Tag: Deadspin

Deadspin’s Will Leitch tried to watch a game at a strip club…

…and didn’t have much luck.

Strip clubs are not about decadence, or fantasy, or even commerce. They are, at their core, about interaction. The dance is not delicate, or disguised. This is not a place where someone can be left alone. You might say that is the point. I might say that I’m trying to watch the game here, and if I desire a word with you, trust me, I will beckon.

Life is full of senseless, empty conversations. We all go through them every day, inventing vague generalities uttered only to end this conversation as soon as possible. Even if you are someone that I like, transferring interaction from Meet to Converse to Mutual Understanding requires an effort that neither of us are willing to put forth. Nothing personal. There’s just so much to do. I’ve got a lot on my mind. So do you. Perhaps there will be a time, friend, when you and I break bread and meld minds. For now, however, I am predisposed. Forgive me.

A strip club, even one as welcoming, clean and hospitable as Rick’s Cabaret, is a minefield of these senseless, empty conversations. At least in the real world, people have the good horsesense to resist sitting right down at the table, unsolicited, and launching into banalities. I know that I am here, and that my presence implies an invitation. I wish it did not, and that I could convey it somehow. Perhaps a sign would help. It is a very important game.

Read the rest over at Deadspin. Also, be sure to check out the post by his partner-in-crime that night, Daulerio.

I haven’t been to a strip club in a long, long time, but my policy was always to tell the girl up front that I wasn’t going in the back room for a lap dance. The response would usually go one of three directions: 1) they’d say “thank you” and move on to a better target, 2) they would see my response as a challenge, pretend they weren’t interested in getting me to pay for a lap dance, and then 15 minutes later proceed to ask me again if I wanted one, or 3) they would find my honesty oddly refreshing and kill their boredom and hatred for their job by actually sitting down and getting to know me.

Al Davis has lost his mind…

…or so Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News says in a round-about way. On Monday, Kawakami had a run in with Raiders senior executive John Herrera about the state of Oakland Raiders’ head coach Lane Kiffin and his future employment.

On Tuesday, Kawakami sat down with Deadspin to discuss, among other things, the mental state of Raiders’ owner Al Davis.

Al DavisHas Davis lost it? Are we talking latter-day Howard Hughes?
Al knows football. But he’s also paranoid; he’s into conspiracy theories about himself. He was that way when he was 40, but even more so now. And the ability to think around that gets harder as he gets older, so that effects his judgment. Also, he used to have people around him who were good at public relations. Guys like Bruce Allen, who were there during the Gruden years. Allen was a real people person and could help Al deal with the outside world. But Bruce is gone now. Al has absolutely no one around him who is good in dealing with people. It’s just Al in the darkness now.

So, what’s the second-strangest thing that has happened to you since you began covering the Raiders?
Do you know the Deng Xiaoping story? That’s the infamous one, I guess. It was at the press conference announcing the hiring of Kiffin. Afterwards I was talking to Al, and remarked that I thought it was a strange hire, given that Kiffin was so young and had no head coaching experience. Al didn’t like that, and said: ‘I’ll bet you don’t even know who Deng Xiaoping was.’ I was like, what? What does that have to do with anything? Al pressed it. ‘Who is Deng Xiaoping?’ So I thought for a minute, and said, ‘Well, if I’m not mistaken, wasn’t he the General Secretary of the Chinese government during the Tiananmen Square massacre?’ And Al repiles, ‘But what can you tell me about him other than that? See? You don’t even know anything about your own culture.’ I said, ‘Al, I’m Japanese-American, not Chinese.’ And Al said, ‘Ohh, geez. I bet you’re going to kill me on that now.’ It all happened in front of about 20 reporters, so I didn’t have to.

In the interview, Kawakami notes that the only reason Kiffin still has a job right now is because Davis isn’t prepared for what happens next. Davis wants Kiffin gone, but isn’t prepared to go through the process of finding another coach.

So in other words, things are about status quo at Oakland Raiders’ headquarters.