FOXBORO, Mass. New England Patriots fans were in shock today after quarterback Tom Brady suffered a knee injury in yesterday's game against the Kansas City Chiefs, but another group showed the 2007 MVP no sympathy. "If I slip at the end of the catwalk," said supermodel Elle Macpherson, "there is no injury cart to bring me back."
Tom Brady
Indeed, the reaction among the world's supermodels to what is believed to be a torn anterior cruciate ligament was dismissive, if not downright hostile. "A lot of your top models see Brady as a threat ever since he turned into a coverboy," says Pro Football Today's Mark Samari. "They watch his stat line to see how many column inches he gets in the gossip columns."
Macpherson: "I would have put on fresh makeup and gone back into the game."
Brady has played in four Super Bowls, leading the Patriots to victory in three of them. Speaking in the broken English that is their official language, German supermodel Claudia Schiffer said that in order to join the supermodels' union "one must be on all the covers all over the world at the same time so that people can recognise the girls so Brady does not qualify, yes?"
"Do you have Matt Cassel's cell phone number?"
There was speculation that Giselle Bundchen, Brady's supermodel girlfriend, would dump him after she was heard muttering "Another Wally Pipp" as she left a luxury box at Gillette Stadium. Wally Pipp was a member of the New York Yankees who sat out a game due to a headache and was replaced by Lou Gehrig, the "Iron Horse" who went on to play in 2,130 consecutive games. Brady was replaced by Matt Cassel, a back-up whose preseason reps did little to inspire confidence.
Wally Pipp: "Not today, Giselle--I've got a headache."
"When I am not feeling well I still must oil up my body for exhausting photo shoots wearing nothing but a bikini in the hot sun," Bundchen snapped at a reporter. "Does anybody have Matt Cassel's cell phone number?"
FOXBORO, Massachusetts. New England Patriots wide receiver Reche Caldwell was cleared to play in this week's game against the Miami Dolphins after taking a vicious hit to the head last Sunday against the Cincinnati Bengals.
Caldwell: "You don't know jack about Bloomsbury, man!"
"He's fully recovered," said Dr. Harry Wernick who examined Caldwell at Boston's Massachusetts General Hospital yesterday. Wernick led a "dream team" of neurologists and other physicians who administered a battery of tests to Caldwell.
Dr. Harry Wernick and his "dream team" colleagues.
"We started out in the traditional way, asking Reche who was president, who's the vice president and so on," said Wernick. "He named the entire Bush cabinet, the current justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, the original members of the Shirelles and all of Elvis's number one records. Then he named the principal dancers of the American Ballet Theatre for the past thirty years in inverse order of height starting with Mikhail Baryshnikov."
The Shirelles
Caldwell's remarkable mental feats did not surprise fellow Patriot Rodney Harrison, who is also known for his hard tackling. "Sometimes a hit like that can clear your head," Harrison said. "I came up to him to make sure he was all right and he said 'Harrison, William Henry--Old Tippecanoe--right?' I said no, I'm Rodney--your teammate. He says 'I know--I'm just messin' with ya.'" The ninth President of the United States, William Henry Harrison died after just thirty days in office, but was picked up on waivers by the San Diego Chargers.
President William Henry Harrison
Bengals' safety Kevin Kaesviharn made the hit that brought Caldwell down, but he was the one left shaking his head. "He bet me I couldn't name five members of the Bloomsbury Group. I rattled off Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey pretty quick, then I was stuck. He starts in with Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, Dora Carrington, Roger Fry and David Garnett. I had to get back to the huddle but he just kept goin' with Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy and Leonard Woolf."
Virginia Woolf
The Bloomsbury Group began as an informal social assembly of Cambridge University graduates in the late 19th century who mingled at events held by the Apostles secret society. After the merger of the NFL into the AFL in 1969, the group became known as the Kansas City Chiefs.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. #### Vermeil has been coach of the year at every level of football from Pop Warner to the pros. He's got nothing left to prove.
That may explain why the man who won a Super Bowl with the Rams in 1999 is looking to try something different now that he's retired from the Chiefs, and will take a position with Lifetime Television for Women writing sob-story screenplays.
"Football has been great to me, but it's time to follow my dream," Vermeil said with a lump in his throat at a press conference here today. The emotional California native has worn his emotions on his sleeve throughout his career, often bursting into tears when his defense forces a turnover, or a kick coverage team pins an opponent inside its twenty-yard line.
"Our kids and our grandkids are grown, so this team became my kids," Vermeil said as he fought back sniffles. Quarterback Trent Green came up to complain that Tony Gonzalez wasn't sharing the Legos, and Vermeil warned the tight end to play nice or he'd tell team owner Lamar Hunt to trade him to Buffalo.
Lifetime TV is 50% owned by The Walt Disney Company and targets female audiences with "disease-of-the-week" films, real-life accounts of husbands who forget their wives' birthdays, and other domestic tragedies.
Vermeil, the oldest coach in the NFL until his retirement at 69, holds the state record for the longest distance driven by a senior citizen with a turn signal on according to the Missouri Highway Patrol. Vermeil traveled the length of Interstate 70 from St. Louis to Kansas City, a distance of 250 miles, with his right blinker flashing when he took over as head coach of the Chiefs in 2001.
"I came out of the clover-leaf at St. Charles and just completely forgot about it!"
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.
