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Kevin Buist @kevinbuist.com ⋅ 6h
Ferric Fang @fangferric.bsky.social ⋅ 1d
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Blue sky nice guy @rajandelman.bsky.social ⋅ 11d
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David M Willis! @damnyouwillis.bsky.social ⋅ 2d
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whereas Walky is flanked by fogey?
The problem is, I was at Purdue when that reference happened.
The coach’s name was Bobby Knight.
Throwing chairs at your players? What could go wrong?
To be fair, he also tried choking them from time to time
Oh of course to be fair
Hey, That would get me to play better. Adversity drives proficiency…
So I went to HS in the mid-late 90s in Indiana, and that incident is so ingrained that it is the mnemonic we learned to remember the classification of living things. Knight puts chair on floor, gets suspended – Kingdom phylum class order family genus species.
That is not the proper order at all!
CHAIRS?!?!?! WTF?!?!?
Oh yeah, Bobby Knight was as famous for his horrible, horrible temper as much as his winningly abusive coaching techniques.
At this point infamous he chocked a player and use to squeeze player testicles the man’s a monster.
The clip of BK hitting a player’s chin to make him look him in the eye when he was tearing into him is forever burned into my brain.
That’s sexual abuse!!!
Why is this motherfucker not in jail and STAYING in jail? He DANGEROUS.
He should be in jail but Indiana was winning alot during his tenure. That tends to be the reason in sports. Bill Romanowski should have been sent to jail but was apart of 4 super bowl teams. Romanowski was a linebacker and was the poster child of Roid Rage and was involved in BALCO scandal. The gut crushed his own teammate Marcus Williams eye socket.
FUCKING SHIT does everyone in the Bible Belt fucking worship sports? So much for no idol worship
I mean, it’s the US. There’s a crazy amount of idol worship of all kinds within the “no idols!” Community
Feels like someone should mention the Nika riots, might as well be me.
Yeah, it’s weird, rugby and soccer fans are so quiet and well-behaved….
“This coach violently abused his players and everyone was cool with it because they were winning.”
“Well, supporters of other sports have been known to get into fights with opposing fans, which usually does result in them going to jail.”
Yes, you’re right. Those are the same.
Sports fans literally overthrew the Roman government at one point, and were renowned for giving their champion charioteers all sorts of exemptions from following the law.
Oh it’s not just the Bible Belt. Google Philadelphia Eagles fans and Santa Claus.
Less idol worship and more clannishness (with a c, this time). A tribe to belong to, a safe-ish way to direct aggression. (See Bobby Knight comments.)
Also, it’s been a family thing for generations. My great-uncle was born in 1903. Not only did he play basketball, he was heartbroken when they couldn’t have kids. He’d wanted 5, to make his own little team.
Don’t live there now, but I grew up 2 counties from the Indiana border. Many a winter’s night drive the only thing on the radio was high school sneakers squeaking on the ball court.
Wow, basketball was already that big? It had only been about 30 years since it was invented when he played.
I mean, it ain’t just the Bible Belt. If you haven’t seen crazy fans in your neck of the woods, you’re just not looking in the right places. Sports can do things to otherwise normal people.
Hell, forget sports, most any fandom has more… extreme factions that can be crazy if you’re aware of them. If you’re not though, blissful ignorance may be a better way to live.
You mean like those certain MLP groups? The Last Jedi Manifesto folk?
Too late I guess.
If your intrested just look up Bobby Knight.
Yeah, I was attending Purdue when that happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukpekodCQ-U
Me too!
that’s pretty tame compared to the looting that happens after one’s fave team ones
And woof linda’s gonna be drinking, this won’t be good (well, entertaining for ‘us’, at least lol)
If they be cheering like Peggy Hill, Satan help us
crosses fingers for flashback of Linda looting following a big win, when she went to school there.
Yeah, why was he only fired and not found in a ditch with his lungs full of chairs?
Is it quintessentially American to be an abusive fuck like Bobby Knight or is that also just a human thing?
Sports guy thing
Ooh, definitely.
Modern american sports are probably on the whole less abusive than the norm for the history of human sports.
It would take me reading the Thagomizer Farside comic only minutes before seeing your name to finally put two and two together. Was wondering why it was always so familiar.
Simulating gladiator games is definitely better than killing people and animals outright, but I’ll always side-eye a sport that requires an ambulance on-site because the possibility of life-threatening injury is that high, and it’s not self-inflicted like mountain climbing or skydiving.
That would be almost all sports
Even baseball and tennis. These aren’t considered high impact full contact violent sports but the possibility of life threatening injury is there so there’s an ambulance on site or very very nearby.
I literally do high-impact full-contact combat sports, and it’s way safer than college basketball, say nothing about, gods forbid, football.
58 years and counting, no combat-related deaths!
Armor works.
Or cheerleading! Super dangerous!
something something toxic masculinity? wonder if it’s ever an issue in women’s basketball or sports team in general.
but these days iwith social media and eveyrone having a smartphone it’d prolly be easier to get cancelled/lose your career over it
getting cancelled is just having a bad week on Twitter and i’m tired of it being this idiotic Boogeyman played up largely by scared white guys.
But if somebody ratios me it means I don’t have a careeeeeeeeer
But when that happens they can write their “I’m being silenced and that’s not fair” book and promote it on the talk show and news interview circuit! That 15 minutes of fame is a money printer!
entitled suburbanite bongoes in sports use this when claiming the only reason they lost was because of non-existant transgender biological superiority.
Funnily enough, I was looking this up recently; there was a bit of controversy when, two years ago, Alana McLaughlin (who’s trans) beat Celine Provost (who’s cis) in an MMA match, and I recently saw someone referring to the former “brutally KO’ing Celine Provost in a laughably one sided debut fight” — exactly the sort of thing the people complaining about transgender people in sports would love to yell about.
Thing is, aside from it not being a KO (Celine Provost tapped out to a chokehold), it was far from one-sided; it lasted two rounds, mostly just ineffectual punches and kicks, but was ended when Alana McLaughlin (who’s shorter and had a range disadvantage, and had been trying to get in close for the whole match) grappled her opponent and, after about a minute of struggling, managed to get her to submit. Granted, she did seem a little vicious (her opponent was bleeding from the mouth at the end due to rough treatment — I’m not sure why), but that’s maybe because she’s ex-military.
But… some context for all of that. I found Celine Provost on an MMA stats site — https://www.sherdog.com/fighter/Celine-Provost-201863 — and it seems she had three previous matches (two amateur and one professional), and lost them all. I’m sure she’d tried her best, but when the oh-so-scary trans woman’s triumph over a cis woman is just something that three cis women have already done, it doesn’t really support the anti-trans argument, does it? Especially if those women did it better…
I didn’t manage to find her other professional bout, but I did watch the amateur ones, both of which seem to have been after her first professional one, and both amateurs beat her more easily than Alana McLaughlin did. Both by grappling, too.
Oh, and something I didn’t mention earlier: Celine Provost was grappled by Alana McLaughlin in the first round too, but escaped. In both of the amateur matches? She didn’t get out of the first grapple.
Just to add: Alana McLaughlin has apparently only had that one match, so I couldn’t directly compare how she would’ve done against other women, which is why I had to indirectly compare her against those other two amateur fighters (who do seem to be better fighters, despite the supposed “disadvantage” of being cis women).
I’m not clear on the rules regarding posting links in comments here, so I’ll drop those three links in a follow-up comment, in case anyone wants to check my claims.
Wow. That ended up longer than expected. Anyway, those links:
Celine Provost against:
Cornelia Holm: https://youtu.be/F6xuo4Kv7UQ?t=12
Joanne Doyle: https://youtu.be/to-wil7tRvs?t=89
Alana McLaughlin: https://youtu.be/3tFUEXDHIz8?t=888
I skipped ahead to the starts of each match for those.
Also, to be fair to her, I think Celine Provost was disadvantaged by the system of weight classes; as she’s so tall, most of her available opponents are going to have more strength for their size, and her main advantage is range, which goes away if they manage to grapple her (which they did).
Our latest unfair advantage is in beauty contests apparently.
that was a lot of research and i feel the need to say good job.
Writing it off as toxic masculinty is too easy, though. It assigns a convenient label, shrugs and moves along.
What it is, is the result of generations of boys raised to be violent, aggressive, abusive and entitled… i.e. “winners”.
These aren’t the dysfunctions of American society. They are the very functions, working exactly as intended, yielding exactly the desired results.
This is how Trumps are made: by our nurturing of aggression, greed and willful ignorance as if they were virtues. And for what? Fucking SPORTS.
You just described toxic masculinity, you realize.
Yeah, but in a way that actually DESCRIBES it instead of buzzwording to the finish line.
Sure, but that’s why we come up with terms for things, so we don’t have to describe the whole concept every time we want to talk about it.
And that’s fine, but once in a while it’s still nice to use a few extra words. Not every time, but sometimes.
*cough cough* wnba players wronged for being pregnant *cough*
Americans can get really gross about sports stuff but still pretty mild compared to
fans, holy moly football fans scare the crap outta me
You mean non-US football fans for football fans in general?
In US its called soccer, I guess its pretty unlikely to see a serious riot at a soccer game. It always mystified me the way people around the world can get so worked up about it, here in the US its last sport we would normally associate with beer chuggin sports bros
Why? The irrational loyalties to geographically close teams is exactly the same. If you mean the game itself, well, both teams spend most of the time almost scoring; if you care about one of them, the suspense is unbearable and the emotional roller-coasters nauseating.
Ok, I think I can follow, tho the frustratingly low scoring rate also sounds like a big part of why it never quite took off.
‘Merkins need there to be a WINNER. They see a 0-0 result and say “nothing happened”. Nobody WON. No one got to sack the castle and gang-rape the Queen. Ergo, the whole endeavor was pointless.
We’re largely unable to appreciate the beauty of a spectacular save, or the agony of a blistering shot that went off the crossbar, or to cheer for an underdog who scrapped and bled for every second to hold off the favorite in what was supposed to be a gross mismatch.
Soccer is fucking beautiful.
Soccer. Association football. The one where you use your foot to kick a ball.
“I was at a fight the other day and a hockey game broke out.” — someone
That was Rodney Dangerfield, who I always respected by the way.
Impossible! I tell ya he gets no respect around here!
It’s not quintessentially American to be an abusive fuck like Bobby Knight.
… but some days it seems to be quintessentially American to place abusive fucks like Bobby Knight into positions of power and then act as if their results (good or bad) justify the abuses.
Don’t know where you live, bud, but if you think we invented crazy sports fan and/or coach, you just ain’t looking at history enough. I guarantee you depending on where you live and what sports are big around there, there’s some awkward stuff in the past (or even present!) and some more extreme fans that long for the… crazier days of old.
I understood that reference
Panel 5 Lucy may be the most politically correct line since Dorothy.
Hey maybe she should try running for president.
Now I don’t know if the alt-text is riffing on Danny Boy or O Holy Night.
Team Danny Boy all the way!
My band did a cover called Dalek Boy that put a Dalek, a Cyberman, and a Mechanoid all in the studio together
things went about as well as you’d expect ^_^
it was funny once it got going but it took too long to get going and we never could figure out how to shorten it :/
Bobby Knight sounds like he needs to be fried by a Dalek!
Reads the alt text.
Okay, now that’s funny.
Were either of these two even alive when Bobby Knight got fired? Not surprised they wouldn’t understand it.
I just got a joke from Parks and Rec.
literally same, that’s the only reason I even know the name
Depends! If we go by the start of the comic, them all being 18 in September of 2010, then they would have been 8 when Knight was fired.
But now they were born around 2005, and next year they’ll have been born around 2006.
They don’t remember America’s electile dysfunction or 9/11.
Glances over at the House. That dysfunction’s kind of ongoing.
Laugh it up, Charles; give it a decade or two of time-sliding and you’ll have been born too late to remember that too.
Also, unrelated to the strip itself, but today is the tenth anniversary of this strip.
Nah, Charles, Linda & the other parents just become progressively older parents- that is, at the start of the comic they had their children in their early-20s, now they had their children in their late-20s, eventually they’ll all have had their children in their early-40s… the parents have clearly always been gen-x or boomer, and will remain that way, even when such an age would make them more likely grandparents of the cast.
I understand that reference primarily through the Pinky and the Brain episode that parodied it.
He’s being condescending and I dislike it.
If they’re playing Ohio State, I’d really expect more of a crowd in the student section.
Like I said on a previous strip, it would make sense if they were playing an unknown school who they were definitely going to beat easily, but another Big 10 school? That seems…big.
I’m chalking it up to alternate universe.
Or perhaps willis (quite rightly) not wanting to draw a large crowd of background characters
In-universe it’s early February, which usually is the meat of the conference schedule, and positioning for its tournament. But if it’s a down year there will be empty seats up here.
Now all I can think about is how jokes about Ruth’s futile Mapplethorpe (I’m leaving this autocorrect) Leafs Fandom will never go out of style.
oh. oh no. early February. that means Valentine’s day is coming. one of the true tests of college relationships.
During the Bobby Knight era, the big rivalry was with Michigan State, not so much OSU. Knight hated Michigan so much, he was once quoted as saying that if the team bus ever ran out of gas, he’d push it across the state line rather than even spend money for fuel in Michigan.
I wasn’t saying so much a specific rivalry as much as I would expect a game against any Big 10 school to draw a bigger crowd.
But also, I live in Michigan, and one of my mom’s friends has been talking about moving from Chicago, and I have been very insistent in reminding her that she can do better than Indiana.
In RL, IU had highest attendance in the big 10, 8th nationally last year. So probably Dean McHenry did something to ruin it.
To this day, Purdue surplus still sells all chairs for 1.00 on the anniversary of the chair throw.
Why yes, you are surrounded by people your children’s age.
Who knew.
When Willis started this webcomic, the characters might have had an older sibling or cousin that remembered Bobby Knight. Now it’s their parents.
Face it, Charles, you’re an old man, now. Children have an easy time surrounding you.
“Getting a beer.”
Wow, Sal really fucked Linda up, didn’t she?
If you’re curious about the coach referenced here, the YouTube channel Secret Base has a pretty good video going into the whole story: https://youtu.be/cfHbp_7SRWQ?si=AlDqpPz-mV7OAHMV
I gotta see this.. The geeky storytelling of Secret Base is a big draw for me.
Thanks, I needed some reference.
Anyway, ugh, he’s the worst.
O-H!
I-O!
Considering how vacant its pretty shitty that the two of them got put in literally the last row.
Wonder if Walky is just making a observation or if he’s subtley drawing attention to the fact that his parents didn’t think him and Lucy were worth sitting with.
My response ended up in the wrong place. I was saying that the seats in the last row was a joke that Willis made – it’s not real life.
Good energy Charles, up the aggression and you’ll be able to vibe with the football fans (Soccer for the Americans)
Pretty sure that’s called a “joKe”.
Football is no joke! It’s a serious matter! More important than life or death, at least according to Bill Shankly.
Yeaaaah I’m sure she is. Definitely not something that could have been bought at the entrance near the ticket booths
Eh, it feels ironic that Little Bobby Chairs played for the Ohio State before coaching the Hoos.
He oughta know it’s a natural progression, teach ’em a thing or three about IU’s athletics history. Maybe not the near-cult of personality of Little Bobby Chairs tho.
There’s something about Charles that I find…distasteful.
For the last 30 years my small town football team was led by
1. A first round hall of fame qb who everyone knew was spending his spare time drinking, drugging and screwing anything that moved. He recently help steal money meant for poor women and children to build a new volleyball stadium for his daughter to play in.
2 another HoF qb who doesn’t listen to coaches, has been separated from his family and is a COVID denying pos. Wants to debate Fauci with his high school level education.
Before that we had a HoF qb who shoveled his neighbors driveways and funded charities. And a HoF DE that was a genuinely nice person.
Sports can develop character but it more often exposes it.
But Bobby Knight was a major jerk who could recruit and develop good college level players.
I was attending IU when he got fired after he physically assaulted a student on campus. Before that point, I remember that whenever I would travel anywhere and I said where I was from, I would get some snide comment about Knight’s awful behavior. He made the town a laughingstock, but folks didn’t really seem to know that because, to my mind, they never traveled anywhere.
Anyway, I could not utter a single word on the subject for three months because I seemed to be the only person I knew who was glad to see him gone. All of the awful, awful things that everyone knew he did, and they were fine with it. It was a big lesson to me that people are generally a good deal worse than I believed at the time.
I didn’t learn this lesson until Trump!
That tracks. Nostalgic alumni care way more than students do in my experience.
Feel like a team losing their edge is better than a team having chairs thrown at them. Especially if that team is a college team (I really don’t know if that’s the case) and thus the same age as the “children” you’re surrounded.
From an objective point, yes, you’re right. But sports fans are both nostalgic (and the more hardcore you get) superstitious, so if the team was good when chairs were gone then by god someone needs to start throwing chairs to make the team great again.
I ain’t gonna lie, I’ve been susceptible to this (in a less violent way). A football team I follow has a coach who (in the first few years of his tenure) only wore gray crappy looking hoodies on the sidelines and the team was bad at the time, then later he started dressing more “professional” I guess you’d call it on game days and the team was suddenly killing it. Sheer coincidence I know, but for a long time if I ever saw the guy wearing a hoodie on game days I’d yell “dammit we’re screwed, have you learned nothing?”
edit: when chairs were thrown*
ugh, I wish there was an edit button
hey ! buckeyes !! i know them !!! its definitely not cause i live in michigan and am forced to know against my will !! lol
Are we supposed to connect this statement to the way he and his wife decided to treat their kids?
Do they serve alcohol at college events now? I haven’t been to one in over 20 years, but back then, we had a friend who would drive his RV to the game and we’d go out to the RV intermittently to drink because they didn’t serve alcohol in the stadium. God, I’m old…
I have read DOA for years and finally we have a strip I can comment on. For those of you who aren’t sportsball obsessives, here’s the 4-1-1 on the “Coach who threw chairs” reference:
Bobby Knight, the coach that was referenced, had severe anger issues. He threw chairs. He strangled players. He also coached national championship winning teams, and he was adored by Indiana fans. Hoosier fans are probably the most obsessive basketball fans in America. It’s a whole big thing. Knight was eventually fired for his antics (after coaching IU for two decades, a rarity in major college sports) and Indiana basketball, once a powerhouse, has never really recovered.
Charles is going to be hot chocolate. Buckeyes have a much better team
I mean, it was referenced in the new Space Jam, so. . .
Ah, so that’s what flavor of crap he is.
Someone’s a sports fan…
I’m not even a sports fan, but I did live in Indy at the time, so I knew by sheer proximity.
I live in Indiana now and I’m kinda amazed that folks and local newscasters and such still speak of Bobby Knight with such reverence and hardly a mention of his garbage behavior.
It was never a jump ball, Bob. That ball was as loose as your cannon.