DETROIT. His Steeler teammates laughed and said it was only a matter of time. Like a long-dormant volcano, Pittsburgh linebacker Joey Porter erupted during the second day of media interviews in the run-up to Super Bowl XL, pouring forth a lava flow of provocative comments that are sure to provide hot bulletin-board material in the Seattle Seahawks' locker room.
"The Irish potato famine? It never happened," said Porter, referring to the nineteenth century crop failure caused by an airborne fungus that resulted in large-scale emigration from the Emerald Isle to America. "All them Irish just wanted an excuse to go to Notre Dame."
"I don't know why he'd say that," said Seahawks' cornerback Kelly Herndon, a black man with an Irish-sounding name. "Porter's entitled to his opinions, but to join the ranks of potato-famine deniers is really going too far."
Porter didn't stop there. "Everybody says Franklin Roosevelt saved us from the Great Depression. Gimme a break. He made it worse by shifting so much of the American economy to the public sector through government entitlement programs!"
Even Steelers' coach Bill Cowher had some reservations about that pronouncement. "That's a subject on which reasonable people can differ," Cowher said in a conciliatory tone. "I for one think the Depression was worsened by a lack of monetary liquidity following the deflation of prices in public securities markets."
Porter blamed the media for egging him on. "They want to talk about everything except football. Yesterday some punk from The New York Review of Books asked me 'Agree or disagree: John Ashbery is our greatest living poet.' Hell, man--disagree. 'The mangel-wurzels that come out of every door.' That's ####."
When reminded that Ashberry had been praised by no less a poetic light than W.H. Auden, Porter didn't back down. "Ashbery couldn't change Auden's typewriter ribbon."
It's a spoof. I'm hoping Porter will come up with a quote to rival Hollywood Henderson's famous pre-Super Bowl line about Terry Bradshaw: "He couldn't spell 'cat' if you spotted him the 'c' and the 't'."
Con Chapman 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 "CannaCorn", a novel about minor league baseball to be published by Joshua Tree Publishing in 2009. He has written 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 articles and humor have appeared in newspapers and magazines including The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, and The Atlantic Monthly, among others.
