REDEEMEDSKIN wrote:EA7649 wrote:You definitely are not clear on what your trying to say...
Have you considered that it may be a poster whose native language isn't English?
Or someone whose native sport is what we call "soccer", which derives from "association football", played with the feet and governed in England by the Football Association, rather than "rugby football, in which a player can pick up a ball and run with it. Stoke City is a club in the English Premier League, and, from their website, they play the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club this weekend. I pay attention to "Spurs" because I saw them during the only weekend I had in London during the season.
I think the poster wants some background on the team.
- "Sponsored by Nike?"...English and Scottish teams (almost all "soccer" teams) have a sponsoring business that gets their name and logo plastered on the jersey. The advertising logo is larger than the team "crest". In our case, Federal Express has bought the naming rights to Jack Kent Cooke Stadium, so the place is now FedEx Field...painted in FedEx colors. The Redskins have many partial sponsors...so many that you'll laugh out loud if you subscribe to Redskin radio broadcasts through the Internet at NFL.COM. "And now, Sonny Jurgensen, a Ledo's Pizza time-out on the field". The NFL has many sponsors...there is probably an official potato chip ("crisp") of the NFL. One company makes helmets for all teams; another makes the jersey; another the pants; another the shoulder pads. You can see the logos if you look carefully, but none are close to the size of each team's logo.
- History and traditions: see
http://www.the-hogs.net/History/ There is debate now over the name "Redskins". As best I know, the team was originally the Boston Braves, named after a baseball team that now plays in Atlanta. My guess: the Braves baseball team was named after the Boston "Liberty Boys" who dressed as American Indians and dumped a shipload of East India Company tea into Boston harbor in 1773 rather than allow the tea to be sold. The Company had paid a tax on the tea; Parliament had passed the tax without consulting the American colonists ("taxation without representation is tyranny"). Parliament closed the port of Boston and imposed martial law in Massachusetts. That led to the first shots of what became the American Revolution.
- The NFL began broadcasting games into the UK some time in the '80s. The Redskins were consistently good from 1981 - 1992, winning the Super Bowl three times, appearing in it a fourth, doing it all without any super-stars. Rather than individual stars, the Redskins were best known for their offensive line, nicknamed "The Hogs". This website honors their name. Ordinarily, fans and sportswriters ignored the offensive line...they block as a unit, each with a planned route and role, but they make way for a running back to carry the football or for the quarterback to throw. The Redskins got a new coaching staff in 1981, and the offensive line coach began to call his group "Hogs"...not elegant, but hard-working and smart, and usually covered in dirt. They won the Super Bowl the following year even though their best pass receiver, Art Monk (Hall of Fame) broke a foot in the last regular season game and their second-best receiver, half-back Joe Washington, was out with a pulled hamstring. Normally, an offense wins by balancing plays that stretch a defense -- something Monk and Washington would have done -- with plays that power through a defense stretched to defend against a pass. All the experts laughed that Washington's chances...the Redskins would have to hand the ball, again and again, to big running back John Riggins, who would have to run through the middle of the defense. The New York Times called the Hogs a bunch of fat guys and predicted that the famous Dallas Cowboys would strangle the Redskins, but Riggins were unstoppable. By the end of the Conference championship, the Cowboys were exhausted; same thing happened in the Super Bowl against the Miami Dolphins.
- Is it more than football? Not really. The Redskins have a marching band and a fight-song, just like college football teams. When the Boston Redskins moved to Washington, in 1937, college football was popular within limited range of the upper-middle-class. "Good old boys" went "back" to their colleges each Saturday to snort whiskey, wave banners, and cheer for their team. Professional football was not quite respectable but everybody followed baseball. The owner of the Redskins, George Preston Marshall, marketed them like a college football team for everybody else. This, the Redskins Marching Band and "Hail to the Redskins", the fight song. Whenever the Redskins score, the band plays "Hail to the Redskins", a phrase used so often here that we often just use the initials:
. See
http://www.the-hogs.net/History/fightSong.php# "Football without a band, is like music without an orchestra," said Marshall.
- More than football? On the other hand, Major League Baseball pulled the Washington Senators out of Washington twice: after the 1960 season, the team was moved to Minneapolis. After the 1971 season, the replacement Washington Senators moved to "a jerkwater town with no distinction except that it is halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth". That's a quote from Shirley Povich, sportswriter for the Washington Post from 1924 to the late '90s, a great writer proud that he was once selected for "Who's Who in American Women". The new coach of the Redskins promised that the 1971 team would make the playoffs, and they did. The Redskins became much more than just an NFL team because they were the only team in Washington. They became so good that during the '70s and '80s big deal politicians and Supreme Court justices would beg to be seated in the owner's box at RFK Stadium. Incidentally, Washington got a baseball team again in 2005, and the Washington Nationals have become pretty good. They were so bad in the '50s that a Broadway musical was written on the premise that a suffering Nats fan might be willing to sell his soul to the devil if the team could win the American League pennant. See
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry8CpIg2fvU
