PHOENIX, Arizona. The United States Postal Service has bowed to pressure from Arizona Cardinals fans, agreeing Friday to assign a separate zip code to the team's mammoth rookie, Taitusi "Deuce" Lutui.
Lutui: "Stay away from the buffet--it's mine."
"In terms of size alone, Lutui is bigger than certain counties in Rhode Island and rural free delivery routes in Missouri, so we caved," said U.S. Postmaster General John E. Potter.
Bigger than Hazard, Nebraska.
"This is the Post Office--we have a lot of time on our hands," he added, "what with not delivering your mail and coming up with goofy stamp designs."
Lutui was an All-American guard for the Trojans of the University of Southern California, where at 370 pounds he was the heaviest player in the school's history. He was invited to rush the Sigma Nu fraternity but declined after learning that their dining hall was not large enough to hold him.
Sigma Nu: Not big enough.
A second-round pick in last year's NFL college draft, Lutui was nonetheless one of the first players from the class of 2006 to be honored with an entry in Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia. "Somebody put his bio up right after he was drafted," said Wikipedia chief information officer A.J. Turner, "but the site crashed when our servers couldn't handle his weight."
Lutui was born in Ha'api, Tonga. His name is an anagram for "Suiti tutu lait", a greeting in the native tongue of his Polynesian homeland that means "I wish to wear your sister's tutu."
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.
