FOXBORO, Mass. In what is turning into a contest of one-downsmanship more intense than any in NFL history, the New England Patriots and the Jacksonville Jaguars today escalated their war of words over which team gets less respect as they prepared for their first-round playoff game.
"Last year when we won our third Super Bowl people told me I could be president if I wanted," Patriots quarterback Tom Brady reminded a crowd of reporters at his locker. "I'm still waiting," he said bitterly.
Jaguars quarterback Byron Leftwich, who has missed five games with a broken ankle, scoffed at Brady's complaint. "He doesn't know what disrespect is," Leftwich angrily asserted. "Saturday night I limped into a Denny's in Jacksonville and they offered me the Senior Citizens' discount--now that's disrespect."
Brady said his life has not been the storybook tale most people assume. "Sophomore year at San Mateo Serra High, I ran for class sergeant-at-arms and lost. It takes more than a decade to get over that kind of disappointment."
Jaguars cornerback Rashean Mathis said he would use Brady's poor self-image against him. "You see it in a quarterback's eyes when they have low self-esteem. That's when you can cheat a little and get an easy pick."
Brady claimed his early years were so discouraging that the Warren Zevon song "Poor, Poor Pitiful Me" was written about him. When a reporter pointed out that Brady was born in 1977, while the song's copyright date is 1973, Brady became defensive. "See," he said. "There you go again!"
The winner of Saturday's game will receive the NFL's Rodney Dangerfield Award, given annually to the team that makes the most effective use of alleged disrespect as a motivational tool in the playoffs.
socal - There is no way in hell that the Jags are gonna beat the Pats, in Foxboro no less. If you believe that, you've spent way too much time out there on the West Coast.
Sarcasm alert: Yeah, right. They don't either one of them know what disrespect is. If they want to know what true disrespect is, they should stop playing on the East Coast and come to the West for a season, then they can start with the Rodney Dangerfield act. That said, the Pats could well make it to the Super Bowl. The Jags----not.
Con Chapman is a Boston-area writer. He is the author of "The Year of the Gerbil: How the Yankees Won (and the Red Sox Lost) the Greatest Pennant Race Ever," a history of the 1978 AL East pennant race, and a number of plays, including "Number One Hockey Mom," "Please, Pope," and "What Mickey Belle Isle Told You," a trilogy about hockey (JAC Publishing). His work is available on Amazon Shorts (at 49 cents a dowload), and he writes on sports for Flak Magazine.
