George R. R. Martin is a big fan of the two New York NFL teams (Jets and Giants) and a big hater of the New England Patriots, and he waves his football war banners high in an entry on this week’s Not a Blog, which he wrote in reaction to the Jet’s overtime victory over the Pats last Sunday:
"Hey, the Jets won! Life is magical and full of joy! Okay, okay, it was not the SuperBowl or anything, just a regular season game. But it was against the New England Patriots, the Horror Out of Boston, the Blue-and-White Walkers from Beyond the Wall, led by Evil Little Bill himself. The Jets always lose to the Patriots, usually in an especially painful fashion. Like they did earlier this season, in Foxboro. But this time they WON!–George RR Martin"
George R.R. Martin is a fantasy guy, but he’s also a football guy, and a pretty hardcore one at that. He often blogs about football when he takes a break from ASOIAF and literary topics. To him, “the Starks are heroes, so they would be the Giants” and therefore, he continues, that makes the bad guy Lannisters the Patriots. GRRM also thinks that the Jets, like his Starks, are currently doomed, and his long-awaited The Winds of Winter will debut before the Jets win a Super Bowl. It seems natural for GRRM to want to inject his love of football into his fantasy work, and guess what: readers of A Song of Ice and Fire do get little Easter egg servings of football along with their fiction. Let’s hit the Westerosi gridiron and take a look (beware the Giants!)
- The name of the kickass giant at Hardhome is a nod to the Giant’s quarterback Phil Simms: the giant who tears up the White Walker army at the Hardhome stronghold is Wun Weg Wun Dar Wun, commonly known as Wun Wun. Quarterback Phil Simm’s jersy number was eleven, or one-one.
- Ser Patrek of King’s Mountain is a Dallas Cowboy and Dies Horribly because GRRM lost a bet: Ser Patrek‘s sigil is a blue star on silver, which is the logo for the Dallas Cowboys. ‘King’s Mountain’ is a reference to the French name of St. Denis’s hometown of Montreal (Quebec, Canada) which translates to ‘Mountain Royal’ in English. GRRM runs an ongoing season-long Giants vs. Cowboys football bet with his pal, popular genre blogger Patrick St. Denis (Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist). When St. Denis finally won, he asked Martin to “kill him horribly within the books.” Thus, the unfortunate Cowboy Ser Patrek is smashed against a wall by the Giant Wun Wun, or Phil Simms.
- Patriots coach Bill Belichick (Evil Little Bill) must die: Tyrion Lannister is reading The Life of the Triarch Belichio in A Dance with Dragons, which is the fourth and final book of Belichio’s adventure tales. Triarch Belichio of Volantis is undefeated until his luck runs out in the fourth book and he is eaten by giants. Predictably, Patriots coach Bill Belichick was defeated in the 2007 Superbowl by the New York Giants, the fourth time Belichick had reached the championship game.
- There be Ravens (maybe): Baltimore Ravens players Terrell Suggs and Mark Clayton may provide the names for a mashup ASOIAF character Ser Clayton Suggs, a hedge knight pledged to Stannis. Ser Suggs’s sigil is a flying pig and he is a crony of Godry the Giantslayer. ‘Giantslayer’ is interesting, considering the Ravens are the only football team to have defeated the Giants in a Superbowl.
Of course, no GRRM victory is won without much hand-wringing, mistakes in judgement and blood-laced-sweat, and this Sunday’s Jets triumph over the Patriots was a nail-biter, with an outcome probably decided by an unforeseen blunder.
"All these kudos aside, though, Gang Green did almost lose this one. After dominating for most of the first three quarters, they let the Pats get back into it… you can’t give Brady that kind of opening…I could feel the victory slipping away as we went to overtime, and the stake was poised above my heart… they tossed the coin, and the Pats won, and the darkness was closing in around me as it has so many times before…Only then the Pats chose to kick off. Instead of receiving, and putting the hands of Tom Brady, the most dangerous mutha in football, Evil Little Bill decided that Fitz and the Jets should have it. Hee hee. Hoo ha. Oh, sweet. Thanks, Bill. What a lovely Christmas present. Fitz took the ball and drove Gang Green right down the field for the winning TD. And that was all she wrote. —George R.R. Martin"
“Evil Foiled!” Or, perhaps, a football game as GRRM himself might have written it.