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On a normal mid-August weekend, sports fans in Minnesota can take their pick. Watch the Minnesota Twins play a ball game, or go up to Brainerd and watch the National Hot Rod Association’s annual drag-raci .
Another choice for our family is to head down to the Minnesota River Valley and witness the state senior men’s 35-and-over baseball tournament.
Nowhere on the horizon are the Minnesota Vikings and their exhibition schedule. Until this summer, that is.
The Twins are still entertaining, particularly now, since Joe Mauer has returned to the lineup and is making a bid to get his batting average up to his customary .300. The big NHRA meet had a weird ending, but not ending because of a persistent rainstorm that pushed Sunday night’s finals into darkness. And the senior men’s baseball tournament also turned weird, particularly for me, because my J-Hawks team had to suspend our game in a scoreless tie when the monsoon hit Norwood and turned the infield into Lake Erie.
Those things might all be surprises, but the biggest surprise left me with something I never thought I could make myself say or write in mid-August: The Vikings grabbed the spotlight with a remarkably entertaining exhibition game against the Arizona Cardinals of Phoenix last Saturday night down at the University of Minnesota’s TCF Bank Stadium.
And I hate exhibition football games, unless you are focusing in on some obscure linebacker or offensive guard to see if he fits into your favorite team’s scheme. I hate the pretense of forcing folks to pay full tariff to watch a game where you’re going to limit the playing time of your starters, and even hold out a couple of stars, such as Adrian Peterson, waiting for the regular season to subject his body to its usual torture.
But this is not your ordinary ho-hum exhibition season for the Vikings. We have a pretty good team in the making, and while we might have had a decent battle between Matt Cassel and Christian Ponder for the starting quarterback job, instead we insert rookie Teddy Bridgewater as a quick-witted, and quick-footed quarterback out of Louisville, who started off high and has moved higher into contention with Cassel.
You’ve got to feel sorry for Ponder, the young prospect who was granted the starting job a year ago and played pretty well before faltering and pretty much playing himself out of a job. By all measurements, Ponder is a decent guy with good skills and a great upside, but he has not yet been able to prove he can consistently come through under the pressure cooker of NFL dramas. Against the Cardinals, Ponder didn’t even get to take one snap. We can hope the Vikings are able to trade him somewhere that gives him the chance to star anew and still make it as a competent NFL quarterback.
The fun part of the game against the Cardinals was in watching the various media outlets -- particularly the sports writers and columnists -- scurry to get things in order as the game progressed. In the first exhibitiion game, the Vikings jumped ahead 10-0 and then had to hang on to win 10-6. Cassel was very good in the first series, taking the Vikings down the field for a touchdown with 5-6 passing. All eyes were on Bridgewater, and he looked impressive, too, but a rash of penalties fouled up his debut.
For the week after the Raiders game, the Vikings coaches and players all made it clear that Cassel looked very impressive, but Bridgewater showed signs of brilliance, too. The media, trying to find some big secret story, seemed divided. Some thought Bridgewater was great, others thought he didn’t do much. All pretty much agreed that the veteran Cassel would be the starter, with Bridgewater a capable backup.
When the Cardinals came to Minneapolis, Cassel got the whole first half, and did very well. I didn’t see any of it, except later highlights, but the numbers were stellar: 12 completions in 16 passes for 153 yards and a touchdown. That touchdown accounted for one-third of his yards, because Kyle Rudolph made a neat move and went 51 yards for a touchdown. After that, the Vikings looked good, but had to settle for three Blair Walsh field goals.
Writers, particularly columnists, have to get their stuff in by deadline, and the preferred method is to come up with a good enough angle in the first half, write it well at halftime, then hope it stands up through the second half and you don’t have to rewrite. Since there was general agreement that Cassel would be the ultimate starter, and the obvious facts of his 12-16 first half that earned a lofty quarterback rating of 125.3, the angle was an easy one. Cassel solidified his hold on the starting role -- plug in the final score.
Then Teddy Bridgewater got his chance, and all bets were off. He was quick, he was smart, he was throwing mostly bullets, and he took the Vikings in for a touchdown and a 24-21 lead with 7:57 remaining. It would have been more impressive, but a receiver dropped a cinch pass in the end zone to nullify another touchdown. Bridgewater was completing nearly every pass, zipping the ball left and right and over the middle.
But the Cardinals got their chance with the ball, too, and they came down the field as time was running down, and got the benefit of a pass interference call that was questionable. But not as questionable as the touchdown to come, when third-string quarterback Ryan Lundley fumbled the ball. There is a rule in the NFL that in the last two minutes of play, anytime a player fumbles, the ball can be advanced only by the player who fumbled it, to prevent a comedy routine of nudging it forward by committee. In this case, however, a lineman knocked it ahead and got it to Zach Bauman, who ran it in for a touchdown. Incomprehensibly, the officials allowed the touchdown to stand, and the Cardinals led 28-24, with 1:11 remaining.
This was only a dreaded exhibition game, but now it meant something. The Vikings broadcast team -- which is simply unacceptable doing simulcasts on radio and television -- was totally deflated. The optimism crashed and burned. True, the score and even the winner didn’t matter, so rationalizations began as defeat appeared to have been snatched from the jaws of victory -- with only 1:11 left, and the Vikings taking possession at their own 17.
Bridgewater took over, and was unflappable. He led a crisp and efficient drive downfield, against the clock as much as the Cardinals, and in seven plays he got the Vikings into position at the Cardinal 2. Then Bridgewater did what I had seen him do at Louisville last year several times. A lot of quarterbacks can zip passes in hard and hot, and some can loft softer passes, but Bridgewater showed last season he can do both, and he put that skill to use with 18 seconds to go from the 2, sending Rodney Smith into the end zone, then on a fade pattern to the right, before lobbing a pass over the defender where only Smith could catch it.
With 0:18 on the clock, Bridgewater’s second touchdown pass in the final eight minutes lifted the Vikings to a 30-28 victory.
And those writers who were hoping to stick with their Cassel-affirms-starting-QB-position angles? They had to throw ’em away and write that Teddy Bridgewater stated his case for the starting spot!
Bridgewater completed16 of 20 passes for 177 yards and the two touchdowns, and he recorded a quarterback rating of 136.9 -- one-tenth away from the all-time Vikings quarterback record rating of 137, attained by Bob Lee in 1971.
Let’s make it clear that Cassel remains the No. 1 quarterback, but he’s fully aware that if the offense bogs down, or finds it difficult to get into the end zone, Teddy Bridgewater is ready, willing, and -- best of all -- able to come in and take over.

Mother Nature 2, Drag Racing 0, Baseball 0

It seemed like an odd, oblique connection, but a connection nonetheless. In years past, I would hustle from the Twin Cities to write a big drag-racing feature on the Friday night qualifying session of the National Hot Rod Association event, then I would drive as swiftly as the law allows to get down to Belle Plaine, or Jordan, or wherever, where my men’s 35-and-over baseball team would be playing its state tournament opener.
After our game, I would drive back north to Brainerd, get there in time for the final qualifying tries, and write a story about who had done what. My stories in those days went to the Minneapolis Tribune, and it was exciting to have lifted the coverage of this huge event to major league status, at a newspaper which only considers the Twins and Vikings major league in August. I would then drive back to the state tournament for an early Sunday game, then hustle back to BIR again to catch the final eliminations in Top Fuel, Funny Car and Pro Stock.
That was in my wild and crazy youth, and now that I’m located in Duluth, still writing and broadcasting sports and news and automotive stuff, it’s not quite as easy to try to be in two -- or three -- places at once. Since I still operate and occasionally play for the J-Hawks baseball team, I had no choice but to pass up the NHRA meet and drive to Gaylord for our Saturday state tournament opener.
The oblique connection to the drag races remained, because my auto test drive for the week was a 2015 factory Dodge Challenger, equipped with the ScatPak 6.4 liter Hemi V8, good for 485 horsepower and 475 foot-pounds of torque, operating through an 8-speed automatic transmission you can activate with steering wheel paddles. The car is designed to resemble the 1971 Challenger, only with the best technology available right now. I call it future-retro. It costs $46,665 as it sits, and it signals its arrival with a wild, lime-green paint job, called “sublime.”
This car is at home on a race track as on the highway, and a dragstrip would be perfect. But instead of going to BIR, I was headed for St. Paul, where my wife, Joan, and I picked up our older son, Jack, who plays on the team as well. Then we headed out Hwy. 212 and turned south on Hwy. 5/25 and drove on in to Gaylord.
We didn’t do well. I have added enough players so we have 18 on the roster, and yet 10 of them had excellent excuses or reasons for not being able to come to our state tournament opener. We played with eight, and we lost, to the surprise of nobody, to a pretty good team that we had beaten during the season. It was discouraging, but we stayed in the Twin Cities because our Sunday game was at 3 p.m. in Norwood. Tourist season is big in the Twin Cities, and we worked for a couple hours before we found a too-expensive room at some time after midnight.
I kept track of what was happening up at BIR, and how Jason Line of Wright, Mn., had moved up to No. 2 qualifier, as he stood third in Pro Stock points behind Erica Ender-Stevens and Allen Johnson. And I listened to the broadcast of the Vikings stirring 30-28 exhibition victory over the Phoenix Cardinals. But Sunday came swiftly, and we were rumbling out 212 again to Norwood.
Again we didn’t have our full complement of players, and I moved from second base to first base for the game against the Edina Grays. It was a tight, tough game, and it stood 0-0 after three innings. As we turned to run out from our dugout for the fourth inning, we were startled to see that it was raining, and very quickly the grounds crew covered the mound and home plate area. We watched and waited from the dugout, and not long after that the heavy downpour had covered the entire infield with water, which was also starting to ebb into the dugout.
They called the game, and we ran to our cars. Sublime is a good color to stand out in traffic, but nothing stood out in that downpour, and we were one of dozens of cars that pulled off onto the paved shoulder, flashers flashing, because it was impossible to see any of the lines on the road or any cars ahead or behind. When it subsided a little, and we could see a little, we moved forward cautiously. It kept raining until we got north of the Twin Cities, and we drove home wondering how they would finish our 0-0 tie.
A couple of days later, we learned that teams involved in those rainouts would advance according to the seedings they had been granted to set up the tournament. By great luck, we were seeded one notch ahead of Edina, so we get to advance to the semifinals for a semifinal in our Class C on Saturday afternoon. That might be the first break our team has gotten all season. And a half dozen more of our players should be back for our next game.
When I got to my television set, I turned on ESPN 2 just in time to catch the capsule coverage of the NHRA finals at BIR. Greg Anderson of Duluth had a swift run in Pro Stock but was beaten clearly off the line and lost the match. How close are teammates Anderson and Line? Well, Anderson clocked a 6.574-second run but lost it at the starting line, and Line won, recording a 6.573 -- one-thousandth of a second quicker than his teammate.
Summit Racing added a third car, for Vincent Nobile, and in the first round, Ender-Stevens had a transmission failure and lost, which meant Allen Johnson could move into the season Pro Stock lead by winning his next match. That was Nobile, however, and Nobile ran a 6.623 to eliminate Johnson’s 6.693, keeping him in second place. That brought Line to the line, and he had the same opportunity. When he ran a 6.580 to beat Shane Gray, Line vaulted past Johnson and Ender-Stevens and into first place in Pro Stock for the season. Tired as I was, I knew I had to stay up until midnight to see if Line could win the BIR title.
John Force dominated Funny Car, and got to the final against Ron Capps, who had eliminated Alexis DeJorian, a woman who had run a track record 4.010 seconds in the quarterfinals.
In Top Fuel, Morgan Lucas, a young driver who is the scion of the Lucas Oil company that sponsored the BIR event -- the Lucas Oil Nationals -- upset Antron Brown in the semifinals, and Doug Kalitta in a wildly wheel-spinning, swerving final.
And then, ESPN switched to soccer. I jumped out of my chair, unable to believe the network would abandon the Funny Car final and the Pro Stock semifinals. It turns out, the frequent rain delays and the enclosing darkness caused the NHRA to halt proceedings. Incredibly, they will delay the Pro Stock semifinals -- Line against Dane River, and Nobile against Jeg Coughlin -- until Aug. 30 at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, where they will work it into a qualifying run. Same for Funny Car, where the Force-Capps match also will conclude at Indy.
That’s when I realized that as fired up as we were for our amateur baseball tournament game, and as fired up as the drag racers were at Brainerd for the Pro Stock and Funny Car finals, neither of us had a chance when Mother Nature struck with enough rain to keep the farmers happy for another month.

Bulldog In The Sky

UMD athletic director Josh Berlo summoned the media to Amsoil Arena for a surprise, and they dropped the curtain on a giant Bulldog head that is affixed to the west outside wall of the facility, right under where the name Amsoil Arena is.
Bulldog athletics have a strong hold on the Duluth scene, and with football, volleyball and soccer all just about ready to start their seasons, the placement of the Bulldog head is perfect. Anyone driving into Duluth on Interstate-35 can’t miss seeing the arena, with its name, and now with a giant Bulldog head -- which looks even better at night, when its lights shine through the sky.
After the unveiling, I talked a little to Adam Krause, UMD’s captain, and then I spotted a familiar face as we were leaving. It was Rob Anderson, the goaltender who came from Superior to anchor the nets for UMD when the Bulldog hockey team made the transition from Mike Sertich to Scott Sandelin. Always in control, Anderson was an unsung hero on those teams.
When I asked Rob what he was doing, he explained that he works for Duluth Sign, the new and growing company which hired him to be graphic designer. It was Rob Anderson, former goaltender, and Duluth Sign, that created the Bulldog face you see hanging on that Amsoil Arena wall.
Somehow, that seems like a perfectly appropriate coincidence.