Mr. Marino: Quick Release Won’t Help With These Guys

Dear Dan Marino:

Welcome to California. How’s the arm? Enough small talk, already.

Dan, I’m writing to offer you some advice that might help you survive the week. It is simply this: Be kind to sportswriters.

Or, if not kind, at least tolerant. From what I’ve been reading in the papers recently, relations between you and the media are becoming strained. The last thing you need this week is open warfare with the press.

After you picked apart Pittsburgh two Sundays ago, throwing your usual four touchdowns passes, you were less than thrilled when asked to analyze the game in the locker room press conference. Maybe you thought you had had a bad day. I guess when you throw for 400 yards every Sunday, it tends to dull your perspective.

After the group press conference, you snapped at a lone sportswriter, “I did everything (answered all the questions) upstairs, OK? Now you can go home.”

What you probably didn’t realize, Dan, is that sportswriters who don’t get good quotes from the game’s superstar for their story are not allowed to go home. They are locked in the stadium press box until the next game, when they are given a chance to redeem themselves.

A couple of days after that, your team was practicing when a group of sportswriters wandered across the field. Somebody probably left their corral gate unlocked. Anyway, according to reliable witnesses, you growled at them to “Get your mullet asses off the field.”

Now a mullet, as I understand it, is a variety of fish not commonly served in gourmet restaurants. I have no idea what the front end of a mullet looks like, let alone the posterior, but I get the impression this is not a fish one would have mounted to hang proudly on the wall of one’s den.

I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Dan. Back in your old Pittsburgh neighborhood, to liken someone’s rear end to that of a mullet is probably a term of endearment. The problem is, darn few of the nation’s sportswriters grew up in your neighborhood.

Not that we’re an oversensitive lot. We kind of enjoy nicknames. Ted Williams used to refer to sportswriters as the ink-stained wretches, which implied a grudging respect for the difficulty of our jobs. Coach Pat Riley of the Lakers has been known to call sportswriters buzzards, but he says it with a smile and we take it as a gesture of friendship.

It seems to me, Dan, that you could be getting off on the wrong foot for this game. Each day this week, you will be required by NFL law to spend approximately one hour chit-chatting with the foremost buzzards, wretches and mullet asses of our nation.

Hundreds of them will be assigned to write stories about you, because you are the hottest new item in football since the plastic helmet. Most of the writers, given the slightest provocation, will write what a swell young man you are. Make the feeblest attempt at humor and you will be labeled the next Eddie Murphy. Smile once in a while and they will write chapters about your charm, poise and charisma.

But order a group of writers to move their mullet asses, and you must take your chances with what they might write.

Not that I’m suggesting you kiss anyone’s dorsal fin, Dan. Norm Van Brocklin was a notorious snarler and he didn’t get shut out of the Hall of Fame.

However, you could make this week’s ordeal a lot easier for yourself. Take a tip from Joe Theismann, who made last year’s Super Week bearable for hundreds of reporters, and no doubt lightened his own mental baggage, by approaching his daily session with the media as if he were on the psychiatrist’s couch with the meter running.

A few writers were put off by Joe’s nonstop talking, but mostly he was thought of as a swell guy and a cooperative gentleman. Joe simply likes to talk, and one of his favorite subjects happens to be Joe. And the Raiders, who pride themselves on their antisocial behavior, were generally wonderful and genial interview subjects, and a grand time was had by all.

You probably understand all this real well, Dan. I read somewhere that you majored in communications at Pitt, and were a pretty good student.

But it sounded to me as if your relationship with the press has been deteriorating recently, and I just thought I’d write and remind you what a swell group of guys and gals we really are, how basically we come to sing your praises.

Also, to remind you how some of these modern-day sportswriters actually take pride in their appearance, even to the point of working out in gymnasiums, and might resent having their gluteus maximi compared to that of a lowly trash fish.

Yours for a pleasant stay by the Bay, Scott