SteveSilver.net

A Playoff Atmosphere

There are just two more days until the titanic Divisional Playoff clash between the Vikings and Eagles, and I'll be at Lincoln Financial Field for it.

Now in the playoffs, with only eight teams still alive and a week between games, stupid one-day stories get magnified and turned into six-day stories. Take the Randy Moss mooning incident, for instance. It happened, the announcers rebuked him, yadda yadda yadda.

Now, the story's veered off until all sorts of equally stupid directions: Vikings owner Red McCombs demanded that Fox remove announcer Joe Buck from the game in response to his anti-Moss comments last week (I'm no Buck fan -and the Red Sox would've had an even stronger bias case against him last fall- but McCombs is quite a few degrees further on the Loathsome Scale). Then Moss was fined $10,000, and dismissed the fine laughingly in one of the great reporter/athlete exchanges of recent years:

Reporter: "Write the check yet, Randy?"

Moss: "When you're rich you don't write checks."

Reporter: "If you don't write checks, how do you pay these guys?"

Moss: "Straight cash, homey."

Reporter: "Randy, are you upset about the fine?"

Moss: "No, cause it ain't [expletive]. Ain't nothing but 10 grand. What's 10 grand to me? Ain't [expletive] … Next time I might shake my [expletive]."

It's the second-best confrontation to take place in the last week between a reporter and an athlete named Randy. And if you lived in Minneapolis about ten years ago, the exchange probably sounded eerily familiar (scroll down to the yellow).

As I said before, I'll be "silent cheering" the Vikings, and wearing a Vikes shirt as one of my three layers. Hopefully the legendarily aggressive Philly fans won't catch on to my allegiances, but I've got a hunch they'll be too angry with Moss to even notice.

Posted by Stephen Silver at January 14, 2005 02:46 AM