Bottom of the Bird Cage 3/31

This is the 90th day of the year and a tip of the hat to No. 90s in Chiefs history, led by DE Neil Smith.

Born on this day in 1928 was one of the greatest hockey players in history, Gordie Howe. Born in 1935 was trumpeter Herb Alpert and in 1945 brought the birth of Gabe “Mr. Kotter” Kaplan.

It was on this day in 1968 that President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. That decision ended up bringing us Richard Nixon. In 1985, the first Wrestlemania was held at Madison Square Garden in New York.

And on this day in 1931, a legend died in a Kansas wheat field. Knute Rockne was on an airplane that had taken off from Kansas City. The legendary head coach at Notre Dame had stopped off to see his sons Bill and Knute Jr. who were in boarding school at Pembroke-Country Day School. The Fokker F.10 Trimotor aircraft took off as a regularly scheduled flight from what was a new airline, Transcontinental & Western Air, known as TWA. It was TWA flight 599.

The plane was in the air for less than an hour when it crashed near Bazaar, Kansas, about 10 miles south of Cottonwood Falls. All six passengers and two crew members were killed. At first, investigators thought the crash was weather related, but later it was learned that the crash came because of problems with the aircraft itself.

At the site of the crash stands a monument (right) to those who died.

Rockne’s coaching record at Notre Dame was 105-12-5, with five undefeated seasons in his 13 years leading the Irish. He had resigned after the ‘30 season and was flying to Los Angeles to serve as an advisor for the filming of the movie The Spirit of Notre Dame.

On March 31, 1931, Knute Rockne was just 43 years old.

From the San Francisco Chronicle: Robert Gallery grew up at a car shop brilliantly disguised as a family farm in the middle of Iowa’s nowhere. This was the place where Gold Edition Thunderbirds went to meet their re-maker a few flat acres outside Masonville. We always had old cars like that around the farm, these big steel boats,” Gallery said. “We’d buy one with a bad engine, then find one with a wrecked body and a good engine, and we’d swap the engines. Never anything like restoration, just gear-head stuff. “Then we’d put one in the ditch and wreck it and have to find something else.”

As Gallery swapped shop stories at his Dublin home this week, he leaned back into the chrome grill of his ‘54 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, which is custom-built for neither ditches nor wrecking.

The Raiders’ offensive lineman is now in the car-show business, and this two-door coupe nicknamed Capone is his prize entry. His next stop is this weekend at the Alameda County Fairgrounds in Pleasanton. The copper-ish brown paint is so customized, it doesn’t have a name. The front bench seat is dropped to the floor and pushed back to make room for Gallery’s 6-foot-7 frame. The chopped top covers his long-haired head just right. The stock engine remains as original as the glass jug for windshield wash.

So yeah, Gallery has come a long ways as a car fixer-upper.

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Gallery is still trying to live up to his status as a high first-round draft choice with the Raiders. He’s gotten better since they moved him inside to guard from tackle and he’s gotten better each season. Gallery will have to continue to get better if he’s going to keep restoring classic cars like his ‘54 Cadillac Couple DeVille.

From the Naples, Florida Daily News:
Things aren’t what they used to be, at least in the NFL. Long gone are the days of clothesline tackles and single-bar face masks. Now we have “The Brady Rule.” Last Tuesday, at its league meetings in Dana Point, Calif., the NFL adjusted an existing rule designed to protect quarterbacks from the types of season-ending hits suffered by New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady in the first game of the 2008 season.

Unofficially dubbed “The Brady Rule,” defensive players who are knocked to the ground can no longer lunge into the quarterback if the play is still going on. This tweaking did not sit well with the former NFL royalty gathered around a table sipping cocktails and puffing on cigars Friday, the first day of the Mike Ditka/Jim Hart Celebrity Golf Invitational at Golf Club of the Everglades on Vanderbilt Beach Road.

To Hall of Famers Sonny Jurgensen, Jack Youngblood, and Ditka, along with Hart and former Washington Redskins quarterback Billy Kilmer, this was just another unnecessary step by the league that dilutes the game. “I think it’s a BS rule,” said Kilmer, who played quarterback in the NFL for 16 seasons, mostly with Washington. “How can they not let a guy finish a play?”

“What’s a guy supposed to do?” said Hart, the Naples resident who quarterbacked the St. Louis Cardinals from 1966-83 before moving to the Redskins for a season. “Knock him down and he’s supposed to stay down, put his hand up and say, ‘I’m down.’ It’s stupid.”

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“How can they not let a guy finish a play” really sums up this whole trend in NFL rules lately. The league wants players to take things to a certain point, and then shut down. They want this to happen without affecting the very nature of the game itself, an impossible task. The old-school guys understand that, because they went through long careers taking plenty of shots that today would get players thrown out of the league.

From the Raleigh News-Observer: It’s pretty safe to assume that Roy Williams doesn’t have Metallica’s “Kill ‘em All” album on his iPod and that 5-foot-7 drummer Lars Ulrich and his bandmates don’t throw down monster jams — the basketball kind — between tour dates. So the sight of Williams, Mike Krzyzewski, Rick Pitino and Bob Knight mingling with the metal band in a commercial for the video game “Guitar Hero: Metallica” qualifies as a culture clash, to say the least.

In a takeoff of Tom Cruise’s scene in the movie “Risky Business,” the four coaches slide into a living room wearing pink dress shirts, white boxer shorts (they said no to briefs) and athletic socks to the opening bars of Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock & Roll.” With Duke’s Krzyzewski and UNC’s Williams on guitar, Louisville’s Pitino on drums and ESPN’s Knight, naturally, as lead vocalist, the faux band launches into the song.

Metallica abruptly interrupts them, Ulrich reminding the coaches there’s a new version of the popular game. “So?” Williams says. “So that means you’re gonna have to put on some pants, Pops,” Metallica’s James Hetfield retorts.

“Who are you calling Pops?” Knight says, then tosses the drum kit in their direction.

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Turns out the four coaches and Metallica all filmed their portions of this commercial separately. That video trickery really takes some of the fun out of my enjoyment of this spot. It was fun trying to imagine what the coaches would have talked about between themselves and what they might have had to talk about with the band.

Oh well, it’s still a scream.