4 | OCTOBER 13 • 2022 

for openers
A Kick in the Pants
I

’m writing my column 
having just witnessed our 
beloved and beleaguered 
Detroit Lions find yet another 
innovative way to lose a close 
football game. 
(This was written 
in advance of 
this past Sunday’s 
Lions-Patriots 
game.)
Instead, this 
account is from 
the day after the 
Lions’ Oct. 2 loss, 
which was for the birds, or 
rather to the birds, the Seattle 
Seahawks by a score of 48-45. 
Our team was once again sing-
ing the Honolulu Blues.
Historically, and often hys-
terically, the misery for us 
diehard Lion fans usually is 
reserved for heart-wrenching 
endings to games. However, 
the team got off to an early 
start when in the first half sub-
stitute Detroit kicker Dominik 
Eberle missed both extra point 
attempts after two Lion touch-
downs.
The first thing I thought of? 
It’s a good thing Eberle wasn’t 
in charge of NASA
’s successful 
Double Asteroid Redirection 
Test (DART) mission, which 
on Sept. 26 intentionally 
crashed a $330 million space-
craft, traveling 14,000 mph, 
into an asteroid 7 million miles 
from Earth. There was no 
room for a miss to the left or 
right by this projectile.
As described by NASA, 
“DART was the first-ever mis-
sion dedicated to investigating 
and demonstrating one meth-
od of asteroid deflection by 
changing an asteroid’s motion 
in space through kinetic 
impact” … like the swift kick 

a snoring spouse receives in 
the middle of the night. The 
end result is to be able to one 
day avoid a dangerous asteroid 
from having a cataclysmic ren-
dezvous with Earth. Welcome 
news for us; too little too late 
for the dinosaurs. 
It turns out some asteroids 
have already wreaked havoc on 
our home planet, as noted by a 
list compiled by The Planetary 
Society, a group whose mission 
is “empowering the world’s cit-
izens to advance space science 
and exploration.” The organiza-
tion counts Carl Sagan among 
its founders — the late, great 
astronomer and cosmologist. 
(Who knew Carl did nails?) 
The list, titled “Notable 
Asteroid Impacts in Earth’s 
History,” identified the 
Chelyabinsk Event of 2013 
as the most recent destruc-
tive asteroid. It exploded 30 
kilometers above the city of 
Chelyabinsk, Russia, “releasing 
the same amount of energy as 
500 kilotons of TNT, creating 
a shockwave that injured 1,500 
people and damaged 7,200 
buildings across six cities.”
The Tunguska Event in 1908, 
featured a 30-meter-diame-
ter asteroid exploding above 
Tunguska, Russia, “Knocking 
down approximately 80 mil-
lion trees over an area of 830 
square miles.” A living witness 
said, “The event was almost as 
excruciating as watching the 
Lions play football.” 
The Sept. 26 DART event 
was carried live on TV
, with a 
camera attached to the hurling 
spacecraft sending back breath-
taking high-definition images, 
where, just before impact, you 
could make out the asteroid’s 
ruddy surface. The same effect 

high-def has on news anchors’ 
faces. The reaction to the direct 
hit by those gathered in the 
NASA control room was as 
exuberant as a winning owner’s 
box at the Super Bowl. 
The eventual impact mirac-
ulously was only about 55 feet. 
from the giant asteroid’s center. 
Unlike the Lion placekicker, 
you could say the impact of the 
DART mission’s spacecraft split 
the goalposts. 
Which takes us back right 
back to where I started from — 
field goal kicking. In a strange 
twist of fate after the Lion’s loss 
to Seattle, that evening I began 
catching up on recent episodes 
of 60 Minutes. 
First, the show that aired on 
Sept. 4, which included a story 
about, and I am not making 
this up … field goal kickers! 
And wouldn’t you know it, the 
first segment opened with the 
replay of Baltimore Raven’s 
kicker Justin Tucker’s boot-
ing an NFL record breaking 
66-yard game winning field 
goal against … the DETROIT 
LIONS!
It also featured a game from 
last year between Green Bay 
and Cincinnati in which both 
teams missed a combined five 
field goals in the last 10 min-
utes of the game. When asked 
how much field goal kicking is 
mental, NFL Half Famer and 

former Michigan State kick-
er Morten Andersen said: “I 
would say 90% of it is mental, 
and the last 10% is mental.”
Thankfully, the 60 Minutes 
episode spared me further grief 
by not including the Saints’ 
Tom Dempsey’s 63-yard game- 
winning field goal against, yes, 
the Lions, on Nov. 8, 1970. 
Dempsey, famously known as 
the kicker born without toes 
on his kicking foot! What other 
team could possibly lose to a 
kicker with a half a foot, right? 
I mean, I think the Lions 
could actually find a way to 
lose even if the opposing team 
forfeited.
Weaving football and aster-
oids into the same conversation 
reminds me of a long-held 
prediction I’ve shared with 
many folks over the years. In 
a moment of delirium, I said 
that the day will come when 
the Lions will actually be in the 
Super Bowl. The game will be 
tied with time running out and 
Detroit lining up to kick the 
game-winning field goal when 
from out of the heavens comes 
… a giant asteroid that doesn’t 
obliterate the Earth but knocks 
the football wide to the left. 
Only the Lions. 

Visit Alan at laughwithbigal.com,”Like” 

Al on Facebook and reach him at 

amuskovitz@thejewishnews.com.

Alan 
Muskovitz
Contributing 
Writer

NASA

PURELY COMMENTARY

A depiction of DART 
closing in on the 
asteroid.

