Controlling The Super Bowl Message...Joe Willie Who?

ThePRificationOfEverything
DuaneThomasLivesVille


There are a couple of things I remember about Superbowl weeks from my football-obsessed youth.

And both involved players running off at the mouth in interesting ways.

The first was Joe Namath spouting off after a few pops about how he was going to clean grandpa Earl Morrall's clock in Superbowl III. Back then I was still young enough to be awestruck, especially when Joe Willie, against all odds, actually delivered.

The second came from Dallas Cowboys troublemaker Duane Thomas who, when asked what he thought about playing in the 'ultimate' game that would be 1972's Superbowl VI responded, "If it's the ultimate game, how come they're playing it again next year?" As an almost, but not quite, teenager at the time I thought that was the ultimate in cool.

Anyway....

This year a cornerback named Chris Culliver, who plays for the San Francisco 49'ers, said some absolutely vile things about teammates and lifestyles in response to a dastardly and duplicitous line of questioning from a shock-jockular interviewer earlier in the week. As a result, the player and his team have since apologized profusely, as they should have.

But the league's response looks to be way over the top and demonstrates just how crazy the world has gotten when it comes to hiding away all the loose cannons, including the potentially interesting ones, at all costs:

...Several NFL teams recently have become concerned about the NFL's credentialing process for the Super Bowl media interview sessions mandatory for all players and coaches on the competing teams.

There is a sense the league should create a more responsible process that scrutinizes media applications and to avoid exposing players to media representatives who might never be approved for credentials to NFL games...


Then again, it would appear that football players and premiers, both, will now be fully protected from the super-scarier shockier-jockier types that want to trap them and trick them with their dastardly and duplicitous questions.

Don't know about you but I sure feel a whole lot better about the future of professional football, not to mention democracy as we know it.

Or some such thing.


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Much later, when I started really reading that crazy hillbilly from Louisville in a little log cabin in the Sooke Hills as an almost, but not quite, adult my faith in DT #33, who had remained silent for most of the 1971/72 season for all the right reasons, was restored when I read this... "All he did was take the ball and run every time they called his number - which came to be more and more often, and in the Super Bowl Thomas was the whole show."

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