Friday, May 20, 2005
Pats Potpourri
A Red Sox travel day is always a good excuse to look in on the Pats. Some of this I've been meaning to blog about for a few days now... Bronchitis has really hampered my brain activity.
In my nineteen years of watching football, I have seen many players make a point to retire with a certain team. I never noticed any players doing this with the Pats. For so many years, I longed for greatness in the Patriots organization that would inspire such loyalty.
That day has come.
Media Credit: Patrick Schneider
New England cornerback Otis Smith celebrates an interception and touchdown by teammate Ty Law during the second quarter of Super Bowl XXXVI at the Louisiana Superdome.
In my nineteen years of watching football, I have seen many players make a point to retire with a certain team. I never noticed any players doing this with the Pats. For so many years, I longed for greatness in the Patriots organization that would inspire such loyalty.
That day has come.
Media Credit: Patrick Schneider
New England cornerback Otis Smith celebrates an interception and touchdown by teammate Ty Law during the second quarter of Super Bowl XXXVI at the Louisiana Superdome.
Otis Smith Retires as a Patriot
(from patriots.com:)
I wanted to retire as a Patriot because the greatest success of my career came in a Patriots uniform, Smith explained in a Patriots Football Weekly interview. The thing I really liked about New England is that the fans always appreciated my talents and what
I brought to the table, win or lose. They appreciated the effort more than the actual winning itself.
*I glow with pride*
We were successful together, he said, and when people ask me what happened with me and football, I decided to retire with the team I won with and the team I got a lot of
exposure with. We won a lot of games together and lost a lot of games, but we stuck together. There is a team concept in New England, not just from the standpoint of the players but expressed throughout the whole organization. I have developed a feeling in my heart for the way that the Patriots do things and that is something I want my to be tied to for the rest of my life. When people ask me who I played for, I say the New England Patriots. I guess you could say I'm a Patriot."
I never thought I'd see the day, until a few years ago. Now my teams have reached such a pinnacle that I feel gluttonous... In a warm, fuzzy, fat & happy way.
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I've grown so accustomed, in fact, to being proud of the Patriot's organization, that I was surprised to see this:
It's waive or goodbye
If Tedy Bruschi decides to play again, the Patriots will ask him to sign an injury waiver to protect themselves from liability. There's probably no way around it, unless the Patriots want to open themselves up to a major lawsuit, but the scope of the waiver could be narrowed to something very specific. Even if Bruschi signed a waiver, was injured, and had his career end, he would have a few alternatives for collecting income, including a one-time $275,000 disability payment from the league, workers' compensation, severance pay, and disability insurance.
I hope they mean to limit this waiver to injuries directly related to his particular health concerns. Tedy has embodied the concept of playing with heart on the field; that his physical heart would be flawed seems ironic. And it would hurt my heart to never see him play again, so I wish there wasn't all this waiver crap to discourage him. This does seem to indicate, however, that talk of him playing this year might be going on, which is very encouraging.
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In his NFL Europe diary, Kory Chapman says one of the things he misses most about home is candy bars. Yup. "The chocolate here is very different."
I've heard that American chocolate is globally considered a disgraceful use of the cocoa bean. It's too bad that our culture has us so spoon-fed with super-processed homogenized crap that we can't recognize quality when we taste it.
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Hey - our new LB Chad Brown is into snakes!
* sorry about the picture thing. I'm so annoyed with trying to get it to display. Guess I'll stick with Hello from now on.
# posted by Rebecca @ 4:18 PM 
