Our friend and future full-time colleague Peter King has compiled his last, and arguably his best, column for SI.com’s MMQB. We highly recommend stopping everything you’re doing and taking 30 minutes or so to soak it in.
This edition of King’s weekly cornucopia has extra corn and even more ucopia, with plenty of anecdotes from decades of devotion to the greatest sport on earth. Read it. Savor it. It’s a masterwork and a football history course all in one, something from which his passion and appreciation readily flows.
Here’s one highlight (but, again, read it all): “Thank you, Michael Irvin. ‘We’re playing in a Sports Illustrated game!’ he shouted when I showed up in Texas during the week of a big game in 1991, when the Cowboys started to get good. That Friday afternoon, Irvin said he’d sit for an interview with me, but not at Valley Ranch. We got in his car, and he took me to a strip club, where we talked for an hour. Great interview. Interesting scenery.”
And another: “Thank you, Jimmy Johnson. For a lot of things. He’s as transparent a coach as I’ve covered in my 29 SI years. The first time we talked extensively, at a seafood place in San Diego in training camp in 1990, Johnson spoke about the pain of his 1-15 rookie season, and he was so candid about how much it sucked that at the end of the evening, perhaps emboldened by four or six Heinekens, he looked me square in the eye and said, ‘Peter, if you f--- me with this story, I’ll squash you like a squirrel in the road.’”
And one more, from 2007: “On my Continental puddle-jumper from Newark to Providence last week to do a Patriots story for HBO, the man in front of me passed gas uncontrollably, constantly, and without any shame throughout the flight. After about 15 minutes of this, the man across the aisle looked at the Wall Street Journal-reading farter and said: ‘Do you think you might be able to control that?’
“‘Control what?’ Mr. Fart said. ‘The farting,’ Mr. Across-the-Aisle-But-Speaking-for-Everyone said. ‘Jesus,’ Mr. Fart said, sounding apologetic. “I’m sorry.” But he couldn’t stop, and we suffered with the acrid fumes for most of the 47-minute flight.”
The sweet fumes of King’s column at SI.com will linger for a while, but then he’ll arrive at NBC in July, where he’ll pick up where he’s leaving off. We can’t wait for that to happen, and we suspect you feel the same way.
