"Have a Nice Day, Buffalo Bills!"
What was Bud Adams thinking last Sunday in Nashville?
His NFL club, the Tennessee Titans, had just dispatched the visiting Buffalo Bills, 41-17, for their third win in a row and all looked well for America’s favorite hillbilly team. Why oh why then did the 86-year old Budman suddenly feel the need to rise from his suite box seat and issue the visiting Bills the universally unpleasant one-finger salute goodbye, serially, and with both hands?
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell just happened to be present in Nashville for the game and had spent most of his time on Sunday watching it with Adams from his private suite box on the upper level of the stadium. Goodell had left Adams in the 4th quarter to smooze a little time away with fans before game’s end. He did not see the actual salute performance, but he sure got a load of the images made available to him later from some fan in the lower deck’s cell phone camera.
As a result of all these circumstances, Commissioner Goodell quickly levied a fine upon Titans owner Bud Adams of $250,000. Wow! That works out to a quarter million dollars, or, breaking it down, $125,000 a finger! The fine also derived an apology from Adams to everyone in the conceivably offended universe as he waxed away also on the notion that his actions were among those that never should have happened in the first place.
Gee whiz! You think so, Bud? ‘Cause if you do, that’s a monumental piece of insight all onto itself! It never should have happened in the first place, but what the heck. You’re only 86 years old, going on 87. You’ve got plenty of time to reckon with the basic questions that face us all on the spiritual plane. May as well get cranked with anger and spite in the meanwhile and either curse or one-finger salute someone else’s football team for losing to or beating up on your own club while there’s still plenty of time to waste.
The one-finger salute is a lot like drinking too much. In fact, those two human events often go hand-in-hand down the aisle of violent promise. They are things some people do to punctuate both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat in the face of some identified enemy. Even though they seem to be very different actions, one arising from celebration and the other emanating from consternation, they are really the same thing – and they each are expressions of violence. One salute says “take this for what I did to you” and the other says “take this for what you did to me.” Both are put forth like bulletin board material to further inspire the anger and desire for revenge that will dominate our next meeting on the field of battle or play.
Sometimes the one-finger salute comes in the form of a few more muscles being put into play then the few it takes to raise the big digit on either hand. Bud Adams knows about that kind of salute too. Back in the mid-1990s, when the city refused to finance Adams’ plan for a new stadium downtown to house his Houston Oilers, Bud gave us all a much more painful version of the one-finger salute. He took his NFL team out of Houston and turned them into the Tennessee Titans.
Keep that in mind when the Titans come to town next Monday night to play our Houston Texans, folks. – It’s time to salute Bud and the boys again.
"When you're smilin' - when you're smilin' - the whole world smiles at you!"
Some of you know about the Sloane Family. Their photographc gallery at 7616 Fondren in Houston has been offering the visual history of early 20th century Houston for quite a few years through singular prints and now – Story Sloane III has put together, in words and pictures, and through Arcadia Publishing Company, one of the finest quick views of life in Houston during the 1920s and 1930s that’s ever been produced.
Dead center field in Buff Stadium was 424 feet from home plate. and the outfield pasture also included a free-standing flagpole of some considerable similarity to the one that now resides in Minute Maid Park. It was located about five feet in from the outer wall, but there was no hill to climb.
When Cecil Cooper was named manager of the Houston Astros in late 2007, the fact that he’s black was not covered by the current media as even an interesting footnote to the fact that it then had been a little more than fifty-three years since Houston saw it’s first black baseball player take the field to play for a racially integrated Houston sports team. – Think about it. From the time Houston “welcomed” it’s first black baseball player to the time it saw its first black manager in baseball, fifty-three years and three months had passed.
fact that I had just started to drive by that time and needed a good excuse to borrow the family car also factored into the equation. When I borrowed the car, I told my dad why I needed to be there at the ballpark that night. I wanted to see Bob Boyd play for the Buffs as the man who broke the color line in Houston.
2007, the day that Cecil Cooper made his debut as a manager for the Houston Astros, a day for change, but it had nothing to do with race. Cecil just didn’t get here quite as loudly and, for reasons that have nothing to do with race, he also may leave soon, just as quietly, but maybe not. Maybe the Astros won’t unload all of the 2009 Astros’ failures on the back of their skipper.
Following his far better than average baseball career, Bob Boyd returned to his home in Wichita, Kansas, where he worked without complaint as a bus driver until he reached retirement age. Bob died in Wichita at age 84 on September 27, 2004. Today, the man who started his career with the Memphis Red Sox (1947-49) of the Negro Leagues is honored as a member of the Negro League Hall of Fame and also the National Baseball Congress Hall of Fame. Hopefully, we shall always continue to remember and honor Bob Boyd and all others who took the first step toward changing things that needed to change. Bob Boyd did his job with grace, dignity, and tremendously unignorable ability.
The goal of every young and upcoming Houston Buff from 1923 through 1958 was to play well enough in the Texas League to either move up the following season to AAA ball, or even better, to do so well that that they went straight on up to the roster of the St. Louis Cardinals. I’m bracketing the era as 1923 through 1958 for one simple reason: That’s the time period in Buffs history in which the Cardinals either controlled or owned the futures of all ballplayers who passed through Houston professional baseball.
The third man, Russell Rac, never got a single time at bat in the big leagues in spite of some pretty good hitting and fielding success with the Buffs in seven of his eleven season (1948-58) all minor league career. He began in Houston in 1948 – and he left as a Buff ten years later with a .312 season average, 12 homers, and 71 runs batted in for 1958. Few, if any, other players spent as many seasons as an active member of the Houston Buffs roster. Russell Rac went back to Galveston and into business from baseball following the 1958 season, where he continues to live in retirement as a man whose heart still belongs to baseball.
Sunday, April 8, 1951 was the date of the most memorable game I ever watched at old Buff Stadium – and it didn’t even count in the standings. It didn’t have to count, except in the heart of play we witnessed that day – and in the pictures it imprinted upon the minds of the record crowd of 13,963 fans who attended that hot and sunny spring afternoon exhbition game.
I watched every single nuanced thing DiMaggio did in the field – and I loved it when he had to run over near us for a fly ball. He was close enough for us to hear the ball pop leather on the catch many times. I even thought we made eye contact once.
The young man they were already calling Vinegar Bend Mizell arrived in Houston with the Buffs in the spring of 1951, heralded full bore as the lefthanded second coming of Dizzy Dean from twenty years earlier. Buff fans, sportswriters, club president Allen Russell, and the parent team St. Louis Cardinals all hoped the “Lil Abner Look-n-Sound-Alike” would turn out to be everything his growing legend screamed out that he was going to be: a sure-fire and consistent twenty game wins per season superstar and future Hall of Famer. Mizell wasn’t quite the young braggart that Dean had been, but he opened his mouth enough to create words that some writers ran to type as promises for use as future nails, should he fail to deliver.
Mizell was critical to the success of Houston’s 1951 Texas League pennant drive, posting a 16-14 record that wasn’t altogether his fault on the short side of his wins to losses ratio. The club just had one of those seasons in which they often had trouble giving Mizell the offensive support he needed to take the win. His 1951 Earned Run Average of 1.96 still spoke volumes about his bright future as a prospect.
I had the good fortune of finally meeting Wilmer David Mizell when we were seated together at the same table at the banquet hall for the Spetember 1995 “Last Round Up of the Houston Buffs.” I had a chance to ask him if the squirrel hunting story were true. “Did you like the story?” Mizell asked me in return?” “Oh yeah! I always loved it!” I told Mizell. “In that case, it was absolutely true!” Mizell shot back with a wink and a smile.
The front of our little house bore no resemblance to the one that now features a long porch across the street-side portion that faces north – nor did we possess or have any need for a museum quality fence across the front yard. – but it was home. From February 1945 to October 1958, from the time I was 7 and just finishing the first grade at Southmayd Elementery until the time I was a 20-year old junior and full-time working student at the University of Houston, “6646 Japonica” Street in Pecan Park, in the Houston East End, just east of the Gulf Freeway off the Griggs Road intersection, was the place where I hung both my baseball cap and my heart. I lived there with two parents who stayed together 58 years in marriage until death took each of them just five weeks apart in 1994.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 