With the NFL football season finally here, you might have a man crush on a quarterback, not just on your man cave, (although you’re not likely to watch from there as its a blackout Sunday, with the Packers big favorites to win and the Vikings a bit less so). But when it comes to sports, HudsonWiNightlife does not get blacked out, so here are some NFL tidbits:
— What, a man crush on Marino? Now that he’s dropped some weight? A guy at the Smilin’ Moose said that he got invited to a party that also had a lower rung on the food chain, “an NFL possession receiver,” who noted, “I hear you’ve got a man crush.” The local guy then was shown around, and ended up in a whirlpool with the curly haired QB, who hung out and was cool, to the point of even shooting some hoops. So who would the bartender pick to share such a social outing? Steve Young, but a patron added the guy being a Mormon might make such a night less exciting.
— Lots of people from River Falls have noted that when the Kansas City Chiefs had training camp there, star quarterback Joe Montana would make the most of curfew and hob-nob at local watering holes, as long as the recipients would let him also be a regular guy and not talk about football. Friends Paul and Joe ran into Montana, after all those earlier years, during a recent excursion to Minneapolis and found him to be not as forthright these days.
— A patron up at one of The Hill haunts, who is a Denver Broncos fan, said he was tired of hearing how great the francise is, based on its record in recent years. In a related matter, 97 percent of those surveyed in Colorado said they weren’t even aware that they had a pro football team, most likely because many were too high to realize that there is a Mile High Stadium (OK just kidding). In another related matter, a moose was seen aimlessly wandering the streets of Golden, just outside of Denver, most likely also because it had smoked too much of the wrong thing. For a blogger, such stuff is just Golden. You’d never find a Minnesota moose doing the same thing, and if it did would apologize all over the place.
— An NFL-themed sign at The Village Inn in North Hudson needed some explanation, or did it? It read: “Finally a beer that won’t leave rings on your table.” Why that last phrase? It was explained to me, in this Packer bar, that the arch-rival Vikings hadn’t won the titles to get such rings. Even though they have had the opportunity for a whole handful, such is already possessed by certain Packers.
— No preview can be written without looking back to the past year. A chief blunder — along the famously bad lines of when a Viking kicker missed that key postseason field goal to wreck a chance of going 17-0, one of several train wrecks involving kickers for the purple — came last year when one of the main sports networks revealed that the Packers were NFC North champions. It actually, of course, was Minnesota (as the Vikes got that opportunity right). Notice that I had a brain blip and couldn’t remember the kicker’s name or the exact network? Sometimes its best to say just a little and not risk being wrong …
— Here’s another time that the entertainment-related pundits did get it wrong. A headline about Garrison Keillor stepping back from his Prairie Home Companion show, “for greener pastures” read, “There once was a man from Wisconsin …” Granted, Keillor did have a house on the St. Croix River bluffs, but his show and all it entailed were more a Minnesota thing. So I would suggest this replacement headline: “There once was a man from Minnesconsin …”
— Now shifting gears to another sport where the guys are big. A very tall basketball player had to duck his head to get into the bathroom at Dick’s, then danced with a women who was much shorter, and tried to jump to High Five him but didn’t come very close. His shirt said UW-Oshkosh, like the university that back in my day was jokingly called “UW-Zero.” Would that be like Seven-Foot-Zero? And, the next night, there were two more people almost as big who were a full head taller than anyone else on the dance floor. Why, over time, do all these super-stature guys show up only at Dick’s?