KING CITY, Mo. In this small town in northwestern Missouri, breeding animals is a way of life. "My daddy bred jackalopes," says Ernest "Woody" Fredrick, referring to the cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope that is rarely seen outside of the Midwest. "But what Wehrli Farms is doing is something new."
Roger Wehrli
Fredrick is referring to an experiment currently being conducted by Roger Wehrli, a Hall of Fame defensive back for the University of Missouri Tigers and the NFL's Cardinals when they played in St. Louis, and one of the last, great white cornerbacks. "He may fail," says Oren Daily, Jr., a professor of animal husbandry at the University of Missouri's Rolla campus. "But when an animal faces extinction, you've got to do something."
Wehrli Farms
Cornerbacks breed without difficulty in nature, often producing children by cheerleaders and other exotic species. "In captivity, it's a different story," says Daily. "They get all skittish if they can't roam from one bar to another, or at least nibble on a sideline reporter during a game."
4H Club: "Next year I'm gonna raise me a cornerback with a quick first step to the ball."
So the prospects for success are not great, but the Wehrlis, in cooperation with the Missouri Department of Agriculture's Extension Service, have brought three white high school cornerbacks to their farm for breeding purposes, mating them to leggy young girls provided by the John Alston Modeling Agency of Kansas City.
"These are the same girls you see modeling fashion undergarments in regional newspapers," Daily says. "They've been chosen for their low body fat, and their willingness to slap you silly if you try to run a crossing route through their push-up bras."
Jason Sehorn
The last white cornerback in the NFL was Jason Sehorn, who played for the New York Giants before a knee injury ended his career. Sehorn has only one son, and environmentalists have become concerned that "The Species"--as Sehorn was known during his playing days--may die out if breeding in captivity fails.
"There is a 15-yard penalty on the offense for excessive celebration."
"Perhaps we've been focusing too much on baby seals and whales," concedes Evan Winslow of the Sierra Club. "I've never seen a whale master the Cover 2 defense."
Instant Favorite. Good stuff. My post this week is on the serious side, but i usually like to try to be amusing. This is good, really good. I wonder if the NFL is desirous of having a white cornerback do well in this league ....
you know what happened? everyone was too critical of white cornerbacks and expected them to be perfect and play at a higher level than black CB's. they couldnt handle the pressure, and as a group just decided to give up any future attempts to play the position.
whites just have less ability to handle criticism than bl...err, donovan mcnabb does. so instead of fighting the good fight, they just took their ball and went home. that is, after letting the WR they were covering score yet another TD on them, celebrate, use the ball as a prop and mock them til they were so embarrassed they soiled and wet themselves.
(...does anything i just typed make me a racist? cuz that was not my intention.)
I dont know about trying to breed them back into existance. However you would think that with all of the medical advances and the ability to clone that someone would have figured out a way to get more quick twitch muscle fibers into my slow white #### by now. Steroids? who needs steroids when you can change your DNA. Doc, get on it. You are already about 20 years late but I would be willing to give the Weekend Old Man League a comeback like no one has ever seen.
This is I hate to say an American problem. There is virtually no difference in the speeds of top black athletes and top white athletes.
Now before you jump on my white #### and point out the world records, i'll point back that there is not one NFL corner that would have qualified in sprint times for the Olympics. however half the athletes who did qualify were white.
The difference between the World record and a 'slow white boy' is three blinks of an eye.. basically nothing.
We make sports players follow cultural lines in the USA simply because of cultural demographics.
You just wait until you see my boys play cornerback. Garnted they are only 3 and 1, but I weened them off their mama's #### at the tender age of 2 weeks. And on our ranch we use Brahma bull juice that will make'em mean as snake and fast as jackrabbit.
A little digging by the staff of Half-Baked Ravings has turned up an addendum to this story - Rush is actually a silent partner in Wehrli Farms. Silent, of course, in the financial sense only....
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.
