Updated again Sept. 24

Holed up here in my little Alpine paradise, pictured above outside my bedroom window in this most beautiful season of all, it’s easy to blissfully ignore the travails of Houston’s sports teams happening 5,400 miles to the west. However, the concurrent disasters that have befallen the Astros, the Texans and now the Rockets in recent days jarred me out of my wine-fueled complacency.

After more than a half-century spent hacking on keyboards about H-Town’s oft-prone-to-frustrate franchises, I recognize a five-alarm fire when I see one, folks. Relative to the city’s high expectations of late — at no point in our history did we have the right to believe we had three franchises with bonafide championship aspirations — I’m thinking our teams have never collectively delivered a worst fortnight.

No, really. I’m not being hysterical here. The Astros, a near-dynasty over recent summers, entered July with a seven-game lead in the AL West. The Texans were coming off consecutive seasons that produced playoff victories with a popular new coach in DeMeco Ryans and a dynamic young quarterback, C.J. Stroud, who, in 2023, delivered possibly the greatest rookie season ever for a player at his position. And the baby Rockets had ascended from the dreggiest dregs of the NBA to actually being mentioned as an outside championship contender after the addition of, holy cow, future Hall-of-Famer Kevin Durant to provide a steadying influence.

Now? After getting their butts kicked bigtime three straight nights by Seattle on their own field in the most important series of the season, then flat rolling over against a nowhere-bound A’s team twice, the Astros have all but played themselves out of playoff contention. This following seven consecutive AL West titles and after they had tricked their fans into thinking all was OK with a sweep of the Rangers. Clearly, it wasn’t.

The Texans, for their part, are a butt-ugly 0-3, having thus far showing a level of offensive ineptitude rarely seen in these parts, and we’ve born witness to some pretty dreadful offenses. How bad have they been? Their 38 points and three touchdowns are waaaay down there with the godawful 2005 Texans, who finished 2-14 after scoring 24 points and two TDs during their 0-3 start, and the pathetic 1-13 Oilers of 1973, who managed only 31 points during the same span but somehow accidentally found their find way into the end zone four times.

Offensive coordinator Nick Caley would be on the firing block if he hadn’t just been hired. The Texans’ 12.7 points per game is 32nd among 32 teams with Stroud barely a shadow of his confident, accurate rookie self. And he’s not helping his cause with an increasingly disenchanted fan base by defiantly wearing the Astros rivals’ ballcaps. Hey, C .J., get your ball-capped head out of your ass and start acting like you’ve played quarterback before.

As for the Rockets, they haven’t even reported to training camp yet and they’re already down a man, a hugely important man in the person of point guard Fred VanVleet, who has somehow torn an ACL and may not play this season. Before that terrible news broke, only the Oklahoma City Thunder were given better odds to win the NBA title than the Rockets, who have gone from 7-to-1 to 14-to-1 — even worse than the 12-1 they were prior to the Durant trade.

Da hell? What’s with these off-season injuries? Part of the Texans’ problem, of course, is their not having running back Joe Mixon, whose mysterious ankle sprain, suffered sometime over the past winter, could also keep him off the field for all of 2025.

In short, things look as bleak across the board as the photo above. Nope, it’s never easy being a Houston sports fan.

But let’s move on to a happier topic — wine — and the week that was! A recent trip to Italy’s Piemonte, three hours to the east by car from the Ubaye Valley, checked every one of my happy boxes, offering gorgeous vineyard landscapes, outstanding food and wine pairings and truly wonderful people. All of the above will be subject of my next blog, to be posted soon, I promise.

Look, I’m kinda busy over here. (Insert smiley face emoji here.) To quote Bum Phillips, the last coach to lead a Houston NFL team to the brink of the Super Bowl — 45 friggin’ years ago, fyi — when he was asked how he was spending his time in retirement: “Not much of nothin’, and I don’t start ’til noon.”

We miss Bum, don’t we?