Author: Scott Adamson

Goodbye, XFL

When billionaire rasslin’ tycoon Vince McMahon decided to reboot the XFL, he dumped enough of his own money into the league that it could last three years without taking in any other cash.

Scott Adamson’s sports column appears whenever he feels sporty. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60

There’s a big difference, however, between “could last” and “would last.”

The COVID-19 global pandemic forced the league to join all other sports entities across the world and suspend play in March. Yet while the economic devastation has already taken its toll on the likes of the NBA, NHL and Major League Baseball, those leagues have enough long-term stability and capital to survive.

Obviously, that’s not the case for the XFL.

Last Friday the league announced that it was laying off all employees with no plans to return in 2021, and then on Monday it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Debts and assets ranging from $10 million to $50 million were listed in the filing, and seven of the XFL’s eight head coaches were among the top creditors.

So how did McMahon go from having plenty of disposable income to being forced to dispose of his second attempt at the XFL?

According to Dave Meltzer of Wrestling Observer Radio, McMahon was prepared to lose $375 million during the first three years of the XFL revival. After that, he expected to secure TV deals totaling $125 million annually which – eventually – would help him recoup his losses. Ultimately, of course, the goal was to see the XFL finish each year in the black and become a staple of the spring sports scene.

But back in January Bloomberg reported that McMahon’s primary business, World Wrestling Entertainment, lost more than $1 billion in market value following a corporate shakeup, so suddenly the XFL went from something of a vanity project for McMahon to a venture much more important to his bottom line.

Then came the pandemic.

XFL employees were paid up through what would’ve been the final week of the 10-game schedule. But while they were supposed to be on the payroll at least through playoffs that never came, the axe fell on Good Friday. McMahon had lost millions more dollars, and I’m guessing he’s unwilling to lose any more on offseason football.

Thus will be the conundrum of any person or group going forward who wants to create what has yet to be created – an alternative American football league with staying power. Simply put, you have to be willing and able to lose millions and millions of dollars for who knows how many years on the slim hope that eventually you might – might – make a profit.

Back when the new XFL kicked off I was asked how long I thought the league would last. I predicted a two-year run, figuring the novelty would wear off by then and McMahon would decide to cut his losses. Now we’ll never know, but had the pandemic not hit I still think that would’ve been the case.

With the notable exception of St. Louis, in-house fan support was starting to dip and TV ratings were sliding at the midway point of the league. If the season played out I think that trend would’ve continued (although not to the degree that it would cause McMahon to bail on it like he did the XFL’s one-and-done 2001 iteration).

But when the XFL returned in 2021, it would’ve done so without that new car smell. Plus, some of the stars established in its inaugural season would’ve moved on to the NFL, and each team would basically be starting from scratch again.

TV viewership for all programing tends to drop in the spring, so I find it difficult to believe the broadcast revenue McMahon was hoping for would ever materialize. I’m not confident the number of hardcore fans (like me) needed to turn a gap league into a box office success are there, either.

None of this is a criticism of the product itself; with the notable exception of the United States Football League, I think this was far and away the best spring circuit to come along. It had cool rules, good players and coaches, and overall it was minor league football done extremely well. Ultimately, though, it was not a moneymaker. No non-NFL pro football organization since the American Football League has turned a profit.

And regardless of how badly McMahon or anyone else wants a new football venture to succeed, I can’t imagine they’d be willing to endlessly lose money to keep one afloat.

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the economy, and I think it’ll be a long, long while before an entrepreneur gives spring pro football another try. But, it will happen eventually.

And when it does it’ll join the USFL, World League of American Football, NFL Europe, XFL 2001, the Alliance of American Football and XFL 2020 as good ideas that will never make enough dollars to make enough business sense.

Quarantine dining tips

I’m a weird dude, and my weirdness (if not my dudeness) can probably be traced back to my mother.

Scott Adamson’s humor column appears whenever he has a funny feeling. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60

Mom, rest her soul, liked to think outside the box, especially when it came to recipes. Her idea was to take simple ingredients and transform them into fancy dishes (applying her own odd definition of fancy).

Sometimes she’d take a good idea and experiment too much, though. Her Rice Krispies Treats were incredible when she first started making them, but then in later batches she’d add other bizarre ingredients like applesauce and syrup.

Had she been Dr. Frankenstein, she wouldn’t have been satisfied with merely bringing the creature to life – she’d have added donkey ears and dressed him in a leisure suit.

One time – many, many years ago – I brought a date home to meet mom and even though I told her we weren’t coming for dinner, she insisted on providing a “snack.”

The snack consisted of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, with upright cocktail weenies forming a crown around the inside of the bowl. Adding a flourish of class was paprika liberally sprinkled over the dish.

To the untrained eye it looked as though the mac and cheese – bleeding after sustaining a grave injury – had been surrounded by cocktail weenies.

It probably also looked that way to the trained eye.

The good news is that it wasn’t bad – as long as you like mac and cheese and cocktail weenies. And paprika has no flavor anyway, so it was just added for dramatic effect.

As for my date, she didn’t try it. She must’ve been spooked by the food’s appearance because after looking at it briefly she ran out of the house and I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

Anyway, that tale is just a sidebar to the main story, and the main story involves quarantine food. Since we aren’t going to restaurants right now and are trying to eat the food we already have due to the global pandemic, I decided to take a cue from mom and spice things up.

In other words, we can keep eating the same things but we don’t have to eat them the same way.

For example, we have a can of vegetarian baked beans in the cabinet. They’re good, but there’s nothing particularly special about them.

Well, there WAS nothing special about them.

Now they’re “Fonzie Beans.”

What are “Fonzie Beans,” you ask?

In December, 1974, there was a Christmas-themed episode of “Happy Days” where Fonzie was bragging about the big plans he had for the holiday.

But Richie spotted Fonzie alone in his garage, eating a can of beans by the light of a small, sparse Christmas Tree.

Oh, I cried like a Baby Boomer. To this day, I get weepy when I see someone eating beans near trees.

But In Quarantine Life, you, too, can eat Fonzie Beans. All you have to do is pretend to be Fonzie and eat beans.

To enhance the experience I like to put on a leather jacket and style my hair in a ducktail. I also say, “Ayyyyy!” and give the thumb’s up sign, but that’s an individual character choice on my part.

We make a lot of soup at our house and the base we use is something called “Imagine Soup.” It comes in a variety of flavors (organic garden tomato is our go-to) and it’s quite good.

But just think of the name. It’s Imagine Soup, so we can imagine it to be whatever we want. I ate a bowl yesterday and imagined it was a frosted cherry Pop-Tart.

It didn’t really taste like it, but as the quarantine drags on there could come a time I forget what a frosted cherry Pop-Tart tastes like so it won’t matter.

I might have some this weekend and call it chicken. I don’t eat meat, but a chicken pissed me off once, so this is a way to be passive-aggressive.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to fun with food.

Have any potato chips around the house?

Pour them into a bowl, hit them with your fist, and suddenly you have “mini-chips.” Or, you can take a bag, pulverize it before opening it, and when you dump it out you can enjoy a bowl of “Tater dust.”

Canned Pringles are also fun because you can take two of them and situate them in such a way on your lips that it looks like you have a duck bill.

Here’s another great idea – since Cap’n Crunch is already nautical by nature, serve it while in the swimming pool, bathtub or when you’re still wet after getting out of the shower.

And if you want to entertain your kids (or your evolved chimps – I have no idea who or what you’re living with) you can change Cap’n Crunch’s rank every time you serve a bowl.

Tuesday he can be Rear Admiral Crunch, Wednesday he’s Vice Admiral Crunch, by Thursday he’s Admiral Chief of Naval Operations Crunch and heading into the weekend he’s been promoted to Fleet Admiral Crunch.

This morning I’ll be enjoying a heaping helping of Secretary of the Navy Crunch and Sunday I’ll have some Retired Crunch.

As for me, perhaps the one quarantine dish that comes closest to being “mom-inspired” is one I make using vegan link sausage and canned crescent rolls.

Really, this is just another version of “pig in a blanket.” You roll out a triangle of dough, wrap it around a sausage, and bake it.

However, since this is vegetarian fare I call it “friend in a quilt.”

I put a pair of toothpicks in one of them and placed green olives at the end of each toothpick. Thus “friend in a quilt” became “monster in a bedspread,” but then I realized maybe I had overdone it because the olives really didn’t have a major role to play.

In summation, my advice as our social isolation continues is to make your own fun with your own food. How you do it is entirely up to you and, obviously, there’s no right way or wrong way.

The key is to eat what you have and have fun while you eat.

And if you have a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, cocktail weenies and paprika on hand, well, you know what to do.

The 715th of April

NBC televised Monday night baseball games off and on starting in 1966, but it wasn’t always “must-see TV” for me. My first vivid memories of sports date back to around 1967, and they almost exclusively center on tackle football (and mostly the New York Jets).

There were notable exceptions, of course. I rooted for the New York Yankees (pinstripes are cool) and Chicago Cubs (loved that baby bear logo), so I was more engaged when they were on. If Pop (my dad) was watching them, I’d usually join him.

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And I always wanted to see games featuring Willie Mays and Hank Aaron because they were my favorite players when I was a kid growing up in Birmingham, Alabama.

That leads me to the NBC Monday Night Baseball game I remember best, played on April 8, 1974.

The Atlanta Braves hosted the Los Angeles Dodgers, which under normal circumstances would be just a run-of-the-mill early season clash between two National League West rivals. On this night however, Aaron – the Atlanta legend – was sharing Babe Ruth’s crown as baseball’s home run king but poised to take solo possession of the throne.

I was well aware of the historical implications. Everybody knew who Ruth was, and his 714 career home runs seemed like a record that would stand forever. But when Aaron blasted his 714th on April 4 at Cincinnati, it was apparent that forever would last only until the spring of 1974.

Making the chase even more remarkable was that the Braves right fielder was closing in on one of the most coveted records in sports while having to deal with hate mail and death threats from racists – vitriol that increased dramatically the closer he got to the milestone.

While Pop had been a huge fan of the Braves ever since the franchise relocated from Milwaukee, the team itself didn’t interest me nearly as much as Aaron himself.

He was piling up Hall of Fame-level hitting numbers even without the homers, and that impressed a young stat geek like me. What was most important, though, was that he and I were from the same state; I took great pride in Alabama stars, and in my world the ones who played sports shone the brightest.

Mays was a Birmingham native and former Birmingham Black Baron, thus I gravitated to him immediately and followed him closely until he retired in 1973. Aaron was born and raised in Mobile, and since I had relatives who lived there, that made him seem even more like a local hero.

So with Pop in his easy chair and me plopped on the couch, I watched every pitch to every batter just for the privilege of seeing “Hammerin’ Hank” come to the dish.

He drew a leadoff walk in the second inning and later scored his 2,063rd run, breaking a tie with Mays for most in National League history. That feat secured his 20th Major League Baseball and/or NL record overall.

In the fourth inning (at 8:07 p.m., CDT), Aaron delivered the big one.

With a 1-0 count and L.A. lefty Al Downing dealing, the 40-year old slugger smacked a fastball over the left field fence, prompting me to leap off the couch and thrust both arms in the air. I had just seen history made, and it was made by a man from my home state.

Pop was happy, too – but even happier five innings later after the Braves secured a 7-4 victory and handed the Dodgers their first loss of the young season. He supported Atlanta’s big league team through thick and thin, and there was so much thin back in the day, any win was extra special.

Now at this point you might expect me to tell you how that game turned me into a serious baseball fan, but that’s not exactly the case. As happy as I was for Aaron – and proud – it was really the early 1980s before I grew passionate about the sport.

Yet if I’m gonna mark significant memories in my journey as a fan, April 8, 1974, ranks right up there. I never let the date pass without acknowledging the most historic NBC Monday Night Baseball game ever played.