The Road To 4-12, Week 2

I have a vision for today's game: Terrell Owens catches a quick slant over the middle, easily shaking off Ahmed Plummer, and rumbles 60 yards into the endzone, pausing only to stiffarm Mike Rumph and to flatten Tony Parrish. The crowd goes nuts, then hushes, expectantly. T.O. will not disappoint.

He grabs a pickaxe hidden in the goalpost padding and races off to midfield where he begins a pantomime history of the West. First he digs about six feet deep into the turf and, with exaggerated triumph, produces a gold ingot that he'd planted the night before. With expert comic cruelty, he dances a drunken jig with a bottle of rye hidden in his shoulder pads. This, suggests T.O., is the history of the "Forty-Niner," one of greed and drunken lust. The crowd roars with approval. He produces a rifle and "shoots" a "Native American," who is his financial advisor in a headdress. Then, the climax: he reaches into his jersey and unveils a couple of Chinese coolies he'd kept concealed during the game. With stage-movements conveying unspeakably arduous toil, they labor on the Coors Light Silver Bullet rail line that had been constructed on the sidelines for pregame festivities. With one touchdown celebration, T.O. has humiliated the Niners and caused them to rethink the historical legacy on which they trade. Then he sketches a crude chalk caricature of Steve Mariucci, Jeff Garcia, and Donovan McNabb in a threesome.