For me it's:
GK:
Alisson
Defence:
Panucci, Marquinhos, Mexes, Spinazzolla
Midfield:
DDR, Nainggolan, Pelligrini
Forwards:
Totti, Salah, Dzeko
​
Bench:
Benatia*, Romagnoli*, Burdisso, Rudiger
Aquilani, Pjanic*
Flo, Montella
​
*fuck those guys, but whatever
**I got into football after Walter Samuel, Cafu, and Emerson.

The entirety of Harry "Truck" Hannah's major league career came with the New York Yankees -- all three years of it. But if you include his participation in the minors, he had a long career, beginning in 1909 with the Tacoma Tigers in the Northwestern League and ending in 1940 with the Memphis Chickasaws in the Southern Association. He is one of only a handful of players to have a hit in five different decades!
Of all the forgotten Yankee with memorable nicknames -- No Neck, Stanky the Yankee, Sailor Bob, Spud, Slow Joe, The Mummy, Birdie, Bump, and Grandma Johnny -- there's something to be said about the sublime elegance of a big, brawny catcher nicknamed Truck.
James Harrison Hannah Jr. was born 134 years ago today, on June 5, 1889, in what was then the Dakota Territory. (It would become the state of North Dakota about five months later.) By age 2, the family had moved to Seattle, Washington.
As a kid, he was called Harry, but by the time he was playing baseball, he was universally known as Truck. There are several stories as to how he got the nickname. Some said it had to do with his imposing size -- he stood 6'1" and weighed a solid 190 pounds -- and others because of the way he could block the plate as easily as a truck could block a street. Other sources say the nickname wasn't comparing him to a motor vehicle but to a horse, or rather a truck horse, as horses that pulled heavy wagons were called at the time. His daughter, Helen, said he got the nickname simply because he was "big and slow."
Another explanation, a little less colorful, was that Hannah paid the bills in the off-season by working as a truck driver!
Hall of Fame Umpire Billy Evans said Hannah was adept at the catcher's trick of distracting the batter with a steady stream of banter while behind the plate:

"Truck Hannah always has been an object of interest to me when catching. Aside from always doing a pretty good job receiving, he never failed to have a line of conversation that would make a bigger hit on the vaudeville circuit than some of the stuff used by some monologue artists. Hannah keeps up a continual chatter from the time the game starts. Of course, his conversation is largely directed at the batter, in the hope that his line of talk will take the mind of the batter from his work, the making of base hits. He seeks to keep the batter from concentrating, and from the many strikes slipped over by the New York pitchers, I would say there was merit in his system. Hannah's conversation is never objectionable. He usually has the batter laughing at some of his talk, rather than sore."

But Hannah used more than just banter to distract batters. As the pitch was being delivered, he would sometimes spit tobacco juice onto a player's shoes, toss pebbles onto the plate, or throw dirt at their hands on the bat!
Hannah got his start in professional baseball as a 20-year-old third baseman with the Tacoma Tigers in the Northwestern League. When the team needed an emergency catcher, Hannah was put behind the plate and stuck there for the rest of his career. Over the next five years he played for five different teams in four different leagues, until in 1914 finally catching on with the Sacramento Wolves in the Pacific Coast League. The PCL at the time was considered by some to be a third major league, or at least the minor league closest to major league competition, and Hannah was regarded as one of the best catchers in the league. He drew interest from several major league teams, including the Tigers, Phillies, and Browns. But it was the Yankees who finally acquired him, paying $4,000 to acquire his rights after he hit .292 in 569 at-bats in 1917.
Truck pulled into the Polo Grounds -- not Yankee Stadium, which wouldn't be built until 1923 -- as the foundation was being laid for a dynasty. Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston purchased the Yankees in 1915 and immediately set about reversing the fortunes of what had been for years one of the worst-run teams in the American League. The Yankees, as they became known in 1913, had only winning season in the last 10 years.
The new owners set about making changes, acquiring a number of valuable players: Wally Pipp, Home Run Baker, Ping Bodie, Aaron Ward, Urban Shocker, and previously forgotten Yankee Bob Shawkey.
After the 1917 season they made the biggest change of all, firing well-liked manager Bill Donovan and replacing him with former St. Louis Cardinals manager Miller Huggins, who over the next 11 years would lead the Yankees to six pennants and three World Series.
Huggins made another move, acquiring from the St. Louis Browns future Hall of Fame pitcher "Gettysburg Eddie" Plank and veteran second baseman Del Pratt. The latter would be a good player for the Yankees, hitting .295/.348/.394 (106 OPS+) over the next three seasons, but the 42-year-old Plank refused to report and retired instead. In return, the Yankees shipped out five players... including starting catcher Les Nunamaker, who had been with the Yankees for four seasons.
And so, needing a catcher to replace Nunamaker, the Yankees paid the Salt Lake City Bees $4,000 for Hannah. He was expected to battle 22-year-old Muddy Ruel to be the backup to the 25-year-old Roxy Walters, who had been Nunamaker's understudy since September 1915, but Ruel would be drafted into the U.S. Army and Walters broke his finger in an exhibition game 10 days before Opening Day. By the time Walters was ready to play again, Hannah was hitting .288/.432/.356 and had thrown out 19 out of 34 basestealers; over the rest of the season, he would maintain that pace to lead the league in CS% (55%) as well as in double plays as a catcher (16). His batting average would fade dramatically, however, dropping all the way to .220 by the end of the season, but he was still contributing with a .361 OBP in 312 plate appearances. Walters's bat never got started at all, and hitting just .199/.239/.236 in 205 plate appearances.
Technically a major league rookie when he joined the team, the 29-year-old Hannah was treated like a veteran from his four seasons in the well-respected Pacific Coast League. In addition, he was -- literally as well as figuratively, at 6'1" -- one of the few players on the team who could see eye-to-eye with the 6'2" Babe Ruth when he was acquired prior to the 1920 season. When Ruth got into squabbles with diminutive manager Miller Huggins, it was often Hannah's duty to keep the peace.
Yankee shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh, the Yankee captain from 1914 to 1921, described one such incident to long-time Yankee PR man Marty Appel in 1974:

"Once we were leaving Boston after a tough loss, and Babe was drunk, and he said he was gonna throw Huggins off the train! He was heading for his drawing room. On the way he stopped in the men’s room and punched this huge mirror. It fell into a million pieces. Me and Ernie Shore and Truck Hannah pulled him down to the ground and sat on him until he passed out. Truck — a big guy — puts him over his shoulder and moves him to the next car."

At the end of the season, the Yankees were happy enough with Hannah that they traded Roxy Walters to the Red Sox. For the next two years, the catching duties were almost evenly split between Hannah and Ruel, who was back from the Army with the end of World War I.
The "Muddy-Truck" tandem was colorfully named but disappointing, with Ruel hitting .255/.325/.306 (71 OPS+) in 560 PA and Hannah .243/.313/.317 (70 OPS+) in 553 PA. Catcher in those days was very much a defense-first position, and both had good gloves, but the Yankees (even with the newly acquired Babe Ruth having an 11.7 bWAR season) finished three games out of 1st in 1920.
Ruppert and Huston asked Huggins what the team needed to win, and his answer: a catcher.
At the end of the season, the Yankees sent Hannah back to the Pacific Coast League, and traded Ruel to the Red Sox for previously forgotten Yankee Wally Schang, the first in the long line of great Yankee catchers. In his five years with the Yankees, the switch-hitting Schang hit .297/.390/.406 (105 OPS+), and in the 1923 World Series -- the first of 27 won by the Yankees -- Schang played every inning of every game, went 7-for-22 (.318) with a double and three runs scored, and allowed just one stolen base.
Hannah would stay in the Pacific Coast League for the next 22 years as a player, coach, and manager. He had a great year with the Vernon Tigers in 1923, hitting .346 with 23 doubles and 6 home runs in 370 plate appearances. His final plate appearance came on May 19, 1940, when he was managing the Memphis Chicks. Two weeks shy of his 51st birthday, with both his catchers injured, Hannah caught both ends of a doubleheader and went 1-for-6.
Hannah retired from baseball two years later after his St. Paul Saints lost 15 games in a row -- 11 of them by one run! He said he couldn't sleep anymore, replaying every loss in his head over and over, second-guessing every decision he made as manager.
He retired to his ranch in Southern California, but remained active enough in the regional baseball scene that when the Los Angeles Angels played their first major league game in 1961, Hannah was selected to catch the ceremonial first pitch.
Truck Hannah died on April 27, 1982, five weeks shy of his 93rd birthday. His wife, Helen, died in October, a month before what would have been their 70th wedding anniversary.
Keep On Truckin':

• One of the more interesting aspects in researching information about Truck Hannah is in looking for pictures of him, you come across many photos of trucks owned by women named Hannah.
  
• Hannah made his major league debut against the great Walter Johnson. In his first major league plate appearance, he singled up the middle! He popped out his second time up, then struck out. His fourth time up he drew a walk against Johnson, advanced to second on a single, and scored his first major league run on a double, and the Yankees won, 6-3. Not a bad debut against the future Hall of Famer!
  
• According to his SABR biography: "Hannah’s daughter may have led a more interesting life than her ballplaying father. Helen Lorraine (Hannah) Campbell was one of the first women in Los Angeles to enlist in the Marine Corps during World War II, and retired from the Marine Corps Reserve in 1975 after 32 years of service. She was also a chaperone for several years with the Muskegon and Kalamazoo teams in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League, the league that inspired the 1992 movie A League of Their Own. At the age of 75 she went parasailing for the first time and at 78 sailed over Africa’s Serengeti plains in a hot-air balloon. She died in 2013 at the age of 97."
  
• On May 12, 1920, Hannah went 4-for-4 (all singles) with two runs and two RBIs in a 14-8 rout of the Chicago White Sox. Hannah singled twice in a seven-run 6th inning, as did pitcher Bob Shawkey; it was the first time in major league history that a pitcher and catcher each had two hits in the same inning.
  
• That was Hannah's best day as a major leaguer, but he had another four-hit day on September 11, 1920, with a double and three singles in five at-bats against the Cleveland Indians.
  
• Truck Hannah was the first major leaguer born in what would become North Dakota when he made his debut on April 15, 1918. He also is one of three Yankees born in North Dakota: Ken Hunt, an outfielder in the Yankee farm system from 1952 to 1960 who had a couple cups of coffee in the Bronx, and later played for the Angels and Senators; and long-time Cleveland Indians 1B/DH Travis Hafner, who ended his career with the Yankees in 2013. The most famous Yankee raised in North Dakota is Roger Maris, but he was actually born in Minnesota. The family moved to Fargo when Maris was 8 years old. A total of 20 major leaguers were born in North Dakota, and the best, by bWAR, was Angels outfielder and two-time All-Star Darin Erstad.
  
• Hannah is on the All-Palindromic Last Name Team, along with Dean Anna, Toby Harrah, Eddie Kazak, Dave Otto, Glenn Otto, Dick Nen, Robb Nen, Johnny Reder, Juan Salas, and Mark Salas.
  
• In 1917, Hannah was behind the plate for the Salt Lake City Bees in the Pacific Coast League when former New York Giants outfielder Fred Snodgrass came up to the plate for the Vernon Tigers. Hannah, by this time a 28-year-old nine-year minor league veteran and hitting a respectable .292, wasn't impressed. "So you're a big leaguer? I guess you're going to come out here and show us how the Giants used to do it, eh? Let's see if you can hit this one." That off-season, major league teams asked Snodgrass for his opinion on the top players in the Pacific Coast League, and his report on Hannah: "I don’t like him personally, but I must say he is the best all around catcher in this league, and my dislike for him does not blind me to that fact."
  
• George Halas -- who would later be the founder of the Chicago Bears -- was a 24-year-old rookie on the New York Yankees in 1919. He was on the bench sitting next to Truck Hannah during a game against the Tigers, staring wide-eyed as his boyhood idol, the legendary Ty Cobb, strode to the plate. Hannah, maybe pranking the rookie, told Halas he ought to razz Cobb to try to throw him off his game. Halas did as he was told, and to his surprise, got a reaction: Cobb dropped his bat, marched over to the Yankee dugout, and pointed at Halas. "Punk! I'll see you after the game! Don't forget, punk!" Halas, a Navy veteran and a college football player, was no punk but not exactly looking forward to a brawl against the famously irascible Cobb. He stayed in the locker room as long as possible, hoping Cobb would be gone by the time he emerged, but when he finally came out, the Georgia Peach was waiting for him. "I like your spirit, kid," Cobb said, "but don't overdo it when you don't have to." Halas said it was a lesson he never forgot.
  
• Speaking of Cobb, he told a sportswriter he didn't care for Hannah's distracting patter behind the plate: “This fellow Hannah of the New York club keeps me busier at the plate than any other catcher in the league. I don’t like letting a recruit outtalk me, and in my effort to keep my end of the conversation, I had my work cut out for me making base hits off those Yankee pitchers.”
  
• Carl Mays, who had pitched for the Red Sox since 1915, was acquired by the Yankees on July 30, 1919. Delighted to go from the 38-48 Red Sox to the 48-38 Yankees, Mays made the rounds in the clubhouse, shaking hands. When he got to Hannah, he offered his hand, but Hannah shoved him away, then charged after him. Mays backed up until Hannah vaulted over a table and cornered him against a wall -- and only then did Hannah shake his hand. "We're even," Hannah said, grinning. Since the previous season, Hannah and Mays had been feuding. Mays took great pride in keeping his uniform spotless, and hated Hannah's trick of spitting tobacco juice onto his shoes while batting. So every time Hannah came up to the plate, Mays came "up and in" to make him hit the dirt. In April, the last time they'd face each other, Mays plunked him. But now they were teammates and all was forgiven. Ironically, a year later, Mays would kill Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman with a pitch that hit him in the head.
  
• During the off seasons, Hannah played in the California Winter League, believed to be the only integrated league in professional baseball at the time. Hannah also played against Negro Leaguers when barnstorming with Babe Ruth in 1920 and Dizzy Dean in 1935.
  
• Prior to the 1927 season, Babe Ruth made a silent movie called Babe Comes Home. Based on a short story called "Said With Soap," it had quite the plot: Ruth is Babe Dugan, a ballplayer whose tobacco-chewing habit means his uniform is always stained. He falls in love with Vernie, the laundress who cleans the team uniforms, but she wants him to stop chewing tobacco. Babe then goes into a slump, and finds himself on the bench. Vernie finally relents and gives him a plug of tobacco, and Babe hits a game-winning home run. The movie was filmed at Wrigley Field -- not that one, but a field with the same name in Los Angeles. It was the home stadium for the Los Angeles Angels, and on the Angels were several ex-Yankees, including Truck Hannah. Ruth was much more interested in his old pals than in the movie, and the exasperated director struggled to keep Ruth's attention. Finally, he moved Ruth to a distant park of the stadium, as far away as he could from Hannah and the other ex-Yankees. But Hannah and the others kept mischievously hitting balls in his direction, causing Ruth to botch take after take!
  
• Hannah was in two movies himself, both times as a baseball playing extra. The films are notable because they are both early "talkies". His first appearance was in 1928's Warming Up, about a pitcher (played by Richard Dix, later a star in westerns) who falls in love with the team owner's daughter (played by Jean Arthur, who would later co-star with Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). A year later Hannah was in Fast Company, about a baseball player (Jack Oakie) who is inspired to greatness thanks to fan letters he thinks come from a beautiful woman (Evelyn Brent) but are actually written by his conniving manager (Skeets Gallagher). In 1940, Oakie was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as a parody of Benito Mussolini in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
  
• Joe DiMaggio, still a teenager, played for the San Francisco Seals in the Pacific Coast League from 1932 to 1935. Hannah, with the Los Angeles Angels, played against him often. Prior to DiMaggio's debut with the Yankees in 1936, a sportswriter asked the former big leaguer for his scouting report on DiMaggio. "They'll be comparing him to Tris Speaker and Harry Hooper and those fellows in a year or two," Hannah said. Truck was right: Speaker and Hooper were both Hall of Fame outfielders, and of course, so was the Yankee Clipper.
  
• In 1936, Hannah was a playecoach for the Los Angeles Angels. Ted Williams, already a legendary hitter (and pitcher) from his exploits at Herbert Hoover High School in San Diego, was being courted by both major and minor league teams. Ted's father, Sam Williams, was acting as his agent, and he arranged a meeting with Truck Hannah to talk about a contract with the Angels. "When my dad went down to talk to him, Hannah said, 'Where's the kid?'" Williams later recalled. "Dad says, 'He's not here.' Hannah said, 'Well, for crying out loud, go get him. He's the one I want to talk to, not you!'" Insulted, Sam Williams walked away. Instead, Williams -- after turning down offers from the Yankees and the Cardinals -- signed with the newly formed San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League. Had he signed with the Angels, Williams likely would have been a Cub, as they were a Chicago affiliate. (But Williams, a San Diego native, likely would have signed with the Padres even if Hannah had made a better impression.)
  
• Hannah's mouth almost cost his team another teenaged prospect. In 1934, 16-year-old Steve Mesner went to an open try-out for the Los Angeles Angels, and Hannah was helping to evaluate the prospects. He took one look at Mesner and shouted, "Get out of here, kid! You're too little!" Mesner started walking off the field, but someone told him to go back. During batting practice, he hit three balls over the fence! During a fielding drill, he was handling every chance, and the coach kept hitting them harder and harder, expecting the teenager to boot one. He didn't, and the team gave him a contract. Mesner hit .328 in three years with the Angels before going to the Chicago Cubs and later the Cincinnati Reds.
  
• The winter of 1918-1919 was gripped by the "Spanish Flu" epidemic and, in a scene that would be familiar to all of us today, the players, umpires, and fans in a Southern California winter league wore face masks during the game. A photo ran in the newspaper with the catcher misidentified in the caption as "Trash" Hannah of the New York Yankees!
  
• Hannah is a member of the Pacific Coast League Hall of Fame. Some sources say he was an inaugural member when it was created in 1943; other sources say he was inducted in 1950. Other notable Yankees in the PCL HoF include Frankie Crosetti, Joe DiMaggio, and Casey Stengel.
  
• Hannah's daughter, U.S. Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Helen Hannah Campbell, went to Whittier High School with Richard Nixon, and later served as a docent the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in Yorba Linda, California. Richard Nixon, who grew up watching Hannah as a player and manager in the Pacific Coast League, said in a 1983 interview: "I remember Truck Hannah. He was a great catcher and could hit."
  
• In 1925, Hannah helped organize the Association of Professional Ball Players of America, created to assist former professional baseball players who are injured, elderly, or destitute. The APBPA is still in existence today!
  

Near the end of his career, Truck Hannah was interviewed about the rigors of being a catcher. He said during his 30 years in baseball he'd broken every finger on his right hand at least twice. "What the hell, it's all part of the game," he said. "It sure was fun while it lasted. Even with busted hands and fingers and everything else, I wouldn't have missed it for the world."

From The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium (1998).
​
"Nothing in the strange world of Buster Keaton's comedy is stranger than the ending of College (1927). In that picture Buster plays a bookworm who strives to become a jock. The top student in his high-school class, and so averse to sports that he makes his graduation speech into a diatribe against athletics, he yet arrives at college the next fall with suitcases full not of books but of athletic equipment. With the dauntless determination characteristic of the Keaton hero, the little scholar involves himself in a pursuit for which he's quite unsuited but which is, under circumstances equally characteristic of Keaton, what's expected of him in his courtship of the girl he loves. Outraged like all his other classmates by his diatribe at graduation, she'll see no more of him, as she promptly informs him after the speech, unless he changes his attitude and takes up sports. And so he changes his attitude, neglecting all his studies at college and instead spending most of his time on the sports field. Although he seems inept beyond hope at the various athletic activities he doggedly tries out, he succeeds in winning her in the end, for he summons up unexpected abilities when she's in danger and he comes to the rescue, running much faster and jumping much farther than he ever could before, managing with no trouble now an obstacle race over the hedges in his path and a high pole-vault into the window of her room. With undiminished momentum, he quickly disposes of the villain, a brawny dolt who has been his rival for the girl's affections, and proceeds with her to church forthwith, not even pausing to change his athletic clothes before they are married. Then follows a very peculiar epilogue. No sooner are the newlyweds out of church than a dissolve transports us many years later to the middle-aged couple in their home, sitting among their several children; this in turn swiftly gives way to the couple in their advanced years, abidingly sitting at home beside each other; this in turn to the closing shot of their adjacent graves.
​
"The element of sadness in Keaton's comedy has often been noted, and it certainly emerges in that brisk final depiction of aging and death. Coming on the heels of the triumphant happy ending, the sudden sadness of the epilogue takes us by surprise; but I don't think it constitutes such a break with the rest of the film as some believe. "'What is this abrupt slap in the face doing at the end of an otherwise unquestioning love story?' wrote Walter Kerr in The Silent Clowns. "It takes no more than eleven seconds of playing time to deliver its chill, and yet it undoes on the spot all of the yearning, the struggle and the victory, of the narrative."1 Evidently perturbed by the chill, Kerr misrepresents the epilogue as portraying a disappointed, even embittered couple, when nothing of the sort is suggested: all that we get is a brief summary of a long, uneventful marriage. It seems to me wrong, or only half right, to view the epilogue as a brusque reversal of a hitherto romantic story. Although the hero is unquestioning in his devotion to the girl, the romanticism of the story has been tacitly called into question all along by the conveyed sense that the girl is as unreasonable in her peremptory demands as is the hero in his stubborn pursuit. If Keaton is a romantic, he's a singularly unsentimental one. Granted, we'd have expected the story to end with Buster's getting the girl, but the epilogue merely shows us that he gets to keep her: surely not the undoing but the exact fulfillment of his wishes. If the epilogue brings about a reversal of the happy ending, it does so by way of being a logical continuation of it, indeed a visual equivalent of those famous romantic last words: and they lived happily ever after.
​
"Seeing the couple's whole life together go by on the screen in so short a time has, of course, none of the reassuring effect of those words. Yet even the disconcerting briskness of those final eleven seconds carries forward unbrokenly the haste of the climactic rescue and ensuing wedding, as if confirming Buster's aim to get things settled once and for all. College is not the only one of Keaton's films to conclude with the grave. In Cops (1922), a short film in which he's surreally chased by every cop in the city, "The End" appears inscribed on a tombstone capped with Buster's porkpie hat. The plot of Cops, however—unlike that of any of his full-length movies—has an unhappy outcome. Rejected by the girl he loves even after he manages to elude all the cops who have been after him, Buster suicidally puts himself back in their midst: an unusual ending for a comedy, to be sure, but not so strange as the way that in College the romance turns sad, in spite of its triumph, by being literally carried out to its conventional conclusion in the couple's staying together for the remainder of their lives.
​
"Although not quite in the class of Keaton's very best— Our Hospitality (1923), Sherlock Junior (1924), The Navigator (1924), The General (1927), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)—College seems to me a splendid film that has been generally underrated. It surpasses, I believe, Harold Lloyd's better-known college comedy, The Freshman (1925), which preceded it and no doubt influenced it. The hero of The Freshman is also an incompetent athlete who redeems himself in the end by performing unexpected feats, in his case by winning the decisive football game of the season. (Apparently to avoid too close a comparison with the Lloyd picture, football is one sport omitted from College.) In giving such prominence to athletics, however, both comedians were merely reflecting a fact of campus life—in which sports are often more important than studies—and making use of material naturally befitting the physical comedy of the silent screen. Their comic conceptions, in any case, are fundamentally different. For Lloyd, athletics are part of the image of the big man on campus his ambitious but unknowing hero wants to become, whereas Buster only wants the girl, a more realistic goal as well as a more romantic one. Lloyd's hero is a thoroughgoing incompetent, a classic fool, whereas Keaton's is only a fool for love, a bookworm out of his element on the sports field and quite aware of his problem. When, after knocking over every other hurdle along the racing track, he succeeds in clearing the last one, Buster, instead of deriving any satisfaction from that success, gravely appraises it as a fluke, and then tips over that last hurdle too, feeling that it might as well conform to the pattern of the others. Such disdain for flukes is inconceivable in the Lloyd hero, who'd get nowhere without them. Unlike Lloyd, Keaton never plays the kind of comic character who is preposterously deluded about himself and what's going on around him.
​
"Buster usually has a good grasp of his situation, as good a grasp as one can expect from, as Kenner put it, 'a visitor, not native.' He is a visitor to the sports field in College who knows that the odds are against him there but nonetheless keeps trying because he also knows that the girl won't have him any other way, because he is a compliant visitor desiring to participate in a situation in which a girl's ideal boyfriend must be a jock.
​
"Why should Buster unprotestingly comply with the undue requirements laid upon him by others? One answer is provided in College by the figure of a dean, friendly to the promising young scholar and built small like him, who may be regarded as an embodiment of what his scholarly future would be like. Disappointed that Buster has been doing poorly in his studies, the older man, when he hears the explanation, tearfully reveals that he himself loved a girl once but lost her to an athlete. Buster would rather take on the alien territory of sports than end up alone like the dean. If all comedians are outsiders, Keaton is the outsider who will not give up the attempt to join in, to connect with others. Chaplin's Tramp, by contrast, is more or less self-sufficient, "an aristocrat," as Robert Warshow put it, "fallen on hard times." Lloyd's bespectacled democrat is a blundering free enterpriser, motivated by self-interest, patently inferior to his fellow men but aspiring to rise above them in the land of opportunity. Buster is unique in earnestly seeking a genuine togetherness. If he seems the loneliest of all comedians, it's because he's the one to whom companionship matters the most.
​
"That loneliness is hauntingly conveyed in those distant long shots, typical of Keaton, in which he appears as a tiny figure amid large empty surroundings: in the river town during the storm, or practicing by himself in the college stadium, or—in The Frozen North (1922)—coming out of a subway exit into an arctic wilderness.
​
"Robert Bresson—another practitioner of the deadpan approach, in a different way from Keaton's but with a similar sense that life is not a matter of personality—once defined originality as the failed attempt to do the same as everybody else, a definition that applies exactly to Buster. For all his efforts to join in, and all his eventual successes in meeting the forces outside, inside he cannot shake off the sense of his singularity. He thinks, therefore he stands alone in a world where no other minds are discernible, only systems of behavior. Ultimately he remains even more isolated than Chaplin's Tramp, since it's not Buster's individual qualities that single him out—these he hardly lets interfere in his transactions with others—but the very fact of his individuality, of his possessing the inner dimension of a self in the realm of the formula.
​
"Buster is not, then, Grierson's "romantic achiever of all things" but a bewildered equilibrist whose mind runs counter to the achievements of his body: a new kind of clown who may not so often trip over physical objects but who, so to speak, keeps tripping over his thoughts. The charming incompetence of the traditional clown was the conception of an earlier time, with more room for eccentricity than has been allowed in our ruthless century. Things were not so good then, of course—things never have been— but at least the clown could thumb his nose at the world and expect the world to let him be. He would puncture our lofty pretensions with his reminder of the claims of the body, of the fact that in our flesh and blood we all fumble our way through life. That conception hasn't lost its validity, and Chaplin can still use it to portray a doughboy in Shoulder Arms (1918) or a factory worker in Modern Times; but he was looking back to a Victorian humanism that decidedly fails him when portraying a Jew under the Nazis in The Great Dictator (1940). Keaton reverses that conception: to our age of increasing mindlessness he offers a comedy of mind. Although he never dealt with contemporary issues as Chaplin did, he accurately depicts the landscape of our time in its vast inhuman organization. He reminds us of the claims of consciousness against a mechanistic order, of the fact that our expert procedures and outward accomplishments take no account of our inner nature. Whereas the old clowns would assert our right to our idiosyncrasies, he asserts our need to live with one another in a community that does justice to our individuality. The sadness that emerges at the end of College underlies all of Keaton's happy endings: it is the sadness of inescapable isolation, of knowing that he does not in the end, any more than he did at the beginning, belong in a world where happiness is available only as a convention. Yet Buster has done his best, and leaves us with the haunting image of his solemn and solitary figure, at once purposeful and detached, bravely attempting the impossible."

Main hub thread with the full 131 rankings
For all the Cyclone fanatics out there, I see you guys. For the 6th worst Power 5 team on this list, Iowa State has had incredible support, averaging 50,000+ fans a year even during their lows. Finally, after years of struggling minus a few nice Dan McCarney years, Iowa State’s found a coach that’s brought them consistent success in Matt Campbell. Outside of Campbell’s first year in which he went 3-9 and the latest 4-8 season in 2022, the 5 years in between (2017-21) all place in my top 7 ISU seasons over the last 40 years. Whether last year was an outlier or if Iowa State will regress to their historical mean remains to be seen, but the last 6 years have been great compared to what fans have been accustomed to.

Best Seasons and Highlights

1. 2020: 7. Iowa State: 9-3 (30.160) 2. 2000: 27. Iowa State: 9-3 (13.294) 3. 2017: 32. Iowa State: 8-5 (12.780) 4. 2018: 37. Iowa State: 8-5 (8.477) 5. 2021: 40. Iowa State: 7-6 (5.442) 6. 2005: 37. Iowa State: 7-5 (3.574) 7. 2019: 43. Iowa State: 7-6 (1.761) 8. 2004: 42. Iowa State: 7-5 (-2.644) 9. 2001: 51. Iowa State: 7-5 (-3.334) 10. 2002: 57. Iowa State: 7-7 (-4.723) 11. 2012: 65. Iowa State: 6-7 (-7.162) 12. 2009: 63. Iowa State: 7-6 (-7.233) 13. 2011: 62. Iowa State: 6-7 (-8.169) 14. 1989: 56. Iowa State: 6-5 (-10.057) 15. 1986: 56. Iowa State: 6-5 (-10.436) 16. 1990: 58. Iowa State: 4-6-1 (-11.929) 17. 2010: 69. Iowa State: 5-7 (-13.761) 18. 1985: 60. Iowa State: 5-6 (-17.317) 19. 2022: 84. Iowa State: 4-8 (-18.173) 20. 1988: 66. Iowa State: 5-6 (-18.197) 21. 1992: 79. Iowa State: 4-7 (-21.249) 22. 1999: 79. Iowa State: 4-7 (-23.653) 23. 1993: 75. Iowa State: 3-8 (-23.926) 24. 1983: 79. Iowa State: 4-7 (-25.659) 25. 1991: 75. Iowa State: 3-7-1 (-26.248) 26. 2006: 92. Iowa State: 4-8 (-30.444) 27. 2007: 93. Iowa State: 3-9 (-31.101) 28. 2015: 97. Iowa State: 3-9 (-31.892) 29. 1998: 84. Iowa State: 3-8 (-31.989) 30. 1984: 85. Iowa State: 2-7-2 (-32.012) 31. 2016: 97. Iowa State: 3-9 (-32.276) 32. 1995: 84. Iowa State: 3-8 (-32.441) 33. 2013: 98. Iowa State: 3-9 (-34.411) 34. 1996: 94. Iowa State: 2-9 (-37.584) 35. 1987: 91. Iowa State: 3-8 (-37.886) 36. 2014: 115. Iowa State: 2-10 (-42.981) 37. 2008: 111. Iowa State: 2-10 (-48.885) 38. 2003: 107. Iowa State: 2-10 (-50.450) 39. 1994: 101. Iowa State: 0-10-1 (-53.566) 40. 1997: 105. Iowa State: 1-10 (-56.575) Overall Score: 9649 (84th) 

• 184-283-5 record
• 0 conference titles
• 5-8 bowl record
• 5 consensus All-Americans
• 42 NFL players drafted

Iowa State certainly has a knack for producing really good RBs. 4 of their 5 All-Americans come from 2 RBs in Troy Davis (1995, ‘96) and Breece Hall (2020, ‘21). At just 5’8 183 lbs, Davis became the first player in NCAA history to rush for 2000 yards in back-to-back seasons, and remains one of only 2 players to ever do so. In 1995 he ran for 2010 yards and 15 TD, placing 5th in Heisman voting. He outdid himself a year later, rushing for 2185 yards and 21 TD, narrowly missing out on the Heisman, finishing to 2nd Florida QB Danny Wuerfel, who got 49% of the votes compared to Davis’ 43%. Davis won 3 of 4 regions, but lost badly in the South. Still, the tradition of producing strong RBs rings true, as Iowa State’s produced 8 RBs during the last 40 years with 2500+ career rushing yards. Notable NFL players include David Montgomery, Breece Hall, Allen Lazard, Pro Bowler Kelechi Osemele, and as a 49er fan, future Hall of Famer Brock Purdy.

Top 5 Seasons

Worst Season: 1997 (1-10 overall, 1-7 Big 12)
Remember how good Troy Davis was, especially after I described him above? Well, his teams weren’t very good, going 3-8 in 1995 and 2-9 in 1996. So you can imagine how 1997 went after he had left for the NFL. Iowa State didn’t stand a chance in Dan McCarney’s 3rd year as head coach, and it’s honestly a miracle the Cyclones let him stay for so long, as it took 6 years for him to get his first winning season. The gamble paid off though, as he was eventually inducted into the Iowa State Hall of Fame. Still, 1997 was his worst year. They had a talented freshman QB by the name of Sage “Helicopter” Rosenfels on the roster, but he wouldn’t start for another 2 years. QB was not a big issue though, as Todd Bandhauer had a respectable year, completing 48% of passes for 2514 yards 20 TD 9 INT, leading the Big 12 in passing yards and TDs. Bandhauer was a 2-time All-Academic Big 12 selection, and is currently an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Colorado State. WR Tyrone Watley led the Big 12 in receiving yards with 827, and RB Darren Davis had 1000+ yards in just 9 games. Offense wasn’t a huge issue, but the defense gave up 44.8 PPG. The lone win on the year was 24-17 over 2-9 Baylor, and losses included 14-77 to #3 Nebraska and 20-63 to #13 Iowa, losing their 15th straight against the Hawkeyes.
5. 2021 (7-6 overall, 5-4 Big 12)
For this season to be a disappointment but also top 5 on this list tells you how far Iowa State’s come under Matt Campbell. Make no mistake, it was a disappointment, finishing 7-6 after a preseason #7 ranking, but they were still the best 7-6 team in 2021 (out of 17 teams) by my metric. Iowa State returned 4th year starting QB Brock Purdy, consensus All-American Breece Hall, 2x 1st Team All-Big 12 TE Charlie Kolar, and Big 12 Defensive POTY LB Mike Rose, so the preseason expectations weren’t unfounded. A typical ISU slow start saw them barely beat Northern Iowa, and a classic Brian Ferentz Iowa performance had the Hawkeyes take a 27-10 lead (27-17 final) despite getting outgained 173-339 in yardage. 2 weeks later, a trap game 31-29 loss in Waco all but ended the Cyclones’ playoff hopes, despite outgaining Baylor by nearly 200 yards. However, in true Iowa State fashion, they rebounded to mess up Oklahoma State’s season a few weeks later, beating the #8 Cowboys 24-21 to improve to 5-2. A 2-4 finish was mostly because of location, going 2-0 at home and 0-4 in road/neutral sites. It was a squandered year for Iowa State, outscoring Big 12 opponents by an average of 12 PPG but going just 5-4. 8 starters on offense made 1st/2nd Team All-Big 12, by far the most in the conference. Breece repeated as consensus AA/Big 12 OPOTY with 1774 yards and 23 TD from scrimmage, while Rose earned 1st Team all-conference again.
4. 2018 (8-5 overall, 6-3 Big 12)
For the first time since the Big 12 moved from divisions to a round robin format in 2013, Iowa State wasn’t picked in the bottom 2 with Kansas. Big 12 media picked them 7th, this time coming above Texas Tech, Baylor, and of course Kansas. But after starting QB Kyle Kempt went down in the season opener, and backup Zeb Noland went just 1-3, Matt Campbell gave a shot to a freshman by the name of Brock Purdy. In a sort of foreshadowing for names in the NFL, Kyle became a mentor to Brock, and Purdy exploded onto the scene, throwing for 4 TD and rushing for another in a 48-42 win at #25 Oklahoma State. He’d top that a week later, beating #6 West Virginia and Will Grier 30-14, this time the defense stepping up big to hold Grier to just 67 total yards. ISU never looked back with Purdy, and nearly made the Big 12 title game if they had beaten Texas. They finished the regular season 8-4, 3rd in the Big 12, and nearly beat 11-2 Washington State in the bowl. Campbell won Big 12 Coach of the Year for the 2nd straight season. Purdy was 6th in the nation in passing efficiency, completing 66% of passes for 2250 yards 16 TD 7 INT, on 10.2 YPA. RB David Montgomery had another 1000+ yard rushing season and has gone on to have a productive NFL career. WR Hakeem Butler was 3rd in the nation in yards per catch (22.0), getting 60 passes for 1318 yards and 9 TD.
3. 2017 (8-5 overall, 5-4 Big 12)
Before Brock Purdy and Iowa State could run, the 2017 team had to walk. Years of effort from give-it-their-all players like Allen Lazard and Joel Lanning culminated in a magical 2018 season that might just be the fondest on this list. ISU had gone just 11-37 over the previous 4 seasons, so a 2nd to last place Big 12 finish was expected. After a 2-2 start, ISU pulled off maybe the biggest win in school history, beating #3 Oklahoma 38-31, who’d go on to make the playoff with Baker Mayfield winning the Heisman. LB Joel Lanning, who was the team’s starting QB the previous 2 seasons, was the Walter Camp Defensive Player of the Week, logging 8 tackles, 1 sack, 1 fumble recovery, as well as 9 rushes for 35 yards and 2 completions for 25 yards on offense. A few weeks later against Oklahoma State he’d become the 1st player in the last 10 years to record a pass TD, rush TD, and half sack in the same game. After the win over OU though, just a few weeks later Iowa State would ALSO beat #4 TCU 14-7!!! A few one possession losses later and ISU finished 7-5, but would beat yet another top 25 team in the bowl in #20 Memphis.
Lanning was named a 1st Team All-American by FWAA, racking up 114 tackles, 6 sacks, 5 TFL, 1 INT, 135 rushing yards, 47 passing yards, and 3 TD. Not bad for a former QB. QB Kyle Kempt was one of the most underrated stories of the season, emerging as the starter in the 5th game and going on to throw 15 TD to just 3 INT. Kempt was a 5th year walk-on who had only thrown 2 passes in his career prior to the Oklahoma game. By the time the season was over, he had 2 wins over top 5 teams, and today is still on the team as a coach.
2. 2000 (9-3 overall, 5-3 Big 12)
Like the 2017 team, the 2000 Cyclones came out of nowhere, a dormant program that had gone just 27-80-3 the previous decade. ISU players knew the talent they had though, led by future NFL QB Sage Rosenfels, one of 9 players that would go on to make NFL rosters. Another would go on to join the Iowa Senate, and the late LB Justin Eilers would fight in the UFC. They played a very favorable schedule, going 8-3 in the regular season with 0 wins over Power 6 teams with a winning record, but did beat 7-4 Ohio, 8-5 UNLV, and rival Iowa for the Cy-Hawk. ISU put any “soft schedule” talk to rest when they beat the Big East’s 3rd placed team, Pitt, in the bowl 37-29. Rosenfels had a nice curtain call, winning offensive POTG with 23/34 passing for 308 yards and 2 TD. Rosenfels did what he had to during the year, with deceiving stats of 2298 passing yards 8 TD 12 INT. He was a solid runner though, and would become known for his patented “helicopter” move in the NFL, rushing for 381 yards and 10 TD. RB Ennis Haywood and C Ben Bruns were ISU’s two 1st Team All-Big 12 selections, as Haywood ran for 1237 yards and Bruns led the way. The 5’6(!) JJ Moses led the team in receiving with 775 yards, and was named team MVP.
1. 2020 (9-3 overall, 8-1 Big 12)
Ahh, but it had to be the 2020 team at #1. Even my algorithm places this team way above 2000 even though they had the same record, with the 2000 team finishing ranked 27th and 2020 finishing ranked 7th. After a typical ISU slow start, losing 13-30 to UL Lafayette, the rest of the year couldn’t have gone much better. In the 3rd game they beat eventual B12 champion Oklahoma 37-30. Later on they beat #17 Texas in Darrel K Royal 23-20, essentially ensuring Tom Herman would be fired after the season, and stomped 6-4 West Virginia 42-6. ISU entered the Big 12 championship game against Oklahoma as the 1 seed, and had an opportunity at the end to win, but came up short 21-27. A 34-17 Fiesta Bowl win over Pac-12 champion Oregon was pretty satisfying though, and Iowa State finished with their highest ever postseason ranking at #9. They cleaned up in the Big 12 accolades, taking up 9 of the 22 1st Team all-conference slots. Breece Hall was Big 12 Offensive POTY and a consensus All-American, with 1752 yards and 23 TD from scrimmage. LB Mike Rose won Big 12 Defensive POTY with 99 tackles, 10.5 total TFL, and 5 INT. Campbell won Coach of the Year, and WR Xavier Hutchinson and DB Isheem Young won Big 12 Offensive Newcomer of the Year and Defensive Freshman of the Year, respectively. Shoutout to 1st Team All-Big 12 TE Charlie Kolar as well, who was a consistent force making 1st/2nd Team all-conference in each of his 4 seasons.

5th Quarter

Iowa State fans, what do you look back more fondly on, the Matt Campbell years with expectations of competing for a Big 12 title, or the Paul Rhoads years with a win over #2 Oklahoma State and some other fun upsets? Do you think Brock Purdy was always as good as he played for the 49ers in 2022, or is he mostly propped up by a stacked San Francisco offense? Who was better, Troy Davis or Breece Hall? Does David Montgomery take the 3rd spot or does that go to someone like Darren Davis/Alexander Robinson? Aside from going there, what makes someone choose to follow Iowa State? And how’d I do on your guys’ history?
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A year to the day since the Dockers announced themselves as premiership contenders at the home of football, Walyalup blew the finals race open, writes ELIZA REILLY in her round 11 report card.
https://www.codesports.com.au/afl/fremantle/fremantle-dockers-round-11-report-card-ruck-quandary-after-luke-jackson-shines-in-win/news-story/b5ebd6d86b7f20fec5d760e76b52e742
There’s something about Walyalup playing Naarm at the MCG.
A year to the day since the Dockers announced themselves as premiership contenders at the home of football, Walyalup blew the finals race open with a thrilling seven-point win over the Demons.
Here is the Dockers’ round 11 report card.

Distinctions

Luke Jackson: It was always going to be a big day for the premiership Demon up against his old side, yet that day got a lot bigger when ruck sidekick Sean Darcy hobbled to the bench with a hamstring injury early in the second quarter. Having played as a midfielder in the first quarter, Jackson assumed the mantle of Walyalup’s No.1 ruck and thrived. Willed himself to contest after contest and limited the influence of Max Gawn and Brodie Grundy, while having a big one himself. It begs the question: should the ruck split be more even when Darcy returns?
Andrew Brayshaw: Cheekily told his helmeted brother Angus to ‘strap in’ and while his older sibling was doing damage on the outside, Brayshaw got to work in the middle. His evasive powers were on full display, fighting his way through traffic to send Walyalup forward, including a crucial inside 50 lace-out pass late to Bailey Banfield, who kicked the sealer. His past month has been exceptional.
Hayden Young: Was highlighted by Justin Longmuir as one of the Dockers who had come the furthest during pre-season and now we’re starting to see why. Was the biggest driver of the footy on the ground, with a game-high 644m gained from 27 touches. That’s the attacking side of Young but it came from nine intercept possessions. He was also exceptional in the air.
Jye Amiss: You’d hope the folks at AFL house were watching because it’s getting harder and harder to overlook Amiss for a Rising Star nomination. External recognition or not, Amiss is growing before our eyes. He’s hitting the scoreboard like a seasoned key forward, not a kid, adding another three goals to his tally to take the lead in Walyalup’s goalkicking stakes. His ability to impact the contest and follow up like a small forward is mightily impressive.

Passes

Matthew Johnson: So much composure for someone so young. Playing his first full game back since suspension, Johnson continues to prove wrong the countless clubs who overlooked him in the 2021 draft. He’s strong in the core and hard to bring down, and his decision-making is excellent, especially that kick in traffic out to a wing that he could’ve easily bombed forward. Used the ball at 75 per cent and sent the footy inside 50 six times.
Ethan Hughes: Had some shaky moments but overall, he looks a lot more settled back in defence after a subpar start to the season on the wing. While Pearce, Cox and Ryan will get all the headlines, it suits Hughes to slip under the radar and focus purely on his opponent. But against the Demons, Hughes also won back the footy a few times and got himself involved in going back the other way with eight marks.

Fails

Brandon Walker: Harsh given he’s played on and won battles against some of the league’s best small forwards in the past few weeks, but Walker got taught a lesson by Kysaiah Pickett. At his best, which he was close to on Saturday, Pickett is an incredibly hard match-up for any defender. Walker can match him for speed but the Dockers defender just lost touch a few times and paid the price; Pickett had two goals and seven score involvements. A lesson learnt for next time.
Skill errors and connection: It ultimately wasn’t costly but some of Walyalup’s early-season demons came back to haunt it in the first half. Probably a symptom of Naarm’s elite pressure, the Dockers fumbled more than they have in the past few weeks and skill errors cost them a few looks, especially going inside 50. Walyalup struggled early to hit that final kick inside 50, in a flashback to its past midfield-forward connection issues. An in-form team would’ve found a way to punish the Dockers but the Demons were having the same issues up the other end.

The focus this week

Rest and recovery. Fremantle arrives at its mid-season bye with a 6-5 record and very much in contention for the top eight. Players and coaches are on a four-day break, with some choosing to remain in Melbourne and spend time with family and friends. All will return to the club later this week, with a Saturday night clash with Richmond back home on the horizon.
Speaking of recovery, the Dockers will get an extra week to make progress on Sean Darcy’s hamstring injury. Michael Walters is on track to return after the bye; his scans revealed a strained calf. Defender Heath Chapman still has around a month to go in his comeback from a hamstring injury, while the Dockers are still yet to place a timeline on Matt Taberner’s rehab from back surgery but are confident he’ll return this season.
The most pressing focus for Fremantle is Wednesday’s mid-season draft. The Dockers have one list spot available, which they are expected to fill. Potential target Robert Hansen Jr missed his final draft audition with Subiaco due to illness but you’d think Fremantle has seen enough to make a decision on the small forward.

The day is finally here! CFL football is back! They play tonight at 7:30 PM on the road in Ottawa. Here are some key players to watch tonight.
The weather is very pleasant outside tonight in Ottawa being partly cloudy and will be around 69°F/ 21°C at 7 pm.

Receivers to Watch

Rookie Receivers

Montreal brought in a lot of talented rookie receivers this year. They brought in more rookie receivers than any other CFL team this year heading into the offseason. Tonight they have 7 rookie receivers showcasing their talents.
Austin Mack out of Ohio State and Tyler Snead out of East Carolina are listed as starters for tonight’s game.
They also have the following rookie receivers playing listed as 2nd stringers: Keshunn Abram (Kent State), Trevon Clark (California), and James Letcher Jr. (Washburn). Listed at the third string we have Quartney Davis (Texas A&M) and John Bruner (Western Illinois).

Other Receivers

In the lineup, tonight as receivers are only 4 players returning from last year. Cole Spieker is starting at slotback who only started in 2 games last year but had 171 yards and a touchdown in those 2 games. National receiver, Hergy Mayala is starting at wide receiver who started at wide receiver in every game last year except for the playoff loss to Toronto which was lost to Toronto.
Kevin Kaya is getting the start also at wide receiver. Kaya has a global player designation and played his college ball for Montreal. He played in 5 games last year as a backup and was on the practice roster the rest of the season.
National player, Regis Régis Cibasuis playing behind Spieker at slotback who played all of last year in a backup role aside from 1 game that was missed due to injury.

Quarterback Pecking Order

Starting quarterback Cody Fajardo is not playing tonight. Tonight will be very important to nail down the pecking order in the position.
Caleb Evans will be starting tonight as he wears a Montreal jersey for the first time in his career. He will be going up against his former team as he was a Redblack in his first 2 seasons. Evans started in 7 games last year for Ottawa and showed signs of high potential after the Jeremiah Masoli injury. He ultimately was not consistent enough as a passer to hold the starting position and was moved down the chart in favor of Nick Arbuckle.
Davis Alexander is listed as the 2nd string quarterback tonight. He was the third-string QB for Montreal last year. Tonight will be an important night for him entering his 2nd season.
Mike Glass III is the third quarterback listed tonight. He played last year in the Indoor Football League. Mike Glass led the MAC in passing yards in 2019 playing for Eastern Michigan in his final year. Glass threw over 300 yards more than Nathan Rourke that year who was also playing his final season in the MAC.

Runningbacks

Jeshrun Antwi and William Stanback are not dressing tonight. Walter Fletcher is getting the start. Fletcher started in 6 games last year during Stanback’s injury and finished the season as the 2nd string on the depth chart.
A.J. Rose is the 2nd runningback listed. Rose is a rookie out of Kentucky. In his senior year rushed for 666 yards and 2 touchdowns averaging 6.3 yards per carry.
Jerry Howard Jr. is the third running back listed. Howard spent 5 games last year with Montreal on the practice roster. In his senior year at Towson, he rushed for 895 yards and three touchdowns averaging 4.8 yards per carry over 11 games.

Players From the 2023 CFL Draft

Round 1, Selection #7: Lwal Uguak, DL, TCU

Uguak is listed at 2nd string defensive end on the right side. Montreal is lucky to have Uguak as he attended 2 NFL rookie camps prior to signing with Montreal. He had 10 tackles and a fumble recovery last season playing in a rotational role for the TCU Horned Frogs who made it to the National Championship last year.
One of the biggest holes to fill this year is at the defensive end. Last year Mike Moore tied the team for first in sacks and started every game as a right-sided defensive end. Moore is not an Alouette this year so there is an opportunity for Uguak to push to make himself a first-year starter.

Round 2, Selection #13: David Dallaire, FB, Laval

Dallaire is listed as the 2nd string fullback tonight. He was the RSEQ Offensive All-Star in 2022 and 2021.

Round 4, Selection #32: Theo Grant, OL, Queen’s

Grant is listed 2nd string at right guard. He was a second-team U Sports All-Canadian guard in 2022.

Round 5, Selection #39: Jacob Mason, FB, McMaster

Listed as tonight’s third-string fullback.

Round 8, Selection #68, Maxym Lavallée, DB, Laval

Lavallée is listed as the 2nd string-free safety. He was a four-year starter at Laval where he was an RSEQ Defensive All-Star in 2022.

Additional Defensive Rookies

Alouettes reporter and Social Media Manager, Joey Alfieri has been doing a great job putting out a lot of training camp reports. In his Preseason Preview, he mentioned 2 defensive rookies that I did not mention above who have looked very good through camp.
Kabion Ento out of Colorado is listed as a starting cornerback tonight. He played receiver at Colorado before switching to cornerback after college. He was a member off and on with the Green Bay Packers beginning in 2019 primarily in training camp or practice roster capacities. He was waived in January 2022.
Bryce Notree is listed as the starting middle linebacker tonight. He played his college at Southern Illinois. In his senior year in 2021, he started all 13 games and was 2nd Team All-MVFC. He led the team in tackles at 91, added 4 sacks, 7.5 tackles for loss, and 2 interceptions.

Ottawa Redblacks Depth Chart

Hello everyone, sorry for the longer delay on this, semester work always gets in the way. But with revisions for my peer reviewed paper likely to arrive in the coming weeks, I think its time to talk about more songs from Assassins Creed IV: Black Flag. We covered the sea shanties last time, and if anyone needs a recap, basically everything wasn't from the Golden Age of Piracy except for the Captain Kidd song, which was a broadside song being used as a sea shanty. Well now we get to cover the genre Captain Kidd is actually apart of, tavern songs!
This list is entirely of songs that appear in the numerous taverns you find from Nassau to Kingston. They are always background songs and some are fairly hard to find, but, and this is a personal preference, I actually like these songs more then the sea shanties. They all have a really catchy beat and tempo, and broadly speaking are more accurate to the era. There are a few songs here that not only date to the years 1715-1722, but almost certainly were sung by real pirates.
Quick note, I am using the phrase tavern song pretty loosely. What is being discussed are drinking songs, folk songs you would hear in a tavern, military marching songs, and broadside songs that were often written for executions but frequently appeared in taverns. Taverns were as important to the men and women of the 18th century as they are now, perhaps even more so. Anyway, lets chug some rum and sing a song!
(There isn't a playlist of all tavern songs, so this tumblr post will have to do. Listen here.)
https://allsoundsasscreed.tumblr.com/post/91060065634/tavern-song-playlist-from-assassins-creed-iv
(Also a YouTube link with some of the songs in higher quality.)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLBIDJyP3XKci5o-0Yw87oskv1D4rTi9mS
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Admiral Benbow
This one has an interesting history with piracy, its a song about the titular admiral, quite a character he was. John Benbow was the son of a tanner who joined the Royal Navy and worked his way up to admiral, he was daring and dashing but also contentious with many he served with. He was mortally wounded in August of 1702 during the War of Spanish Succession, hit in the leg with chainshot. This song is broadly speaking true to Benbows life and noticeably mentions how he dies in a somewhat graphic manner you don't often see with these songs.
Dating the song is difficult, the oldest reference I could find is from 1780 and its in print as early as 1820. So no its not accurate to the game or the era, but it was probably included for one key reason. The Inn young Jim Hawkins lives in at the start of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island is called. The Admiral Benbow Inn, I'm guessing the writers couldn't resist. You shall hear you shall hear a song that's fitting but not quite right.
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All for Me Grog
This one is so close to the right era kinda. All for Me Grog has an iteration coming from 1740 originally titled, "If E'er I Do Well 'Tis a Wonder". The lyrics are vaguely similar but I would still call it a different song. The version in game is closer to an 1880s version that appeared in print with the same title. Now the origin of the word grog tends to come Vice Admiral Sir Edward Vernon, hero of the 1739 War of Jenkins Ear. Well he always wore a grogam cloak and in 1740 to reduce drunknenss he forcibly watered down the rum sailors were carrying by half. Sailors quickly started calling this grog and any watered down rum became known with the name, the original iteration of the song was penned pretty soon after. So not accurate for the game, but its on the border. Well I am a rambling lass so let me say, close but not enough.
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As I Was Going to Banbury.
This one is pretty easy to pinpoint, its from 1890 first appearing in the Crawford Collection so pretty obviously not from the 18th century. But the tune that goes with the lyrics, well that's from Tom Tells Truth which is a song first recorded 1562, so the melody could have appeared in the Golden Age of Piracy, but not the lyrics. I saw an apple tree, but not history.
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Barbara Allen
This song is very famous and very old. Recording wise its been covered heavily in Country Music since Bradley Kinkaid in 1930 and has been done by singers like Dolly Parton ever since. But its old, like the oldest mention of it is from 1666 and it was either a stage song, or a libel song mocking King Charles II. The oldest mention notes its a Scotch song, referring to the Scottish, this is how it became big in Country Music. Various Celtic immigrants moving to the new world and bringing songs like this with them. The version in game seems to be an abbreviated version of the 1690 broadside version often called "Barbara Allen's cruelty: or, the young-man's tragedy." There are some lyric changes but there never was one consistent version. I have no qualms with this song being in game at all, there were notable Scottish pirates like William Kidd of Dundee, and its always been somewhat popular in British folk circuits. In Scarlet Town where I was born, there was a fair maid song, that was fit and true.
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Blow Away The Morning Dew
This song first appeared in 1609 with lyrics and a melody written specifically for it, which is very rare. Originally it was titled the Baffled Knight but later versions were better known as Blow Away The Morning Dew. The version in game appears to be the Cecil Sharpe version published in 1905, which was a modified version of the Thomas d'Urfey version first written in 1719 or 1720. The Sharpe version isn't too radically different from d'Urfey, its debatable but I will fall on the side of the game and say this does fit the era, although just barely within the confides of the games narrow timeline. Blow your winds hi ho it made the grade!
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Blow the Candles Out
This one is very easy to pinpoint. This song came from Thomas Durfey's Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (Volume in 1720) also known as The London Prentice or London Apprentice. Although said to be from the 17th century, this 1720 version is almost word for word what appears in Assassin's Creed IV. The only difference is an interesting change in pronouns, she being sung as I, so a change in perspective, the type of thing you seen often done with folk songs. This is 100 percent accurate to the era, yes its late Golden Age of Piracy but it counts no doubt. Roll me in your arms and blow the candle out for it counts!
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The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood
This ones a bit hard to judge on. This song has a decent sized family tree, the original version, Come listen a while you Gentlemen all, is from 1684. It came from a song called Robin Hood and the Stranger which is from 1675. But the version known as The Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood is from 1857. While some lyrics are similar I am going to say this doesn't count, the melody and most of the lyrics are too different. I merrily trudged over the lea and found it wrong.
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Buleria
Far as I can tell this Spanish Flamenco song was written specifically for the game, I cannot find any reference to a song like this that's pre 2013, that's a tad disappointing.
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Captain Ward
This song is full of history. This song was registered in 1680 and is about Jack Ward, an English pirate from the 16th century who eventually joined the Barbary Corsairs. There's a lot of stories and legends about him and its hard to tell how true most of it is. Ward is the namesake inspiration for Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean films by the way. Sir Walter Scott was well aware of this song and so was John Gay who incorporated parts of it into his 1715 play, The What D’ye Call and it later appears in the 1728 Beggars Opera. There's a great number of variations of the song also sometimes called Captain Ward and the Rainbow, the name of a ship in his story. Needless to say this is accurate to the era and even would likely be known to some English pirates, great choice. Come all you gallant sailors bold this song was perfect!
​
Down Among the Dead Men
Ah yes this song, it probably has the second largest amount of variations in the game, appearing in both taverns, as orchestral music, and prominently being sung by Charles Vane at one point, also it briefly appears in AC Syndicate. First off its about getting drunk, dead men is a metaphor term for an empty bottle. Second, this has a somewhat well established history, it was first published in 1728 with lyrics by John Dyer and composition by Henry Purcell. There's rumors its older then 1728, but every claim from Wikipedia onward doesn't come with a citation so be cautious. I don't begrudge the developers for using it, 1728 technically falls under the Golden Age of Piracy if you use the long 1650 to 1730 dates. But the game ends in 1722 and the scene with Charles Vane happens in 1720 and he was executed in 1721. Its so close, but its not accurate to the timeframe. Down, down, down, down among the dead men, where the lyrics are fine but the song isn't placed.
​
Fandango
Much like Buleria, the fandango music that plays in a few taverns in Cuba don't seem to be any actual fandango songs. Which is a shame, the oldest recorded fandango song, "Libro de diferentes cifras de guitarra", comes from 1705. There is also some traditional flamenco music that plays in these taverns and while those songs aren't remotely accurate to the early 18th century Caribbean, they are genuine flamenco style songs so that's nice.
​
Fathom the Bowl
Another popular British drinking song. This song is from the 19th century, the first reliably written version is from 1832, there's maybe an older broadside version but that's debatable. Its fun but its not very close to the correct era. Come all you bold heroes give ear to my rants!
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The Golden Vanity
Oh lord what a mess this song is. Also titled, "The Sweet Trinity" or "The Golden Willow Tree" this song is all over the place. Its pretty popular for folk and country singers, from the Carter Family to Pete Seeger. Oddly enough a version appears in Black Sails, probably the only song overlap between Black Flag and Black Sails. Anyway, the oldest version is from 1635 and was about Sir Walter Raleigh telling a cabin boy to sink a ship, he does but Raleigh doesn't rescue him leaving him to die. Obviously the in game version isn't that rendition but the plot structure and lyrics are pretty similar. The in game version is closer to a London published rendition somewhere in the mid 19th century, but the lyrics are still very close it just replaced Raleigh with an unnamed captain. Hard call but I am leaning toward it being accurate to the era since all you really need is change the name of the person telling the cabin boy to sink the ship and the ship name. In the lowland sea I found an reasonable song.
​
Here's a Health to the Company
This song is fantastic, its either my second or third favorite overall song in the game, a perfect mix of drinking fun and melancholy. Anyway it has an Irish origin, but its not from the 19th century, the oldest written down version is from 1875, but it might be as old as 1836. Regardless, it is most certainly not a song you would expect drunk pirates to be singing in the 1710s. Sorry, I wish this song was from the right era really badly. Let us drunk and be merry all out of one glass and forget this song isn't from the 19th century.
​
Jaberas
Another Spanish song that was written entirely for the game. I am rather disappointed no real period accurate Spanish music made it into the game, it could have been done. This version comes from the Malaga style to be specific.
​
(This song is listed as being in AC4 but I think its from AC Rogue, just to be safe I will include it here)
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The Leaving of Liverpool
This song, also sometimes called Fare Thee Well, My Own True Love, has a lot more in line with sea shanties. It was first noted in 1885 as a popular sailors song. Ironically it probably should have been swapped with Captain Kidd and been used as such instead of being a tavern song. Not much more to say, its not the right genre and its not the right timeframe. Bob Dylan actually partially covered it under the title Farewell. Farewell to you, my own true love of history.
​
Maggie Lauder
This ones aggressively Scottish, if you don't sound like a football hooligan or Groundskeeper Willie I suggest not singing it. It has a very clear origin, it was written by Francis Sempill sometime during his life, and he lived from 1616 to 1682. It appears to have been a rather popular Scottish ballad, so yep this fits well in the game to anyone who hails from the high or lowlands. *unintelligible Scottish noises*
The Nightingale
Alternatively called One Morning in May, or The Bold Grenadier, this song was first published between 1689 and 1709 as "The nightingale's song: or The soldier's rare musick, and maid's recreation". Here's the catch, this version has 16 verses, the vague general structure is there but its not the version in game. The in game version is a lot closer to a mid 19th century version, the biggest giveaway is the references to India. Although Britain has long had an association with India, soldier songs referring to going over there really started springing up in the 1850s and onward. So while there are versions of the Nightingale that are period accurate, this isn't one sadly. I shall sit down to hear the nightingale sing instead of false stories!
​
Old Rosin the Beau
Sometimes called Old Rosin the Bow, referring to the violin bow, this song is from the 19th century. the melody comes from an Irish song called "Eoghan Coir" which is late 18th century. Most note that Old Rosin the Beau first starts appearing in 1838 and eventually that melody that Eoghan Coir started being called Old Rosin the Beau (Bow) melody. To a point where several US president campaign songs like William Henry Harrison and Abraham Lincoln used that melody. They lyrics in game are pretty clearly the 1838 rendition, so yeah not accurate nope. I've always been cheerful and easy except with inaccuracy.
​
Over the Hills and Far Away
This is my pick for the easiest song to research, and also my pick for most accurate song in the game. Yep, the marching song from Sharpe, not the Led Zeppelin song. This song was a very popular marching song for the British army, and there's multiple versions. The oldest is from the late 17th century and was penned by Thomas D'Urfey. There is George Farquhar's version from his 1706 play The Recruiting Officer, and lastly John Gay had a version for the 1728 play Beggars Opera. There's also the John Tam version written for the Sharpe series but obviously that doesn't quite count. The version in game is 100 percent the Farquhar version, its almost one for one the same lyrics, the in game version only added Queen Anne commands instead of The Queen commands which is the thing singers fiddle with constantly. The Recruiting Officer was a very popular play, and a lot of privateers who became pirates participated in the War of Spanish Succession, which is clearly being referenced in the song. There's a really good chance real pirates like Benjamin Hornigold actually sang this at some point, so absolute props to the writers for picking the right song and the right version for tavern music. Over the hills and far away! Queen Anne commands to keep on it!
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The Parting Glass
Here it is, my favorite song in the entire game, regardless of genre. Its the most covered with 5 renditions in game. Crowning achievement of the best ending of the franchise, incredibly powerful, namesake of a website I made, and capper of my peer reviewed Anne Bonny paper. This song is wildly popular, still is, I remember a big memorial to Covid victims being marked with the song. It was for a while the most used farewell song until Auld Lang Syne. So is it accurate to the Golden Age of Piracy? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Its best described as Celtic in origin, mostly Scottish but a bit Irish. The original melody of the song dates to the 1620s and 30s, originally titled Goodnight and God Be With You. By the 1700s the melody was slowly becoming what we know as The Parting Glass but it wouldn't fully form until the 19th century. Lyric wise, the first version is a broadside called Neighbors Farewell to his Friends in 1654. Its not remotely lyrically close, look.
Now come is my departing time,
And here I may no longer stay,
There is no kind comrade of mine
But will desire I were away.
But if that time will me permit,
Which from your Company doth call,
And me inforceth for to flit,
Good Night, and GOD be with you all.
For here I grant some time I spent
In loving kind good Company;
For all offences I repent,
And wisheth now forgiven to be;
What I have done, for want of wit,
To Memory I'll not recall:
I hope you are my Friends as yet
Good Night, and GOD be with you all.
Complementing I never lov'd,
Nor talkative much for to be,
And of speeches a multitude
Becomes no man of quality;
From Faith, Love, Peace and Unity,
I wish none of us ever fall;
God grant us all prosperity:
Good Night, and GOD be with you all.
I wish that I might longer stay,
To enjoy your Society;
The Lord to bless you night and day,
And still be in your Company.
To vice, nor to iniquity,
God grant none of you ever fall,
God's blessing keep you both and me!
Good Night, and GOD be with you all.
The Friends Reply.
Most loving friend, God be thy guide,
And never leave thy Company,
And all things needful thee provide,
And give thee all prosperity;
We rather had thy Company,
It thou woulds't have stayed us among;
We wish you much felicity:
Good grant that nothing doe thee wrong.
The only lyrical crossover is, And all I've done for want of wit To memory now I can't recall. There's a lot of versions, and with each version a few more lyrics come into focus, until the 1840s where this broadside version was produced. This is the version in game with the chorus removed and some verses taken out.
ll the money that e’er I had,
I spent it in good company.
And all the harm ever I done,
Alas! it was to none but me,
And all I have done for the want of wit,
To memory now I can't recall,
So fill to me the parting glass,
Good night and joy be with you all.
Chorus:
Be with you all, be with you all
Good night and joy be with you all
So fill to me the parting glass,
Good night and joy be with you all.
All the comrades that e’er I had,
They’re sorry for my going away,
All the sweethearts e’er I had,
They’d wish me one day more to stay,
But since it came unto me lot,
That I should rise and you should not,
I gently rise and with a smile,
Good night and joy be with you all.
If I had money enough to spend,
And leisure time to sit awhile,
There a fair maid in this town
That sorely has my heart beguiled,
Her rosy cheeks and ruby lips,
I own she has my heart enthralled;
Then fill to me the parting glass,
Good night and joy be with you all.
When I‘m boosing at my quait
And none but strangers round me all
My poor heart will surely break,
When I’m boosing far awa,
Far awa, oh, far awa;
When I am boosing far awa,
My poor heart will surely break,
When I’m boosing far awa.
So as much as it breaks my goddamn heart to say this, there is no chance that Anne Bonny or any individual of the Golden Age of Piracy, ever sang The Parting Glass, its just not possible. But since it falls unto my lot, that I should learn the truth, and few should not.
​
Patrick Spens
This popular Scottish ballad about a shipwreck was first published in 1765 via Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. It still remains quite popular in England and Scotland, for who doesn't like a good song about a shipwreck? It sure worked for Gordon Lightfoot. But its 50 years past its date, so it shouldn't be in Assassins Creed IV. Sorry. The king has written a braid letter, and signed it with his hand, it says this is badhistory!
​
Spanish Ladies
The only time where a sea shanty is also featured as a tavern song. It fits more as a tavern song, but as I wrote about in the last post, while its from the 18th century, its pretty far removed from the Golden Age of Piracy. I will rant and will roar about discussing this again!
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Star of the County Down
Okay this is a bit weird, this is a late 19th century Irish song penned by Cathal MacGarvey and first published by Herbert Huges Irish Country Songs list in 1909. I don't need to explain that a song first sung by people like Irish tenor John McCormack doesn't quite fit with the Golden Age of Piracy. I will say I like it and will always remember it as the song that kept me semi conscious at times during my 8 hour conference on Pirate history, that's nice. From the Bantry Bay to the Derry Quay I keep finding stuff wrong.
​
The Three Ravens
Talk about old, this is a Scottish folk song first compiled by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1611, he didn't write it though so its older. Although there are a lot of lyrical versions, the one in game seems to stick fairly close to the original rendition. There are a decent number of changes but its the type of changes you expect from folk songs, I think its within a reasonable level. I don't know if any pirate would sing such an archaic song even in to there era, but sure why not. There were three rauens sat on a tree, there was badhistory nevermore.
​
Tientos
Its another Spanish song, you know what that means. It was written for the game, its not an authentic song. Moving on.
​
Trooper and the Maid
Another of my favorite songs, the beat is impossible not to dance too. The original song, usually called Trooper and the Fair Maid appears in the Skene Manuscript which is from the 17th century. That version names the maid as Peggy and is about a woman leaving her husband for a soldier and then returning. Its stated to be an English broadside song, but at some point it became more popular with the Scottish, most obvious for the repeated use of the word bonnie. The version in game is a lot closer to the version in The Laird of Killary from George Kinloch's Ancient Scottish Ballads, which dates to 1827. There's still a lot of changes so its possible Black Flag is using an even later version. Regardless, while a real banger of a song, its not accurate, pity. Bonnie lass I have to say I expected better.
​
Verdiales
The last Spanish song written for the game, its a type of Flamenco. I am so sorry to any Spanish gamers who expected good music from the 18th century in this game.
​
We Be Three Poor Mariners
Another old one, also collected by Thomas Ravenscroft, this time in Deuteromelia around 1609. It was said to be a song Henry VIII liked and it also appears in the Skene Manuscript. Thomas D'Urfey even did a version around the time he did Over the Hill and Far Away. The lyrics shockingly are very consistent through all these versions and what AC4 uses is basically the same as it has been since at least 1609. Another really old song that is plausibly used, I'm surprised. Come dance this round the round the round of victory!
​
(Another I think from AC Rogue but maybe also from AC4)
​
Whiskey You're the Devil
This song has origins from a broadside ballad called John and Moll which first appears in Ireland around 1790, but what's in game is without question the version from 1873 penned by Jerry Barrington. This version was made famous in the 1950s due to the Clancy Brothers covering it. Its another fun folk song that really doesn't belong here. Drums are beating, banners flying The Devil at home in the form of false knowledge.
​
William Taylor
Another of my favorites, a fun catchy song about a woman looking for her pressed into service husband, finding him with another lady, and killing them both! Before anyone asks, this probably isn't inspired by the legend of Anne Bonny or Mary Read, it probably draws more from Hannah Snell, who did look for her husband by disguising herself as a man. The date also makes me think that, the oldest version, a chapbook rendition called Billy Taylor, is from 1792, Snell was from the Jacobite Uprising years. The song seems to have become popular by 1811, as both a serious ballad and a comedic song. There's a lot of versions, so much so I can't pinpoint which version the game is using. This is just a rundown of the title variations, Billy Taylor, Brisk Young Seamen, Bold William Taylor, Down By the Seashore, The False Lover, The Female Lieutenant; Or, Faithless Lover Rewarded, If You'll Get Up Early in the Morning, The Life and Death of Billy Taylor, My Love, Poor William Taylor, Sally Brown and William Taylor, and Young Billy Taylor. Yeah... fun song, not accurate. 4 and 20 British sailors told me on the Kings highway, Folleri-de-dom, de-daerai diddero, folleri-de-dom, domme daerai dae for believing it so.
​
Young Edwin in the Lowland Low
The final song, and its a classic murder ballad. It was first printed by J. Catnach between 1813 and 1838, it was first written down and preserved in the early 19th century. Its a nice atmospheric piece for drinking but it doesn't pass the accuracy test. Come all you wild young people and listen to my song about truth and honesty!
​
That's the list folks! As you can see the tavern songs are broadly speaking more accurate to the era then the sea shanties, some are so accurate I confidently can state the historical figures depicted in game probably sang them. There's still a lot of ones that don't fit, some really on the border and some pretty far off, but pound for pound I like them more. In a perfect world I would like all the songs to be from the era, but that would mean giving up on The Parting Glass and I don't think there's much that could convince me to do that. So overall, the music in AC4 is a mixed bag of accurate stuff and enjoyable fanfare for the sake of it. I fully understand why it was done and will continue to enjoy the music anyway. I toast to thee the parting glass to the writers of AC4, you made a rough music gem, but it shines brighter still then anyone else!
​
Sources
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=2169
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https://boblesliemusic.com/2019/12/12/songwriting-basics-section-ii-analysis-38-barbara-allen/
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https://imslp.org/wiki/Irish_Country_Songs_(Hughes%2C_Herbert))
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Rising Star or not, there’s a special place in history on offer for young Dockers spearhead Jye Amiss, writes ELIZA REILLY.
https://www.codesports.com.au/afl/fremantle/fremantle-dockers-jye-amiss-on-track-to-follow-matthew-pavlich-and-win-club-goalkicking-award-in-second-season/news-story/9118cccd142df7a8dc005f3c29d26808
Some commentators carefully consider what headlines they’ll create before taking a stance.
Paul Hasleby, by contrast, believes the opinions he forms.
Still, only the most optimistic Walyalup supporter would’ve taken note of Hasleby’s pre-season prediction for emerging Dockers key forward Jye Amiss.
The four-time Glendinning medallist predicted Amiss, in just his second season, would kick 40 goals.
“We talk about this kid like he’s been around for a long time, but in reality, he hasn’t played much footy,” Haselby said in February. “Two or three games last year, he came in for the finals. We know what he did in that first finals. He was brilliant.
“Another pre-season, better ball movement expected by the Fremantle Dockers, a few more options in and around him to take some pressure off.”
It was bold on two accounts.
To begin with, no Docker kicked that many in 2022 when Walyalup returned to finals. Rory Lobb came closest with a tally of 36 before packing his bags for the Western Bulldogs. Lobb was 29, had eight seasons of AFL football under his belt and was the Dockers’ primary target when he kicked his career-high haul.
It was also brave because Amiss had yet to cement a spot in Walyalup’s best 22.
Despite being parachuted into Fremantle’s finals campaign last year, Josh Treacy had overtaken Amiss in the pecking order after a strong pre-season. The Dockers also had to squeeze Matt Taberner, Luke Jackson and Nat Fyfe into their attack.
A sudden oversupply of talls meant Amiss was the one to miss out in round one, punching an early hole in Haselby’s prophecy. But his absence would only last one week.
Brought back into the team in round two in place of Fyfe (injured) and Treacy (omitted), Amiss didn’t set the world alight against North Melbourne. With Walyalup’s midfield-forward connection failing to ignite, the 19 year-old finished with just three disposals and no scoreboard impact.
In the eight games since, Amiss has stamped himself as a star of the now. Not only has he kicked at least a-goal-a-match, he has bagged a trio of three goal games, including Saturday’s treble against Geelong.
Now up to 16 goals, Amiss is an equal leader of Walyalup’s goalkicking alongside Lachie Schultz and Michael Walters and he has kicked more goals than any other of the Rising Star nominees to date.
And if he continues at this rate, 40 goals is suddenly within reach.
With 16 majors in nine games, Amiss is currently sitting on a goals-per-game average of 1.8. That trajectory puts him on track to kick 39 goals with 13 rounds left to play this season.
The last Docker to kick 40 or more goals in a season was Michael Walters in 2019. And in the past decade, there have only been three years a Fremantle player has reached that mark.
The key for Amiss might just be his accuracy. The East Perth product‘s pinpoint approach became apparent in his final year of colts football at the Royals, kicking 51.15 at a 77 per cent accuracy rate.
Against hardened AFL defenders each week, Amiss might not get the same level of opportunities in front of goal but his ability to make them count will play a big part in the pursuit of 40.
Amiss’ goalkicking technique is so renowned he has even offered advice to former skipper Fyfe, who has notoriously struggled in front of the big sticks.
Amiss might have missed out on an AFL Rising Star nomination this week in favour of Hawthorn’s Josh Weddle, but there’s no doubting his importance internally – as much as a campaign is mounting out west.
“(A nomination) would have to be coming,” teammate Jordan Clark said. “He’s an unflappable character, even if he doesn’t get one it won’t bother him at all. I think he’s due! It would be good to see him get one.”
Each of Amiss’ three goals against the Cats drew upon a different skillset. The first was a powerful contested mark as Geelong defenders Jed Bews and Jake Kolodjashnji cannoned into him. The second was a delightful read of the ball as it dropped out the back of the pack, Amiss stepping inside and into traffic before hooking it home off the left. And the third was a drop punt from outside 50. It’s a key forward tool kit that’s already setting him apart from some of the game‘s generational spearheads.
At that rate of 1.8 goals a game, Amiss is already ahead of modern power forwards Charlie Curnow (0.95), Joe Daniher (1.3), Tom Hawkins (1.3), Josh Kennedy (0.5), Ben King (1.5) and Aaron Naughton (1.4) at the same point in their careers.
Jeremy Cameron (2.95), Jack Darling (2.2) and Lance Franklin (2.2) are the benchmark.
Walyalup knew exactly what they were getting when they drafted Amiss with pick eight in the 2021 AFL draft, its first top 10 key forward since Matthew Pavlich. With time, Amiss will fill those long empty boots.
But what a feather in the cap it would be to match the achievements of Dockers’ doyen and win the club’s goalkicking award in just his second season. Pavlich did it in 2001 and the door is open for Amiss to follow suit more than two decades later.
“I thought I competed well,” a modest Amiss said after helping down Geelong. “I just want to keep building and learning and trying new stuff each week. You want to build consistency and a good connection with everyone else in the forward group. The last couple of weeks, we’re really starting to gel.”

"He was maybe 5-6 and weighed 185 and he had no neck to speak of. His head rested on his shoulder like an apple on a tree stump. When he wore a batting helmet, he looked like the world's largest turtle." -- sportswriter Mickey Herskowitz

Of all the great baseball nicknames, one of the most memorable -- even if it is attached to a forgotten player -- is Walt "No Neck" Williams, a squat outfielder who played for the Yankees from 1974 to 1975... and whose grand nephew, Mason Williams, would be a Yankee prospect thirty-five years later!
Walt was a short, muscular guy at 5'6", and much heavier than his listed weight of 165 pounds -- sportswriters said he was 20 pounds heavier if not more. His build was often compared to a fire hydrant.

"I can see where he got that No Neck nickname. He's built like a baby bull. What surprised me about him is his weight and his apparent tremendous strength. I thought he weighed around 185, but he told me that he tips the scales at 200. And he isn't a bit fat." -- White Sox manager Ed Short

A lot of powerfully built dudes have heads that seem directly connected to their torsos, but Walt's short neck even has an origin story: as a baby, he received a typhus vaccination in the back of his neck, which he said caused him to develop a lifelong "crick".
I guess not surprisingly, at first he didn't like the nickname "No Neck", but grudgingly came to embrace it, even occasionally signing autographs with the nickname. He told sportswriter Jimmy Cannon:

“They can call me anything, as long as I’m in the big leagues.”

Given his muscular build, you'd think Walt was a power hitter, but he had just 33 career home runs. He wasn't a speed demon either, with just 34 career stolen bases in 53 attempts. Nor did he draw a lot of walks, with a career OBP of .310. But in an era where players were measured by batting averages, his career .270 was good enough for him to stick in the bigs for 10 seasons.
Williams's stand-out tool, according to The New York Times, was hustle:

Like Pete Rose, he played with a caffeinated enthusiasm, running out every batted ball, hustling to his position for the start of an inning and even sprinting to first after receiving a base on balls, although that did not happen too often.

Williams was the anti-Three True Outcomes player, the proto Willians Astudillo. He rarely hit home runs, rarely walked, and rarely struck out. In 2,555 career plate appearances, had 33 home runs, or 1.3 percent of his PAs; the league average in 1975, his last year in the majors, was 1.8 percent. (Last year, 2.9.) He walked in 4.9 percent of his plate appearances; the league average in 1975 was 9.0 percent. (Last year, 8 percent.) And he struck out just 8.3 percent of the time; the league average in 1975 was 12.9 percent. (Last year, it was 22 percent.) He was all about balls in play. It was tough to walk him or strike him out because, like Yogi Berra, he was a "bad ball" hitter, able to tomahawk balls above the letters as easily as putting a golf swing on pitches below his knees.
A fan favorite everywhere he played, Williams also was popular with his teammates and spent his off-seasons helping troubled kids.
Walter Allen Williams was born December 19, 1943, in Brownwood, Texas. At the age of 10, he was picking cotton for $2.50 a day. His family then moved to Northern California, where he graduated from Galileo High School in San Francisco. The Lions have produced 12 major leaguers... and two Hall of Famers, Joe DiMaggio and Tony Lazzeri!
Williams then attended City College of San Francisco, and in 1963 -- two years before the MLB draft -- was signed as an amateur free agent by the Houston Colt .45's, which had been founded as an expansion team a year earlier. (They would become the Astros in 1965.)
After hitting a blistering .381/.411/.530 in 321 plate appearances as a 19-year-old with the A-ball Modesto Colts in 1963, the right-handed hitter and thrower made his MLB debut on April 21, 1964. But after going 0-for-9 with a run scored in 10 games, Houston put him on waivers and he was claimed by the Cardinals. They stashed him in the minors for two years, where he tore it up. In 1965, he hit .330 in Double-A in 632 plate appearances... and the following season in Triple-A, exactly .330 again, in 639 plate appearances.
The Cardinals traded Walt to the White Sox, where he finally got a chance in the bigs. He hit .271/.314/.363 in six seasons, and then he was dealt to the Indians, hitting .289/.316/.406 in one season.
In 1974, we finally get to our part of the story: Williams was traded from the Indians to the Yankees as part of a three-team, five-player deal.
Williams was added to the Yankees with the expectation he would be, if not one of the starting outfielders, surely the top backup. The previous year the Yankee outfielders had been Roy White, Bobby Murcer, and Matty Alou, with occasional appearances from Felipe Alou, Ron Swoboda, Johnny Callison, and Otto Velez. But now the Alou brothers were gone -- Matty to St. Louis, Felipe to Montreal -- as were Swoboda and Callison. And Velez had been a September call-up and would start the 1974 season in Triple-A.
And so even with that off-season's acquisition of Lou Piniella from the Royals, it looked like there was going to be plenty of playing time in New York for No Neck.
Four days after acquiring Williams, Yankee team president Gabe Paul -- nicknamed "The Smiling Cobra" for the friendly way he killed other teams in trades -- made another deal, getting Elliott Maddox from the Texas Rangers. To this point in his career, the 26-year-old Maddox was a good glove, no bat outfielder, hitting just .239/.348/.300 (90 OPS+), and was expected to be used as a late-inning defensive replacement. But to everyone's surprise, after hitting just .174/.208/.174 in April, Maddox caught fire. He hit .371 in May, forcing his way into the everyday lineup. (Manager Bill Virdon moved Murcer to right field, a controversial move at the time as Murcer had long been seen as the centerfield heir to fellow Oklahoman Mickey Mantle.) With Maddox's hot hitting, and Murcer, White, and Piniella healthy all season, suddenly there was no playing time for Williams. After getting 22 plate appearances in April, he had just 34 the rest of the season. He had two hits in his first five plate appearances... and only four more by the end of the year. With so little playing time, it's not surprising Williams had a terrible season, hitting just .113/.127/.113 in 56 plate appearances -- a -30 OPS+. Yes, even worse than Aaron Hicks!
That year, the Yankees were battling the Orioles and Red Sox for the division lead all season long. New York was in 1st place on September 22, with only eight games to go, but dropped two out of three to the Red Sox and the Orioles went ahead. The Yankees won four of their final five games but it wasn't enough as the Orioles ended the season on a nine-game winning streak to win the A.L. East title by 2 games. It was the closest Williams would get to the post-season in his 10-year career.
The following year Walt got more playing time as Maddox, Piniella, White, Bobby Bonds -- acquired that off-season for Murcer -- and DH Ron Blomberg all went down with injuries. Williams responded by hitting .281/.320/.400 (104 OPS+) in 200 plate appearances -- by OPS+, the second-best season of his 10-year career. He also made himself a little more versatile by working at second base in spring training, a position he'd never played in the majors or minors. He played 14 innings at second base that season and did not make an error.
His biggest moment as a Yankee came on June 25, 1975, a Wednesday night game against the defending A.L. East champion Baltimore Orioles. At the time the Yankees were battling the Red Sox for the division lead, and while the Orioles were seven games under .500, they had future Hall of Famer Jim Palmer on the mound. Over the first six innings, Palmer allowed just one hit, and the Orioles had a 1-0 lead courtesy of a 1st inning RBI single by Tommy Davis off Rudy May. But then in the 7th, the Yankees tied it up on a Chris Chambliss single. In the top of the 9th, with the score still tied 1-1 and Palmer still on the mound for the Orioles, Williams led off the inning with a triple. After Ron Blomberg popped out to short, Thurman Munson then hit a fly ball to center deep enough to score Williams to give the Yankees the lead, and Sparky Lyle retired the side in the 9th to preserve the victory.
Alas, the Yankees would fade in July, going 11-18, and finish in 3rd place, 12 games out.
After the season, the Yankees released the soon-to-be 32-year-old Williams. He signed on with the Nippon Ham Fighters of the Japanese League, and hit .285/.316/.466 with 23 home runs in 520 plate appearances. The following season he hit .269/.293/.476 with 21 home runs in 487 plate appearances. Nippon Ham didn't bring him back the following year, and he played the next two years in the Mexican League before hanging 'em up at age 35.
Williams was the first base coach for the White Sox in 1988, then suited up again in 1989 playing for the St. Lucie Legends in the short-lived Senior Professional Baseball Association. He would later manage in the minor leagues for the Texas Rangers.
After his baseball career was over, Williams returned to his boyhood hometown of Brownwood, Texas, where he became the sports director of the town community center. He died in 2016 at the age of 72.
No Neck Notes:

• Asked how he got the nickname, Williams answered bluntly: "Cause I got no neck."
  
• The nickname came when Williams arrived for his first spring training with the Houston Colt .45's. Catcher John Bateman took one look at him and shouted "No Neck!" Bateman also quipped that Williams didn't get a signing bonus from Houston GM Paul Richards, "but if he makes the team, Richards promised to buy him a neck."
  
• Some sources claim Williams got the nickname later, during his hey-day with the White Sox, but the nickname was used in print as far back as May 15, 1965, when Walt was a 21-year-old outfielder in Double-A: "Williams, known as 'No-Neck' because his head appears to be sitting right on his shoulders..."
  
• While "No Neck" was routinely used in newspaper stories about Williams, Yankee PR man Marty Appel said no one actually called him "No Neck"... at least, not to his face!
  
• Appel also reported Williams rubbed vaseline all over his body -- "top to bottom" -- before and after games, saying it was good for his skin. He said Williams would use "gallons of the stuff."
  
• While with the Indians, sportswriter Russell Schneider reported Williams's nickname with teammates was "The Good Humor Man" because of his boyish enthusiasm and infectious smile. The 5'6" Williams also was captain of the Indians' basketball team, which played against other baseball players, sportswriters, and local teams. Williams made it clear the team wasn't a Harlem Globetrotters-esque exhibition: "We're serious about this thing. We're out to win, not to make people laugh. We take a lot of pride in the way we play. We're not clowns." Williams organized a Yankee basketball team when he went to New York.
  
• Due to Yankee Stadium being renovated from 1974 to 1975, Walt never played a home game in the Bronx -- his first chance to wear pinstripes at Yankee Stadium came when he returned for Old Timer's Day! He did have 90 plate appearances at the pre-renovation Stadium as a visitor, and didn't find it to his liking, going 15-for-85 with no home runs and three RBIs (.177/.222/.224). He was only a little better at Shea, hitting .252/.270/.336 in 115 plate appearances. His best ballpark was RFK, where he crushed a .403/.429/.612 line in 70 plate appearances against the Senators.
  
• Yankee Ron Blomberg said he, Gene Michael, and Williams loved to go to Burger King and wolf down 39 cent hamburgers. Blomberg claimed he once ate 28 hamburgers in one sitting -- but even he was in awe of Walt's bottomless appetite. He compared Williams's love for hamburgers to Wimpy from the "Popeye" cartoons.
  
• Walt wore #3 with the White Sox, but couldn't wear it in Cleveland -- it hadn't been issued since 1962, and in 1975 would be retired for Hall of Fame outfielder Earl Averill. So he switched to #13. When he was traded to the Yankees in 1974, #3 also was out of the question, so he stuck with #13. He was just the fifth player in Yankee history to wear #13, and the first three -- Spud Chandler, Lee Stine, and Cliff Mapes -- only wore the "unlucky" number briefly. The fourth to wear it was Curt Blefary, who had it from 1970 to 1971. Perhaps modern ballplayers are less superstitious, because after Walt it's been worn by 18 players... most notably Alex Rodriguez, who wore it from 2004 to 2016. It also was worn by Joey Gallo, Jim Leyritz, and Mike Pagliarulo.
  
• Don't confuse the 5'6" No Neck with Walt "The Wizard" Williams, a 6'8" small forward who was a 1st round pick in the 1992 NBA Draft. There also have been several football players named Walter Williams as well as a noted economist.
  
• Walt is one of four major leaguers born in Brownwood, Texas. The others were 1920s starter Slim Harriss, 1980s reliever Jerry Don Gleaton, and the last was Jim Morris, a pitcher who was actually drafted by the Yankees out of high school, but didn't sign. Instead he went to college and a year later was taken in the 1st round by the Milwaukee Brewers, but after six years in the minors, quit to become a high school teacher and baseball coach. Ten years later, at the urging of his players, he tried out for the Devil Rays, and made the team. His life story became the inspiration for the 2002 movie The Rookie starring Dennis Quaid!
  
• San Francisco's Galileo High School, now known as the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology, was founded in 1921. The school's motto is Eppure si muove ("And yet it moves"), a tribute to its namesake. Williams is one of 12 major leaguers to graduate from the school, which most notably produced Joe DiMaggio and his brothers, Dom and Vince, as well as Yankee Hall of Fame second baseman Tony Lazzeri. 1950s Yankee third baseman Bobby Brown, who became a medical doctor (and later American League president), also graduated from the high school. The only graduate who is active in MLB today is Diamondbacks reliever Kyle Nelson.
  
• City College of San Francisco has produced six major leaguers, but Williams is the only Yankee. The most notable alumnus is probably Mike Norris, who pitched for the A's from 1975 to 1990; there's also Doug Davis, who pitched for five teams between 1999 and 2011.
  
• Walt attended both Galileo High School and City College of San Francisco... as did, four years later, O.J. Simpson. (The Juice would later transfer to USC and be reunited with another Galileo H.S. grad, his best friend and white Bronco driver Al Cowlings.)
  
• During the off-seasons, Williams volunteered to speak to kids who had been arrested on drug charges as part of a pre-trial intervention program.
  
• The Houston Colt .45's had a ping-pong table in the clubhouse, and two of the top players were Joe Morgan and a rookie named Aaron Pointer. Morgan was small and quick, while Pointer was tall and graceful. But the best, according to John Paciorek's book If I Knew Then What I Know Now, was Walt Williams. Paciorek said Williams was "built like a massive hunk of granite" but despite his thickly muscled body "was as flexible as anyone, in all other areas but his neck."
  
• Prior to the 1967 season, White Sox manager Eddie Stanky praised Williams's hit tool, but said he needed to be more patient at the plate. Stanky, who had a career .410 OBP despite a .268 BA, promised to buy Williams a new suit if he drew at least 50 walks. He never got it: his highwater mark for walks in a season came in 1969, when he drew 26 walks in 507 plate appearances.
  
• With the White Sox on June 14, 1967, Williams made one of his most memorable plays -- and it came at the expense of the Red Sox! With a runner on second, Williams fielded a single to right and threw the ball home. The throw was cut-off by the first baseman, who tried to tag out the batter as he rounded first to head to second. The batter evaded the tag, so the first baseman threw the ball to second base. The batter reversed course to run back to first, and the second baseman threw the ball back to the first baseman... but way over his head. The runner turned around again and raced to second... only to be tagged out! Williams, who had started the play a moment earlier in right field, had followed the little league maxim of "follow your throw" and, Jeter like, seemingly appeared out of nowhere to intercept the bad throw and fire it to second base. The White Sox would win the game, 8-7. Williams was a rookie at the time and his hustling play made him many lifelong fans on the South Side.
  
• Another notable moment against the Red Sox came on May 21, 1970, when he had five hits (a double and four singles) in a 22-13 win at Fenway Park. He also had four hits in a game five different times.
  
• In 1969, Williams's .304 batting average was sixth-best in the American League, behind only Rod Carew, Tony Oliva, Reggie Smith, Frank Robinson, and Boog Powell -- pretty good company!
  
• Walt played for Chicago's Triple-A team, the Hawaii Islanders, in 1968. Honolulu Stadium had a Columbia Inn sign over the right-field fence that had a hole in the letter "o", and a sign reading that a batter who hit a ball through the "o" would win $1,000. Walt was the first player to do it, according to the book Hawai'i Sports by Dan Cisco. That season, Walt hit an impressive .319/.344/.472, though with only six home runs in 305 plate appearances.
  
• Harry Caray, then a broadcaster with the White Sox, had a memorable line one day when Williams was playing center field and on either side of him were Carlos May, who had lost his right thumb in a mortar accident while in the Marine Reserves, and Pat Kelly, who had a famously weak throwing arm. "Tonight for the White Sox we have No Thumb in left, No Neck in center, and No Arm in right," Caray quipped.
  
• In 1973, when Williams was on the Indians, he found himself mostly on the bench or used as a pinch hitter. On June 12, he had just 71 plate appearances, and some Cleveland fans unfurled a huge banner reading "WALT IS TOO GOOD TO WASTE." Manager Ken Aspromonte started him in the outfield that day for the first time in a month, and Walt responded by hitting a two-run home run in a 5-4 win! Finally unleashed, Walt hit .301/.332/.443 in 300 plate appearances over the rest of the season, and his post-banner performance is undoubtedly what drew the Yankees' interest in a trade for him.
  
• The three-team, five-player deal that brought Williams to the Yankees was made on March 19, 1974: Jim Perry from the Tigers to the Indians; Jerry Moses from the Yankees to the Tigers; Ed Farmer from the Tigers to the Yankees; and Rick Sawyer and Walt Williams from the Indians to the Yankees. The headliner was Perry, the 1970 Cy Young Award winner, who went to the Indians to join a rotation led by his little brother, Gaylord. So from a Yankee perspective, it was Moses for Williams, Farmer, and Sawyer. Farmer would never play for the Yankees, as he was flipped two days later to the Phillies for cash. Sawyer would see just 7.2 innings with the Yankees between 1974 and 1975 before being traded to the Padres for minor league outfielder Gene Locklear.
  
• It seemed odd that the Yankees would get three players back just for Jerry Moses, Thurman Munson's little-used backup -- he had just 64 plate appearances in 1973. But Moses had been a 23-year-old All-Star with the Red Sox just three years earlier, and the Tigers wanted him as their starting catcher so they could move veteran Bill Freehan to 1B/DH. The Tigers had a new manager, Ralph Houk, who had managed Moses on the Yankees in 1973 and maybe he saw Moses as a kindred spirit: Houk had been Yogi Berra's little-used backup! Alas, Moses hurt his hand and only played in 74 games for the Tigers, hitting .237/.282/.359 (82 OPS+) in 215 plate appearances. After the season, his contract was sold to the Mets, who then traded him to the Padres, and they in turn sent him to the White Sox. Between the three teams Moses only had 23 plate appearances and he retired.
  
• Williams had a minor role in an infamous bit of Yankee history when, on September 8, 1974, Graig Nettles had a broken bat single. Tigers catcher Bill Freehan picked up the broken bat, saw it was corked, and turned it over to home plate umpire Lou DiMuro, who called Nettles out. Nettles, who had homered earlier in the game, claimed it was the first time he'd ever used that particular bat and that he'd grabbed it by mistake. "Some Yankee fan in Chicago gave it to me and said it would bring me good luck," Nettles said "with a marvelously straight face," according to sportswriter Jim Hawkins. "I had been using Walt Williams's bat and this one looked just like it. It looked the same and it felt the same. I just picked it up by mistake. As soon as the end came off, I knew something was wrong."
  
• In 1975, a former Yankee bat boy -- now a college infielder -- named Ray Negron was drafted in the 2nd Round of the January draft by the Pittsburgh Pirates. That off-season, Williams spent six weeks working with Negron on hitting. Unfortunately, Negron didn't make it as a ballplayer -- but he did stay in baseball, working in the Yankee front office in community outreach for more than 40 years.
  
• Why was Williams allowed to have those awesome mutton chops as a member of the Yankees? The "no facial hair below the lip" policy didn't officially go into effect until 1976, and Williams was on the team from 1974 to 1975. However, the Yankee appearance policy specifically allows both mutton chops and sideburns. Mr. Burns obviously has a different policy.
  
• Asked who was the toughest pitcher he ever faced, Walt said Dean Chance of the California Angels. Chance had an 11-year career in the bigs, going 128-115 with a 2.92 ERA (119 ERA+) and 1.212 WHIP, but a back injury ended his career at age 30. Chance was a notorious Yankee killer, going 18-11 with a 2.34 ERA and 1.103 WHIP in 32 starts against the Yankees. "Every time I see his name on a lineup card, I feel like throwing up," Mickey Mantle once said of the right-hander. In 1964 -- when the Yankees won 99 games and went to a fifth straight World Series -- Chance was an incredible 4-0 with a microscopic 0.18 ERA against the Yankees. He allowed just one run in 50 innings against the Bombers that season!
  
• Walt had some fun baseball cards. Here's one where he's crushed what appears to be an infield pop up. Here's one where he's clubbing the photographer. There's this classic with his Topps All-Star Rookie Card. (Williams confirmed that you do, indeed, get a real trophy from Topps, it's just not an image they put on your baseball card.) And this is a great one.
  
• Walt was briefly name-checked in "The Baseball Spur," a short story by W.P. Kinsella (author of Shoeless Joe, the novel that was the basis for Field of Dreams). A character in the story says he saw the retired Williams on a street in Chicago and chased him for a block, shouting "Hey, No Neck!" until Williams stopped and agreed to sign an autograph.
  
• Williams had a heartbreaking tragedy during the 1972-1973 off-season. He was playing in the Venezuelan Winter League when his 2-year-old son, Tyrus, died in Chicago from spinal meningitis. Williams had two other sons, Deron and Walter Jr., and when he died in 2016, he had four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
  
• Walt's nephew was Derwin Williams, a wide receiver for the Patriots from 1985 to 1987. Derwin's son Mason Williams -- Walt's grand nephew -- was a 4th round pick of the Yankees in the 2010 draft. Mason was ranked Baseball America's top Yankee prospect -- and #32 overall -- after hitting .304/.359/.489 in A-ball in 2012. But he never panned out, maybe due to a shoulder injury that derailed his 2015 season and would require surgery to repair. In 289 plate appearances with four different teams spread out over seven seasons, Mason hit .265/.308/.366, and apparently is now out of baseball at the age of 31.
  

In 1970, sports columnist Jim Murray wrote of "No Neck": “He is 6 feet tall, only it doesn’t show on the outside. What you can see of Walt Williams is 5 feet 6.” He said a scout said the broad-shouldered, bow-legged Williams “looks as if somebody tried to cram him into a suitcase when they heard the cops coming.”
“He didn’t like the name much at first,” his widow, Ester Williams, said after his death. “But he was stuck with it.”
Williams wasn't blessed with a perfect body, but like the nickname, he was stuck with it... and with hard work and hustle, got everything he could out of it.

This is a ranking I started about a year ago, but I never finished it because at the time it wasn't getting enough attention to justify the amount of effort I was putting into it. When I posted the poll thread the other day, it seemed like this was the one that the most people wanted to see, so I'm going to go ahead and finish it. For the first few days I'll be reposting the ones I made a year ago with updates where needed, and then once I get to where I left off I'll finish the list with new posts. Fingers crossed the mods will allow this to stay up even though it's technically a repost.
The "leading receiver" is defined as the player who had the most receiving yards on the team during the regular season of the year that team won the Super Bowl. In each case, I will be ranking the player on their entire career and not the just the Super Bowl winning season. So while their have been 57 Super Bowl champions, a total of 44 unique players have led a Super Bowl winning team in receiving yards.
Without further ado, here is the basement tier of the list:
44. David Givens, 2004 New England Patriots (56 receptions, 874 yards, 3 touchdowns)
David Givens was a native of the city of Humble, Texas, which is near Houston. He played college football at Notre Dame, where he was primarily used as a running back. He entered the 2002 NFL Draft as a wide receiver, where he was scooped up by the Patriots in the seventh round, 253rd overall. He joined a team that had just won a Super Bowl the year before.
Givens barely saw the field as a rookie, hauling in just 9 receptions on only 15 targets. He had an expanded role in 2003, establishing himself as the second wide receiver on the team behind Deion Branch. In Super Bowl XXXVIII against the Panthers, Givens hauled in a five yard touchdown pass in the second quarter, helping the Patriots narrowly win 32-29. He finished the Super Bowl with a respectable 69 yards on five receptions.
In 2004, despite sharing the receiving room with ostensibly better receivers in Branch and Troy Brown, Givens emerged as Tom Brady’s favorite target. His 56 receptions and 874 receiving yards were both the most on the team. Givens scored touchdowns in all three postseason games as the Patriots won their second Super Bowl in a row. In the Super Bowl against the Eagles, Givens hauled in 3 receptions for 19 yards, including a four yard touchdown. However, his performance was overshadowed by fellow Patriots receiver Deion Branch, who was named Super Bowl MVP after hauling in 11 catches for 133 yards.
His performance with the Patriots was rewarded when the Titans signed him to a 5 year, $24 million deal prior to the 2006 season. However, his career in Tennessee would end prematurely when he tore his ACL midway through 2006. The injury caused him to miss the entire 2007 season, after which he was released by the Titans and never picked up by another team. He sued the Titans, claiming his injury was caused by the failure of team doctors to test his knee, but the lawsuit was dismissed in 2010.
All in all, Givens spent six seasons in the NFL, and caught 166 passes for 2318 and 12 touchdowns. While you could argue that he would have had a better career if he hadn’t been injured, he had the shortest and least notable career of any player on this list.
43. Stephen Baker, 1990 New York Giants (26 catches, 541 yards, 4 touchdowns)
Stephen Baker “The Touchdown Maker” was a Los Angeles native who stayed close to home and played college football at Fresno State. The Giants made him a third round pick in the 1987 draft. Baker was used mainly as a reserve receiver, while Lionel Manuel and Mark Bavaro were the preferred targets of quarterback Phil Simms. His receiving stats from 1987 to 1989 were rather unimpressive.
However, injuries to Manuel during the 1990 season thrust Baker into the starring role. He split catches rather evenly with Mark Ingram, but finished ahead of him in receiving yards with a rather mediocre 541. Baker contributed with a touchdown in the divisional round, but was held without a catch in the NFC Championship Game, a game the Giants won 15-13 despite failing to score a single touchdown. In Super Bowl XXV against the BIlls, Baker caught 2 passes for 31 yards, one of which was a 14 yard touchdown. The Giants topped the Bills 20-19.
The remaining two seasons of Baker’s career weren’t any less mediocre. According to Football Outsiders, Baker had the worst catch rate of any receiver from 1991 to 2011 during the 1992 season, catching only 28% of the balls that were thrown his way. He was let go by the Giants following the 1992 season, and a back injury forced him to retire rather than find a new team.
In 6 NFL seasons, he caught 141 passes for 2587 yards and 21 touchdowns. For a guy nicknamed “The Touchdown Maker”, he was never anything better than mediocre.
42. Charlie Brown, 1982 Washington Redskins (32 receptions, 690 yards, 8 touchdowns)
Good ol’ Charlie Brown was a South Carolina native who played college football at his home state South Carolina. The Redskins selected him in the eighth round of the 1982 draft. Brown became a contributor immediately as a rookie, outperforming future Hall of Famer Art Monk in the Redskins receiving room. He was named to the Pro Bowl as a rookie, as well as the PFWA All-Rookie team. In Super Bowl XVII against the Dolphins, Brown’s eight yard touchdown pass in the fourth quarter helped seal a 27-17 Redskins victory.
Brown had a career year in 1983, and helped his quarterback Joe Theismann win MVP. He was Washington’s leading receiver, once again beating out Art Monk for the title. His 1225 yards and 8 touchdowns led him to be named to a second consecutive Pro Bowl. Brown had three catches for 93 yards in Super Bowl XVIII, but it was for naught as the Redskins fell to the Raiders 38-9.
After injuries sidelined him for most of the 1984 season, Brown got into a dispute with head coach Joe Gibbs over his status as a starter, and skipped minicamp in May of 1985. This culminated in a trade that sent him to Atlanta prior to the 1985 season. Brown played three seasons for the Falcons, but never saw the same success he had had in Washington. His best season was 1986, where he caught 918 yards and 4 touchdowns. He retired following the 1987 season.
In an NFL career that lasted only six years, Brown caught 220 passes for 3548 yards and 25 touchdowns. While he had two great seasons that led to two Pro Bowl appearances, he was mediocre for the rest and his short career doesn’t help him.
41. Willie Gault, 1985 Chicago Bears (33 receptions, 704 yards, 1 touchdown)
A Georgia native who played college football at Tennessee, Gault was selected by the Bears 18th overall in the 1983 draft. Gault was a former Olympic sprinter and is still considered one of the fastest NFL players of all time. Nevertheless, Gault proved to be a relatively mediocre NFL receiver and never posted more than 1000 yards in a season his entire career.
Gault’s most notable season was 1985, when he was the leading receiver on a middling offense that went 15-1 behind an elite defense. While the Bears offense still ran through Walter Payton, who led the team in receptions, Gault was the team leader in receiving yards. In the Bears 46-10 blowout of the Patriots in Super Bowl XX, Gault caught 4 passes for 129 yards.
After spending five seasons with the Bears, Gault was traded to the Raiders prior to the 1988 season and spent the remaining six seasons of his career in LA. His best season was 1990, when he caught 50 passes for 985 yards, helping the Raiders reach the AFC Championship Game. He retired following the 1993 season.
In 11 seasons in the league, Gault caught 333 passes for 6635 yards and 44 touchdowns. While you could argue his results were due to the middling QB play of Jim McMahon and Jay Schroeder, Gault was never anything better than a mediocre receiver.

https://thewest.com.au/sport/fremantle-dockers/michael-walters-stars-in-stirring-sir-doug-nicholls-round-performance-for-walyalup-dockers--c-10714527
Written in block letters on the Optus Stadium wing was the poignant phrase: “Moments forged by First Nations”.
In Sir Doug Nicholls Round, in a win over the reigning premiers, before a packed home crowd, Michael Walters forged plenty of moments — and owned the big ones.
The Dockers star and Indigenous leader kicked three goals and had seven score involvements, playing under the name Walyalup for the first time.
When he kicked his first he grabbed his jumper — designed by Palawa man and Walyalup captain Alex Pearce. When he kicked his second he celebrated with a traditional kangaroo dance. He kicked his third standing on the Aboriginal flag painted in the goal-square.
“It means a lot. To get the win, but it’s also the first time we’ve changed the name of the football club, that was significant in itself,” he said.
“It represents where Fremantle’s from, represents where this jumper’s from and represents all the past players, the present players, but also the future as well.
“The amount of Indigenous representation we’ve had at this football club by Indigenous players, but also multicultural players, is massive, so to go out there and get a win is unreal.
“This is an important round... Indigenous Round is a special moment for Indigenous players but the wider community as well.”
With a host of the players that had shaped the club’s rich Aboriginal history on hand, Walters paid tribute to those that had come before him.
“We all know how significant this round is because of the past players that paved the way. The Adam Goodes, the Krakouer brothers, the Nicky Winmars — I could just go on — but these guys have paved the way for me to come through and enjoy my footy and play the way I do,” he said.
“I just hope I can pass the same message on to everybody else that we are all equal, we all love supporting the game that we love.”
The win over Geelong is the Dockers’ third straight, their biggest of the year and continues their climb after a slow start. But it also continues their remarkable streak of 625 games and 28 years with at least one Indigenous player in their side.
It’s a record that may never be broken.

Willie Sutton the famous bank robber of the 1920s and 30s was asked by a reporter,
“Why do you rob banks Willie?”
His response was, “Because that’s where the money is.”
The same applies for doing contact work. If you want to interact with flying saucers out in the field, then go to UFO hot spots, because that’s “where the money is.”
In the fall of 1992, my newly formed team had several sightings near Rocky Peak in the Santa Susana Mountains located in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. Red orbs had been observed there moving up and down behind the southern ridge of the high desert wilderness California park surrounding Rocky Peak.
A DECISION TO MAKE
I was under pressure to move our research site to the Rocky Peak State Park. I was somewhat concerned however that the first scouting team had encountered what seemed like probable surveillance.
I called “CSETI Central” for advice. Not much was forthcoming. My impression of my colleague Dr. Greer’s attitude to my request for guidance could be summarized as, “You’re a smart guy. You go figure it out. “
He was busy enough with four young children at home and a busy ER practice involving long shifts with a great deal of stress. He was also flying out of North Carolina several times per month to give public lectures and workshops promoting the very campaign that I was an active participant in. It involved what the CSETI Director called “human initiated contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.”
His assistant Shari Adamiak was a lot more helpful. She had been leading a contact team in Denver for close to a year. Much of what we called “the contact protocols” came out of her pioneering CE-5 Working Group’s experience. She advised me that it was wise to move the team to higher ground where the UFOs seemed to be operating. Bank robber Sutton’s law was evoked, and I needed to go to “where the money is.”
ANOTHER SCOUTING MISSION
I was playing it safe; before sending my entire Working Group up the mountain, I wanted to check out the site at night with another scouting party. Including me, we had three volunteers. One was an experienced hiker that I will call “Linda.” She was planning to move out of town, and this was going to be her last field investigation with our LA team.
My medical partner, David Gordon was also with us. He is a Board-Certified Family Medicine specialist and has an undergraduate degree in physics. Dave was a great asset to the team because he was also private pilot with great sky watching skills. On the night we were to hike up to Rocky Peak, he was “on-call” for hospital admissions. On the trail up the mountain, he carried with him what was then a new gadget called “a cell phone.” By modern standards his device was large and bulky, about nine inches long with a heavy battery pack inside. No matter how clunky it looked, it was better than carrying a beeper. With a cell phone you could call the hospital back immediately without having to look for a phone booth; there were no phone booths in Rocky Peak Wilderness Park.
RATTLESNAKE COUNTRY
The trail up the mountain was a series of switchbacks. Boulders and steep hills on both sides of the path blocked our view of the surroundings during the first part of the hike.
It was still warm as the sun was going down. We kept a look out for rattlesnakes. It was autumn, the season when snakes hunt in preparation for hibernation. During winter when the temperatures at night can drop into the low thirties, it is a safer time to go off trail. During cold weather the rattlesnakes are under ground and not underfoot.
As we reached higher elevations, the trail opened up; we had a better view of the sky and the surrounding hills. To the south loomed the massive sandstone mesa that had been hollowed out to build the Department of Energy’s massive laboratory. The lab was a dark and dangerous place that had been plagued with series of industrial accidents. This included a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor in the 1950s with the release of plutonium into the environment. During the 1980s, I volunteered for the anti-nuclear group Physicians for Social Responsibility. A staff member for our group attempted to get information out to the public about leaks of radiation from the base. His efforts were stifled however by national security regulations.
ALLEGATIONS OF SABOTAGE
As we climbed up the trail towards Rocky Peak, I didn’t know that just a few years before a flying saucer had allegedly carried out sabotage at the DOE facility. This reportedly occurred just a few thousand yards away from our UFO field laboratory in the Santa Susana Pass. In 2006 I interviewed a Kaiser Health Plan patient who worked there as a maintenance engineer. According to the then retired worker, a large mountainside water main had been cut one afternoon and there was a loss of water pressure at the Santa Susana installation. When he and another repairman climbed down the mountain to correct the leak, they found a large pipe had been cleanly cut as if by a power tool. Less than a hundred yards away a saucer shaped craft hovered, as if waiting to show off its handiwork. It was his impression that this event was a deliberate act of sabotage. (For more details on this incident follow link provided below.)
A FATEFUL PHONE CALL
As we continued to climb on our scouting mission, the trail eventually opened up. We took a rest to enjoy the view. To the south past the DOE site, the west San Fernando Valley stretched out all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains. We were high enough to get a good signal and Daniel took out the cell phone to call his wife.
David must have been happy with his new toy. Very few people had cell phones back in 1992, and he left his wife a message about our “objectives.” In a melodramatic tone as if he were a news reporter, he said something like.
“Here we are on a scouting mission for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. At this very moment we are in position on a rugged desert fire trail in Rocky Peak State Park, looking down on the United States Department of Energy site. Our mission is to “vector in” ET spacecraft as part of Dr Greer’s CSETI CE-5 Initiative.”
It was funny the way he hammed it up, but I seem to recall thinking he might be offering “too much information.”
Back in the 1990s, activists in our network knew of rumors that the NSA had extraordinary abilities for screening calls employing voice recognition of “key words.” This involved using supercomputers. Just a few years before, it had been a crime for any official to merely state in public the name “National Security Agency.” Subsequent dramatic events that night may have been an indication as to just how good their surveillance of phone traffic may have been.
MEDITATION IN THE HIGH DESERT
In less than an hour, hiking uphill all the way, we reached a plateau on which stood Rocky Peak. It was twilight and the temperature was dropping. We chose to meditate on a large flat rock near the edge of a cliff that afforded us a great view of the Simi Valley to the west. I led the guided meditation that started with,
“Sit quietly for a moment and then take a deep breath,
Very deep with the diaphragm and then all of the breath out.
Let go of all things,
Let go of all thoughts,
Let go of all feelings.
Be still.
Quietly let your mind follow your breathing...
Who is watching your breath?”
Seated in a tight semicircle with our backs against the rock we carried out the prescribed mental exercises quietly for about a half hour. Then we watched the sky and waited.
Rocky Peak rose like a giant pyramid up from a flat area several football fields in size. Dr. Dave had to work the next day. We decided it was time to head for the summit. It was a relief not to be climbing anymore. The trail pointed toward the base of Rocky Peak. The area was covered with boulders of varying sizes. The light was fading fast, and there was a chill in the air. We had to get going before it got too late.
BLACKHAWKS
As we moved quickly over level ground, we heard a distant rumbling sound coming from the south. It slowly became louder. Daniel recognized it as aircraft engines.
“Those are turboprops,” he told me.
“You’re right,” I replied, “it sounds like a chopper.”
A few moments later as the sound increased to a roar, we saw them. Two massive Blackhawk helicopters were flying up the hillside that we had just climbed. They were moving at low elevation, about one hundred feet above the ground. To my amazement, they were following the trail that we had just climbed. I thought they might be looking for somebody or something. The Blackhawks moved in a tight formation with the lead chopper bit off to the side and just ahead of its partner.
Daniel immediately pointed out that they were flying “dark.” Regulations required lighting array of rotating beacons and strobe lights were absent. Instead, only tiny pale “anti-collision” lights were on the sides of each of the dark forms rapidly approaching us. They were clearly US military, but what were they doing flying at night in this desolate place?
In no way was I prepared for what I was witnessing. The three of us quickly ran over to some small boulders and we crouched down behind them. It wasn’t much cover, but it was the best we could do. My team watched intently as the Blackhawks seemed to have found something of interest. They were hovering directly over the rock where we had just completed our meditation/sky-watching just a few minutes before. “This is totally weird.” I thought.
JAMES BOND FANTASY
My mind flashed back to my teen years. I remembered the first James Bond movie that I saw. It was titled “From Russia with Love.” Towards the end of the movie Bond played by Sean Connery finds himself fleeing over a rocky terrain pursued by a helicopter. Its crew drops hand grenades on the hero. As the roaring choppers circled a few hundred yards away, there I was peeking out in fear from behind a rock while fantasizing about James Bond. These thoughts made me feel kind of ridiculous.
The Blackhawks’ apparent interest in the rocks where we had meditated made me wonder whether they were using infrared night vision devices. Perhaps the crew had have picked up heat signatures left by our bodies as we sat on the rocks.
THE CHOPPERS DIVIDE
One of the helicopters broke ranks and headed directly towards us. Our attempts to hide were not working very well. Less than sixty feet off the deck the chopper passed right over our heads. My body vibrated in resonance with the low-pitched thunder created by its engines. That helicopter headed directly towards a radio-television tower array located on a hilltop a few miles away. There it circled a bit while its companion stayed above us at the base of Rocky Peak. No sense in our trying to hide. We went back to the trail and kept our eyes on the aircraft that was nearer to us.
During one of its passes, it came so close to me that even in the semi-darkness I could make out a helmeted crew member standing in the side door of the copter. During the Vietnam War the side door was the position from which a gunner fired a machine gun. The thought made me feel even more nervous. I imagined that soldier with night vision goggles was standing right at the opening and was staring directly at me. My body trembled in the excitement. The roaring diesel engines and the swirling blades were deafening.
At that moment, a strange set of thoughts raced through my mind. I envisioned a military man positioned at the communications array that one of the chopper’s was flying to. In my mind’s eye I could see him in an observation post overlooking the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. The man was out of uniform but still carried an automatic pistol in a holster on his right hip. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a muscular build and short crew cut, and he was wearing dungarees. For some reason, I thought that he was a US Marine Sargent, an intelligence “non-com”. This particular detail has significance pertaining to the likely base where the choppers flying over us were stationed.
After a several minutes of flying around in circles, one above us and the other to the east near the hilltop communication array, the choppers teamed up and flew south heading over the San Fernando Valley. We continued to move towards our original objective of climbing Rocky Peak, however, we were really disturbed up by our “close encounter of a Blackhawk helicopter kind.” Instead of climbing to the summit of Rocky Peak, we decided to call it quits for the night. Using flashlights in the darkness, we descended the trail to the reassuring comfort of our vehicles parked down below in the Santa Susana Pass.
DISCUSSION
We chatted about what we had just experienced. The notion that the helicopters had been looking for us and that Daniel’s phone call had something to do with their sudden appearance seemed like something out of an action novel, not part of real life.
We couldn’t ignore the fact that the military craft had followed the trail up the mountain as if they were looking for somebody. They had hovered over the spot where we had sat on the rocks for about an hour and then one flew directly over us as we pathetically tried to hide behind some boulders. We were going to need more information before concluding what might have precipitated the appearance of the Blackhawks.
THE BLACKHAWKS WERE NOT ON A “ROUTINE TRAINING MISSION.”
Information concerning this disturbing incident came from several sources. The first was from Dr. Dave Gordon’ medical practice. During the following week he asked several of his patients from the neighboring communities of the Simi Valley and Chatsworth if they had heard or seen large military helicopters the previous Saturday night. At least one told him in no uncertain terms that the choppers caused quite a racket. He then inquired if this had ever happened before or was a regular occurrence. The answer he received from his informant was that it was not. The powerful helicopters flying at low altitude over the suburban community had been a unique event.
Two important witnesses allowed us to track the path of the choppers on their way to Rocky Peak. The first was Dave’s partner in the Department of Family Medicine. If memory serves me correctly it was Dr. Maizel who ran the headache clinic. He lived in Woodland Hills and reported that the military helicopters had passed by his home Saturday night and were headed north. The second informant was the investigations director for MUFON LA. He lived near the Hollywood Bowel. The roar of the choppers rattled the widows. When he looked out, he saw the two Blackhawks flying just above the treetops heading northwest. I’ll never forget his words. He said that the choppers were flying so low that he wondered if they were on some kind of “counter-terrorist mission.” Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit helicopters from flying lower than five hundred feet. The Blackhawks were clearly in violation of those regulations.
These last reports allowed us to chart the likely path of the choppers. They flew over the Hollywood located southeast of Rocky Peak. They were likely following the 101 Freeway north, headed toward the San Fernando Valley. Once in the Valley they followed the 101 due west, thus allowing them to pass over Dr. Maizel’s home in Woodland Hills. His location was just about ten miles due south of Rocky Peak Wilderness State Park. Given this information, the only logical source of the origin for the choppers was the Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Tustin located in Orange County some 90 miles southeast of Rocky Peak. That base was closed in 1999 but during its operation it had up to five thousand uniformed and civilians employed there. According to Wikipedia, “It was the country's first air facility developed solely for helicopter operations… By the early 1990s, MCAS Tustin was a major center for Marine Corps helicopter aviation and radar on the Pacific Coast. Its primary purpose was to provide support services and material for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.”
Blackhawks have a cruising speed of 175 miles per hour and a range of 500 miles. Dave’s call to his wife Eve was made approximately 90 minutes prior to their appearance at Rocky Peak. With a flight time of about 30 minutes, this would have given the crews sufficient time to arrive following David’s phone call. Another significant factor was that during a previous scouting mission at the site, I had observed several indicators of probable surveillance. These included a large Black Mercedes Sedan parked illegally at the overpass of Highway 118 at the Rocky Peak exit, as well as two men with a military bearing that were hiking at the site when we were. This occurred in the middle of the week when the wilderness park was essentially deserted.
Surveillance was a regular feature of the contact work that I did under the CE-5 banner during the 1990s. To understand how this came about it is necessary to describe how US government agencies have been involved with contactees going back to the 1950s as well as the highly bizarre circumstances surrounding Dr. Steven Greer’s alleged involvement with the US Secret Service, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the CIA.
The proposition that our team had precipitated a major surveillance operation by Marine helicopters will to some undoubtedly seem like a fantasy akin to “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Paranoid delusions of grandeur are not uncommon in the flying saucer subculture. For those critics, I ask you consider the following:
The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) has a long history of involvement with the UFO subject. The documentary UFOs: Past, Present and Future was produced with Pentagon assistance in 1974. In the film, the former head of Operation Blue Book Colonel Friends described an incident in which a Navy intelligence officer was trained by a psychic to communicate via telepathy with UFO intelligence. More recently the Office of Naval Intelligence has been playing a significant role in the US Executive Branch’s current efforts confirming the reality of what is now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
I am now in my eighth decade of life and have not had a UFO sighting during fieldwork in nearly a decade. Thus, I no longer consider myself to be a “volunteer contact worker.” This document is shared in the hope that it may help the next generation of contact activists to understand the experiences and lessons learned by past volunteers.

​
Willie Sutton the famous bank robber of the 1920s and 30s was asked by a reporter,
“Why do you rob banks Willie?”
His response was, “Because that’s where the money is.”
The same applies for doing contact work. If you want to interact with flying saucers out in the field, then go to UFO hot spots, because that’s “where the money is.”
In the fall of 1992, my newly formed team had several sightings near Rocky Peak in the Santa Susana Mountains located in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. Red orbs had been observed there moving up and down behind the southern ridge of the high desert wilderness California park surrounding Rocky Peak.
A DECISION TO MAKE
I was under pressure to move our research site to the Rocky Peak State Park. I was somewhat concerned however that the first scouting team had encountered what seemed like probable surveillance.
I called “CSETI Central” for advice. Not much was forthcoming. My impression of my colleague Dr. Greer’s attitude to my request for guidance could be summarized as, “You’re a smart guy. You go figure it out. “
He was busy enough with four young children at home and a busy ER practice involving long shifts with a great deal of stress. He was also flying out of North Carolina several times per month to give public lectures and workshops promoting the very campaign that I was an active participant in. It involved what the CSETI Director called “human initiated contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.”
His assistant Shari Adamiak was a lot more helpful. She had been leading a contact team in Denver for close to a year. Much of what we called “the contact protocols” came out of her pioneering CE-5 Working Group’s experience. She advised me that it was wise to move the team to higher ground where the UFOs seemed to be operating. Bank robber Sutton’s law was evoked, and I needed to go to “where the money is.”
ANOTHER SCOUTING MISSION
I was playing it safe; before sending my entire Working Group up the mountain, I wanted to check out the site at night with another scouting party. Including me, we had three volunteers. One was an experienced hiker that I will call “Linda.” She was planning to move out of town, and this was going to be her last field investigation with our LA team.
My medical partner, David Gordon was also with us. He is a Board-Certified Family Medicine specialist and has an undergraduate degree in physics. Dave was a great asset to the team because he was also private pilot with great sky watching skills. On the night we were to hike up to Rocky Peak, he was “on-call” for hospital admissions. On the trail up the mountain, he carried with him what was then a new gadget called “a cell phone.” By modern standards his device was large and bulky, about nine inches long with a heavy battery pack inside. No matter how clunky it looked, it was better than carrying a beeper. With a cell phone you could call the hospital back immediately without having to look for a phone booth; there were no phone booths in Rocky Peak Wilderness Park.
RATTLESNAKE COUNTRY
The trail up the mountain was a series of switchbacks. Boulders and steep hills on both sides of the path blocked our view of the surroundings during the first part of the hike.
It was still warm as the sun was going down. We kept a look out for rattlesnakes. It was autumn, the season when snakes hunt in preparation for hibernation. During winter when the temperatures at night can drop into the low thirties, it is a safer time to go off trail. During cold weather the rattlesnakes are under ground and not underfoot.
As we reached higher elevations, the trail opened up; we had a better view of the sky and the surrounding hills. To the south loomed the massive sandstone mesa that had been hollowed out to build the Department of Energy’s massive laboratory. The lab was a dark and dangerous place that had been plagued with series of industrial accidents. This included a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor in the 1950s with the release of plutonium into the environment. During the 1980s, I volunteered for the anti-nuclear group Physicians for Social Responsibility. A staff member for our group attempted to get information out to the public about leaks of radiation from the base. His efforts were stifled however by national security regulations.
ALLEGATIONS OF SABOTAGE
As we climbed up the trail towards Rocky Peak, I didn’t know that just a few years before a flying saucer had allegedly carried out sabotage at the DOE facility. This reportedly occurred just a few thousand yards away from our UFO field laboratory in the Santa Susana Pass. In 2006 I interviewed a Kaiser Health Plan patient who worked there as a maintenance engineer. According to the then retired worker, a large mountainside water main had been cut one afternoon and there was a loss of water pressure at the Santa Susana installation. When he and another repairman climbed down the mountain to correct the leak, they found a large pipe had been cleanly cut as if by a power tool. Less than a hundred yards away a saucer shaped craft hovered, as if waiting to show off its handiwork. It was his impression that this event was a deliberate act of sabotage. (For more details on this incident follow link provided below.)
A FATEFUL PHONE CALL
As we continued to climb on our scouting mission, the trail eventually opened up. We took a rest to enjoy the view. To the south past the DOE site, the west San Fernando Valley stretched out all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains. We were high enough to get a good signal and Daniel took out the cell phone to call his wife.
David must have been happy with his new toy. Very few people had cell phones back in 1992, and he left his wife a message about our “objectives.” In a melodramatic tone as if he were a news reporter, he said something like.
“Here we are on a scouting mission for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. At this very moment we are in position on a rugged desert fire trail in Rocky Peak State Park, looking down on the United States Department of Energy site. Our mission is to “vector in” ET spacecraft as part of Dr Greer’s CSETI CE-5 Initiative.”
It was funny the way he hammed it up, but I seem to recall thinking he might be offering “too much information.”
Back in the 1990s, activists in our network knew of rumors that the NSA had extraordinary abilities for screening calls employing voice recognition of “key words.” This involved using supercomputers. Just a few years before, it had been a crime for any official to merely state in public the name “National Security Agency.” Subsequent dramatic events that night may have been an indication as to just how good their surveillance of phone traffic may have been.
MEDITATION IN THE HIGH DESERT
In less than an hour, hiking uphill all the way, we reached a plateau on which stood Rocky Peak. It was twilight and the temperature was dropping. We chose to meditate on a large flat rock near the edge of a cliff that afforded us a great view of the Simi Valley to the west. I led the guided meditation that started with,
“Sit quietly for a moment and then take a deep breath,
Very deep with the diaphragm and then all of the breath out.
Let go of all things,
Let go of all thoughts,
Let go of all feelings.
Be still.
Quietly let your mind follow your breathing...
Who is watching your breath?”
Seated in a tight semicircle with our backs against the rock we carried out the prescribed mental exercises quietly for about a half hour. Then we watched the sky and waited.
Rocky Peak rose like a giant pyramid up from a flat area several football fields in size. Dr. Dave had to work the next day. We decided it was time to head for the summit. It was a relief not to be climbing anymore. The trail pointed toward the base of Rocky Peak. The area was covered with boulders of varying sizes. The light was fading fast, and there was a chill in the air. We had to get going before it got too late.
BLACKHAWKS
As we moved quickly over level ground, we heard a distant rumbling sound coming from the south. It slowly became louder. Daniel recognized it as aircraft engines.
“Those are turboprops,” he told me.
“You’re right,” I replied, “it sounds like a chopper.”
A few moments later as the sound increased to a roar, we saw them. Two massive Blackhawk helicopters were flying up the hillside that we had just climbed. They were moving at low elevation, about one hundred feet above the ground. To my amazement, they were following the trail that we had just climbed. I thought they might be looking for somebody or something. The Blackhawks moved in a tight formation with the lead chopper bit off to the side and just ahead of its partner.
Daniel immediately pointed out that they were flying “dark.” Regulations required lighting array of rotating beacons and strobe lights were absent. Instead, only tiny pale “anti-collision” lights were on the sides of each of the dark forms rapidly approaching us. They were clearly US military, but what were they doing flying at night in this desolate place?
In no way was I prepared for what I was witnessing. The three of us quickly ran over to some small boulders and we crouched down behind them. It wasn’t much cover, but it was the best we could do. My team watched intently as the Blackhawks seemed to have found something of interest. They were hovering directly over the rock where we had just completed our meditation/sky-watching just a few minutes before. “This is totally weird.” I thought.
JAMES BOND FANTASY
My mind flashed back to my teen years. I remembered the first James Bond movie that I saw. It was titled “From Russia with Love.” Towards the end of the movie Bond played by Sean Connery finds himself fleeing over a rocky terrain pursued by a helicopter. Its crew drops hand grenades on the hero. As the roaring choppers circled a few hundred yards away, there I was peeking out in fear from behind a rock while fantasizing about James Bond. These thoughts made me feel kind of ridiculous.
The Blackhawks’ apparent interest in the rocks where we had meditated made me wonder whether they were using infrared night vision devices. Perhaps the crew had have picked up heat signatures left by our bodies as we sat on the rocks.
THE CHOPPERS DIVIDE
One of the helicopters broke ranks and headed directly towards us. Our attempts to hide were not working very well. Less than sixty feet off the deck the chopper passed right over our heads. My body vibrated in resonance with the low-pitched thunder created by its engines. That helicopter headed directly towards a radio-television tower array located on a hilltop a few miles away. There it circled a bit while its companion stayed above us at the base of Rocky Peak. No sense in our trying to hide. We went back to the trail and kept our eyes on the aircraft that was nearer to us.
During one of its passes, it came so close to me that even in the semi-darkness I could make out a helmeted crew member standing in the side door of the copter. During the Vietnam War the side door was the position from which a gunner fired a machine gun. The thought made me feel even more nervous. I imagined that soldier with night vision goggles was standing right at the opening and was staring directly at me. My body trembled in the excitement. The roaring diesel engines and the swirling blades were deafening.
At that moment, a strange set of thoughts raced through my mind. I envisioned a military man positioned at the communications array that one of the chopper’s was flying to. In my mind’s eye I could see him in an observation post overlooking the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. The man was out of uniform but still carried an automatic pistol in a holster on his right hip. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a muscular build and short crew cut, and he was wearing dungarees. For some reason, I thought that he was a US Marine Sargent, an intelligence “non-com”. This particular detail has significance pertaining to the likely base where the choppers flying over us were stationed.
After a several minutes of flying around in circles, one above us and the other to the east near the hilltop communication array, the choppers teamed up and flew south heading over the San Fernando Valley. We continued to move towards our original objective of climbing Rocky Peak, however, we were really disturbed up by our “close encounter of a Blackhawk helicopter kind.” Instead of climbing to the summit of Rocky Peak, we decided to call it quits for the night. Using flashlights in the darkness, we descended the trail to the reassuring comfort of our vehicles parked down below in the Santa Susana Pass.
DISCUSSION
We chatted about what we had just experienced. The notion that the helicopters had been looking for us and that Daniel’s phone call had something to do with their sudden appearance seemed like something out of an action novel, not part of real life.
We couldn’t ignore the fact that the military craft had followed the trail up the mountain as if they were looking for somebody. They had hovered over the spot where we had sat on the rocks for about an hour and then one flew directly over us as we pathetically tried to hide behind some boulders. We were going to need more information before concluding what might have precipitated the appearance of the Blackhawks.
THE BLACKHAWKS WERE NOT ON A “ROUTINE TRAINING MISSION.”
Information concerning this disturbing incident came from several sources. The first was from Dr. Dave Gordon’ medical practice. During the following week he asked several of his patients from the neighboring communities of the Simi Valley and Chatsworth if they had heard or seen large military helicopters the previous Saturday night. At least one told him in no uncertain terms that the choppers caused quite a racket. He then inquired if this had ever happened before or was a regular occurrence. The answer he received from his informant was that it was not. The powerful helicopters flying at low altitude over the suburban community had been a unique event.
Two important witnesses allowed us to track the path of the choppers on their way to Rocky Peak. The first was Dave’s partner in the Department of Family Medicine. If memory serves me correctly it was Dr. Maizel who ran the headache clinic. He lived in Woodland Hills and reported that the military helicopters had passed by his home Saturday night and were headed north. The second informant was the investigations director for MUFON LA. He lived near the Hollywood Bowel. The roar of the choppers rattled the widows. When he looked out, he saw the two Blackhawks flying just above the treetops heading northwest. I’ll never forget his words. He said that the choppers were flying so low that he wondered if they were on some kind of “counter-terrorist mission.” Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit helicopters from flying lower than five hundred feet. The Blackhawks were clearly in violation of those regulations.
These last reports allowed us to chart the likely path of the choppers. They flew over the Hollywood located southeast of Rocky Peak. They were likely following the 101 Freeway north, headed toward the San Fernando Valley. Once in the Valley they followed the 101 due west, thus allowing them to pass over Dr. Maizel’s home in Woodland Hills. His location was just about ten miles due south of Rocky Peak Wilderness State Park. Given this information, the only logical source of the origin for the choppers was the Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Tustin located in Orange County some 90 miles southeast of Rocky Peak. That base was closed in 1999 but during its operation it had up to five thousand uniformed and civilians employed there. According to Wikipedia, “It was the country's first air facility developed solely for helicopter operations… By the early 1990s, MCAS Tustin was a major center for Marine Corps helicopter aviation and radar on the Pacific Coast. Its primary purpose was to provide support services and material for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.”
Blackhawks have a cruising speed of 175 miles per hour and a range of 500 miles. Dave’s call to his wife Eve was made approximately 90 minutes prior to their appearance at Rocky Peak. With a flight time of about 30 minutes, this would have given the crews sufficient time to arrive following David’s phone call. Another significant factor was that during a previous scouting mission at the site, I had observed several indicators of probable surveillance. These included a large Black Mercedes Sedan parked illegally at the overpass of Highway 118 at the Rocky Peak exit, as well as two men with a military bearing that were hiking at the site when we were. This occurred in the middle of the week when the wilderness park was essentially deserted.
Surveillance was a regular feature of the contact work that I did under the CE-5 banner during the 1990s. To understand how this came about it is necessary to describe how US government agencies have been involved with contactees going back to the 1950s as well as the highly bizarre circumstances surrounding Dr. Steven Greer’s alleged involvement with the US Secret Service, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the CIA.
The proposition that our team had precipitated a major surveillance operation by Marine helicopters will to some undoubtedly seem like a fantasy akin to “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Paranoid delusions of grandeur are not uncommon in the flying saucer subculture. For those critics, I ask you consider the following:
The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) has a long history of involvement with the UFO subject. The documentary UFOs: Past, Present and Future was produced with Pentagon assistance in 1974. In the film, the former head of Operation Blue Book Colonel Friends described an incident in which a Navy intelligence officer was trained by a psychic to communicate via telepathy with UFO intelligence. More recently the Office of Naval Intelligence has been playing a significant role in the US Executive Branch’s current efforts confirming the reality of what is now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
I am now in my eighth decade of life and have not had a UFO sighting during fieldwork in nearly a decade. Thus, I no longer consider myself to be a “volunteer contact worker.” This document is shared in the hope that it may help the next generation of contact activists to understand the experiences and lessons learned by past volunteers.

NOTES FROM THE CONTACT UNDERGROUND
Contact Network History Project
Saturday October 17, 1992: Did a fateful phone call trigger the appearance of Blackhawk helicopters at a UFO research site in the high desert?
Joseph Burkes MD 2021
Willie Sutton the famous bank robber of the 1920s and 30s was asked by a reporter,
“Why do you rob banks Willie?”
His response was, “Because that’s where the money is.”
The same applies for doing contact work. If you want to interact with flying saucers out in the field, then go to UFO hot spots, because that’s “where the money is.”
In the fall of 1992, my newly formed team had several sightings near Rocky Peak in the Santa Susana Mountains located in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. Red orbs had been observed there moving up and down behind the southern ridge of the high desert wilderness California park surrounding Rocky Peak.
A DECISION TO MAKE
I was under pressure to move our research site to the Rocky Peak State Park. I was somewhat concerned however that the first scouting team had encountered what seemed like probable surveillance.
I called “CSETI Central” for advice. Not much was forthcoming. My impression of my colleague Dr. Greer’s attitude to my request for guidance could be summarized as, “You’re a smart guy. You go figure it out. “
He was busy enough with four young children at home and a busy ER practice involving long shifts with a great deal of stress. He was also flying out of North Carolina several times per month to give public lectures and workshops promoting the very campaign that I was an active participant in. It involved what the CSETI Director called “human initiated contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.”
His assistant Shari Adamiak was a lot more helpful. She had been leading a contact team in Denver for close to a year. Much of what we called “the contact protocols” came out of her pioneering CE-5 Working Group’s experience. She advised me that it was wise to move the team to higher ground where the UFOs seemed to be operating. Bank robber Sutton’s law was evoked, and I needed to go to “where the money is.”
ANOTHER SCOUTING MISSION
I was playing it safe; before sending my entire Working Group up the mountain, I wanted to check out the site at night with another scouting party. Including me, we had three volunteers. One was an experienced hiker that I will call “Linda.” She was planning to move out of town, and this was going to be her last field investigation with our LA team.
My medical partner, David Gordon was also with us. He is a Board-Certified Family Medicine specialist and has an undergraduate degree in physics. Dave was a great asset to the team because he was also private pilot with great sky watching skills. On the night we were to hike up to Rocky Peak, he was “on-call” for hospital admissions. On the trail up the mountain, he carried with him what was then a new gadget called “a cell phone.” By modern standards his device was large and bulky, about nine inches long with a heavy battery pack inside. No matter how clunky it looked, it was better than carrying a beeper. With a cell phone you could call the hospital back immediately without having to look for a phone booth; there were no phone booths in Rocky Peak Wilderness Park.
RATTLESNAKE COUNTRY
The trail up the mountain was a series of switchbacks. Boulders and steep hills on both sides of the path blocked our view of the surroundings during the first part of the hike.
It was still warm as the sun was going down. We kept a look out for rattlesnakes. It was autumn, the season when snakes hunt in preparation for hibernation. During winter when the temperatures at night can drop into the low thirties, it is a safer time to go off trail. During cold weather the rattlesnakes are under ground and not underfoot.
As we reached higher elevations, the trail opened up; we had a better view of the sky and the surrounding hills. To the south loomed the massive sandstone mesa that had been hollowed out to build the Department of Energy’s massive laboratory. The lab was a dark and dangerous place that had been plagued with series of industrial accidents. This included a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor in the 1950s with the release of plutonium into the environment. During the 1980s, I volunteered for the anti-nuclear group Physicians for Social Responsibility. A staff member for our group attempted to get information out to the public about leaks of radiation from the base. His efforts were stifled however by national security regulations.
ALLEGATIONS OF SABOTAGE
As we climbed up the trail towards Rocky Peak, I didn’t know that just a few years before a flying saucer had allegedly carried out sabotage at the DOE facility. This reportedly occurred just a few thousand yards away from our UFO field laboratory in the Santa Susana Pass. In 2006 I interviewed a Kaiser Health Plan patient who worked there as a maintenance engineer. According to the then retired worker, a large mountainside water main had been cut one afternoon and there was a loss of water pressure at the Santa Susana installation. When he and another repairman climbed down the mountain to correct the leak, they found a large pipe had been cleanly cut as if by a power tool. Less than a hundred yards away a saucer shaped craft hovered, as if waiting to show off its handiwork. It was his impression that this event was a deliberate act of sabotage. (For more details on this incident follow link provided below.)
A FATEFUL PHONE CALL
As we continued to climb on our scouting mission, the trail eventually opened up. We took a rest to enjoy the view. To the south past the DOE site, the west San Fernando Valley stretched out all the way to the Santa Monica Mountains. We were high enough to get a good signal and Daniel took out the cell phone to call his wife.
David must have been happy with his new toy. Very few people had cell phones back in 1992, and he left his wife a message about our “objectives.” In a melodramatic tone as if he were a news reporter, he said something like.
“Here we are on a scouting mission for the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. At this very moment we are in position on a rugged desert fire trail in Rocky Peak State Park, looking down on the United States Department of Energy site. Our mission is to “vector in” ET spacecraft as part of Dr Greer’s CSETI CE-5 Initiative.”
It was funny the way he hammed it up, but I seem to recall thinking he might be offering “too much information.”
Back in the 1990s, activists in our network knew of rumors that the NSA had extraordinary abilities for screening calls employing voice recognition of “key words.” This involved using supercomputers. Just a few years before, it had been a crime for any official to merely state in public the name “National Security Agency.” Subsequent dramatic events that night may have been an indication as to just how good their surveillance of phone traffic may have been.
MEDITATION IN THE HIGH DESERT
In less than an hour, hiking uphill all the way, we reached a plateau on which stood Rocky Peak. It was twilight and the temperature was dropping. We chose to meditate on a large flat rock near the edge of a cliff that afforded us a great view of the Simi Valley to the west. I led the guided meditation that started with,
“Sit quietly for a moment and then take a deep breath,
Very deep with the diaphragm and then all of the breath out.
Let go of all things,
Let go of all thoughts,
Let go of all feelings.
Be still.
Quietly let your mind follow your breathing...
Who is watching your breath?”
Seated in a tight semicircle with our backs against the rock we carried out the prescribed mental exercises quietly for about a half hour. Then we watched the sky and waited.
Rocky Peak rose like a giant pyramid up from a flat area several football fields in size. Dr. Dave had to work the next day. We decided it was time to head for the summit. It was a relief not to be climbing anymore. The trail pointed toward the base of Rocky Peak. The area was covered with boulders of varying sizes. The light was fading fast, and there was a chill in the air. We had to get going before it got too late.
BLACKHAWKS
As we moved quickly over level ground, we heard a distant rumbling sound coming from the south. It slowly became louder. Daniel recognized it as aircraft engines.
“Those are turboprops,” he told me.
“You’re right,” I replied, “it sounds like a chopper.”
A few moments later as the sound increased to a roar, we saw them. Two massive Blackhawk helicopters were flying up the hillside that we had just climbed. They were moving at low elevation, about one hundred feet above the ground. To my amazement, they were following the trail that we had just climbed. I thought they might be looking for somebody or something. The Blackhawks moved in a tight formation with the lead chopper bit off to the side and just ahead of its partner.
Daniel immediately pointed out that they were flying “dark.” Regulations required lighting array of rotating beacons and strobe lights were absent. Instead, only tiny pale “anti-collision” lights were on the sides of each of the dark forms rapidly approaching us. They were clearly US military, but what were they doing flying at night in this desolate place?
In no way was I prepared for what I was witnessing. The three of us quickly ran over to some small boulders and we crouched down behind them. It wasn’t much cover, but it was the best we could do. My team watched intently as the Blackhawks seemed to have found something of interest. They were hovering directly over the rock where we had just completed our meditation/sky-watching just a few minutes before. “This is totally weird.” I thought.
JAMES BOND FANTASY
My mind flashed back to my teen years. I remembered the first James Bond movie that I saw. It was titled “From Russia with Love.” Towards the end of the movie Bond played by Sean Connery finds himself fleeing over a rocky terrain pursued by a helicopter. Its crew drops hand grenades on the hero. As the roaring choppers circled a few hundred yards away, there I was peeking out in fear from behind a rock while fantasizing about James Bond. These thoughts made me feel kind of ridiculous.
The Blackhawks’ apparent interest in the rocks where we had meditated made me wonder whether they were using infrared night vision devices. Perhaps the crew had have picked up heat signatures left by our bodies as we sat on the rocks.
THE CHOPPERS DIVIDE
One of the helicopters broke ranks and headed directly towards us. Our attempts to hide were not working very well. Less than sixty feet off the deck the chopper passed right over our heads. My body vibrated in resonance with the low-pitched thunder created by its engines. That helicopter headed directly towards a radio-television tower array located on a hilltop a few miles away. There it circled a bit while its companion stayed above us at the base of Rocky Peak. No sense in our trying to hide. We went back to the trail and kept our eyes on the aircraft that was nearer to us.
During one of its passes, it came so close to me that even in the semi-darkness I could make out a helmeted crew member standing in the side door of the copter. During the Vietnam War the side door was the position from which a gunner fired a machine gun. The thought made me feel even more nervous. I imagined that soldier with night vision goggles was standing right at the opening and was staring directly at me. My body trembled in the excitement. The roaring diesel engines and the swirling blades were deafening.
At that moment, a strange set of thoughts raced through my mind. I envisioned a military man positioned at the communications array that one of the chopper’s was flying to. In my mind’s eye I could see him in an observation post overlooking the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. The man was out of uniform but still carried an automatic pistol in a holster on his right hip. He looked to be in his late twenties, with a muscular build and short crew cut, and he was wearing dungarees. For some reason, I thought that he was a US Marine Sargent, an intelligence “non-com”. This particular detail has significance pertaining to the likely base where the choppers flying over us were stationed.
After a several minutes of flying around in circles, one above us and the other to the east near the hilltop communication array, the choppers teamed up and flew south heading over the San Fernando Valley. We continued to move towards our original objective of climbing Rocky Peak, however, we were really disturbed up by our “close encounter of a Blackhawk helicopter kind.” Instead of climbing to the summit of Rocky Peak, we decided to call it quits for the night. Using flashlights in the darkness, we descended the trail to the reassuring comfort of our vehicles parked down below in the Santa Susana Pass.
DISCUSSION
We chatted about what we had just experienced. The notion that the helicopters had been looking for us and that Daniel’s phone call had something to do with their sudden appearance seemed like something out of an action novel, not part of real life.
We couldn’t ignore the fact that the military craft had followed the trail up the mountain as if they were looking for somebody. They had hovered over the spot where we had sat on the rocks for about an hour and then one flew directly over us as we pathetically tried to hide behind some boulders. We were going to need more information before concluding what might have precipitated the appearance of the Blackhawks.
THE BLACKHAWKS WERE NOT ON A “ROUTINE TRAINING MISSION.”
Information concerning this disturbing incident came from several sources. The first was from Dr. Dave Gordon’ medical practice. During the following week he asked several of his patients from the neighboring communities of the Simi Valley and Chatsworth if they had heard or seen large military helicopters the previous Saturday night. At least one told him in no uncertain terms that the choppers caused quite a racket. He then inquired if this had ever happened before or was a regular occurrence. The answer he received from his informant was that it was not. The powerful helicopters flying at low altitude over the suburban community had been a unique event.
Two important witnesses allowed us to track the path of the choppers on their way to Rocky Peak. The first was Dave’s partner in the Department of Family Medicine. If memory serves me correctly it was Dr. Maizel who ran the headache clinic. He lived in Woodland Hills and reported that the military helicopters had passed by his home Saturday night and were headed north. The second informant was the investigations director for MUFON LA. He lived near the Hollywood Bowel. The roar of the choppers rattled the widows. When he looked out, he saw the two Blackhawks flying just above the treetops heading northwest. I’ll never forget his words. He said that the choppers were flying so low that he wondered if they were on some kind of “counter-terrorist mission.” Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit helicopters from flying lower than five hundred feet. The Blackhawks were clearly in violation of those regulations.
These last reports allowed us to chart the likely path of the choppers. They flew over the Hollywood located southeast of Rocky Peak. They were likely following the 101 Freeway north, headed toward the San Fernando Valley. Once in the Valley they followed the 101 due west, thus allowing them to pass over Dr. Maizel’s home in Woodland Hills. His location was just about ten miles due south of Rocky Peak Wilderness State Park. Given this information, the only logical source of the origin for the choppers was the Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Tustin located in Orange County some 90 miles southeast of Rocky Peak. That base was closed in 1999 but during its operation it had up to five thousand uniformed and civilians employed there. According to Wikipedia, “It was the country's first air facility developed solely for helicopter operations… By the early 1990s, MCAS Tustin was a major center for Marine Corps helicopter aviation and radar on the Pacific Coast. Its primary purpose was to provide support services and material for the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing.”
Blackhawks have a cruising speed of 175 miles per hour and a range of 500 miles. Dave’s call to his wife Eve was made approximately 90 minutes prior to their appearance at Rocky Peak. With a flight time of about 30 minutes, this would have given the crews sufficient time to arrive following David’s phone call. Another significant factor was that during a previous scouting mission at the site, I had observed several indicators of probable surveillance. These included a large Black Mercedes Sedan parked illegally at the overpass of Highway 118 at the Rocky Peak exit, as well as two men with a military bearing that were hiking at the site when we were. This occurred in the middle of the week when the wilderness park was essentially deserted.
Surveillance was a regular feature of the contact work that I did under the CE-5 banner during the 1990s. To understand how this came about it is necessary to describe how US government agencies have been involved with contactees going back to the 1950s as well as the highly bizarre circumstances surrounding Dr. Steven Greer’s alleged involvement with the US Secret Service, the Office of Naval Intelligence and the CIA.
The proposition that our team had precipitated a major surveillance operation by Marine helicopters will to some undoubtedly seem like a fantasy akin to “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.” Paranoid delusions of grandeur are not uncommon in the flying saucer subculture. For those critics, I ask you consider the following:
The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) has a long history of involvement with the UFO subject. The documentary UFOs: Past, Present and Future was produced with Pentagon assistance in 1974. In the film, the former head of Operation Blue Book Colonel Friends described an incident in which a Navy intelligence officer was trained by a psychic to communicate via telepathy with UFO intelligence. More recently the Office of Naval Intelligence has been playing a significant role in the US Executive Branch’s current efforts confirming the reality of what is now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena.
I am now in my eighth decade of life and have not had a UFO sighting during fieldwork in nearly a decade. Thus, I no longer consider myself to be a “volunteer contact worker.” This document is shared in the hope that it may help the next generation of contact activists to understand the experiences and lessons learned by past volunteers.