| | | Editor's note: When we got to work today, we found another e-mail from that bartending, skateboarding buddy of ours in California. We decided to pass it along again. A word of warning: always wear a helmet.
Chapter 38
... in which our hero looks on as two NFL QBs almost kill each other
At the beginning of football season every year, my friend Newt stops in to start his season. By his season, I mean hanging out here at Lore's all day Sunday and Monday night so he can watch football while enjoying a mega-helping of Nachos Supreme and a couple beers.
Newt likes football because it is so violent, and he makes no bones about it. Newt is realizing his ambition in life this year, he tells me, by starting two websites -- one of them cataloguing football's greatest hits and the other professional sports's greatest all-time bar fights, which he is trying to spin off into a TV series.
So, naturally, I have to tell him what he missed here the other week. That's when Rob Johnson stopped by to say good-bye. Rob is totally torn up each year when he has to go off to Buffalo to re-join the Bills. Usually, he winds up weeping all over the bar or threatening suicide if we make him go.
"I hate Buffalo, Wheeler," Johnson starts crying as soon as he's dropped his suitcase on the floor. "I hate the people. I hate Rich Stadium. I hate Buffalo wings. I hate bison. I hate everything that is north. I even hate northern Mississippi. That's how much I hate Buffalo."
|  | | Rob Johnson is the undisputed starter in Buffalo, but that doesn't mean all is rosy. |
"Repeat after me, Robbie," I say, "I am a rich man."
"I am a rich man, Wheeler," he says. "But that doesn't mean I can't curse Buffalo."
Then he hands me his list of nacho orders that he wants FedExed every day all season long to Buffalo. So he can have a familiar taste of Southern California while he is shivering by Lake Erie. Nachos with Fingerling Potatoes and Stewed Beets is his favorite.
"So," I tell Newt, "who do you think walked into Lore's just as Rob Johnson was heading for the airport to catch a flight to New York?"
Newt has no idea. Understandably. Since Newt is a pal of my homey Puker, and the two of them have just finished making a direct-mail video called "Backyard Bashers." The marketing twist with this video is that it is personalized. Newt and Puker make video of people falling off the roof of every house in someone's zip code or neighborhood. This way, as Puker explained, whoever buys the video gets a kick out of people falling off houses they actually recognize or have even been inside of.
Since this was made on a low budget, Puker and Newt couldn't afford actors, so they have both spent quite a lot of time falling off houses onto picnic tables in the
past few months, and this might account for why Newt can't even think of who might have gotten into it with Rob Johnson.
"It was Doug Flutie," I tell Newt, after he spends 15 minutes trying to guess, and can only come up with "Alexander Graham Bell."
|  | | In San Diego, Doug Flutie's new QB rival is rookie Drew Brees, right. |
Flutie is on orders from his new team, the San Diego Chargers, to take their rookie quarterback, Drew Brees, under his wing.
Flutie hates this idea. He hates Brees. He hates young people. But he has to go along with it, so he decides to bring Brees to Lore's to show him exactly how a winning NFL quarterback conducts himself when he is out on the town. I think Doug secretly knew he would run into Rob here, and this way he could make it two against one.
Anyway, it sounded as if a lot of what Flutie was imparting to Brees had to do with Johnson, and it wasn't totally flattering. I mean, "pretty boy" isn't a compliment, is it?
But that in itself wouldn't have started the ruckus. What started it was Flutie having spent much of the evening trying to show this kid, Brees, that even though he was shorter, he was tougher and could do things like, for example, eat or drink greater amounts of things than a 21-year-old, without it having any bad effect.
Well, it was having a pretty bad effect on Flutie by the time he showed up and crossed paths with Johnson.
Flutie doesn't hate San Diego. The only thing he hates about San Diego as much as Johnson hates about Buffalo is San Diego's offensive line. He stood there at Lore's imagining what the season was going to be like for him, running for his life, blowing out a knee or shoulder, suffering concussions and getting booed, probably hearing applause only when he was led off the field after being knocked unconscious, and Drew Brees, the fans' new young favorite, came in to take his first NFL snaps.
"You should have gone to San Diego, and I could have stayed in Buffalo," Flutie said to Johnson.
It was the last complete sentence either of them said to each other that night. For the next 20 minutes they tumbled all around Lore's, trying to gouge each other's eyes out with broken bottles, and trying to dislocate each other's throwing shoulders.
My manager, Stu Getzler, just told me to let them go at it, figuring it had been building up for a couple years.
They are two great competitors.
Flutie finally got Brees to step in and help him out by offering to teach Brees how to look off defensive backs in the secondary.
The two of them tossed Johnson out of Lore's and into the limo that would take him to exile in Buffalo.
"It looks to me like San Diego's got its quarterback problem worked out," I said to Newt, after we'd mopped things up. But he was too busy updating his website.
Next week: In Chapter 39, our hero reveals his top-secret preseason NFL ratings. Send this story to a friend | Most sent stories
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