BURBANK, California. The Walt Disney Company today rescinded the player-for-rabbit trade that sent Monday Night Football's Al Michaels to NBC for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit after the aging cartoon character failed his physical.
"He was in much worse shape than we thought," said Disney President and CEO Robert A. Iger. "His knees were shot from all that hopping around."
Other sports executives questioned Disney's judgment in making the deal in the first place. "They're a bunch of artists, not businessmen," said Scott Pioli, VP of Player Personnel for the New England Patriots. "It was a case of 'Liberal Arts Major Disease'--the delusion that all big numbers are the same."
In Oswald's case the numbers weren't that hard to figure out. The cartoon rabbit was born in 1927 and was Disney's franchise player before he was lost to NBC's Universal Studios in a front-office snafu that recalled the Red Sox' loss of Carlton Fisk. In that incident, Fisk was allowed to become a free agent when team management forgot to mail him a contract.
Oswald will test the free agent waters now that he knows he's expendable in the eyes of NBC management. "I guess they've decided to go in a different direction," the rabbit said with a disappointed tone in his voice. "I'm not feeling so lucky anymore."
Oswald said he will talk to New York Yankees management next week about a position with that club. "They appreciate over-the-hill stars in the twilight of their careers," he said, "and 1927 was a pretty good year for them."
Someone must have had, shall we say, sexual relations, and the rabbit ...well, in the immortal phrase of the great Paul Harvey, "now you know... the rest of the story"!
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.
