Coach's Corner

I am, at heart, an anti-social person. It's a fact of nature that even the feeblest of earth's creatures are equipped with some device to offer a semblance of protection for the weak and pathetic. I come with just enough social skills -- I can tell an amusing tale, laugh at a joke, not burp at the table -- to function for short bursts. To mix a metaphor, I possess social skills miles wide and inches deep. I like to go to a bar and see old friends, but I can't stand sitting for more than an hour. Long restaurant dinners, like more than an hour, are absolutely intolerable. I like home. Home's good. Home's dark. The couch is worn. The television's good. Sports are on the television. The bed's soft. The sheets are cool. Dogs and a cat are at home. Kelly's at home. She's not so good with people either.

And so it came to pass (after much creative delay) that the new married people finally had to have the post-wedding party they'd been telling everyone about for the past few months. For those with hermit-like tendencies, this is a hard thing. Other couples accomplish this sort of thing with a gay panache, each part of the twosome complementing the other. The opposite's true in our case. Ergo: all party details grind along at a deadly slow, lethargic pace -- procrastination rules the day. Because we subliminally understand that picking a date commits us to all that will follow, choosing the date seems an impossible, staggering task. A date finally picked, the issue of food looms. Onion dip sounds good to me. What? A caterer? I didn't want to deal with that shit. "Kelly, how about you finding us a caterer? What do you say, honey?" She says little. For too long, with the party now looming like a slobbering, carnivorous apparition, nothing happens. Finally, I ask my ex-wife, a far more social animal than me, about caterers. She gives me three names. The list sits, not looked at, for a week... until I lose it.

So I pick the first guy who'd take me. I let Terry the Caterer pick the menu. Since I got stuck with the food, I make Kelly deal with the invitations. Eight days before the party we start addressing envelopes. The mass of invitations hit the mail party minus six days. Up until a few hours before the party, we're calling friends whom we forgot on our hastily scribbled lists.

As the house fills with party stuff, the inevitable, terrible anxiety of what-if-nobody-comes insidiously creeps in. This typically paranoid anxiety becomes stomach-twisting fear as I gaze upon the kitchen center island filled with wonderful foods no one will eat. Now dead certain that no one will come, I "share" the moment with Kelly. The attempt at shared intimacy isn't accepted gracefully.

The party begins at 6. At 6:05, my hands bleeding all over the rock-hard limes I'm gamely trying to cut, I quaff the first of many glasses of vodka. Then a Valium. Dick and Meg arrive, thank Jesus, at 6:17. For hours it seems -- really I'm told minutes -- it's just us. Soon it's the next morning. Bottles and plates litter the yard. Someone's blue blazer still lies in the living room.

If I had it to do all over again there are some changes I'd make, but then I don't have the benefit of instant replay, which will, after almost a decade's absence, reappear in the NFL next fall. I was all for replay when it first appeared. Quickly I grew to hate it. It was ridiculously cumbersome, took an absurd amount of time in a game that already moved way too slowly, and as often as not, still didn't result in the correct decision. These were all seemingly easily correctable glitches, something a growing business might view as growing pains.

Not the NFL. Instead, they stubbornly stuck with the same system, made few changes, and turned everyone against an idea which made so much sense. After all, if everybody watching sees grossly incorrect calls, how can the league allow its human officials to look so bad as ever-improving technology sees what, at real time speed, real people can't?

Just being against instant replay on some confused, hazy principle is like a turn-of-the-century merchant railing against the automobile. It's just stupid. A reasonable, restricted use of TV technology to correct season-killing calls is as sensible today as it was a decade ago. Forcing coaches to risk precious time-outs to make a challenge -- they'll only get two per half -- will discourage one of the worst abuses of the old system: the replaying of every close play. Placing a 90-second time limit on all challenges is 30 more seconds than is necessary tomake most calls. Still, it's infinitely better than the endless delays of before. Placing a "replay official" in charge of calls in the last two minutes should eliminate many of the disasters of last year.

The new replay rule doesn't address the most poorly defined and often the most costly miscalled play in the game: pass interference. And rightly so. Pass interference is a common-sense kind of deal, a virtue in short supply with NFL officials. Ah well, the world, I'm told, isn't a perfect place. Still this is, in theory anyway, a huge step in the right direction. Of course, I've said that before.

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