We have officially entered

.... the dog days of summer now that The Rapist and the Lakers won the NBA Championship. All that's left for the next 6 weeks is Major League Baseball. And NASCAR. And Nationwide. And trucks. And the Indy Racing League. And F1. The MLS is playing, too. And there's usually some random international soccer tournaments every summer. And MMA fights and boxing. Oh, and golf every week. And tennis. Plus there's girls basketball now. Slow times at the Superbook. At least until football starts.

I'll give a few thoughts on the NBA Finals, tell a few stories about our trip to Omaha and then I'm calling it a night.

Actually.... I can tell this is going to a long one. Chris - You may need to read this in like 4-5 sessions spread out over a month or so. Enjoy.

* I was not happy for Kobe or the Lakers at all last Sunday. I wasn't happy for their idiot fans. I wasn't even happy for Jeff. Why exactly should we be happy for Kobe again? He has millions of dollars, is a lock for the Hall of Fame, and had 3 championship rings before the season started. Plus he raped a girl in Colorado a few years back and got away with it. Why would anyone be happy for this person? Fuck that.

* I want to thank Dwight Howard for making every FT attempt during the Eastern Conference Finals and then shooting like my sister against the Lakers. Perhaps the Lakers defense was really tough while Dwight stood on the free throw line.

* Orlando just shot the ball out of their minds against the Cavaliers and they couldn't possibly duplicate that performance against L.A. Please don't tell me that it's because the Lakers defense is better than Cleveland's. That just isn't true. The Cavs had one of the best defenses in the leasgue all season and the Lakers are a bunch of Europeans and lazy players. Orlando just went through an historically hot stretch against the Cavs and couldn't keep it up in the next round.

But I'm not bitter.

* I was at the Palms with Hoffman at the end of Game 4 of the NBA Finals surrounded by idiots rooting abnoxiously for the Lakers. After Dwight Howard choked and missed both free throws, Orlando was still up by 3. All they had to do was foul the Lakers and they win the game. Instead they let Derek Fisher take a 3 and he (miraculously) made it to send the game to overtime. Great.

* At the end of the day I'm just bitter about the Cavs not being able to make it to the Finals and the entire postseason just reminded me of why I hate the NBA.

You can hear more of my thoughts on the NBA and life in general in the most recent Blogcast which Andy and I recorded the afternoon before Game 4. Chris.... just listen to it.


And now I will talk about the Omaha trip by making fun of each person who was on the trip individually. Let's start with Matt.

* The Big Guy is a party animal. We went to bed about 6 am the first night we were there and Matt still woke up around 9 to catch the shuttle over to Rosenblatt and start tailgating. There's really nothing good to mock him about but I'm going to do it anyway. For one thing, Matt was the only person who took this stupid tailgate game we were playing seriously. The object of the game was to toss this thing and have it catch on a ladder a few feet away. (It's not as fun as it sounds. Actually it's exactly as fun as it sounds.) All of Matt's tosses would hit the ladder and bounce off at which time he would complain about how unlucky he was. Everyone else was just standing around hoping that somebody would win so that we could stop playing.

For the record, the team of Austin and I defeated Matt and Hoffman thanks to my winning shot. Had I known that Austin and Scott had bet $20 on the match, I most likely would've thrown the game on purpose, then split up the booty with Hoffman back at the hideout.

Matt was also obsessed (Obsessed!) with collecting wristbands from every bar and/or beer tent he went to. I believe that I tweeted that he was like a sorority girl proudly displaying the many wristbands adorning his arms. He was also so self-conscious about this that he actually used bigger wristbands to cover up the smaller ones when I started making fun of him for it which only made me want to make fun of him even more. That guy is too easy.

* Austin made the smart decision to turn in early on the first night instead of joining us on our dumb trip to a place called "The Play House." He also came through with free tickets to several games and got us into a few tailgates where we drank and ate for free. But even he was not without flaws. He and I had planned to leave at the same time on Wednesday so that we could share a cab to the airport. His original flight back to Vegas was around 2:30 so I booked a flight at 1:55. Makes sense. What he failed to tell me until Tuesday morning was that not only was he going straight to NYC from Omaha but that his new flight was at 7 AM. This wouldn't have been a huge deal except for the facts that we had no place to stay on Wednesday morning (We had slept at his buddy's house and his buddy would be at work) and a cab ride from his buddy's house to the airport cost more than 50 bucks. Instead of just apologizing for this, he went into to classic defensive Austin and repeatedly told me he had "Forgot" and that somehow it wasn't his fault that he had never bothered to look at his new itinerary. Sigh.

To make a long story short, I called Southwest Airlines on Tuesday night around midnight and paid a decent amount of money to move my flight up to 7:20 AM so that we could leave his buddy's house in the morning and split a cab. However, more problems ensued when Austin left his cell phone at the kid's house and the cabbie had to turn around and go back to get it. When we were a few minutes away from the airport, Austin mentioned to me that he needed me to pay the whole cab fare because he had very little cash left and would need to pay for a cab ride from the airport in NYC to his brother's apartment. He and I are no longer on speaking terms.

* Back to the first night..... With Austin in bed and us headed to the local strip club, The Play House, we needed to find a fourth guy to fill in for him and round out our group. That fourth guy was a young Nebraskan kid named Chris who was sitting at the bar, heard us talking about going to a strip club, and somehow ended up in our limo on the way to The Play House.

Yeah, we had a limo in Iowa. I don't really remember what happened but Matt says we jumped into a limo that two other guys were already using at the urging of the valet guys and had them take us to a strip club. But not before we stopped at a gas station so Hoffy and this kid Chris could jump out and buy beer. Okay, there's a lot at play here:

1. You can bring your own beer into strip clubs in Iowa. I still can't get over that. You just walk in carrying cases of beer like you're going to a house party. An Iowan house party. With fully naked girls. Fully naked Iowan girls.

It was awesome.

2. We were in a limo that was not our own and the other people were not amused. The one thing I do remember is that one of them was wearing Vikings gear and a scowl the entire time we were in there. That person may have been related to Chris Bennett.

3. Being the asshole that he is, Matt started to mock this Nebraskan kid Chris in the limo and Chris didn't realize he was joking around and got offended. I'm pretty sure Matt even got up and went to the other side of the limo to apologize.

4. Chris ended up going out to breakfast with us and our driver dropped him off at his house around 5:30 AM. This begs several questions: How did he get to the bar we were at in the first place? Who did he come there with? Or was his plan to just go to a random bar in Iowa and hope to run into some dumb kids from Vegas looking to go to a strip club?

It also begs the question of how 3 morons like us had our own driver. Well, we did. She was an employee of the hotel who drove a shuttle for hotel guests. I was so drunk that I had no idea that's who she was. I honestly thought she was a cab driver who was just following us around from the strip club to breakfast and then back to the hotel. Scott thought she was some girl I had met at the bar and convinced to drive us around. After we all had a nice post-strip club drunk breakfast, she dropped Chris off at his house in Nebraska and we never saw him again. (Although he was one of about 10 guys to give me his phone number during the week. Nice kid.)

* I'll make fun of myself for a while and ease into the Scott jokes. I was pretty drunk that first night. I can handle beer like a champ but throw in a few shots of Tequila and I'm like a tweenage girl experimenting with alcohol for the first time. A little tequila and I'm screaming at bartenders to come to the strip clubs with us and nearly getting into a fight with a bouncer who Metcalf swears was two seconds away from ripping my head off while I leaned against a car and mocked him. Matt said I was pretty funny, so I have that going for me. Still probably wasn't a good idea. I was a little sloppy on Friday but I pulled myself together on Saturday. Somebody had to babysit Hoffman. And I managed to take a few notes while I was blocking the "Shot Girls" from getting near him.

Try to guess which one of these things Scott didn't really do:

- Elbow me literally every single time a hot girl walked by. (Which during an LSU or Arizona St game was pretty much every 2 seconds) Dude - I'm already looking at her. Every guy in our general vicinity is already looking at her. Freakin' Hoffman.

- Took a piss in the street across from the stadium. This wasn't like an abandoned alley. This was a very busy street with hundreds of people everywhere. Luckily we were in Nebraska so the security guard and police officer let us off with a warning and a boys will be boys laugh. Except Scott is 31.

- Went up to a guy and asked him to "Make a line" on whether I could knock Scott out with one punch. The guy looked at him with a "What the hell are you talking about?" face but eventually bought us a few beers. And offered to help me get a job as a sports writer. And gave me his phone number offering to take my buddies and I to a Nebraska football game if I'm ever in Lincoln.... People in Nebraska are really nice.

- Threatened to fight Austin repeatedly. And threatened to fight Matt. And threatened to fight Austin and Matt at the same time. And refused to sit with us at dinner one night, instead opting to sit across the room muttering about how Matt was "Overrated" and how he wanted to kick Matt's ass.

- Nearly got into a fight with a belligerent kid at a beer tent in Omaha after the kid refused to buy him shots.

- Was banned from going to the casino area of our hotel and forced by security to return to our room for no less than 8 hours.

- Slept in the same bed as Matt Metcalf.

- Spooned every night with Matt Metcalf.

- Took about 90 minutes to get ready on Saturday morning, prompting me to tweet about how much of a diva he is.

- Finally gave up on Sunday night and went to bed at 10:30 PM.

- Almost fought through it on Sunday night when Matt told him that The Play House was doing 2-for-1 black lap dance night.

I need to stop here for a second because I thought that was definitely the funniest joke anyone made on the whole trip. Think about how funny that is. The strip club gives you two dances for the price of one as long as the girl is black. Does that mean that you get two black girls at once? Or does the same black girl dance for two songs and only charge you for one? What if the girl is half black and half white? Does it cost $12.50 instead of $25? What if the girl is related to Tiger Woods? Do you need to break out a calculator at that point? What if there's only one black girl working? How long would that line be?

Whatever the case may be - Scott was very intrigued by this.

Actually the funniest thing that happened on the whole trip occurred on Monday morning. Austin and I had just boarded the shuttle for Rosenblatt and Scott and Matt were standing on the curb waiting for their ride to the airport. A pretty girl walked past the two high rollers and Scott looked right down at her ass as Austin and I watched the whole thing play out and laughed out loud. I love the Hoff. He really is incorrigible.

Before I go, I will rank the 8 schools who were in Omaha based on the hotness of their female fan bases:

1. LSU. And it's not even close.

2. Arizona St

3. Texas

4. Arkansas

5. UNC

6. Cal Fullerton

7. Southern Mississippi

8. Virginia


UVA has to be one of the worst sports schools in the country. They never have good crowds at their basketball games. Their own football coach called them the "Wine and Cheese" crowd of the ACC, and they had about 20 fans in Omaha despite it being their first ever trip to the College World Series and hardly something they can expect annually the way fans from LSU or Texas do. UVA sucks.

(The above rant has nothing to do with the fact that I wish I had been smart enough to go to UVA.)


That's enough for today. It was light out when I went to bed last night and when I woke up the U.S. Open was already over. And had been over for several hours. It sucked. Going to get some sleep tonight. I'll try to force out a blog from time to time but there's really no point now that I have the aforementioned Blogcast and I am available to follow on Twitter.

(And yeah I follow Miley Cyrus on Twitter. So what? Have you heard what Eminem says about her in the second verse of his new song 3 AM? Well, I suggest you listen to it. I won't seem so bad after you hear that.)


Enjoy the game.