February 1 Notebook
February 01, 2006 12:01 PM | General
February 1, 2006
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| Jennifer Berry |
Today is national letter of intent day – college football’s version of the Miss America pageant. It’s a day filled with suspense and drama. Big things like world hunger, peace and prosperity and helping the homeless are riding in the balance.
Like Miss Jennifer Berry -- the pretty 22-year-old aspiring teacher from Oklahoma who has a plan for preventing drunken driving, can think on her feet better than 49 others, and showed us how to ballet dance -- high school football players all over the country today are being evaluated and re-evaluated by rabid fans searching for the Holy Grail.
We have studied the lists, suffered through de-commitments and re-commitments, the soft verbals and the heavy leans, poured our hearts out on the chat boards, and placed our faith in those self-anointed judges like Mike Farrell and Tom Lemming to tell us that, yes, our team did do well.
We know more about Johnny “Play” Doe, the 6-foot-6-inch, 235-pound wide receiver with the 4.3 forty time from Imastar, Ohio, than we do our own 17-year-old sons and daughters. Johnny likes rap music and hanging out at the mall; he scored 10 touchdowns in a single game (with a pulled hammy mind you) and he picked OUR school over defending national champion Texas, USC and Florida State. He’s a five-star wonder, so they say.
Of course we did lose Jimmy Dazed, a 6-foot-5-inch, 295-pound defensive tackle from Imnotsure, Texas, who became the first 18-year-old in the history of the world to change his mind. It seems he didn’t want to disappoint a bunch of grown men begging him to go to their school, so he tried to please them all and wound up only pleasing one.
In the end, Jimmy had to get rid of his cell phone because there were just too many calls for him to handle -- all those people running those web sites desperately trying to find out what he couldn’t figure out for himself.
Then there’s Timmy Terrific, the star running back from Imtheman, Pa., who worked out every last detail before making his announcement in front of a live televised audience. He brought ball caps from five different schools and invited all their fans to come and watch him go through his charade of putting on caps and removing them until he got to the one he planned to wear for the next four years. Then moments later a riot broke out. RAW Superstar John Cena couldn’t have done it any better.
Five years from now Timmy will be carrying a Sharpie inside his socks to sign autographs after touchdowns, or pulling out his cell phone to call his peeps. Look at me I’m an idiot and I'm teaching young kids how to be idiots.
In the meantime, we stay up half the night searching for all those obscure Top Metro 100 and Super Blue Chip lists everyone enjoys reading, cramming them into biographies that read longer than Albert Einstein’s.
By the way, did you know that in 1895 Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to study for a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich?
And this guy had a five-star brain inside his helmet!
Then there is Miss Berry, a self-proclaimed ugly duckling in the sixth grade with big horned-rimmed glasses and frizzy hair. She had to endure the ultimate humiliation of being called out by a classmate for wearing those “horrid glasses.”
Heartbroken, Berry spent the rest of middle school determined to prove her wrong. And today, well … “There She Is, Miss America!”
Let the judging begin.
