On Bigger Than the Game: The Deadspin Excerpt

Deadspin was kind enough to run an excerpt of my book this afternoon, between jokes about Brett Favre's anatomy. It is--what else?--a depiction of Jim McMahon's outrageous behavior during the week of Super Bowl XX.

On Inconsequential Things That Matter To Me

1. Tebow Knows 

This is sheer blasphemy. There is only one true Lord and Savior, and his name is Bo. The mere fact that this T-shirt exists should condemn Tebow to an eternity in the Ninth Circle, forced to endure extended lectures about his throwing motion from Jon Gruden while being ruthleesly mocked by a cabal of sports bloggers wielding photos of well-endowed women.

2. Brettfavre

So...I got bumped from a Minneapolis radio show last night because of Favre. Which begs the question: How is all this Favre time filled? What is there to discuss in a three-hour block between pizza commercials and trivia questions? But of course, it's Minneapolis, and it's the Vikings. I get it. No hard feelings, WCCO.

Still, because I do not incessantly follow sports news, I have no idea how much of this Schadenfavre is actually based in reality. I cannot say I watch SportsCenter that often, but how much do they really address Favre?* Has anyone ever timed it? Or are we all just making broad presumptions based on the Twitter feed of Ken Tremendous? It's clear that Favre wants to play. It's clear that the only thing holding him back at this point is his health. It's also clear that he has an uncanny ability to get under people's skin, even when he does nothing at all. At this point, since we're going to hate him no matter what he does, why wouldn't he make it his express goal to screw with people?

At this point, I've come full circle. I'm so tired of the complaining that I'd prefer to see the complainants keel over from sheer exhaustion. I hope Favre does come back, and I hope he has his best season ever. And then I hope he retires the week of the Super Bowl.

And then unretires the next day. 

3. Vampire Envy

Why is it that people who have only a casual interest in movies will pay $12 to see a movie that consists entirely of second-tier actors satirizing films that many of them probably haven't actually seen in the first place?**


*Although, I will admit: I turned on SportsCenter for 12 seconds last night and saw a state-of-the-art graphic of a human ankle, and heard the voice of an orthopedic surgeon. I did not remain on the channel long enough to pass the anatomy exam that followed.

**Probably for the same reason I subscribed to MAD Magazine for the first 15 years of my existence. I've never actually seen Top Gun, but thanks to MAD, I still presume the lead characters' names are "Maniac" and "Goof."

On Today's Radio Schedule

As of this morning, Bigger Than the Game officially exists. And in case you're in one of these places, here's where I'll be stuttering away...

10 a.m. ET...FOX Sports AM 1340, Farmington, NM
4:05 p.m. ET...WHTK AM 1280 Rochester, NY
5 p.m. ET...WANI  AM 1400 Auburn, AL
7:05 p.m. ET...KFXX AM 1080 Portland, OR
8:20 p.m. ET...KCKK AM 1510 Denver, CO
8:40 p.m. ET...WCCO AM 830 Minneapolis, MN(Postponed: Favre)*

*Seriously.

On The Boz (and Other Self-Promotional Notes)

1. I wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog about Brian Bosworth and his relationship to the '80s hair-metal phenomenon.

2. You can sign up to win a free copy of Bigger Than the Game over at The Pigskin Doctors website.

3. I'll be making an appearance on the Scott Ferrall show on Sirius satellite radio tonight around 9 p.m. (Speaking of which, if you haven't seen Big Fan, I highly recommend it.)

(Photo: Everett Collection)

On JoePa, and How Coaches Speak

I guess you could say the first "real" event I ever covered in my journalism career was the Big Ten football media preview. We were in college, working for our school newspaper, and five of us would pile into a barely functional company car in early August, sweating McNuggets residue, and drive twelve hours from central Pennsylvania to Chicago, only to spend a couple of days listening to overzealous coaches drone on about nothing at all. We'd take copious notes and transcribe what we'd missed, because this is what you do when you're young: You presume that the stale platitudes of someone like Gary Barnett* carry some sort of deeper meaning that you don't yet have the sophistication to fully comprehend. I suppose this is why football coaches act like football coaches do: Because youth is easily swayed. Because we are not yet cynics.

Last night on the Big Ten network, I watched the coach of the Minnesota Golden Gophers, Tim Brewster, address the media. I have no reason to believe that Tim Brewster is anything but an extremely decent and earnest man, but every time he opened his mouth, I thought of Eric Taylor. Brewster said he'd talked to his quarterback over the summer, and he'd been assured that his team had a uniform commitment to winning; Brewster said, with all due respect to his Big Ten brethren, that Minnesota now had the greatest football stadium in America; Brewster said every position on his team's roster was up for grabs, and that he'd told his players the story of Wally Pipp to assure them that he was serious. Every one of these statements sounds like the thread for a Friday Night Lights episode, except the producers would probably dismiss it as cliche.

But Brewster was not the reason I turned on the Big Ten media day replay last night. The reason I watched was for the man who succeeded Brewster on the podium, an especially suntanned octogenarian who spent much of his brief session in front of reporters addressing his IBS. On the surface, Joe Paterno looked great; he was thin, and he was bronzed, and nothing seemed different about him until he opened his mouth. And then, you could hear it; everyone could hear it. David Jones, the excellent columnist for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, could hear it, too. "How often do you infer a person’s intents, thoughts and condition based not on what they say, but how they say it?" he wrote.

In a back hallway, Jones tried to ask Paterno if he was taking any medications, if the slurring in his voice could have been a side effect. Paterno refused to answer. 

None of this means that Paterno is finished. He's bounced back so many times that to count him out now would be ignorant of his history. In fact, if you look back, there is a moment in every single decade of Paterno's career when it appeared as if he might be down and out, and he's endured. This is the signature of Joe Paterno: He endures by refusing to embrace the cliche. He still believes in the Grand Experiment. He is both intractably stubborn and surprisingly pliable. He went 6-6 his first season in the 1966, and people wondered; he endured some disciplinary problems in the mid-to-late '70s, and people wondered; he endured more disciplinary problems in '83, and people wondered;** he had his first losing season in 1989, and people wondered; the program briefly fell off the national radar in the late '90s and early '00s, and people wondered. The magic of Paterno's career is that he always finds a way to adjust to the times, that he has a wondrous ability to reinvigorate both himself and his program, to somehow decipher the next generation of youth while preserving his own body. And you hope maybe he has one more renewal left in him. And you hope that maybe his body and his mind will bounce back once more. But every time, it gets more precarious.

As I was writing this, I got an e-mail from my oldest friend in the world. I've known him since the first grade. We grew up in State College, and Joe Paterno has been a constant presence in our lives. "Did you see Joe last night?" he wrote, and I said I had, and I said this was the first time I felt palpable concern about when and where and how this whole thing might end. He wrote me back right away, a two-word response.

"Me too," he said. 

*Expect Victory!

**I'm told you can read more about that era in here 

(P.S. Here's hoping there's still more of this Joe left.)

On Me (Again? Enough Already!)

I did an interview with the Sports Crackle Pop blog, in case you're interested in such things.

(Also, here's my interview with the good folks at KGOW in Houston, in case you'd like to hear me stutter and say "sort of" a lot.)

On Bo

I've started doing interviews for the book, and one of the prime topics, unsurprisingly, is Bo Jackson. Everybody wants to know about Bo, about the sheer impossibility of his accomplishments, about the marketing and the myth and the man himself. I was fortunate enough to spend a day with him a couple of years ago, and I'm not going to lie--it was one of the most intriguing experiences of career. Bo is probably the self-contained athlete I've ever met. And it would appear USA Today's longtime baseball writer, Bob Nightengale, found the same thing when he interviewed Bo last month.

There's a lot of amazing stuff in there--stuff I wished I'd gotten myself, like the fact that Bo's license plate reads BROKE--but this is my favorite quote of all, because this sums up the endearing quasi-egotistical quasi-innocent individualism of Bo:

"When I was born, God gave me a natural greenie, a built-in steroid," Jackson says. "I was always faster than people, stronger than people. So when I found out what guys were doing, I figured guys were cheating just to catch up to where I was.

"But I didn't know. To be honest with you, I was so focused on what I was doing, people could have been doing steroids right under my nose and I wouldn't have known.

"But you know what I always wondered, why the guys were drinking all of this milk after games. I'm going to have a beer or drink some water, and I'm thinking, 'Why are all guys drinking all this milk?' I found out later it was because they were coming down from greenies. I didn't even know what a greenie was. I swear to God I didn't know."

There aren't a lot of athletes I believe anymore. But I believe Bo.