San Francisco News Blog

Newsom -- and his right-hand men -- won our praise for thinking of the best name in the league (The Barbary Coast Bombers) and coming up with cool, city-related imagery for the team's Web page. But style is easier to master than substance.

Career-wise, this has worked out to be the winter of Newsom's discontent. In addition to his setbacks on the local, state, and national political stage, the city teetering on a financial abyss, and Chris Daly leaving that flaming bag of shit on the Newsoms' front porch -- The Barbary Coast Bombers have dropped three straight games.

2009: Stephen Jackson sent to Charlotte for Raja Bell (old) and Vlad Radmanovic (The Adam Keefe of the Balkans). For the Warriors, the man known as "Captain Jack" had rapidly morphed into Captain Queeg. Does it show a level of poor management befitting a government bailout when the man you recently signed to a $28 million extension and anointed team captain turns mutineer? One could make the argument. Yet, on the other hand, this effectively serves as a salary dump (both the incoming stiffs' contracts are soon up). And, on the bright side, at least Jackson didn't race into the stands and beat the fans as he did while playing for Indiana. Here in Golden State, abusing the fans is a job reserved for team management.

Our rating in terms of being a "good bad trade": Two Gugliottas --
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Coral Springs, Fla.-based financial management company Pro-Management Resources, Inc. has filed a $15,000 suit against the Giants' leadoff hitter in Miami Superior court. Attempts to reach the Dominican-born Velez were unsuccessful; the team's Web site indicates he may be in his home country. Meanwhile, our calls to Pro-Management were answered by staffers who would only confirm that the Velez in question is the Major League baseball player. Company CEO Tony Chirlcosta is out of the country and messages for Pro-Management's attorney have not yet been returned.

SF Weekly has not yet obtained an actual copy of the suit, so the charges are unclear. But it warrants mentioning that, just a week after filing suit against Velez in late August, Pro Management sued Florida Marlins reliever Renyel Pinto alleging he "failed to pay" the agreed-upon 1.5 percent commission on his $400,000 salary.

Tim. We saw that you got busted for pot, and obviously we find it appalling. Will this end your promising young career?Or will your sinewy, 261 strikeout-throwing arm have to atrophy in the dugout for some unspecified amount of time? Hard to say. But if you are out of a job, we'd like to be the first to extend you an offer for a backup career.

The utterly perfect photo for this article

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Please become our new SF Weekly pot critic!

Westword, our sister paper in Denver recently put out a call for the nation's first official pot critic, and the idea caught on so brilliantly that we were thinking of hiring one of our own. Although we're not even sure if you're literate, we feel you would be perfect for this job.

We'll even offer you this free legal advice: Just tell everyone you were only holding the pot for Michael Phelps. Works every time.

Click on the ballpark for a massive version

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That being said, during The Half That Saved Alex Smith's Career on Sunday, the announcer mentioned something that almost didn't register: Smith is only 25 years old. The last four 49ers seasons have, in their own way, served as an example for Albert Einstein's layman's definition of relativity: "Sit next to a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. Sit on a red-hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour. That's relativity." So, yes, watching the Niners of late has been a lot like sitting on a red-hot stove -- and paying $8.75 a pop for beer to boot.

And yet, despite the distortions of the space-time continuum induced by awesomely bad football, Smith is still in the prime of his athletic career. Sure, he played splendidly bad football -- but with extenuating circumstances. His rookie season was with a magnificently crappy squad, and following his decent sophomore season he seriously injured his throwing shoulder, requiring a pair of surgeries (then-coach Mike Nolan seemed to think Smith's arm was A-Okay -- indicating that, just because he dressed like a doctor on the sidelines, Nolan felt he was somehow capable of diagnosing medical conditions). Finally, offensive coordinators stuck around in San Francisco for about as long as dissident Lebanese politicians.

And yet, has any promising quarterback played as badly as Smith has and gone on to greatness with his original team? 

Courtesy of Harmann Studios and the Green Bay Packers. Used with permission.

Craig Newsome celebrates the Green Bay Packers' victory in Super Bowl XXXI following the 1996-97 NFL season

​Former Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers defensive back Craig Newsome has joined the ranks of U.S. athletes suing the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Newsome and others allege that the organization's requirement that college athletes sign in-perpetuity agreements giving the NCAA's marketing arm, Collegiate Licensing Company, exclusive use of athletes' image amounts to a price-fixing conspiracy.

His suit, filed in San Francisco federal court Oct. 14, alleges that the NCAA illegally forced athletes to sign agreements giving away rights to profit from their images.

Jim Herd

Cory Ross and the Redwoods apparently know the way to San Jose

​On Saturday, we stopped by the California Redwoods' first game in San Francisco. If we knew the expansion United Football League's San Fran era would potentially be so fleeting, maybe we'd have picked up a signature plastic cup. Damn -- they didn't have any.

Don't get us wrong, it was a decent football game. Sure, you could have switched the rosters of the home Redwoods and visiting New York Sentinels just before opening kickoff and no one but the players' friends and family would have been any wiser -- but we had fun. Yet we had lots of elbow room. The league claims 6,341 fans straggled into AT&T Park. Reasonable people can differ, but I'd guess about 3,000 of those folks dressed as empty seats or were doing their best impression of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.

And now the Redwoods are leaving us. In an announcement made this morning, the UFL stated that it will play its Nov. 19 game at AT&T Park as scheduled -- but will play on Nov. 14 at San Jose's Spartan Stadium. League commissioner Michael Huyghue said this move was made in order to "get a feel for Spartan Stadium in preparation for next year." League spokeswoman Rachel Gary told SF Weekly that the trigger was pulled on this move very recently -- and it had nothing to do with Saturday's awful attendance figures.

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I was also razzed for "wearing a button-up." Evidently working for a living earned me demerits in the eyes of these Southern Californians. Now, this isn't Latin American or European soccer -- there's nothing so useless as physically tussling over the exploits of the millionaires paid to wear our cities' names across their chests. But a little verbal repartee seemed to be in order; it's fantastically entitled behavior to ostentatiously root for the Dodgers in Downtown San Francisco and then bristle at even the hint of locals' alternate preferences.

Well, as our SoCal visitors might have put it, "Whatever." The lead Dodger fan -- who could make many sounds resembling speech -- curtailed the situation by waddling out of the bar and shouting "fuck off."

So, yes, I was pleased when the Phils finished the job last night and knocked L.A. out of the postseason. While those who sell commercial airtime for a living were no doubt pining for the bonanza of a Los Angeles vs. New York World Series, for Giants fans the matchup of the loathed arch-rivals vs. the ultimate corporate monolith was unappealing (the Yankees' ascent to the Series seems inevitable; sorry Anaheim fans).

Jim Herd

There is grandeur in this view of life...

​Text by Joe Eskenazi. Gorgeous photos by Jim Herd.

In the many months between when we first reported the inception of the San Francisco-based United Football League up to the moment we wandered into a largely abandoned AT&T Park for the Saturday night home debut of the California Redwoods, we never did figure out the league's "mission statement." The UFL, it reads, "was developed to fulfill the unmet needs of football fans in major markets currently underserved by professional football."

Within a speedy 15-minute drive of AT&T Park sits not one but two professional football stadiums -- and large portions of Saturday's crowd came outfitted in the gear of both professional squads. And yet, you can't shrug off the unforeseen benefits of locating a team in San Francisco. Within moments of the Redwoods' historic opening kickoff, a pair of breathtakingly gorgeous young women loudly and abruptly ended their romantic relationship an arm's length from your humble narrator; one lithely sprinted up the aisle to parts unknown, her mascara running awkwardly down her cheeks. The other gritted her teeth, sunk low into her green plastic chair, and forlornly began to bang out text messages.

Show me another football venue in the nation that can provide that.

We're going to go fairly lightly on the game details of Saturday's contest in this article: If you cared to know, you'd have probably been there. God knows there was room for you, and this was not a hard ticket to obtain. Half an hour prior to the game scalpers were offering us the best seats in the house for 15 bucks -- 10 dollars below face value.

Jim Herd

Down in front!

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Courtesy Code Pink

What did you do to promote world peace today, Tiger?

​San Franciscans heading to the southwest of the city for the weekend's President's Cup golf tournament may not have been 100 percent certain if the president -- and those who'd like to tell him a thing or two -- would be heading out to the links.

Well, President Obama did not show. But Code Pink -- which earlier told SF Weekly to be "on the lookout on Sunday" -- did indeed head out to Harding Park. The anti-war activists did not last through all 18 holes, however.

After letting the golfers and fans know that the President's Cup's namesake ought to "further economic stability and justice" and bring about peace via "economic support, diplomacy and justice" in Iraq and Afghanistan, activists Rae Abileah and Nancy Mancias were handcuffed and led out by the San Francisco Police Department, and cited for the disruption (this is what happens when you raise your voice at a golf course, apparently). 

San Francisco sports bars have turned their backs on the California Redwoods

​We've talked about the United Football League's business plan, personnel, and ghastly, ghastly uniforms. But with tonight's debut game between the hometown California Redwoods and the host Las Vegas Locomotives, we'll finally get to see whether the UFL can produce watchable football.

Actually, that all depends on your definition of the word "see." Because if you're hoping to catch the 6 p.m. kickoff at any local sports bar, you're out of luck.

SF Weekly called more than a dozen San Francisco watering holes to see if any of them planned on showing tonight's game. Not a single one did. And it's not snobbery over expansion football teams wearing fluorescent uniforms or scheduling conflicts with tonight's Major League Baseball playoffs that'll keep the Redwoods-Locos game off San Francisco sports bars' dazzling array of televisions. Unfortunately, the UFL games are broadcast on a TV channel no sports bar in the city gets.

Yes, that is Michael Crabtree on the cover of NCAA Football

​Insiders have whispered to ESPN that holdout wide receiver Michael Crabtree has opted to finally ink a contract with the San Francisco 49ers, curtailing a months-long holdout that extended through training camp and the team's first four games.

Financial terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed -- meaning no one is certain if Crabtree's obstinacy worked out in his favor or not, or counterbalanced the damage he's done to his 2009 season (and reputation). Still, there must have been something pretty sweet in that contract to induce Crabtree to sign now:

• 49ers pulled strings with Madden Football people to ensure Crabtree gets good ratings in next version of the game

• Team stores will cease using No. 15 jerseys for purposes other than their intended use

• San Francisco coaches will curtail phoning Crabtree at home and asking "if he's busy"

• Crabtree will be paid in Euros, which have a higher value than American dollars. Also, the squat Euro notes and bulky two-Euro coins take up a lot of space -- which justifes toting around that gorgeous man purse you had your eye on.

Pinned you! And again! And again! And...

​No, there won't be a torch-lighting -- someone's short hairs might get singed -- but all the Olympic sports you love are coming to Baker Beach sans those pesky jerseys, leotards, or other articles of apparel.

George Davis -- former nudist mayoral candidate and "naked yoga guy" -- has organized the second annual Nude Beach Olympics, scheduled for  Saturday, Oct. 10 at noon. It's free and anyone who wants to drop by to ogle, or, perchance, outsprint the field and take home top honors, is welcome to attend.

At last year's inaugural Nude Olympics, Davis estimates the historic event drew around 15 competitors and not many more spectators -- answering, once and for all, the age-old koan, "If you hold a Nude Olympics and no one comes, will there be another?" Oh yes. In fact, Davis is optimistic he can get twice as many participants this time 'round -- "easy." In time, he believes his event can grow to eclipse both Bay to Breakers and Burning Man in popularity (an ambitious claim, as even the real Olympics may not rival Burning Man these days).

Greenskeeper Joseph Frankel tees off in his backyard

​Since we first covered the "funemployment" phenomenon in a June cover story, we here at SF Weekly have been pleasantly surprised again and again by the productive uses to which jobless young San Franciscans are turning their idle hands. From blogging to designing funemployment flare, folks in this city seem inexplicably hellbent on doing creative and useful things instead of turning to drink, television, and despair.

Time to add another all-star to the funemployment hall of fame. His name is Joseph Frankel. He's a 25-year-old resident of the Inner Richmond, via New Jersey, where he grew up. Since he was laid off from a beer distributor at the end of last year, Frankel has actually built a golf course in his back yard.

You don't exactly have to be Tiger Woods to make it on the green in one at the Richmond Country Club, as Frankel and his roommates have dubbed their idyllic golfing enclave, which was previously a fenced-off dirt lot not much bigger than a garage. The club now features several sets of turf for teeing off from different distances, a strip of lawn serving as a fairway, and a rolling green with multiple holes, each of which can be capped when not in use. Frankel has even laid out some turf on the roof of his building, where players can take a swing at their wiffle golf balls (the only kind used at Richmond CC) from par-5 range.

Leggo my logo...

​We at the Snitch love to hate on everything. Not two hours had passed since Gavin Newsom's baby slid down the chute, and we were already mocking Baby Montana's name. Headline: "Newsom Baby Arrives. It's... A State!"  We even pointed out that one of the baby's namesakes was a porn star. See what I mean? Haters.

The same day the nascent United Football League unveiled its San Francisco team name, the California Redwoods, we ripped it apart with glee.  Headline: "Are You Ready For Some Football? The Team Is Named 'The California Redwoods.' Still Ready?" 

We berated the uniform's nasty neon green and teal color combination with the blistering censure of Joan Rivers. Ouch. And now that they've released the helmet designs today, you guessed it: We're not lovin' it.

​The other day, we noted that, once again, Giants fans will have the unenviable task of determining which other teams they detest least in the postseason. It's a difficult and unpleasant task akin to deciding which kidney you'd rather part with or which non-Alec Baldwin brother you'd want to sit next to on a trans-continental flight.

It seems this notion is alien to Colorado Rockies fans, whose team came into existence back when Bill Clinton still had salt-and-pepper hair. They couldn't understand how a Giants fan could be peeved about the Rox inability to win even one of 13 games vs. Atlanta in 1993, and how that cost San Francisco in the end. But Giants fans are weaned on the bile of near-misses and failure. So we remember the details.

That's more than we can say for our colleagues at The Westword in Denver. Recounting one of the most tragic sports experiences of his life, the Denver fanatic notes "the 1990 Super Bowl, in which the Giants absolutely destroyed the Broncos 55-10."

It must have been one hell of a bender our colleague went on -- as it was the 49ers that crushed Denver in the Super Bowl that year, not the Giants. The football Giants play in New Jersey, incidentally. They have pretty blue helmets, and even won the title two years ago.
  

​Back in April, we pondered what it would be for the Giants this year: It was a Shawshank Redemption theme, so we wondered if the team would finally escape from its also-ran prison or just deliver the usual 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness.

It'd take a fairly cynical person to rip the Giants too hard for their overachieving -- yet still deeply disappointing -- season. Yet the oft-repeated Tom Hanks refrain is incorrect: There is crying in baseball. But there is no tying in baseball. You win or you lose. Moral victories are for losers. The Giants, mathematically eliminated from the postseason last night, haven't finished on top since the Eisenhower administration. And them's the facts.

So, as is all too often the case, the playoff races force Giants fans to play the game "Who do I hate least?" For supporters with long memories, this is an exercise eerily similar to the conversation my colleague Benjamin Wachs had with a woman in Scotland. Sure, she could let go of the hatred for those who'd wronged her people through the generations, and even forgive the death and horror wrought by Bonnie Prince Charlie's vain attempt to wrest away the English crown. But, she said, she would never forgive nor forget the Massacre of Glencoe. Never, do you hear me? Never!

I'd buy that for a dollar!

​We can probably thank Malcolm Gladwell for stoking the desire of anyone with something to sell hoping to "go viral"; 25 years ago these folks would likely have aimed to emulate the organizational techniques of Japanese samurai warriors. The current situation is ostensibly an improvement.

Still, receiving something from a marketing person who professes "it's our viral campaign" is kind of like a policeman trying to use "hip language" when lecturing junior high school students on the perils of drug use. So we were extremely pleasantly surprised by the West Coast Conference's "viral campaign" to promote women's college basketball.

In a nutshell, if you enter your name (or any name -- we'll get to that) at the beginning of the video, you'll be surprised to see coaches hoisting jerseys with your name on them, newspaper headlines about you, or limo drivers holding up signs ... just for you! I'll admit, I was amused.

Scott Leykam, the WCC's associate commissioner for external relations, said his conference was given $90,000 out of a $750,000 pool set up by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to promote women's basketball -- and this is the result. The San Bruno-based conference hopes to spike its season-ticket and single-game ticket sales by 15 percent via this ad campaign. 

Tom Tracy

He's back!

​Steve Mahoney notes that he didn't play football in high school -- "I was kind of small." So he found a way onto the field at Candlestick Park along with the San Francisco 49ers by gaining a few hundred pounds -- of motorcycle.

We've written a bit about the Department of Public Works steam-cleaner's dream gig whooping up the pregame crowd by roaring around the field on his custom red-and-gold Harley-Davidson emblazoned with a Niners logo. It turns out Mahoney's dream isn't done yet. Over the weekend, he reports, team officials called him up and invited him back -- for Monday Night Football.

In a word, Mahoney is stoked; when he utters the term "Monday Night Football," each word grows progressively louder. "I'll do whatever they want me to do," he said of the Dec. 14 contest vs. Arizona.

​Our colleagues at The Westword today in Denver -- whom, if we were forced to utter a kind word in their regard, we might note that they apparently possess the correct number of chromosomes -- today gave us a hard time for not giving them a hard time. There's no pleasing some people.

Rather than exchange verbal barrages related to the Giants-Rockies playoff race -- when San Francisco has all but pissed away any last semblance of competitiveness this weekend, ceding the role of main Rockies challenger for the Wild Card berth to Atlanta, even -- we instead featured much-tattooed Giant Justin Miller in our Weekly Ink feature.

We didn't want to mention it, but we were actually somewhat shocked by a couple of the specifically anti-Denver, anti-Westword tattoos hiding on the pitcher's body: 

Share your tattoos with SF Weekly! Write us here!

Justin Miller as a relatively ink-free Minor Leaguer...

​Justin Miller has never picked up a copy of Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man or watched the 1969 Rod Steiger flick based on the book. But, as Pee-wee Herman told Dottie before they biked out of his own "life story" -- "I don't have to see it. I lived it."

Miller, 32, is a big, friendly looking man with a shaved head and a casual sartorial style; when he met us at AT&T Park he was wearing a sweatshirt, jeans, and Chuck Taylors. Before elbow inflammation landed him on the 60-day disabled list, he'd amassed a 3-3 record for the San Francisco Giants pitching in long relief. Like most baseball players, you wouldn't look at Miller and think "That guy must be a professional athlete" -- but you would look at him.

Justin Page

...and now as a San Francisco Giant (click pix for larger versions)

​When asked if he even knows how many tattoos he has, Miller shakes his head, smiles and admits he does not. "One," he says with a laugh. "Just say I have one big one." In short, Justin Miller is a tattoo. If we attempted to describe, in detail, every last one of Miller's marks we'd crash the bandwidth on our server. In Major League Baseball circles, the 2003 stipulation that pitchers with arm tattoos must wear long sleeves -- the tats ostensibly distract batters -- is known as "The Justin Miller Rule."

Miller -- who hails from Torrance, Calif. and has a two-foot-high "L A" emblazoned across his back amid scores of other tats -- got his first tattoo on his 15th birthday. He was escorted to the parlor by his father, who'd struck a deal with the future Major Leaguer -- the elder Miller had noticed that Justin's buddies were showing up with tattoos older friends had given them out of garage-based studios. Miller's dad figured that if he couldn't stave off his son's budding desire to be inked up, he might as well "be done professionally, done right."
 

​Your humble narrator may be the only person who ever worked the agate page for a major newspaper's sports section who didn't amuse his buddies by slipping their names into the text on NFL cut day.

On that black day, hundreds of spectacular football players with the ability to nearly cut it at the highest level are unceremoniously dropped from team rosters. Sometimes the names of aging veterans do pop up, and ardent fans may recognize a player hailing from their alma mater. But, for the most part, these are anonymous men on the fringes of the professional game whose one newsworthy achievement with the team was to be removed from it.

Every once in a while, a name does jump out of the transactions page. Yesterday was such a day: A curt message from the fledgling United Football League noted that the San Francisco franchise, the California Redwoods, had cut wide receiver Peter Warrick. Now that is a name that will register with many fans: In the course of a decade Warrick went from football prodigy to odds-on Heisman Trophy favorite as college ball's most outstanding player to NFL bust to minor league gypsy. Now he's been released by a nascent league with the highest hope of one day being a minor league feeder to the NFL.

​The smug rapscallions breathing sweaty, testosterone-saturated air a mile high in Denver have to be humming "Time is on My Side" right about now. The Rockies lead the Giants by four games with 10 to play in the race to lose the opening round of the National League playoffs. But Colorado did piss away a victory yesterday while San Francisco prevailed -- so the wind is in the Giants' sails, even if the waterway they now navigate is growing rather shallow.

But, as the season grows short, consider this: Will a Colorado Rockies triumph in October result in the Rapture? The franchise is proud of its identity as the most Christian Baseball Team In All The Realm, has a reputation for recruiting Christian ballplayers, and have maintained a bowdlerized locker room in which Playboy is banned and prayer meetings are the order of the day. When you're a mile high, it seems, you're just that much closer to Jesus.

"They have a great group of guys over there, but I've never been in a clubhouse where Christianity is the main purpose," then-San Francisco Giant Mark Sweeney told USA Today of his experience with the Rox. "You wonder if some people are going along with it just to keep their jobs. ... Look, I pray every day. I have faith. It's always been a part of my life. But I don't want something forced on me. Do they really have to check to see whether I have a Playboy in my locker?"

​Watching Matt Cain and the Giants piss away a big lead and then mount an ill-fated comeback was unpleasant, especially when coupled with the Colorado Rockies staving off an epic bullpen meltdown to gain another game on San Francisco. But we didn't assuage our disappointment by draining a 12-pack of cheap, watery beer and then wearing the box on our heads like a crown while commanding our fellow apartment dwellers to make way for the real King of Beers. 

We don't work for The Westword, in Denver, where, apparently, this is how you deal with life's problems. In their latest bout of trash-talking all things Giants and San Francisco, the rapscallions at our sister paper assumed we'd have resorted to massive quantities of alcohol to ease the pain. Two things: Coors may run in the taps out Westword's way, but not here. Second, any Giants fan who reaches for a bottle of booze whenever this team disappoints will live on in perpetuity when his relatives visit his beachball-sized liver in a medical museum well into the 22nd century.

The Westword also took issue with our earlier statement noting that Denver is a city that has never "felt the joy of a sporting championship that wasn't connected to John Elway's equine, leering mug," noting the Colorado Avalanche's pair of Stanley Cup trophies. Fair enough -- let us amend that statement. Denver is a city that has never felt a joy of a sporting championship that wasnt connected to John Elway's aforementioned equine mug -- or the plundering of a hockey team from Canadians who nurtured it with their tears for agonizingly long stretches of futility only to have it greedily yanked away to Denver the moment it showed any promise.

Justin Page

Was this picture the real inspiration for the name of Gavin Newsom's daughter?

​Mayor Gavin Newsom's Tweet noting that his wife, who just moments before had passed a 7-pound, 12-ounce baby through her body, was not pleased with his constant presence on Twitter was a good sign. There are limits to acceptable dorkiness, and apparently the mayor knows this. That a man who apparently spends a significant chunk of time styling his hair would later Tweet how 72 hours of fatherhood have given him a newfound respect for the burdens of child-rearing could belie that notion, however -- Newsom, of all people, should know that some things don't just fall into place. 

That being said, there's dorkiness and there's dorkiness. So if the mayor's wife was displeased he was Tweeting about their baby girl, imagine how much she'd have taken it if Newsom chose her maternity room as the perfect locale to inform his breathless legions of followers about how splendidly he's doing in fantasy football.

Because he's doing really well!

Other than waking up in a drunken haze in a zoo cage, this weekend couldn't have gone all that much worse for the San Francisco Giants. The team lost, badly, in two critical games at Los Angeles, the Colorado Rockies picked up two more games, and, oh yes, Giants top prospect Angel Villalona is the prime suspect in a murder case.

Is this the best atmosphere in which to talk trash with our colleagues at The Westword high up amidst the Denver's testosterone-laced clouds? Not as such -- but, like Captain Ahab, whom we paraphrase in this article's headline, we are lashed to the Giants as he was Moby Dick. On several occasions, I've had to call up contemporaries whom I pushed into Giants fandom when we were children, and tell them "I'm sorry I got you into this." With that in mind, exchanging rude banter with the proud testicle-eaters in Denver is but a trifle.

Tom Tracy

Steve Mahoney's pregame ride at yesterday's Niners game wasn't without a touch of drama

When a big, strong, tattooed man roars across the football field with a flag-waving cheerleader on the back of his Harley-Davidson just prior to game time, it's not usually meant to be taken as a metaphor. But if the dude on the motorcycle has to push-start his bike just prior to the team's home-opener -- well, every sportswriter would be overtly pining for a crappy game from the home squad just so he or she could work that anecdote into the game story's lead. And, yes, this incident would be exhumed at year's end for the article summing up a crappy season.

This very nearly came to pass for Steve Mahoney. The San Francisco Public Works Department steam-cleaner has been walking on air for weeks since he nailed an audition to lead the team onto the field on his custom red-and-gold Niners Hog. Then, just hours before he was to make his big debut at yesterday's Candlestick Park opener -- it wouldn't start.

Mahoney's desire that his bike should shine as brightly as Perseus' shield was almost his undoing. He washed the bike on Saturday, and some of the water found its way into the starter. As a result, Mahoney was up at 3 a.m. on Sunday working out the kinks. He, his mechanic, and other pals were at Candlestick Park by 9 a.m. performing mechanical CPR on the bike.

​Earlier today, we responded to a sudden and deliberate attack from the Colorado Rockies jockstrap-sniffers at our sister paper, the Denver Westword. While we acknowledge that our hometown San Francisco Giants are facing an uphill battle to make the postseason, we contend that the team's competition, the aforementioned Rockies, are about as desirable as spending one's birthday in the General Hospital waiting room ... with the city's Friends of Scabies club.

Needless to say, the vicious wits at the Westword saw things differently, and earlier today fired off a rejoinder in which they first boasted of their love of feasting on testicles and then started talking dirty. Here's the highlights:

• Names of various Giants were compared to nasty physical ailments ("I shouldn't have eaten that second burrito. I have a terrible case of Renteria" or "That boil on your ass looks awful. Do you have Bumgarner?")

• Randy Winn was named "most ironically named Giant." It's hardly ironic! The man has one "n" for each home run he's hit this year.

You can read the whole thing here, and our original article here.

​Wednesday's Giants game vs. Colorado was one of those nights where you realize you're dizzy and your head hurts because you've forgotten to keep breathing during the late innings. You walk home in a fog, mentally replaying key moments of the game that may well have damned the team's season, imagining some scenario other than the only one that will ever exist.

For Giants fans, it has always been this way. Famously, in 1962, Charlie Brown sat morosely next to Linus for three tense cartoon panels before exploding in the fourth: "Why couldn't McCovey have hit the ball just three feet higher?" Yes, this means the Giants are Charlie Brown's baseball team. We know this.

But we don't need you to point it out. While we may have been carrying on the analogy between a lifetime of rooting for San Francisco and a long prison term all season long -- we don't take kindly to outsiders opining on the matter. So when we checked the pneumatic tube connecting all the Village Voice Media newspapers and found what appeared to be the stub of a spent "victory cigar" sent our way by the wits at our Denver paper the Westword -- well, that done teared it.

Vindictive messages were fired back and forth via the tube and you are reading the result -- we have decided to rain on each others' playoff parade over the final weeks of the season. And to spice things up, the paper whose team makes the playoffs will get a little booty from the other. SF Weekly pledges to send a signed photo of one of the city's top drag queens should Colorado make the postseason. What signature item will you guys be giving us? Coors? John Elway's toenail clippings? Elway clippings in Coors? Is that "Coors Cutter?" 

In any event, you wanted trash-talking. You got it: