Wonderful! - Wonderful! 330: More of Our Favorite St Louis Stuff, Live!

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

Rachel’s favorite inversion! Griffin’s favorite thirst-quenching mood stabilizer! Rachel’s favorite film-named musical artist! Griffin’s favorite food curse! Rachel’s favorite decorated poet! Griffin’s favorite sports move!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaEquality Florida: https://www.eqfl.org/

Hi, I'm Rachel McElroy. Hi I'm Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. This is a show where we talk about things that we like, that's good, that we're into. It's so good to be back in St. Louis, kind of. It's so good to be so close to being back in St. Louis that the posters just went ahead and said St. Louis. I don't know if there's any Chesterfield locals here who are like, fuck St. Louis.

But I hope not. Because who are you kidding? Yeah, I think this is actually the first time I've been in Chesterfield. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you grew up in St. Louis. Yes. So what did Chesterfield do wrong that you didn't come here until just this moment?

I just had everything I needed already. Okay. I didn't have to come out. That's fine. Come out to this bar. I think this complex here absolutely rips ass. The fact, this is my small wonder, the fact that you can start at one end of this complex, hit some top golf, get some pretzel sticks with your buds while you hit the lengths and make some memories, walk three minutes, now you're at main event eating a different kind of pretzel sticks

and playing Dance Dance Revolution, you do a little bit of strip mall shopping, there's like an escape room that's based on game shows and then you catch a night of kick-ass alt comedy podcasting. That's the best day of your life. Why would you ever go back to St. Louis? Chesterfield has everything you need. Or where we live with our children. I'm moving to Chesterfield. It's a big decision, but do you have any small wonders? I do, actually, and I wanted Paul to help me with this. My small wonder is toast ravioli, baby.

What's that? Don't get me wrong. I know about toasted ravioli and in fact, maybe speaking more about it later this very evening, but I didn't know it came in delectable baby form. So since I have left St. Louis over 20 years ago, St. Louis got into soccer. Okay.

I think basically every major city in America has done that without consulting me at any point in the process. Or giving anybody a real primer on what soccer is or does really. I don't know enough really to be a fan yet. They should have a town hall meeting where they explain to everyone the rules of soccer before they allow soccer to take place here.

Anyway, so this is a star soccer player for the St. Louis soccer team? So before there was toasted ravioli baby, there was toasted ravioli man. Paul, can you bring up? Whoa and a witch turned him into a baby? So this is Nick Lamarine. Him and his girlfriend made this costume for himself to wear at the games and then there was another family Chris Burke and him and his wife went to IKEA, got a brown IKEA slipcover.

I thought you were about to say they got a toasted ravioli costume. Bought it for $5 and said we have to put our baby in this. And so this is the next evolution. Of toasted ravioli, Man, I love it. Yeah. I mean, I would dip that baby in marinara sauce and. Granted, it's no Chesterfield, but it is. No.

It is remarkable. Who here has never heard an episode of Wonderful before? It's okay. Oh, wow, holy shit. A lot of you have heard Wonderful, that's great. We talk about good stuff. They brought up the lights for that, just so I could.

I know, that was chilling. Really make eye contact with everybody who has not listened to this show before. Frickin' missed a button on my shirt, that sucks. Anyway, we talk about good stuff on this show, that's literally it. We used to talk about The Bachelor, but that became dicey.

One might say it was always a little dicey. Yeah, sure. Okay, am I starting? Yes, please. Okay. So, as I mentioned, I haven't lived here in 20 years, so I may not be up to date on everything that is popular, but when I was a young person person here the place to go was Six Flags and I wanted to talk about the first roller coaster I went on that ever went upside down and that is the Ninja. I love a roller coaster that

people have any kind of feelings about. Yeah as if I had said like the Screaming Eagle everyone would be like boo! Ninja has been around since 1989. I became very familiar with the subculture of coaster enthusiasts. As I was researching this, I got a lot of information from coaster101.com. Great. OK, there's definitely some fans of coaster101.com here tonight. And the YouTube channel theme park, Crazy. OK. This audience is the best audience on the planet.

Of course, of course there is overlap. I just love the overlap between us and roller coasters. But before I talk about that, I wanted to read the description of the ninja off of the Six Flags website. Okay, please. Okay. A ninja is not just strong, precise. Oh!

And a master of technique, but the ninja is also a master of stealth. He sneaks up on you, delivers his punches and kicks, and is gone before you even look up. May I interject? If you have waited in a line and strapped yourself into a moving vehicle that is not stealthy, when it starts moving, you can't be like, whoa, where am I?

It moves? Slicing through the air at 55 miles per hour at over 2,430 feet of track, you're about to learn the ways of the black belt. Riding ninja is like an education in the art of looping. How many trained assassins do you know who could, in one maneuver, fly through a half loop and a half corkscrew then back out at a nearly vertical angle? I feel like actually that is taught at ninja school. There's only one martial artist that comes to mind. At ninja school, they call that trick a sidewinder loop.

Do you think the person who wrote this had to go door to door to different ninja schools around the world? Excuse me. Excuse me, what do you call this? If it is a half loop and a half corkscrew. Okay, including a sanity warping double corkscrew. There are a total of five inversions. Ninja employs its famous stealth as it takes the low banking curve so close to the ground you'd swear you never saw a roller coaster race by, unless of course you were riding it. No, again, I have to disagree with that.

I feel like I'd be pretty certain I just saw a roller coaster. One more sentence. This attraction is presented by Eminem's. So deep in the ninja lore, like really brought you into the culture of ninjas. Absolutely. And then reminded you. So I personally remember the ninja feeling like a very exhilarating, smooth, upside down experience. But that is because my previous point of reference was the Screaming Eagle, which was an incredibly old

wooden roller coaster. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The first gnarly wooden roller coaster I ever went on was Son of Beast, which was only open at Kings Island, which I only rode once or twice because it didn't go up for very long because it kept hurting people's bones. And then I went on a metal roller coaster and was like, oh, okay, I get it.

Now I understand. There was a description on one of the roller coaster websites that I was looking at that says, "'Ninja' is perhaps the most infamous attraction at the park due to many enthusiasts labeling the ride as quote, rough and a neck breaker. I don't remember that being true, but again, I was very young,

my bones were not fully connected. Your bones were so supple. I will say I was not present for this, but for a few years there was a VR experience. Did anyone participate in that? Oh wait, so they didn't put a VR helmet on you while you were on Ninja, right? So there were headsets that had like a Samsung phone in it, and you would wear the headsets

on the roller coaster and it would present a themed fighter jet experience. But you're on a roller coaster! What could you possibly see on a screen that is better than the roller coaster you're on a rollercoaster. What could you possibly see on a screen that is better than the rollercoaster you're on? You were going through a futuristic city and you were battling aliens. Eventually you would encounter a mothership and then that debuted in 2016 and then as I understand it was gone by 2019. Yeah, yeah. There was a lot of cracking and freezing of the phone or running out of battery.

You mean the one that's an inch and a half from my face and eyes? And also, the operators of the roller coaster had to manually adjust each headset. Oh, god almighty. So the wait times became enormous. And also, if the phone was out of sync, it would cause extreme nausea.

No way. Because people would have the visual of going down a hill before they were going down a hill and it would just... Oh my God. Yeah. It sounds like you've engineered the scariest imaginable roller coaster experience. So this launched in 2016. As of 2019, all Six Flags VR coasters were discontinued. I bet I could put it together on my phone in a shoe box.

I bet I could make my own ninja headset. So that is the ninja. That's amazing. I would like to talk about a beverage. Last time we came in town and did wonderful, you sang the praises of Vess Soda. Thank you. Which I still think is made up.

Specifically, you mentioned Whistle, an orange soda, which apparently contains a billion bubbles. Did you also know that the create, you probably do, because you grew up here, the creator of that drink, Charles Grigg, also whipped up a little beverage called 7 Up. I don't know if I did know that or not. Well, now you freaking do.

He invented it in 1929. It was a formula he devised which he named Bib Label Lithiated Lemon Lime Soda. And it launched two weeks before the Wall Street crash of 1929, which is fortunate actually, because this beverage was chock full of lithium citrate, which is a potent mood stabilizer. You may know it as a medication historically prescribed to folks with bipolar disorder. It is also a premium thirst quencher.

They later went on to change the name to 7-Up Lithiated Lemon Soda, which is weird, because I guess they took the lime out, but they left the lithium in. And then they just shortened it to 7-Up in 1936. But don't get it twisted, this bad boy had lithium in it all the way up to 1948. It's interesting because people talk about how there's been this increase in diagnosis of mental health concerns, but it's just because your carbonated beverages don't have lithium

anymore. That's right. People were getting what they needed from 7-Up. The name 7-Up, there is no universally agreed on reason for the etymology of that name. Some people theorize because it has seven main ingredients. One of which I assume is lithium. Or that lithium's atomic mass is seven.

Or because it was released in seven ounce bottles when the norm at that time was six ounce bottles, so you got extra thirst quenching mood stabilizing drug with every bottle you bought. There's been some great marketing campaigns that have come out of 7UP, like the Make 7UP Yours campaign, which is still very, very good.

But it can't be the original marketing campaign, which is this will cure your hangover. Which like, maybe. Wait, that was the marketing campaign or that's just true? That was sort of what they pushed as the main message of 7UP, is if you're hungover, this will help you get better from that.

Which I have used it for that purpose post-Lithium, and I don't know, it does okay. I bet it- It's bubbles, something about bubbles, man. Something about those bubbles. It can also cause hangovers when blended with Seagram 7 Crown Whiskey to create the classic 7 and 7,

which swept the nation in the late 70s. It was also my drink of- Yeah, it was your go-to. It was my drink of choice for a long time, partially because the bubbles made my tummy feel better as I was making it sicker by putting alcohol in. But also because that's what Ryan Atwood drank on the OC and I wanted to be like him. I never realized that.

But like all great things invented in St. Louis. It didn't stay here forever, because eventually it got bought by Philip Morris in 1978. The cigarette guys, where the beverages market just completely tanked. Now it's part of Keurig Dr. Pepper, which I didn't know that's what that company was named. That's gross. That's seven up. Thank you.

You're welcome. So I wanted to bring a musical artist, which meant that I had to reacquaint myself with the St. Louis musical scene. And I was very delighted to discover Smino. Smino? Yeah. Okay. Oh, is this new to a lot of people? Some people know Smino,

and some people don't. Love Smino! I feel really hip right now. Yeah, cool man. Okay. So Smino was born in 1991 in St. Louis, born Christopher Smith Jr. in a very musical family, his father played the keys, his mother sang, he learned to play the drums and sing at church. And I know you're all wondering what high school he went to. And that is Hazelwood Central High School. All right. Y'all are so freaking weird for that.

You know that, right? You're the only ones weird for that. You know that, right? You're the only ones that do that. You know that, right? So and I don't know if this is a movie you're familiar with. So the name Smeeno supposedly was inspired by a character named Nino in the movie New Jack City from 1991 starring Wesley Snipes. I don't, I haven't seen it enough times to recognize the names of characters from it. To be fair, you were four years old when that movie came out.

Yeah, but I was a cool four year old. You were very cool. And so his, he did a few EPs, but his first album came out in 2017. It was called Black Swan and I wanted Paul to play a song from that album and it is called Anita. Shoulder to shoulder, clean up Go David, go David, go David Turn up the balayun This feel like hallelujah Cue the quiet two

I'm off to Holyo, cry like a polio I got a chicken coop Dip out interior barbecue I'm fly while she want the cacachu And that's why my bread like a big maga Staring over her degree maga Straight out the mud like a Keno like Never had time time for the tea the kind on the fish like vines when I got my flash niggas hold till I smell it like loud around Republicans like why they no niggas working obvious

Really genuinely great very very cool Really though I will say one of the most uncomfortable 35 to 40 seconds of my entire life Because for a few seconds it was like, okay, what do I do? A lot of people are watching me right now and they're just listening to a song, but they're not seeing the person making the music. They're just kind of what, it's like they're watching a YouTube reacts

live video of this artist. So I kind of nodded my head for a while, but then after 10 seconds, I was like, I'm gonna look like an asshole if I just nod my head this whole time. I know. I had to fight a lot of instincts to just like really move my body Yeah, I didn't I didn't want to do that any of that. Yeah for sure We should have just climbed under the desk that we're sitting behind

So that album Was named a top 50 album of 2017 by Consequence of Sound, one of the 40 best rap albums of 2017 by Rolling Stone. And the story behind it is that he really wanted to kind of elevate black women. He had just seen hidden figures, and he felt like it was so frustrating to him that there were so many black women in history

that aren't written about. So he wanted to do a song that kind of emphasize, you know, black women. And he said, quote, with Trump in office, now is such an important time to be confident about blackness. We need some congregational ass music that we can sing together.

That's fantastic. So he released that album on March 14th in honor of St. Louis Day and he said I feel like a lot of people don't know much about St. Louis period I can't even explain it St. Louis is a city that doesn't have a lot of influences we're cool with whatever is around us but I want people to know that St. Louis has creative talent coming like in the early 2000s. That's amazing. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. He has released two albums since then.

Noir came out in 2018. Love for Rent came out in 2022. He has also started a new collaboration with the aforementioned soccer team. I didn't expect this to be such a soccer heavy episode. Yeah. Smino and St. Louis City SC announced their new collaboration called Homegrown, where Smino chooses artists with ties to St. Louis and they receive one-on-one access to him

and he advises them on building their craft and career trajectories. He also has an annual concert called KriBmas. KriBmas? K-R-I-B-mas. Okay, cool. Started in 2016, and the proceeds from that benefit Almost Home, a nonprofit helping homeless women and their children, and provide new coats to the Annie Malone

Children and Family Services Organization. Speedo sounds like the best. He's the best. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm glad that this is new to you all, or a lot of you. Check it out. It's incredible. His work is amazing.

Hey, this is Mike Cavalon. It's Huatiwe. And Sierra Cotto. The hosts of TV Chef Fantasy League. Where we apply fantasy sports rules to cooking competition shows. And we're here to help you get started. Hey, this is Mike Cavalon. If you want to wait. And Sierra Cato. The hosts of TV Chef Fantasy League. Where we apply fantasy sports rules to cooking competition shows. We're not professional chefs or fantasy sports bros.

Just three comedians who love cooking shows and winning. We'll cover Top Chef, Master Chef, Great British Bake Off, whatever's in season really. Ooh, you know chefs love cooking whatever's in season. We draft a team of chefs at the top of every series. And every week we recap the episode and assign points based on how our chefs did. And at the end of the season, we crown a winner. You can even play along at home if you want. Or you can just listen to us like a regular podcast about cooking shows.

That's cool too. Subscribe to TV Chef Fantasy League on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Hallelujah! Hello, welcome everyone. Step right up, we're going to heal you. We are the healers Ross and Carrie. Yes, yes, you there, you look like you're upset. Come up here. Yes, you are healed because you've listened to our podcast. Yes. Have you been having trouble with demons?

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We won't actually heal you. We won't actually heal you. We won't actually heal you. We won't actually heal you. I want to talk about something that you all probably haven't heard of before, and that is normal toasted ravioli. St. Louis has given a lot to the rest of the country, but I think your most generous offering remains this new and exciting way of eating ravioli. You guys heard about this? St. Louis has given a lot to the rest of the country, but I think your most generous offering remains this new and exciting way of eating ravioli.

You guys heard about this? It is superior to, no you don't, because you've lost perspective. It's so much better than eating untoasted ravioli in every conceivable way. That's true, that is 100% true. Upon my first visit to St. Louis when we were courting, you took me to a restaurant to sample two of St. Louis' trademark cuisines, the first of which was this

profane cracker thin pizza, which is, you all still should be ashamed of. You all should be ashamed of. Y'all were cheering so loud, I thought for sure, Y'all were cheering so loud, I thought for sure Paul put a picture of your bad pizza up on the screen behind us. Here's what I tried to tell Griffin, I said, you're going to enjoy it if you don't think about it as pizza. And I stand by that.

Yeah, sure. The other thing that I sampled there was T-Ravs, which absolutely dazzled me. T-Ravs, I think, are... CHEERING Love those. Love those. T-Ravs are a curse, if you think about it, because after I had one the first time,

it became impossible to unflip the switch in my mind that told me that regular ravioli is now just raw toasted ravioli. It's just wet dough for idiots. That is reborn in the flames of a deep-frying machine. That's also great that it's not toasted. That's the best part about it, because no one really knows why, except there's a lot of argument

about who was the originator of toasted ravioli. There are a few restaurants on the Hill that say that they are responsible for it. There is one potential originator named Louis O'Donny, or perhaps Louis O'Donny, who said he called them toasted ravioli on his menu because it sounded more appealing than fried ravioli, which I would reply to that with, no, it fucking doesn't.

Fried ravioli sounds a lot better than toasted. It's something- No, see, I disagree. Toasted, it sounds like there's a real precision to it. Like when you fry something, you just dump it in and pull it out. Toasting, you are watching it, and you are monitoring the exact time

when it is right to remove it, I would say. Right. That's- That also sounds healthier, toasted. Yeah, but I, but it doesn't sound as delicious, I would say. Right. That's, that's, that's. It also sounds healthier, toasted. Yeah, but I, but it doesn't sound as delicious, this fried ravioli does. Okay, that's fine. You all are, I feel like immune to this,

to this revelation. I despise ravioli. I think it is, there's not a good bite of a ravioli that doesn't just turn into like, ricotta gushers. Yeah. But when you told me we were getting toasted raviolis, I assumed that we were going to get these crusty, dried out versions of my least favorite pasta.

And then out came these gorgeous, golden brown, crispy beauties. I didn't know you felt that way about ravioli at the time. And it really speaks to me how much of a sport you were that you were like, you know what, this is early in our relationship recording. Yeah. I'll give this a shot. It was a real one-two punch because you were like, you got to try our pizza.

And I was like, pizza, I know what that is. I do not think I introduced it as pizza. What I adore about toasted ravioli, I've been all over this beautiful country of ours, and there is a way that local delicacies have of expanding their turf. Your Philly cheesesteaks, your buffalo wings. You all have had this thing going with ravioli for a while that the rest of the country has decisively said,

we're good, actually. But those people are cowards, because T-Rabs absolutely rule. Everyone else is wrong. What have you got? Okay, so those of you that have listened to the show know that a signature bit of mine is a trip to the poetry corner.

Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum If you haven't watched a show before I do like a I do like a Frasier thing. So salad scrambled palms. It's never good. I don't want to do it anymore. But to change it at this point would be wild. I'm going to explain what I think is your process on connecting it to the Frasier theme, which is you see poetry as a very intellectual thing and the most intellectual song you can

think of is the theme song to Frasier. Am I right? I mean, yeah. Okay, so the poet I wanted to talk about is a- Frazier Crane from Seattle, Washington. I bet he does have a book of poems out there, Kelsey Grammer, I bet he does. Oh, I bet it is good.

Okay, so the poet I wanna talk about is a professor at WashU. His name is Carl Phillips. There's some Carl Phillips heads in the audience. I mean, so he has been teaching at Wash U over 30 years. So, thoughts are a little bit better that there would be people in the audience if you've been to Wash U in the last 30 years. Oh, Carl Phillips! Oh, Carl! Carl Phillips. So he just recently, as of last year,

won the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of poems called Then the War from 2022. He lives in the Central West End, walks his dogs in Forest Park. And he has been a very celebrated poet. He has a Guggenheim and a Library of Congress fellowship. He got a Pushcart Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letter Prize.

That's a lot of prizes. He's celebrated. He ended up at Wash U. So he is actually originally from Massachusetts. He ended up at Wash U because a friend of his and friend of the show, Robert Pinsky, not really a friend of the show, but I talked about him. I was so confused, you just scared the shit out of me. I have talked about him on the show before. Okay, my mind was racing, I thought you were about to say, you remember, right, our friend, Robert Pinsky?

So, where did you go to salute your shorts immediately? Immediately, without a beat, yeah. So he found out about a three-year job at Wash U from Robert Pinsky that, as I mentioned, turned into over 30 years. So I wanted to read a poem of his called Domestic. And I will do that now. If when studying road atlases

while taking, as you call it, your morning dump, you shout down to me names like Miami City, Franconia, Cancun, as places for you to take me to from here, can I help it if all I can think about is the things that are stupid, like he loves me, he loves me not? I don't think so. No more than some mornings waking to your hands around me and remembering these are the fingers, the hands I've over and over given myself to. I can stop myself from wondering, does that mean they're the same I'll grow old with?

Yesterday in the cafe, I keep meaning to show you, I thought this is how I'll die maybe, alone, somewhere too far away from wherever you are then. My heart racing from espresso and too many cigarettes, my head down on the table's cool marble and the ceiling fan turning slowly above me, like fortune, the part of fortune that's half-wished, for only it did not seem the worst way. I thought this is another of those things that I'm always forgetting to tell you, or don't choose to tell you, or I'll tell you but only in the same way each morning I keep myself from saying too loud,

I love you, until the moment you flush the toilet, then I say it, when the rumble of water running down through the house could mean anything, flood, your feet descending the stairs, any moment, any moment, the whole world, all I want of the world coming down. Isn't that lovely? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is the first poem you've ever brought

with poop as a framing device. I know. And I think that represents a tremendous amount of growth from you. It's growth, yeah. He said, he gave an interview in studentlife.com and said, in the early days of writing poems, the story that was unbearable was my queerness. And my poems knew that even if I didn't at the time.

Closing each poem, I realized now that I was constructing a world within which, and a language with which, a crucial part of myself could find a voice and make space for itself. I love that. Isn't that lovely? That was beautiful. Yeah.

Yeah, Carl Phillips is set to retire, so if you're thinking about going to WashU, now is the time, get there. Cause he, I mean, every interview I read with him was like any day now. So. You're gonna get tail end career. Just the, the snickle fritz.

These fricking kids. I'd like to do one more. If that's okay. Please. I want to talk about to just do a complete 180 totally. The forward projectile football pass. This is connected to St. Louis in a way that probably not a lot of people in here may know about.

This episode has been way too sports heavy for me. That is a good point. No, I'm talking about football norte-americano, not the soccer traditional form. Okay. So. Which I know a lot more about. Which you know way more about. In the early days of football,

basically every third person who played the sport died. Because it was a game about ramming your head into someone else as fast and as hard as you possibly could. Some might say it still is. Well, maybe. We didn't have great pad solutions for that back then. Everything was made out of actual factual leather. In 1905, in the Collegiate's football circuit,

which is all there was, there was no NFL at the time, there were 19 deaths and 159 serious injuries reported across the nation's college. Yeah, it's a lot. And they just thought like, we'll get this. We keep telling them to slow down, but everyone just goes crazy out there. People went to President Teddy Roosevelt and were like,

hey, maybe we should ban football. And Teddy Roosevelt was, he probably just finished bow hunting or something. And it was like, well, no, football's great. Let's just make some new rules. And so the year after that, a bunch of schools got together to change the rules of football, which, you know, bear in mind, no NFL.

This was it. These were the big, this was all the football that there was and they came up with allowing legal forward passing. This is wild to me for a few reasons. One, I think we can all agree the only exciting good part of football is when somebody throws the ball really far and someone catches it and you're like, holy shit!

That's so much more football that I don't have to pay attention to because they skipped a lot of it. And you're telling me that never happened until these rules went into effect in 1906. How did this sport stick around for so long I mean, that never happened until these rules went into effect in 1906. How did this sport stick around for so long when it was just running plays forever? So the team that is credited with really taking ownership

of this new touchdown vector was the 1906 St. Louis Blue and White football team. Bradbury Robinson was the quarterback for that team and he threw the first ever legal forward pass on September 5th, 1906, playing against Carroll College. It was an incomplete pass. So there must have been lots of people who thought, ha, this new way of playing football is for dummies.

So did he know that he was doing it, or was it just like, no, everyone looked at each other like, eh, we'll let this one slide. No, he knew what he was doing. At this point, the rules had been agreed on. This was the first season where the rules had taken place. And this was the first game in that season where somebody had done it.

Later in that game, they went on to make a lot of complete passes to win that game. And every other game They played that season ending that season with a record of outscoring their opponents for the season 407 to 11 This is why I'm obsessed with this moment in sports history y', they played a game against the Missouri Miners, which they won 71 to nothing. Wait, so I don't understand why other people

weren't doing this. Because when they changed the rules, there were probably a lot of people, a lot of cigar smoking coaches was like, they think they figured it out, no way. The Missouri Miners at this, can you imagine the terror in those boys eyes where the defenders like, we don't know what to do.

The ball is up. None of us can run very fast. He can't run. We're all huge lads who can tackle so good. The ball's up there. We can't fly. The coach of the St. Louis University football team that season was a man named,

I didn't look up the pronunciation of his last name and I never will because in my name it's pronounced as follows, Eddie Coachums. That's incredible. Did everyone eventually get wise to the fact that you could make the ball go so far so fast if you just yeet it with maximum excitement? Yes. Are there other teams that did that that season that didn't get as much credit because they didn't go first because their football season started

later than St. Louis? Yes, also. But only one team had a coach named Coach Cochibs and that's gotta count for something. That's amazing. Yes, that's all that we have prepared for you today. Thank you all so much for joining us. You're wonderful. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of our theme song, Money Won't Pay.

If you're listening to this later, there's a link to that in the episode description. We have a poster for sale from a Bim Bam out in the lobby designed by Kate May. We've signed a bunch of them that you can go grab. And we'll be back soon. Thank you all so much. Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on Money won't pay, working on Thanks for watching!