[rtpoe]

Playing Professional Sports While Injured

Overrated: Willis Reed, New York Knicks, Game 7, 1970 NBA Finals

During Game 5, Reed tore a muscle in his thigh and looked finished for the series. Without him on the court for Game 6, the Knicks got clobbered by the LA Lakers, 135-113. But at the end of warm-ups for Game 7, he came out onto the court to the wild cheers of the home crowd and started the game. "Inspired", the Knicks won handily.

Except...

Reed managed only FOUR points in 27 MINUTES. It's not like they just had him warm up and start the game, taking him out to save his leg from further damage after a few minutes. They left him in for half the game! One could easily make the case that he actually hurt the Knicks! And don't forget, they had home court advantage!

Underrated: Bert Trautmann, Goalie, Manchester City, 1956 FA Cup Final

I could go on about how Jack Youngblood of the Los Angeles Rams played in the NFC Championship Game in 1979 and then the Super Bowl on a busted leg. Or how Shun Fujimoto helped Japan win the team gymnastics gold at the 1976 Summer Olympics on a broken knee. But I'd rather talk about Bert Trautmann, since he is not from the U.S., plays what Americans call "soccer", and happened to come from Germany to England as a WWII POW...

With fifteen minutes left to play and ahead 3-1 in the match against Birmingham City, Trautmann was clobbered by the knee of Birmingham's Peter Murphy. Knocked completely for a loop, the rules at the time prevented Manchester from replacing him. Shaking off the dizziness, he carried on and blocked every attempt by Birmingham to score.

When the officials were placing the award medals around the necks of the victorious Manchester team, they noticed that Trautmann's head seemed crooked. Three days later, when the pain in his neck still hadn't gone away, he finally got some X-rays.

He had broken his neck.

Specifically, five neck vertebrae were dislocated, and one was cracked. He was extremely lucky that one of the dislocated ones wedged against the cracked one, preventing further injury. Otherwise, he'd have been killed.

[Palomine]

Fiction chicks edition:

Overrated: Ginger - Underrated: Mary Ann
Overrated: Daphne - Underrated: Velma
Overrated: Amy - Underrated: Leela
Overrated: Starfire - Underrated: Raven
Overrated: Jill Munroe - Underrated: Sabrina Duncan

[Bad Kitty]

Overrated: Daphne - Underrated: Velma

and yet... if we could put Velma's brain in Daphne's body... you could create the perfect crime solving seductress!
and it would have worked too, if it weren't for those snoopy kids and that darn dog of theirs.


side-note, Daphne was my early-life hairstyle role model. Can't say my sense of hairstyle ever really changed all that much since

[number3fac]

Overrated: Jill Munroe - Underrated: Sabrina Duncan

This is the only one of those pairings I didn't know.  Any pics for a comparison?  

BTW, if you don't mind Raven with big muscles, I dropped a couple such images in the "...with a 6-pack" thread.  

Pal replies: Jill vs. Sabrina is a reference to the original "Charlie's Angels" on TV. I.e: Farrah Fawcett is overrated whereas Kate Jackson was underrated. I saw the muscle-bound Ravens and enjoyed them very much... thank you!

[PregNut]

Overrated: Thigh gap.

Underrated: Calf gap.

[rtpoe]

(gets all "Old Man Grumpy" again...)

Hmm... Care to explain your choices?

Ya know, this 'project' is sort of an exercise in rhetoric (of which there is far too little these days). I could, for example, take the position that when it comes to whiskey, single malts are overrated and blends are underrated. While eminently correct, I do not persuade anyone of this if I cannot or will not make any effort to explain my beliefs in a clear and rational manner. A lack of elaboration is even worse when the reader has no information on the topic the writer is discussing. For example, in the above entry, if one knows nothing about the named "gaps", one is at a loss to understand the argument. Are these related to the "Missile Gap" of the Cold War? What about the Delaware Water Gap?

[DruulEmpire]

I'm going to go out on a limb -- literally -- and assume that he was referring to clothing showing off calves as compared to thighs.  I can appreciate this, as I like a good calf.  Still, he may need to clarify.

By the way, from a year ago -- I think the whole Ginger/Mary Ann controversy is fake.  I've seen this topic come up time and again, AND I'M THE ONLY GINGER FAN.  Every other guy is for Mary Ann -- and I don't think that's necessarily all that noble either.  Sometimes there are women around.  Or they may simply feel intimidated by Ginger, which is entirely understandable.  I don't think any Ginger fever exists.  It's a little like Charlie's Angels -- I can see the Kate Jackson attraction, but it was Jaclyn Smith who was the most beautiful.

[Eliza D]

^Literally "going out on a limb" would be something like you going outside while you were standing on a tree limb, as if exiting a tree house, or weirder, standing on someone's arm.

Just sayin' 

[rtpoe]

A Scent of Autumn:

Overrated - Pumpkin Pie Spice

It's in fucking everything. Coffee. Muffins. Vodka. They'll be using it in condoms next.... Does anyone really know what it's made of? No doubt it's filled with all manner of unpleasant chemicals. Seems that once the calendar turns to October, the crap gets dragged out of the lab to annoy us until Thanksgiving, when it mysteriously vanishes to be replaced with Egg Nog flavor. Look, if it's supposed to psychologically warm you up, why not let it stay around through February?

Underrated - Burning Leaves

They don't let you do it anymore. At least not in bulk, since large amounts of burning leaf litter produces a heck of a lot of nasty, irritating smoke. For those of us old enough to remember things before the ban, the smell of burning leaves was a sure sign that Autumn was in full swing. For the rest of us, it can bring to mind campfires, and being out in the wilderness. Try it sometime. Put a small handful of old, dried leaves into a can, and put a match to them...

[pedonbio]

Overrated: Michelin Tires

Underrated: Dunlop Tires

Forty years ago Michelin was innovative and creative. Alas, everybody else has now caught up with them.

Dunlop has been in the business more than a century, but continues a record of slow but regular developmental progress. Dunlop was, alas, bought out by a number of firms in the 1980s, mostly Goodyear, but still makes racing tires. Or tyres, as they put it.

[funkyboobster]

Overrated: The Beatles and The Stones
Underrated: The Who and The Kinks.

[tdotter]

Overrated-oxygen
Underrated-air

[Djoser]

Overrated: Avatar (James Cameron's)
Underrated: the other Avatar (nickelodeon)

[solvegas]

Overrated - Titanic - Cameron's overwrought and overlong chick flick with a little bit of historical accuracy.
Underrated - Das Boot ( The Boat ) - Great german movie which used a real type VII U-boat to tell a true story with great historical accuracy.

[rtpoe]

(kicking the anthill....)

SUPERHERO

Overrated: Iron Man

It's really all in the suit. Give me the suit, and after a few days practice, I can be just as awesome. Without the suit, Tony Stark's got nothing.

Underrated: "Doc" Savage

Even among the pulp heroes (Zorro, Bulldog Drummond, The Shadow, et al.) he gets overlooked. And his "Man of Bronze" epithet and "Fortress of Solitude" in the Arctic are not ripoffs of Superman - Doc Savage predates Supes by several years, having first appeared in March of 1933.

Clark Savage Jr. was deliberately trained by his father and a team of scientists to be exceptional in everything - strength, endurance, intelligence - right from his infancy. He became fabulously wealthy from a gold mine given to him as a reward for his assistance in his very first adventure. He used that to build up a modest business empire, where he kept all the best tech toys (answering machines, television, et al.) for himself. With a few like-minded friends, the "Iron Crew", he battled evil, injustice, and supervillains bent on world domination.

Perhaps his being overlooked is that he is primarily a literary character (there were a few comics, but they were all short-lived), and has yet to have a successful screen adaptation.

But 181 novels (as a start) is nothing to sneeze at.