Coach's Corner

It's the afternoon before Christmas. My computer crashed exactly 43 minutes ago. I've spent 42 minutes frantically -- furiously -- trying to find any sign of the half-finished column I'd spent the previous three hours laboring over. "Laboring" is the operative word. Sometimes columns flow like gin on Sixth Street, some weeks they move like the digestive tract of a constipated penguin. I try to write the column on my normal schedule, but after reading every sports section printed in English, the digestive tract is stuck. Dunn and his daughter are visiting and I know tomorrow (a deadline day) is another day. Yes! The Chronicle office is closed. I win the challenge, get the first down, and keep my time-outs. Instead of writing, I fill the entire surface of my Napoleon gas grill with ribs and chicken. Dunn and I get drunk. A crisis looms: I hustle out to flip the chicken, but the fire's out. The grill ice cold. The kids are hungry. Dunn's mashed potatoes are almost ready. The table's set. The meat looks bad. The beautiful timing of our dinner is destroyed, like a flanker reverse gummed up by a slightly mishandled snap. This is worse. The entire game plan's shattered. I'd already had far too much eggnog, splashed with bourbon or rum or brandy, whatever Dunn feels like pouring.

Dunn -- who drinks more than I do on a daily basis, providing him with a higher ability to function in moments of crisis -- saves the day. Somewhere in the dark depths of my garage we find another tank of propane gas. I only rip off one fingernail in our sotted struggle to reinstall the tank on my dark patio as the frigid wind blows gently over our dinner a few inches away. "Let's," Dunn suggests sagaciously, "nuke the meat!" Neither of us has ever actually cooked anything in a microwave oven. Earlier in the day -- in a harbinger of events to come -- I had pulled a week-old piece of chocolate cake out of the garbage can, to the disgust of the girls (it was covered!), and Dunn devised a scheme to zap the old cake into its original fresh form. However, bad cake probably won't kill you, the ribs and chicken might ... or at the very least create a bad Christmas mood, with vomit, IVs, and emergency rooms. The girls' mothers would not be amused.

In any case, we're hungry. We send the daughters out for more eggnog and barbecue sauce as the dinner crisis is worked out on a need-to-know basis. Dunn estimates two three-minute cycles on maximum power equals 20 minutes of grill time. Who was there to question Newton or Einstein? Sometimes you go with your instincts. After six minutes the gray meat comes out of the microwave internally steaming like Old Faithful. The flaming Napoleon grill will turn the brainish gray a toasty black. No one, certainly the girls, will be the wiser.

And indeed, everybody awakens the next morning showing no discernable ill effects. Dunn's daughter, in fact, has another piece of chicken for breakfast. No harm, no foul.

None of this information was in the first draft of this column. You are spared a turgid word-by-word struggle about a faithless Jew left all alone on another Christmas, trying to stave off suicidal thoughts while listening to "Holiday Hits" (Adam Sandler's "Chanukah Song, Part 2") on AOL Radio. No matter what you think of what you've just read, it's better than what's lost on my computer's hard drive.

Still, the truth remains: I don't have much to say this holiday season. I refuse to read lazy year-in-review pieces of crap, I'm sure not going to write one. So I'll leave you with a few random thoughts on sports today, Dec. 24, 2001:

How have we become so sensitive as a society that a good man must flog and piss on himself in public to keep his job because he lost his temper and called an obnoxious heckler a "fat Mexican?" Are we all so perfect? I'm no biblical scholar but didn't the Holiday Child say something about casting stones? ... Rarely did a team deserve to lose more than the Eagles in a dreary 13-3 loss to the 49ers, where a win would have clinched a playoff berth for Philly. Behind 6-3 late in the fourth quarter, the Eagles run about 22 plays from the San Francisco one-yard line. They have a 250lb QB who's faster, stronger, and tougher than most fullbacks. All Donovan McNabb needs to do is stick his nose across the goal line, a few inches away. Instead, the Eagles go to finesse; a few slow moving handoffs, a series of disorganized two-foot pass plays. Even after Philly's bailed out by a penalty, giving them another four downs from the one-foot line, the QB sneak is just too bland for suddenly creative Andy Reid... Nebraska, after reading how much they suck for the past month, will beat Miami. Florida giving 16 points against Maryland is also out of whack. The Terps, another give-us-some-respect squad, will cover that spread, maybe win the game. Colorado will lose to a pissed off Oregon... And I wouldn't bet on Texas to cover any 12-point spread against a good team, but that could be my heart talking.

Let's hope we're all here and healthy next year. That's the best "Happy Holidays" I can muster.