoes until you add it up, and then it becomes something quite large. The sad news is that Catfish is dead; the good news is that there are others like him. They're out there. Baseball just has to find them and nuture them, give them a place to grow. Everything in life -- in baseball, even -- cannot be reduced to a 30-second endorsement.

So how's that Rick Mirer-to-Keyshawn Johnson combo looking? And how many more players' seasons is the new Giants Stadium fake turf going to claim before someone looks into the possibility that, er, errors in judgment were made? Forget testing for drugs; how's about the NFL starts testing stadiums for natural substances? Handy recurring hint: If I can't grow it in my backyard, there's a good chance that pro football athletes ought not to be attempting to play on it.

Partial score: Sammy Sosa 59, Chicago Cubs 56. Hope that isn't a final -- on either side of the board.

It wasn't just the awe of watching Serena Williams play tennis, it was the fun of listening to Williams discuss her breakthrough victory over Martina Hingis to win the U.S. Open. After too often sitting through tedious melodramas played out by older sister Venus or visiting the sideshow spectacle that father Richard so easily can become, it was tremendously refreshing to see Serena reacting with such class and enthusiasm after scoring a genuinely great victory. Referring to her becoming the first black woman to win the Open since Althea Gibson in 1958, Serena said, "It's really amazing for me just to even have an opportunity to be compared with someone as great as Althea Gibson." When was the last time any of the young guns on the women's circuit made a comment even remotely as humble? And it gets better: Venus and Serena came right back and won the women's doubles title, marking them as the team to watch -- potentially for years to come. It is almost completely a good thing.

Leonard Coleman's impending departure as National League president, besides being depressing in its own right, underscores just how divisive the whole umpiring issue has become in baseball, and how split the parties remain on how to handle it. And while we're here, a memo to Sandy Alderson in the commissioner's office: You won. Get over it. It's not like your troops stopped Rommel with a daring desert maneuver; you came out with the leverage in a nasty dispute that has unquestionably left baseball poorer in the short term. It's nothing to crow about, and it is nothing to be lording over anyone, particularly with that silly veiled threat about putting an end to the umps wearing a little tribute on their ballcaps to their 22 vanquished colleagues. There is such a thing as grace in victory.

Guess that wait for an NFL team in Cleveland is going to take a little longer than people thought.

Mark Kreidler is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, which has a web site at http://www.sacbee.com/.


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