Knight: Real Man's Football
Rich Knight
Issue date: 4/3/06 Section: Life & Leisure
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Who needs pedestrian teams like the New York Giants, the Miami Dolphins or the Oakland Raiders when you could have crash headfirst through your bathroom wall with teams like the New Jersey Hitmen, the San Francisco Demon and the Los Angeles Xtreme?
You don't, and that's what the XFL - founded and folded in 2001 - provided for sports fans: a brash brand of football that shed all its feathers and showed the world what it was really made of.
Vince McMahon, owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), thought it would be a nifty idea to reinvent football by starting his own league and adding new rules and regulations to the game.
These rules included sprints to the ball for first possession and overtimes that consisted of scoring without first downs; you know, real man material that screams to be followed by the Spike TV staple "Walker, Texas Ranger" or any Steven Segall movie.
And this reinvention of football was all because the "X" in XFL (which didn't stand for xtreme as people surmised) was all about X-ing out all the boring and contrived elements of the NFL.
The first match-up was between our local boys, the Hitmen, and the Las Vegas Outlaws, and both teams ran onto the field like Maniax (sorry, that was the name of the Memphis team).
They came out screaming at the camera, flapping their arms while doing leaping pirouettes to show off the nicknames on the back of their jerseys.
But it wasn't until former Carolina Panthers star, Rod Smart (he was fired this year over salary cap problems), turned around that I realized that this would be the first, and last, season of this new, exciting brand of football, because nothing this cool and outrageous could never survive on national television (see: "Arrested Development").
And the name on the back of his jersey was: "He Hate Me". Never mind that this technically isn't even a complete sentence. To see the words "He Hate Me" on that young man's back got me all weepy eyed in the sort of way I only get when I see Bambi's mother die.
You don't, and that's what the XFL - founded and folded in 2001 - provided for sports fans: a brash brand of football that shed all its feathers and showed the world what it was really made of.
Vince McMahon, owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), thought it would be a nifty idea to reinvent football by starting his own league and adding new rules and regulations to the game.
These rules included sprints to the ball for first possession and overtimes that consisted of scoring without first downs; you know, real man material that screams to be followed by the Spike TV staple "Walker, Texas Ranger" or any Steven Segall movie.
And this reinvention of football was all because the "X" in XFL (which didn't stand for xtreme as people surmised) was all about X-ing out all the boring and contrived elements of the NFL.
The first match-up was between our local boys, the Hitmen, and the Las Vegas Outlaws, and both teams ran onto the field like Maniax (sorry, that was the name of the Memphis team).
They came out screaming at the camera, flapping their arms while doing leaping pirouettes to show off the nicknames on the back of their jerseys.
But it wasn't until former Carolina Panthers star, Rod Smart (he was fired this year over salary cap problems), turned around that I realized that this would be the first, and last, season of this new, exciting brand of football, because nothing this cool and outrageous could never survive on national television (see: "Arrested Development").
And the name on the back of his jersey was: "He Hate Me". Never mind that this technically isn't even a complete sentence. To see the words "He Hate Me" on that young man's back got me all weepy eyed in the sort of way I only get when I see Bambi's mother die.