Even during the lockout, there’s no shortage of interesting NFL-related stories.
Recently, the 49ers parted ways with former linebacker Gary Plummer, who had been working as a color analyst on the team’s radio broadcasts. Though Plummer thinks the team believes he was too critical of a franchise that lately has deserved plenty of criticism, the folks at Deadspin uncovered a raunchy interview given by Plummer earlier this year, which possibly prompted the move.
Plummer thinks that the sexually graphic comments were a pretext for dumping a guy who spent too much time dumping on the 49ers.
“It was a convenient excuse to get rid of somebody who told the truth,” Plummer told the San Jose Mercury News.
“I literally asked them, ‘How much powdered sugar do you want me to put on dog [waste] to make it taste good?” Plummer said when he was confronted about his remarks about the team during the 2010 season. “We’re 0-5. We’re last in the league in offense, and we’ve had three players quit.”
The Niners have denied that Plummer was fired for his on-air candor during games, and the team wouldn’t say whether he was fired for his on-air candor regarding sexual activities and exploits.
“The 49ers thank Gary for his services to the organization as a player and as a broadcaster,” the team told the Mercury News. “We wish him all the best.”
Litigation could be in the offing, especially since Plummer is saying that nothing in his contract was violated by doing a raunchy radio interview. We’d need to see the contract before agreeing with that one, especially since we suspect that any deal of this nature contains sufficiently general language that could be invoked when the employee engages in questionable conduct on his own time. Moreover, most of those deals permit “without cause” terminations, if certain procedures are followed.
And Plummer seems to realize he shouldn’t have been so specific or detailed during a segment that not only included talk about his own sexual activities but that disclosed embarrassing details about the 49ers sexual exploits during their heyday of the 1990s, including players cajoling team employees into getting phone numbers from female fans and players engaged in certain activities best conducted behind closed doors in the vicinity of the team bus.
“I regret that I didn’t get an opportunity to listen or edit it first,” Plummer said. Which is probably the closest he’ll ever come to admitting what he now knows.
That he never should have done the interview.
