I still remember being a kid and watching This Week in Baseball with Mel Allen’s mellifluous voice casting a baseball spell over me on rainy Saturday afternoons and I can still see Kansas City Royals’ third baseman George Brett come screeching out of the dugout – with about two pounds of Red Man lodged in his cheek — after the home plate umpire discounted Brett’s home run against the Yankees because there was too much pine tar on the hall of famer’s bat. With Mel Allen narrating, I read George Brett’s tobacco-spewing lips like I was watching my first R-Rated movie.
Will New England Patriots’ quarterback Tom Brady ever live down DeflateGate?
Photo facsimile of Topps Company, Inc. football card
I wish Tom Brady would come screeching out of Gillette Stadium like a mad man right about now, because I’ve had it with DeflateGate and The Wells Report and the texting of locker-room flunkies and this seemingly endless sad-song drama of Patriots’ detractor upon detractor.
Here’s the thing about football most arm-chair quarterbacks won’t ever seem to grasp: you don’t win football games by taking a pound or two of air pressure out of a football. Just stand on the field next to these giants who make a living trying to shatter each other’s bones every Sunday afternoon. The average NFL career is three years and why is that? Because the sheer physical brutality of the game and those who are stronger and tougher and meaner and faster than the guy next to him is what wins games and the whole object of playing professional football is to win.
So even if Tom Brady is entirely guilty of colluding with two locker room “guys” to lessen the air pressure in the balls used in the Patriots’ AFC Championship game versus the Indianapolis Colts on January 18, let’s take into consideration one very important statistic before nodding our heads and painting the future hall of fame quarterback with such a painfully broad brush: the score of the game was 45-7.
Does anyone remember a guy named LeGarrette Blount? You know, the RUNNING BACK who scored three touchdowns and ran for 148 yards on 30 carries in that game? Blount’s performance alone would have won that game for the Patriots even if he had been carrying a well-lubricated bowling ball because the man has proven he is virtually next-to-impossible to tackle.
45-7. That’s what is called a beat-down. A rout. A complete football blow-out. A massacre.
I don’t care if Tom Brady was whipping Wham-o Frisbees® instead of pigskins in that game: the Patriots annihilated the Colts and all we’ve heard for five months is whining and foot-stamping and pouting at an almost Joffreyesque, Game of Thrones level.
Someone should trademark the official Tom Brady football-shaped Whoopie Cushion® and give them out as a gate promotion at the next Patriots-Colts match-up because the amount of breath expended in the media has reached gaseous proportions. It would be a National catharsis of sorts for 65,000 Whoopie Cushion®-toting fans to collectively just let … it… go.
When the New York Times sends a reporter to downtown Boston (the Patriots play in Foxboro, by the way, which the rest of the planet seems to perpetually align with Boston) to ask Suffolk students hanging out on Ashburton Place how they feel about the whole thing, I’m wondering to what depth the press is willing to sink to “create” more “news.”
It’s nauseating and frankly, boring. I half expect Giselle to be chased around next with kids in tow by a host of microphone-toting paparazzi asking her if she “knew” that her husband was intentionally deflating his balls before games. And to compare Tom Brady and DeflateGate to James Michael Curley? Good grief.
I reiterate: 45-7.
The statistic I’d like to know is: how much money has the National Football League spent on this investigation and wouldn’t it be better spent on helping any of the 1,000 NFL veterans who broke their backs to make the NFL what it is today as they struggle to balance daily life due to concussion suffered after concussion?
And how about the driving force behind this entire thing, you know, the NFL hot-shot whose name has so conveniently been left out of just about every media report on this waste-of-time-and-energy since January? Who was the driving force behind this whole thing, anyway?
Well, that would be former New York Jets front office guy Mike Kensil. That’s right, it was NFL Vice President of Game Operations Kensil who was the Jets director of operations for nearly 20 years and he was there in 2000 when the Jets went batty over Bill Belichick’s resignation as Jets’ head coach.
And it was Kensil – as strong as his reputation amongst NFL big wigs may be – who was at the AFC Championship game and launched this “investigation,” apparently, in the first place.
It’s been a long, long, long time since Broadway Joe Namath wagged his finger in the air after winning the 1969 Super Bowl, but at this rate, one might as well put money on the chance that the New York Knicks will soon coax Cazzie Russell and Walt Frazier out of retirement with hope at another title before the Jets will ever contend for another one.
I wonder what George Brett would say.
— Sean Walsh’s column One On One appears on Capecod.com Sports weekly. To email him send to [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @coachwalshccbm
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