Rules of the road

This is the last of the introductory postings, and it deals with how and what you'll see in this space.
You should know first that I am a huge basketball fan, a big baseball fan and am mildly interested in football (for reasons that will be delved into a little later on).
Now, included in that love of basketball is a deep appreciation for women's basketball. I've covered 14 women's Final Fours, a ton of ACC tournaments and hundreds of college and girls games. Besides the fact that I met my sweet wife at a game five years ago, I enjoy the game and the people who play it. If you can't respect that fact with your posts, then don't bother.
I love popular culture, and I can assure you that there will be regular posts about television shows I'm watching, music I'm listening to or movies I've seen. And I am quite political. I vote left of center. If those things are a problem for you, then move on to the next blog.
Oh, about football. As a kid, I loved football. On most fall afternoons, I would go out in my front yard and run around, pretending to be Sonny Jurgensen or Billy Kilmer or Larry Brown or Johnny Unitas (remember where I grew up). I would collect team and player stamps from the local Sunoco station and fill a book with players I knew and players I had never heard of. I distinctly remember watching the Miami Dolphins beat the Kansas City Chiefs in overtime on Christmas Day 1971 in a playoff game. Football was great.
But at some point, football became all-encompassing, as in unavoidable. Once the season starts, between the colleges and the NFL, there are games every night, and when the season is over, football talk continues to overshadow everything in its path. It's like, how can I miss it when it just won't go away?
Worse yet, the NFL has grown increasingly arrogant, running roughshod over everything in its path, from players to fans. The league's ole to the side when the Colts left Baltimore in 1984, while throwing its corporate body in the way of the Eagles when Leonard Tose wanted to move to Phoenix was galling enough. The owners' attempt to try to pass off Gus the lovable mechanic down the street and his like as replacement players in 1987 was the next step.
The final straw was former commissioner Paul Tagliabue's comment in 1995 to Baltimore television reporter Scott Garceau after Baltimore's expansion effort was rebuffed. When Garceau asked Tagliabue what the people of Maryland should do with the money that had been set aside for a stadium for a new stadium, the smug, self-righteous prig said Marylanders could build a museum. Three years later, they did, named Ravens Stadium, for the team that moved here from Cleveland, leaving Tags to wipe the smirk and the egg off his face.
All of this is not to say that there won't be some football posts; there will be. But I do take pride in being one of the few straight male Americans who doesn't automatically kneel at the altar of the great god football.