Hey there, and thanks for opening The Cipher. We’re back from Philadelphia, and we’re finishing out a week of republishing some of our favorite Dan McQuade newsletter bits.
Thank you so much for supporting the work that we do, and take care of yourselves this weekend.
-Lauren
I Watched The “Lost” Live-Action ‘Dilbert’ Pilot Episode, And It’s Clear Why It Didn’t Get Picked Up
John Mohr went to the Library of Congress for this.
The Westminster Dog Show’s Youngest Handlers Don’t Know If They Want To Do This Forever
Heather talked to the youths who balance dogs with school.
Max B Is New York Rap’s Best Hope
Iz’s latest Listening Habits opens with some catch-up on the newly freed rapper.
Interlaced Memories: The Grabowski Shuffle
The Grabowski Shuffle (excerpt)
Uploaded to YouTube: Aug. 22, 2013
Highest resolution: 400x300
Earlier in this series, I wrote about Iron Mike, the Mike Ditka straight-to-VHS music video released on New Year’s Eve in 1986 during the NFL playoffs. Ditka showed his team the tape, and the 14-2 Bears lost to Washington. The team would never win that many games in a season again.
Though Iron Mike was a big flop, Ditka was not done trying. Nine months later, Ditka released The Grabowski Shuffle on VHS. Dick Meyer, who created "The Super Bowl Shuffle," conceived and produced Ditka’s knockoff version. The Chicago Tribune’s Ron Perler said most people at the Sept. 11, 1987 premiere rated it an 85. “Mike Ditka can't rap to save his life,” WXRT DJ Lin Brehmer told him. “If they said, ‘Mike, rap or we'll kill you,’ he’d die.” Perhaps those people were rating it an 85 out of 1,000.
You can watch a full VHS rip on YouTube; linked at the top here is just part of the song, which is only two minutes and is the version I suggest you watch. Actually, I might suggest you watch neither. I first learned of this video from a story by Seanbaby on his comedy website, 1-900-HOTDOG. Before the music video starts, there is a long sequence where Ditka tries to explain what the Grabowski Shuffle is (he fails), where people audition to become Grabowskis (they all have to append Grabowski to their full names) and where the five Grabowskis rehearse their song. Sean summarizes the conceit of the Grabowski Shuffle: “Mike Ditka’s attempt to recreate ‘The Super Bowl Shuffle’ for profit by taking out the football part, replacing it with nothing, and then giving that nothing a name.”
Incredibly, I can actually explain the “Grabowski” thing. The Bears went 15-1 in 1985 and were gearing up for the NFC Championship game. Mike Ditka was already working the refs, calling the Rams’ offensive line dirty. He said the Bears actually played a cleaner game, but because of their rough-and-tumble reputation were called for more penalties. Here’s how he put it: “I don’t think we come in favor with some people. There are teams that are fair-haired and some that aren’t fair-haired. There are teams named ‘Smith’ and some are named ‘Grabowski.’ We’re Grabowskis. The Rams are a Smith team.” Ditka was playing up Chicago’s history of Central European immigrant communities by picking a Polish surname, but to me it is also a bit confusing. Was, say, left guard Mark Bortz really picked on by the refs?
I may not have understood it, but I’ll tell you who did: The Chicago Tribune. The paper’s Paul Galloway did a big feature a week before the Super Bowl about Ditka’s quote. “What does being a Grabowski mean? Does it represent a particular view of the world and a particular set of values? And if it’s, indeed, part of the city’s image, how accurate an image is it?”
People were not really immigrating to Chicago from Poland anymore, but the people Galloway interviewed for the story did seem to agree that Chicago really was a Grabowski city. "In Europe and here, the differences between these nationalities are taken seriously,” Northwestern prof Bernard Beck said. “But in general in Slavic cultures, the people see themselves as enduring, hanging on. Victory comes from taking a lot of punishment and not giving in.”
Though the VHS tape was ridiculed—"The Grabowski one, it's just a waste of film,” Kim Bell said during one weekend where football was on hiatus due to the strike—fans supposedly bought it way more than they bought Ditka’s previous effort. Meyer, the producer, told the Associated Press it was certified platinum by the RIAA with 50,000 copies shipped to stores. People were not convinced. A Tribune reporter actually saw someone buy it and wrote about it because “we are always interested in unusual sights.”
Meyer had an explanation for the tape’s negative reviews, too. "I think it suffered by comparison with ‘The Super Bowl Shuffle,’” Meyer told the paper. “That was a phenomenon … It wasn’t fair to compare the two.” Yes, that’s right. The video with the same basic song as “The Super Bowl Shuffle,” only with random people replacing members of the Chicago Bears singing nonsensical lyrics, was really not worth comparing to the previous effort of the same producer.
-Dan McQuade
I Took My Son To His First Phillies Game
I told my wife after Zack Wheeler retired the first 15 batters he faced: “If it continues like this, we’re not leaving until the game ends. I don’t care if Simon is screaming so loudly the fielders can hear him.” She’d bought tickets to the Phillies as a Father’s Day gift, and this was Simon’s first game. He is 19 months old. I did not expect to last the whole game! But if Wheeler continued to pitch perfectly, we were staying.
I didn’t want to jinx it by saying the magic words, but I guess I did anyway: Austin Hays led off the sixth with a home run. But it was the only hit Wheeler would allow in his 12-strikeout, complete-game win. Also finishing a complete game? Me, Jan, and Simon. We made it through all nine innings.
I was almost never able to do this as a kid. My parents say I was ready to leave after two innings of my first Phillies game. But to be fair to my younger self, the current Phillies’ park has quite a few more amenities than Veterans Stadium did. We left our seats in the third inning and did not return until the eighth. We walked around the park. We got hot dogs and pretzels. We lingered in the team store to enjoy the air conditioning. We walked into an auxiliary team store in a tent before learning it did not have air conditioning. Simon ran around the concourse area. Now that I think about it, I guess I could have done most of this at the Vet, too. Perhaps my son is just tougher than his old man.
There was one truly special moment: The very first thing my son did at his very first Phillies game, before he even entered the stadium, was meet the Phillie Phanatic. Otherwise, it was a day out in the sun for my wife and me where we enjoyed the company of our kid while Wheeler mowed down Reds batters. There was nothing particularly notable about this trip to the park, except for the fact that I was doing it as a dad for the first time. Being there with my wife and son was a better treat than even a perfect game would’ve been.
-Dan McQuade