Week 2: Let's Make It Sporting: Herold and Swanberg go to Kansas City

Baglovers know I LOVE making it sporting, and what better way is there than to make a ridiculous and potentially costly bet over bad teams?  Last year's bag boy and I (pictured) made a wager over which of our bag teams would have more wins - Randie's Poisonous Fish from Miami or my Black GloryHoles from Oakland.  The winner of the bet would choose a road game, and the loser would get them there - and so we found ourselves in the rustic confines of the Westport district of downtown Kansas City, MO.  But our story doesn't begin there.

(Aside:  Notice the uber-white trash yet fantastically functional makeshift handle on that cooler.  That project has Randie written all over it, and was conducted in the parking lot of a hardware store the night before the game.  The obvious fate of the apparatus will be documented later, but I wanted to call that little glimmer of engineering prowess to your attention.  Also notice the $20 Dan Marino jersey he's sporting. We're both wearing classic QBs, as the current crop for both teams are pretty god damned underwhelming.)

We settled on Kansas City for a couple of reasons.  Raiders/Chiefs is one of the NFL's ultimate hate-fests - closely followed for me by Raiders/Broncos, and in line with other rage-a-thons such as Dolphins/Jets, Browns/Steelers, Packers/Vikings, Cowboys/Eagles/Giants/Redskins, etc. Since I'm an expert at being "that guy," we thought it would be damn cool to go into one of these hostile environments and live to tell about it.  That, and we asked ourselves, "when the hell are we ever going to go to Kansas City again?"

It so happens that we'd decided much earlier in the year that we were going to do a Yankees road trip as well (and before you tell me how much they suck, you're welcome to put a fucking sock in it).  Scanning the weekend series, and rating cities for "fun factor," we settled on Seattle - nice, relatively new park, reportedly awesome downtown area chock full of bars and restaurants (thanks for the hospitality, Isaac), and none of us had ever been there.  Everything sounded great, until we realized the games were on consecutive weekends.........

.......so we settled on Vegas for the week in the middle, instead of coming back East just for a few days.  This seemed like a fantastic plan, mostly because my liver can't talk (well, I think it does have some way of communicating with my intestines, as I'm quite certain the two conspired to inflict me with a chronic and extremely unpleasant bout of mud butt for most of the last two days of the trip).

And so it was decided - 10 full days of rock-solid debauchery,  utterly excessive binge drinking and professional Sporting as only your friends here at FWTBT can git 'er done.

The first night in Seattle is mostly gone from my consciousness, as I drank no less than 8 Jacks on the flight in.  I do have this classic pose to remember the cab ride by:

The Seattle weekend was fantastic, other than almost getting no-hit by a guy in his first major-league start for the worst team in the Majors (Brian Cashman was sitting right next to us, so I guess we weren't the only ones who were displeased). We lost the series, but did some A-class drinking - highlights included the deliciously shitty Hooverville (Ranier and PBR on tap, among many others), the Seattle Aquarium, the Pike Place Market, Slugger's (which had this truly awesome framed SI cover with young A-Rod and Jeter) and the historic Triangle Pub.

Vegas was... Vegas.  The first night, I had the distinct displeasure of watching my Raiders get absolutely walloped by Brodie Croyle some SEC QB with a bowl cut and the hated Broncos, while listening to an entire Bellagio sports book full of douchebags root against my team. That "early night" ended around 3am, and the week continued with lots of losing poker sessions, raucous blackjack tables, little to no food or sleep and late nights early mornings like this one:

We finished off with a bang - had to have at least one nice dinner while we were there.  This was the appetizer we got:

After that dinner - and an all-night blackjack session - we went straight to LAS to catch an 8:30am flight to KC through Denver.  This was a fairly miserable leg of the trip, as we'd both been drinking Jameson for what seemed like a year since we'd last slept, and arriving in KC at the same time as Ike didn't really perk things up much.  Still, we stayed in a jazzy little section of downtown called Westport that had lots and lots of bars and restaurants within walking distance of our hotel, so while Randie caught a nap, I headed out to see what I could see.  While I doubt anyone else would make a special trip to KC, if you're ever there I definitely recommend Kelly's Westport Inn (since 1947!) and one80. We spent most of our time at Kelly's - it's a classic shot-and-a-beer Irish bar.

The night before game day, we took it easy.  This was taken at about 3:40am - we were scheduled to be on a 9:30am bus to Arrowhead:

That's exactly what you think it is in Randie's cup.

Anyway, GAME DAY rolls around and both of us were feeling pretty rough.  We pulled it together, though, and grabbed our cooler full of PBR and hopped on the Chiefs Express to the game.  As you can see from the pic, folks aren't thrilled with us, but in general people were a lot more civil than I expected - it seems having Herm Edwards as your coach, and actually KNOWING you're probably going to lose at home to a bitter rival that only had 4 wins last year, will do that to you.

Once we got to the parking lot, we met up with some members of Raider Nation that were in from Omaha:

These guys were great, letting us tag along on their tailgate, feeding us Busch Light for posterity (it tasted just as delicious as it did in high school), and giving us a place to stash our cooler until after the game.  The crazies parked next to them were painting faces, and although I didn't get a shot of any of their work, they did make me an awesome Raiders balloon hat.  If I didn't fear death, I'd have worn THAT into the stadium!

As dysfunctional as the Raiders are - and they're like a bizarro-world Big Brother house these days, with the head coach, the D coordinator and the owner all doing and saying ridiculous things on a daily basis - they played great against the Chiefs.  Our seats were fantastic, right on the 40-yard line on the Raiders side of the field about 20  rows up, and we even got a flyover before the game.  Darren McFadden exploded for 164 yards and a touchdown, Kirk Morrison and the defense gave up a paltry 190 yards of total offense and all-time idiot Nole Sebastian Janikowski actually kicked three field goals including a 56-yarder as the Raiders bitch-slapped the punch-drunk Chiefs 23-8.

It was a glorious day for yours truly.  Check out the guy behind me and imagine what he's feeling at that moment: