I don't even make sense anymore

By Harvey McGuffin
I remember when ...

I remember 1976 like it was yesterday. Probably because I went out partying yesterday until 4 a.m. in remembrance of that remarkable time. I’m really quite tired.

As an elderly man in the Tampa area during that Year Which Will Live in Infamy, I found myself clad in the puke-colored orange and white that characterized my beloved Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The glorious expansion team was remarkable in its goddamned awfulness, averaging 77 yards per game on the ground and allowing 340 overall yards per game to their opponents. Five times, the fuckers didn’t even score a point. It was my greatest year.

Every week, the Buccaneers lost. And every week, to wash away the sorrows of the football field, I would hit the bars with my boys Lee Roy Selmon, Steve Spurrier, and the incomparable running back tandem of Essex Johnson and Jimmy Gunn. Those weren’t even their porn names.

We laughed, we cried, we shot a few jukeboxes with handguns and we celebrated the great life afforded by the Tampa nightlife. Sure, my friends couldn’t play football, but who cares? They went down in history as somebody special, remembered as the only 0-16 team in the history of the National Football League.

Those of you who think being remembered for something like that is shameful can go to hell. You think Vanessa Williams was upset when she became remembered as the beauty queen who got her title stripped, because she did a little advance stripping of her own? Now she’s on that damn Ugly Betty show with some little slut named America. You think Chris Daughtry is pissed that everyone remembers him as a loser on American Idol? He has the voice of God.

At least my friends from 1976 are remembered for something. Take it from me, assholes, people forget you. Wives. Kids. Dogs. Business associates. Grocers. They move on with their lives unless you do something interesting. And by being the worst of the worst, the Bucs and their damn handsome uniforms were immortalized.

This year has been a rough one, watching the Miami Dolphins lose game in and game out. But when they scored an overtime touchdown to defeat Baltimore this week and improve to an unremarkable 1-13, it sent me and my Tampa friends into a frenzy of damn joy. Look at me! I can’t stop smiling.

Every year, we gather much in the same way, when the final winless team gets its first victory. Linebackers Richard Wood and Jimmy Sims come pick me up from this hell hole and take me out on the town, where inevitably, I get hammered like a college boy on his 17th birthday.

I called Don Shula and Bob Griese, because I heard they have been waiting for a champagne toast when the streak ended, but they explained that they didn’t intend on taking their bubbly off the ice this week. What a bunch of homos.