Surfing Culture

What intrigues me is that no one seems particularly upset by the Chargers loss to the Cardinals on Monday night. The local sports writers are basically saying that the Chargers did what the Chargers do, which is lose games they should have won; nothing to see here, move along. The coaches and players are saying that they played well and just made some mistakes which cost them the game; nothing to see here, move along.

Nobody asks the question which is sort of the great white shark in the swimming pool; why did the Charger players make those mistakes?

I would suggest that it has to do with a lack of mental discipline, something which the Chargers have suffered from for many years. No coach or general manager has been able to overcome it, and I think it goes with being in a city whose culture is “let’s go surfing.”

I would like to know where the Charger players were on Saturday night. I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of them were not studying their playbooks, but were in downtown Phoenix studying something a great deal more lively than x’s and o’s. The local sports writers, none of whom have ever played football, all claim that players can be in a drunken stupor on Friday night and have recovered fully to play at peak level on Sunday. They are wrong.

The mistakes which I see being made at game time are for the most part due to a lack of mental focus, and by far the majority of them are being made by players whose names appear in the society pages as having been part of “the scene” on Friday nights. There is a connection. The Chargers will consistently win games, and championships, when they have players who are less interested in being celebrities and more interested in being professional football players.