On January 12 I made an announcement. That announcement was that I was after 3 seasons (mainly as a free agent) I was retiring from dating. Now that it has been 2 weeks, I feel I should issue a full and official statement.
The decision to retire was a tough one. I mean no one just wants to give up and quit something, but with a record like mine, I probably should have done it a while ago. I just have not had any luck with girls. They always seem to cause problems and all my relationships have not ended well. So while I blamed the girls and them being psycho, there is still some blame on me. Retirement will allow me to become a better person and hopefully after my mission things can go better than they have for the past 3 years. In these 2 weeks I have not really missed being in the dating scene. I still have friends and have fun, but without the worry of dating or flirting or feelings. I look forward to retirement for at least the next 2 years and also look forward to returning at some point in the future.
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So yesterday during church I had an idea. I don't know exactly where it came from, but the more I thought about it the more I liked it. The basis for this analogy is the late 1980's Detroit Pistons Bad Boys. The Bad Boy Pistons were known for being incredibly tough down low and not allowing and easy layups. They had a saying "Tap Tap" and it was the end for the other team. They put up huge fights against anyone brave enough to venture down in the low post.
Ok what does this have to do with the Gospel of Jesus Christ? Well we all need to adopt a sort of "Tap Tap" attitude in our fight against satan. Like it or not, satan comes at us hard and once he gets it he can become pretty relentless. We can not passively defend ourselves against him. If we stand idly by, satan can come at us any way he pleases. On the other hand if we hard foul any temptation and put up a huge fight, satan can't score and we can walk away with wins. Yes every once in a while satan will get us, but that's what weekly repentance during the sacrament is for. We need satan to fear us. This can not happen over night. It is a diligent and at sometimes tiring effort if we want to be successful. Reading from the Book of Mormon and improving our relationship with God through prayer allows us to stay tough. I'm not going to lie, it feels great to send satan to the floor when he tries to get to me. The first victory is the hardest, but after that you can have the confidence to keep up the fight and keep getting those wins. To quote Stan Van Gundy "Build A Wall" 2008. That's the year I became a Lions fan. That's also the year they went 0-16. Coincidence? Oh yes, huge. That's the reason I fell in love with them. They did something no other team had done. I have to admit, I'm weird when it comes to picking teams to root for. For most of my life I was not exposed to sports. Neither of my parents had any allegiance to a sports team and I never was exposed to sports. Then in middle school, in order to keep up with the guys in my PE class, I watched SportsCenter every morning to keep up and through that learned all about sports. With that I established a good base of all sports, but still couldn't really pick a team to root for. Yeah the Patriots had me cheering for them when they went 16-0 but after that Super Bowl loss I cried and kind of swore them off.
Then I met Dennis who was a big everything Michigan sports fan. He introduced me to the Lions and then they kept losing. See I have this thing where when I pick favorite players and teams I have some interesting criteria: They can't be that good, for at least 50% of the time considered underdogs, and have good loyal fans. The Lions fit all of that (and so did the Suns, Steve Nash, and the Pistons, but those are for other posts) and at that point became a Lions fan and have never looked back. I was for the most part a casual one cheering when I heard about wins and shrugging off losses. Those seasons taught me about dealing with big loss and enjoying even the small victories. I thought I could handle any season the Lions would have, but this season was different. I became more fully invested than I ever had before and was paying more attention to the team. I realized how much potential the team had and like everyone else saw this team doing something special. Making the playoffs on its own was impressive but we all knew that the team was capable of making a playoff run. The game started off amazing with a 14 point lead and then things went downhill from there. Before halftime I had the feeling that this was going to get a lot closer than any Lions fan would have liked. In fact I had a sense of Deja Vu. I remember having a dream a year ago of me sitting on the couch on twitter watching the game fall apart. And then it happened. I'm not going to being to rant about "The Call" that really turned the game around. It was heartbreaking to watch my Lions team fall apart at the end. The worst was the post game conference and the mighty Suh was reduced to tears when talking about the game. That is rough. This was my first real hardcore following of the Lions and by far it won't be the last, but this is a new experience having some of these emotions of anger and disappointment. It's hard especially when you know they should be playing at least one more game. You never want your team to go out like that. But there's always next season. Detroit forever. Lions forever. There has been a lot of talk recently about Ndamukong Suh and his "dirty" style of play. If you don't know what I'm talking about, here's a video for reference.
Now personally I don't really care about his style of play. Honestly I admire it (to a degree) because he does what he's supposed to do; instill fear in his opponents. He plays tough. I don't consider it dirty, and if you look at those "dirty" plays, you can argue that they come about accidentally and just in the heat of the moment. Suh gets results and is considered to be one if not the best defensive tackle in the league, so excuse him if he plays tough. I watched an interesting segment on him that really helped me understand Suh and that he's not a horrible person as most people think. If you have the time watch it here. I will continue to defend Suh and any Lions player. This brings us to other dirty teams and players in other sports. My personal favorite is the 1980's Bad Boy Pistons. If you get the chance check out he 30 for 30: Bad Boys, because it's really good. I have a connection with them because that's how I play. When I played city league I was down low. I'm not a very talented player and don't have a lot of offensive skills, and because of that I had to learn to use my body to my advantage on defense. So I started transforming myself into a defensive player with a no easy shot mentality. Usually the guys I would defend would be either my height or taller so I learned to use my elbows and get away with it. I would push, shove, elbow, and foul and soon enough I figured out I could get away with it. So that was my style of play. I never went too far and never injured or hard fouled anyone, but I always made sure my presence was felt. Before my last season started I was introduced to the 30 for 30: Bad Boys and I immediately came to admire the team and more specifically Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn. They were the anchors of the team and played very hard. Now some people called it dirty, but I call it tough. They had a saying "Tap-Tap" and that meant it was over for the other team. Watch here. My friend and I started to learn from them and on the court we were unstoppable. There were plenty of memorable moments and the other team never liked it. And the best part was that when they reacted, they got the fouls. There have been plenty of other notoriously dirty teams and players and I think it's good. It helps prevent the pacification of sports. It allows them to be the tough players they're supposed to be. Usually they don't result in gruesome injuries, in fact most of the worst injuries in sports were freak accidents. It's just always nice to see a player be tougher than everyone else and play a little dirty. As long as there are rough players, they'll have my support. |
Austin "Apex" SteeleSports. Cars. Sports cars. Archives
January 2018
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