Why Do I Continue to Read Peter King?

[Corsi]

Reminds me of this:
 
 

Since 2005, Super Bowl winners are 12-0 on the road in the playoffs.

 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/writers/peter_king/12/11/mailbag/index.html

 

[DJnVa]

I actually expected them to go 7-2 before reaching the Final Four, my math may be off though

 
Well, you left out the second sentence of that section.
 
Factoid of the Week That May Interest Only Me:

 
Final Four contestant Wichita State is 4-0 in the NCAA Tournament....Wichita St was 0-2 this year versus Evansville.
 
 
I mean, it's not really much better.  It's HEY LOOK, THIS GOOD TEAM LOST TO CRAPPY TEAMS THIS YEAR!!!  I MEAN, DOES THAT EVER HAPPEN?
 
Then again, Evansville wasn't shitty this year.  They won 20 games.  Lost 15, but anyway.

 

[Dehere]

Did you guys know that no team that lost in the first two weekends of the Tournament has ever gone on to reach the Final Four?
 
Look it up. It's science, bitches.

 

[pappymojo]

Well, you left out the second sentence of that section.
 
Factoid of the Week That May Interest Only Me:

 
Final Four contestant Wichita State is 4-0 in the NCAA Tournament....Wichita St was 0-2 this year versus Evansville.
 
 
I mean, it's not really much better.  It's HEY LOOK, THIS GOOD TEAM LOST TO CRAPPY TEAMS THIS YEAR!!!  I MEAN, DOES THAT EVER HAPPEN?
 
Then again, Evansville wasn't shitty this year.  They won 20 games.  Lost 15, but anyway.

 
Shouldn't it be Factoids of the Week, though?  Unless, I suppose, a factoid is defined as two facts mashed together.

 

[DJnVa]

Look, you punked me last week. I ain't responding to you!!

 

[CoffeeNerdness]

Phil Coke (Jason Motte on the DL)

 
 
These guys aren't on the same team.  They aren't even in the same league.

 

[Cousin Walter]

Coke is the relief pitcher he'll be using until proven closer Jason Motte comes off the DL. Unless he's in an AL-only or NL-only league, it doesn't matter.

 

[Corsi]

We need to run MMQB through this.
 
http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/new-york-times-haiku-bot.html#.UV33_UfYd54.facebook

 

[coremiller]

There are some real doozies this week, but this one takes the cake:
 

c. Paragraph of the Week That Shows How Shallow I Am: This comes courtesy of critic A.O. Scott of the New York Times, in his elegy of Ebert: "Twitter was the last, and maybe the least, of the discursive forms Mr. Ebert mastered. A journalist for nearly half a century, a television star for three decades, a tireless blogger and the author of a memoir and a cookbook, he was platform agnostic long before that unfortunate bit of jargon was invented. Social media, another neologism and, too often, an oxymoron, was for him a tautology.''
d. I shall now define the previous four terms I do not understand, with help from Webster's Online Dictionary. "Discursive:'' moving from topic to topic without order; rambling ... "Platform agnostic,'' I believe, means that he was unwilling to commit to work on one platform, and he enjoyed and was good at many ... "Neologism'' is a new word, usage or expression, meaning that social media was just another new tool to communicate for Ebert ... And "tautology'' means a needless repetition of an idea. Meaning, I think, that all media is social, so why use the term "social media?"
e. Thanks for the vocab lesson, A.O., and I mean that.
f. Well, at least I knew "oxymoron.''
g. The meaning, it seems to me, is that Roger Ebert was his profession's Troy Brown. Mr. Versatile, getting the job done in many different media.

 
He realizes that he's a professional journalist, right?  Who writes with words for a living?  Admitting he doesn't know what these words mean, which were published in that obscure academic journal called the New York Times, does not make him look good.  None of these terms are especially difficult jargon -- this is standard SAT prep/advanced high school vocab stuff.  This common man shtick just makes him look like an incompetent idiot.  Plus, he gets some of the meanings wrong.
 
And the Troy Brown analogy is so misplaced.  Brown was a very good, versatile player who had a nice career.  Ebert was the most successful and influential film critic of his generation (even if not the best).  If there were a Movie Critics HOF, Ebert would be a slam dunk first ballot guy.  Obviously Brown is not.  Comparing Ebert to Brown suggests that Ebert's most valuable quality was his versatility, which was not the case at all.
 
The irony of this paragraph is that it does show how shallow King is, but not in the way King thinks it does.

 

[Leather]

Yup.
 
I think the "message" was that Ebert was constantly working to stay on top of media trends, because he realized that it was necessary to stay relevant in a period when mass-media (i.e. "social" media) was evolving incredibly quickly.   It was his job to be heard, not the job of readers/listeners/fans to search him out,  and he busted his ass to make sure he was doing his job as effectively as possible.  
 
Instead of taking a cue in a devotion to one's own craft, and figuring out what that means in the 21st century, King downgrades Ebert's efforts to being some sort of necessary step to merely remain relevant at all, which is how King uses "social media."   
 
Ugh.  The gulf between the type of professional, and person, Roger Ebert was and what Peter King currently is, is vast.    When King crokes, he will get a little write up in SI, maybe a sidebar in the NY Times.  That's about what his legacy is worth.  "Innovator" will not be a word used to describe him.  Nor will the phrase "Mentored younger writers",  or "Never forgot his roots", all things that I've heard fellow journalists say about Ebert over the past few days.

 

[joe dokes]

Consider also what Ebert endured while remaining at the top of his craft, without complaining or making it "about him" in anything but the most selfless way.
Meanwhile King gives us 250-500 words to complain that the barista didn't didn't inject the jizz into his latte at the correct angle or temperature..

 

[Koufax]

His choice of the meaning of "discursive" was mean-spirited.  I doubt that A.O. Scott meant it to mean "rambling" in his piece.  it can also mean fluent and expansive, rather than formulaic or abbreviated.  That is much more likely to be how AO Scott meant it it read, and PK should have understood that.

 

[Corsi]

Two: Maybe wearing gym shorts and an old hoodie, with an open paper cup of coffee, and a dog laying at my feet, isn't the proper way to wait for one's wife outside a Food Emporium grocery store on the east side of Manhattan. There I was over the weekend, while my wife did a little shopping inside, and a guy walked out of the store toward me and fished out two quarters. "Here you go,'' he said.
 
I said, "No, no, no, I'm good. But thanks.''

 

"I'm not poor, I live on the East Side of Manhattan!"
 
But seriously, what kind of anecdote is this?  Are we supposed to get a chuckle out of the fact that someone mistook him for being homeless, but he's actually an extremely affluent individual? 
 
Gotta love how he set up the story with all the Upper Class identifiers (Food Emporium, East Side of Manhattan, "a little shopping," etc) to remind his readers that he is indeed a wealthy, wealthy man.

 

[coremiller]

This is great, too:
 

5. I think I'll pass this along, with the names not used because I was let behind the curtain of the draft process with this particular team a few years ago for educational purposes and not to reveal who told me this. But in 2001, when Michigan wideout David Terrell was the eighth pick overall by Chicago, I was allowed into the Michigan Pro Day. I'd say there were 60 NFL people at the Pro Day -- coaches, scouts and a couple of general managers. I saw two fairly famous scouts there, guys I'd known for a while. Very opinionated guys, both of them. These two scouts didn't sit in the large meeting between coaches and scouts, and during the Terrell workout, I saw both sitting on the sidelines, not paying much attention to the throws and catches. One of them told me he'd watched tape of Terrell and didn't like him, and he was quoted the same way before the draft.
The point is, whether he watched a lot of tape and loved the guy or didn't love the guy, scouts have opinions. They like to share those opinions. In my opinion, I wouldn't have trusted the two scouts I saw on the sidelines nearly as much as I would have trusted those being worker bees at the workout that day, because the two veteran scouts had such a laissez faire approach to their jobs and had already made up their minds about a player before seeing all the available evidence. Turns out, on Terrell, they were correct. But in general, I trust general managers who make tough and seemingly against-the-grain decisions more than I trust the ones making the predictable decisions.

 
This paragraphs makes zero sense.  Terrell was drafted 8th overall; evidently the consensus was that he was a very good prospect.  The guys who were making the "tough and seemingly against-the-grain decisions" were the two veteran scouts who ignored the workouts, watched the tape, and figured out that he sucked.  Maybe the reason they got to be experienced, veteran scouts was that they learned to trust tape over workout performances; that's not being "laissez faire".  Yet King throws these guys under the bus?
 
What's so bizarre about this is that King could have chosen an example of an anonymous scout predicting a player would be a bust and then being wrong about it.  I'm sure in PK's time covering the draft he's seen plenty of examples of this, and then at least the story here would be internally consistent.  But he blasted the scout when the scout was right!  Huh?

 

[jacklamabe65]

Bones are sticking out
Tibia and fibula
Worse than bad latte

An instant classic.

 

[jacklamabe65]

Shuddering to think when he'll take credit for Will Middlebrooks. It would make my day if he decided to become a Mets' fan exclusively.

 

[Leather]

 

"I'm not poor, I live on the East Side of Manhattan!"
 
But seriously, what kind of anecdote is this?  Are we supposed to get a chuckle out of the fact that someone mistook him for being homeless, but he's actually an extremely affluent individual? 
 
Gotta love how he set up the story with all the Upper Class identifiers (Food Emporium, East Side of Manhattan, "a little shopping," etc) to remind his readers that he is indeed a wealthy, wealthy man.

 
I would bet $50 that this never fucking happened.   "An open paper cup of coffee" - undoubtedly Starbucks, right?   Also, I'm assuming the dog was on a leash and is at least moderately well-groomed.   
 
That so didn't fucking happen, the bit with the guy with the 4 bits.  It's a LIE.  
 
EDIT: Plus, what are the odds that King's "old hoodie" is really some ratty, stained, thing that would lead even a moron to think he was homeless (and not, you know, coming back from a gym? Moreover, what homeless people wear fucking gym shorts? None.)?  It's almost certainly some NFL branded thing or from some stupid Fun Run he ran 4 years ago.  

 

[joe dokes]

 

"I'm not poor, I live on the East Side of Manhattan!"
 
But seriously, what kind of anecdote is this?  Are we supposed to get a chuckle out of the fact that someone mistook him for being homeless, but he's actually an extremely affluent individual? 
 
Gotta love how he set up the story with all the Upper Class identifiers (Food Emporium, East Side of Manhattan, "a little shopping," etc) to remind his readers that he is indeed a wealthy, wealthy man.

 
I last lived in Manhattan in the late 80s. At that time "Food Emporium" was not a high-end type place, even though it sounds like a DeLuca's or Whole Foods or one of those things.  It was the re-named A&P (a decidedly NOT upper-class grocery experience). Its where I shopped on a student budget, walking the extra few blocks because the closest supermarket (D'Agostino's) was a high-priced rip off. (Black Label for $2.29 a six?! I can get it for $1.89 at Food Emporium!! In bottles!)
 
Maybe its changed. Or maybe Peter King is a haughty dipshit.

 

[Dropkick Izzy]

I would bet $50 that this never fucking happened.   "An open paper cup of coffee" - undoubtedly Starbucks, right?   Also, I'm assuming the dog was on a leash and is at least moderately well-groomed.   

 

 
Brother, can you spare some kibble?

 

[Corsi]

I last lived in Manhattan in the late 80s. At that time "Food Emporium" was not a high-end type place, even though it sounds like a DeLuca's or Whole Foods or one of those things.  It was the re-named A&P (a decidedly NOT upper-class grocery experience). Its where I shopped on a student budget, walking the extra few blocks because the closest supermarket (D'Agostino's) was a high-priced rip off. (Black Label for $2.29 a six?! I can get it for $1.89 at Food Emporium!! In bottles!)
 
Maybe its changed. Or maybe Peter King is a haughty dipshit.

 
The Yelp reviews of the East Side Food Emporium are basically unanimous in calling it expensive and overpriced.

 

[joe dokes]

The Yelp reviews of the East Side Food Emporium are basically unanimous in calling it expensive and overpriced.

 
Whaddya know. Times change.
 
A yelp reviewer at my old store on 32nd street might have seen PK there though:

go btwn here and Gristedes across the street. The prices are better on some things than others. They have a larger selection of frozen foods, so you may have an easier time looking for thing here than at others. They also have 5cent bottle redemption and coin star on the lower level. Make sure to clean your hands from the germs of homeless touching the machines.

 

[blueline]

He doesn't know what a tautology is?

 

[Leather]

He doesn't know what a tautology is?

 
His insecurity and vanity are in constant struggle, like a shit yin and piss yang.   On one hand, he doesn't want to come across as a "nerd" who uses big words, or cares about impressing people with his vocabulary, so he implicitly writes off a lot of superior writers as verbose or pretentious.  On the other, he desperately wants people to think he's really smart, and could be just as deft a writer as those others if he, you know, thought it was important to impress people.
 
It's the same thing he wrestles with when he talks in one paragraph about being an ordinary Joe, and then in the next talks about the joys of staying in a four-star hotel (for free) as if it's something that he just innately deserves because of who he is.

 

[Shelterdog]

His insecurity and vanity are in constant struggle, like a shit yin and piss yang.   On one hand, he doesn't want to come across as a "nerd" who uses big words, or cares about impressing people with his vocabulary, so he implicitly writes off a lot of superior writers as verbose or pretentious.  On the other, he desperately wants people to think he's really smart, and could be just as deft a writer as those others if he, you know, thought it was important to impress people.
 
It's the same thing he wrestles with when he talks in one paragraph about being an ordinary Joe, and then in the next talks about the joys of staying in a four-star hotel (for free) as if it's something that he just innately deserves because of who he is.

 
 
The funny thing here is that his insecurity led him to just fuck up the analysis of the Scott paragraph. I know what tautology and neologism and discursive and oxymoron and platform agnostic mean but putting all that crap in a short paragraph is showoffy and self-indulgent: using long words doesn't make a paragraph good or a thought clear.  For example, I read it several times and I still only have at best a foggy notion of what Scott meant when he said social media was a tautology for Ebert.  King simply doesn't have the courage to say "I'm a professional writer and my god that sucked--use some punchy words NY Times guy and if you have to show the world how smart you are maybe do it a little less frequently."

 

[Gravistar]

The funny thing here is that his insecurity led him to just fuck up the analysis of the Scott paragraph. I know what tautology and neologism and discursive and oxymoron and platform agnostic mean but putting all that crap in a short paragraph is showoffy and self-indulgent: using long words doesn't make a paragraph good or a thought clear.  For example, I read it several times and I still only have at best a foggy notion of what Scott meant when he said social media was a tautology for Ebert.  King simply doesn't have the courage to say "I'm a professional writer and my god that sucked--use some punchy words NY Times guy and if you have to show the world how smart you are maybe do it a little less frequently."

 
I don't think it was completely indulgent on Scott's part -- based on the tone of the piece and of that paragraph, you can tell that he's trying to say that Ebert was a singular individual, and that he cared about communicating with his audience by whatever means possible. Ultimately, he's saying that Ebert's adoption of Twitter wasn't bandwagoning, but was just an extension of his normal inclinations to be a man of the people.
 
I'm with you that the social media/neologism/oxymoron sentence is completely unnecessary; Scott really shouldn't have injected his own commentary on twitter and social media in a fricking obit piece. But at least that part is mitigated to some degree by the overall tone of the piece.
 
Peter King, on the other hand, remains a one-trick pony piece of shit. If he were a sensitive reader at all, he would have realized that Scott was indicating that "platform agnostic" is silly jargon and he could have then looked it up on google in 5 seconds. But then he wouldn't be Joe Lunchpail (it's kind of fun/gross to compare Ebert and PK's versions of the man of the people, salt of the earth -- PK believes the common man is unbelievably stupid and has no desire to learn; Ebert believed the common man has hopes and dreams and is capable of anything).
 
Can you imagine what PK would say if he had to write an obit? Possibly for Favre?

 

[DJnVa]

Yeah, I think Scott was saying something about how Twitter wasn't really "social media" to Ebert, because ALL media was social. Or supposed to be. That's the point.

 

[Shelterdog]

Yeah, I think Scott was saying something about how Twitter wasn't really "social media" to Ebert, because ALL media was social. Or supposed to be. That's the point.

 
I think that's right, I just don't think Scott expressed the sentiment as clearly as you just did. Which is way, in my book, picking that paragraph from Scott is a peculiar--even "weird"--choice for the paragraph of the week: it's as if King was amazed by the number of smart-sounding words so he just had to give it the paragraph of the week.

 

[Leather]

How many of you said, watching that: "I've got to get to the Masters!'' And you do. I scratched that off the bucket list two years ago, and I'm still determined to go again, once, twice, three times.
 

You think it would be cool to go to the Masters?  Yea, well, the Kingster's done it already, bitches.  In fact, he plans on doing it a few more times.  Why? Because he can.  Why is this leading off a column about the NFL?  Because LIVE FROM MIDTOWN MANHATTAN IT'S MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK!
 
(Sax-heavy blues-rock with montage of King eating greasy food and quaffing coffee, sweating up a hill in a headband, and sneering at foreign-born baristas and cab drivers).
 

Anyway, enough with my Masters infomercial. The next big sports thing is 10 nights away. That's the first night of filming of Draft Day, the next Costner movie, in which he plays Cleveland GM Mike Lombardi. (Sort of.)

Um.  Is this a joke?  Guess not.
 
So that's two things not NFL related. 
 

It's also the night of the first round of the NFL draft, which occupied most of my time this weekend when I wasn't drooling at the TV over the Masters.
 

Oh Shit!  There it is!  THE NFL DRAFT!  Which King was kinda-sorta skimming while he wasn't sitting by the TV, eating girl scout cookies.   Because, you know, putting effort into your job is for suckers.
 
But seriously:  Why should any NFL fan read beyond this point?  King has demonstrated, and then admitted, how uninterested he is with the NFL at this point in the year.  He's not even trying to show that he's engaged with the draft or anything else going on.   He's watching golf. 
 

This was mock draft weekend. When Paul Zimmerman suffered a series of strokes four-and-a-half years ago, SI's Mock Draft was handed down to me. I've done one forever, just not with the pressure that comes from following Dr. Z.

"And I've decided to respect that legacy by talking about Golf and some Kevin Costner movie that's destined to be dogshit instead of putting any effort into my mock draft."
 
 

It used to drive Zim crazy, the time he spent on the unknowable. Many's the Sunday afternoon before the draft we'd be on the phone, Zim trying to crack the code of just one more team and asking if I knew anything to help. How angry he'd be if he found out something about, say, the Vikings at 11, that swayed him to make a change there, and then of course the dominoes would fall and he'd have to change 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 23, 25, 26, 27 and 28. Aaaarrrrrgggghhhhh! Not happy Sundays.

"Zim used to actually work at those things, and make these things that editors call 'revisions'.  Can you believe that shit?  Crazy old man."
 

Now, with round one of the draft moved to a Thursday night, the magazine has moved the mock to a week earlier. I used to file mine two or three days before the draft, online; now I file it 11 days before, and it runs in the magazine a week before. It's never very pretty. This year, it could be a stink bomb.

"I suck at this.  Why even bother?  Can we talk about golf some more?  Jesus, people might bust me on twitter if I make a mistake.  If only I had some forum, some sort of technology, that allowed me to update my mock draft in real time up to the day of the actual draft.  Christ.  I wish I was platform agnostic, and not a magazine fundamentalist."
 

I talked in confidence to quite a few people around the league Friday through Sunday, so they could (I hoped) be relatively honest. I tried to barter some information as the calls went on, but mostly I was fishing. And the lines I cast over the weekend came up empty quite a bit.
 

"I didn't talk to more than one or two people because I was watching the Masters,  but I'll be really vague about it and nobody will be able to call my bluff.  Instead, I'll name just one person to give myself some credibility and leave it at that."
 

Empathizing with me Sunday was Mike Mayock, the wizard of these things and of draft research...

"See? I'm not the only one that thinks these things are hard!"
 

...and we agreed on the three reasons draft-placement intelligence is going to be hard to come by this year
 

"But I'll just repeat the three things he told me and pretend that we came up with them together."
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

 

 

[Corsi]

Mr. Starwood Preferred Member Travel Note of the Week
 
Well, now I've seen the other side. I spent three days last week in Boston, Detroit and Chicago talking to advertisers and ad agency reps about the new NFL-exclusive website SI is foolish enough to be giving me to play with. This week, I'll do more in Manhattan, and I'll travel to Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles.

 
I fucking HATE this guy's false humility.  It's so damn transparent.  
 
I still can't believe Sports Illustrated is paying me, Peter King, millions and millions of dollars to run this exclusive website.  And they're putting MY name on it!  And now I'm jetsetting all over the place.  Boston, Chicago, Manhattan, Seattle, Los Angeles.  Look out Paris and Milan!  Kingster's coming down the catwalk!  

 

[Leather]

 

Mr. Starwood Preferred Member Travel Note of the Week

 
Well, now I've seen the other side. I spent three days last week in Boston, Detroit and Chicago talking to advertisers and ad agency reps about the new NFL-exclusive website SI is foolish enough to be giving me to play with. This week, I'll do more in Manhattan, and I'll travel to Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles.

 

"I'm Peter King.  I have a website coming out.  People want to talk to me.  I get to travel a lot.  What do YOU do that's so great?"
 

 

The Five Things I Have Learned About the Business of Our Business
1. Dress i pretty casual. I have never dressed well consistently, but I figured I should on this trip, and so I went in with a pinstripe suit to chat with the Chevy Silverado folks. Not a tie in the room. Oooops. Same on the tour of agencies and companies in Chicago.

 
"I talk to important people at companies you've heard of.  I wear suits.  And ties.  Well, maybe not ties anymore.  Because I'm hep."
 

2. Youth is served. Oldest of nine people in the room for one of the meetings: 30. Impressed with the intelligence of a room full of execs young enough to be my children. They do what people should do when they're trying to figure if there's a match between them and a media company: They think and brainstorm and throw out ideas that get dismissed a minute later. A cool experience.

"Young people can, apparently, become successful by thinking and working, and if an idea is shit, they ignore it!  Amazing.  Unfortunately, as an old person, I will drive any idea, no matter how shitty, into the ground so long as I'm the one that came up with it."
 

3. We on this side of the biz always think the ads will be there, but ... There's money out there. That I see. But you have to work for it, and you have to convince people why their money will be better spent on this site than on sites and TV shows significantly more mountainous.

"Here in 'The Biz', people won't just throw money at you for the fuck of it.  You people not in The Biz can't possibly understand this.  The Biz is hard work, people.  It's not...whatever it is you people not in The Biz do for a living."
 

4. Thought I'd be meeting in some pretty stuffy board rooms. Not. Met most of Casual Friday with different agencies, and their meeting places are just as casual. In one place they brainstorm on the wall (a giant dry-erase wall) with markers.

"Here in The Biz, we are stuffy, uptight, unfunny people.  NOT!  Oh, and MARKERS.  Dig it. Don't like an idea?  Erase it.  No chalk allowed in The Biz."
 

5. You do a better job if you can drink well out there. I have closed Ditka's. Now that is a point of pride. I'm not usually a bar-closer or a restaurant-closer, but when the Iron Mike's Icon Cabernet flowed, I got a pretty good second wind. Talk about emptying the NFL Story Saddlebag, those guys for four big companies got my best stuff that night. And when the party of 12 went downstairs, golly, everyone was gone and the place was being vacuumed.

King doesn't seem to understand that, if you're trying to sell a group of people (say, Silverado), it probably doesn't help to then say you gave a better, more engaged, presentation/shmooze fest to a competitor.  But whatever. 
 
I would also like to point out that Ditka's closes at 10 PM, Sun-Thurs, and 11 PM on Fri-Sat.   So...King stayed out, most likely, until 10:15 or so.  What an animal.

 

6. I think someone's going to have to tell me, if the Patriots really wanted Emmanuel Sanders in restricted free agency, why they signed him to a one-year, $2.5 million contract. That's like saying, "Well, we sort of want him, but we're really not sure, and we'll give him a D-minus deal, and maybe Pittsburgh will just take the third-round pick in return." I don't get the gesture. At all.

"I could think about this a bit, or ask someone, but I won't.  I'll just shrug and imply that the Patriots were being dumb."
 

7. I think for those questioning the Steelers matching the offer and forgoing a third-round pick and paying $2.5 million for a potential starting receiver for one year on a playoff contender ... I mean, really. Why wouldn't they match? Unless they were rich at the position and thought they could get by without a marginal starting player making marginal starter's money?

Wait, wha?   If it's a no-brainer for the Steelers, why is it such a questionable offer by the Patriots? 
 

Sanders had 44 catches for a team-high 14.2 yards per catch. He'll likely start alongside Antonio Brown. Folks, that's worth $2.5 million, a starting wide receiver on a team that's going to send the quarterback back to pass 575 times.

Oh, right.  The Steelers like to pass and the Patriots don't.  (?)
 
 
 

 

[Leather]

e. Memo to MLB: Maybe scheduling the Mets to start the season in Queens (six games), Philadelphia (three) and outdoors in Minneapolis (three, minus Sunday's sleet-out), and then Colorado (three), with temperatures for one game this week scheduled to be in the teens, wasn't such a great idea.

 

Question to King: Where would you have had the Mets play? And, before you answer that, consider that you're suggesting that no team should play in those locations for the first 2 weeks of the season. And if you're suggesting that, then you are also implying that the Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, Cubs, and White Sox should also play in domes/warm weather places. Let's see how that's possible. Show your work.

 
 

f. Memo to MLB II: Maybe scheduling the Yankees to start the season in the Bronx (three games), Detroit (three games) and Cleveland (two coldouts, one game) wasn't such a great idea.

 
Oh, Cleveland, too!

"Hey, everyone who roots for a team above the Mason Dixon line that isn't in a dome:  Peter King is suggesting that you never get to see your for the opening two weeks of the year because this one year, we've had particularly shitty weather across the northern states.  He thinks that this is such a good idea, that he's posting it online for everyone to see."
 

g. Memo to MLB III: Maybe scheduling the Twins outdoors in the north for the first six weeks of the season wasn't such a good idea.

 

"In the North"? As a Minneapolis resident, I can tell you that everyone here is as flummoxed by this freak weather as anyone. In the four Aprils since Target Field has opened, this is by far the worst. In fact, this is looking to be the worst April in Minnesota's recorded history. So, I am comfortable saying with confidence that I speak for everyone in the Gopher State when I say: Go fuck yourself, King.

 
 

j. Beernerdness: Doubt I am the first, but I managed to have an Iron Mike's Ale (nice and dark) and glass of his Iron Mike's The Icon Cabernet (bold, heavy on the blackberry aroma) in the same evening. And I'm a better man for it.

One beer and one wine. Animal.
 

 

[Corsi]

The Five Things I Have Learned About the Business of Our Business:
 
1. Dress is pretty casual. I have never dressed well consistently, but I figured I should on this trip, and so I went in with a pinstripe suit to chat with the Chevy Silverado folks. Not a tie in the room. Oooops. Same on the tour of agencies and companies in Chicago.
 
2. Youth is served. Oldest of nine people in the room for one of the meetings: 30. Impressed with the intelligence of a room full of execs young enough to be my children. They do what people should do when they're trying to figure if there's a match between them and a media company: They think and brainstorm and throw out ideas that get dismissed a minute later. A cool experience.
 
3. We on this side of the biz always think the ads will be there, but ... There's money out there. That I see. But you have to work for it, and you have to convince people why their money will be better spent on this site than on sites and TV shows significantly more mountainous.
 
4. Thought I'd be meeting in some pretty stuffy board rooms. Not. Met most of Casual Friday with different agencies, and their meeting places are just as casual. In one place they brainstorm on the wall (a giant dry-erase wall) with markers.
 
5. You do a better job if you can drink well out there. I have closed Ditka's. Now that is a point of pride. I'm not usually a bar-closer or a restaurant-closer, but when the Iron Mike's Icon Cabernet flowed, I got a pretty good second wind. Talk about emptying the NFL Story Saddlebag, those guys for four big companies got my best stuff that night. And when the party of 12 went downstairs, golly, everyone was gone and the place was being vacuumed.

 

1.  He's an executive representing Sports Illustrated.  He should be wearing a suit to these meetings, even if the agency people aren't.
 
2. "Loved seeing those youngsters get their ideas shot down Rambo-style.  A cool experience."
 
3. Well, yeah.  It's called a sales pitch, dummy.
 
4. What the fuck?  Where has this guy been for the past ten years?  Did he expect a chalkboard?  Of course they use a whiteboard.  And what exactly is casual about a whiteboard?  This guys is SO out of touch.
 
5. Aren't I just the greatest?  Treating these agency folks to drinks and all my wonderful stories.  Is there any double these stories are all about him, rather than anything NFL related?

 

[lostjumper]

This weeks column is quite possibly his worst column ever. The very little football he discusses is utter crap(his draft work, or lack of work I should say, and having no understanding of why the Pats offered that offer sheet to Sanders), and his take on golf, baseball, and business is hilariously bad.

 

[DJnVa]

So, the Pats, who offered Sanders a bigger deal than the first one the Steelers offered, didn't really want him.  But, the Steelers did, even though they low-balled him and without the Pats offer Sanders would have made far less this season.

 

[Freddy Linn]

I can't get over the whiteboard thing.

 

[ifmanis5]

Dr. Z suffers a stroke but this lazy fat bag of crap is perfectly healthy. If Zimmerman was healthy enough to read this 'NFL column' he would suffer another stroke or never stop vomiting. Probably both.

 

[soxfan121]

Moved from THAT thread:
 
 
 

For a split second, I thought Wolf Blitzer was going to THAT Peter King.

 
Well, it did happen outside a Starbucks. I'll bet he's devastated.

 

[tims4wins]

Looking forward to PK's haiku on yesterday's events. Will he go with the never forget theme, tie it to his "running" hobby, talk about how Boston overreacted like the NYC snowstorm a couple months ago... I have no idea!

 

[soxfan121]

SI.com chose Peter to write their "keep your chin up, Boston" piece. 
 
drleather - I want that battleship of bullshit cut into thousands of razor blades by the time I sober up, OK? 

 

[Turrable]

Have your chips ready, folks
 

 

[Corsi]

Looking forward to PK's haiku on yesterday's events. Will he go with the never forget theme, tie it to his "running" hobby, talk about how Boston overreacted like the NYC snowstorm a couple months ago... I have no idea! 

 
 

The Marathon Sports store, at the finish line ... bought five pairs of shoes there, including the one I used for the 2010 half-marathon I ran.

 



 

And, watching from 200 miles away -- I live in Manhattan now -- I was struck by the rush of cops, EMS workers and fire fighters,

 


 


This column has been written 500 times over the past two days, and all 500 are better than what he barfed up.  It's entirely formulaic, unimaginative, and probably took him fifteen minutes to write.  

 

[pappymojo]

 
 
This column has been written 500 times over the past two days, and all 500 are better than what he barfed up.  It's entirely formulaic, unimaginative, and probably took him fifteen minutes to write.  

No other writer was able to so eloquently tie this horrible event to the factoids that Peter King once ran a half marathon and now lives in Manhattan.

 

[ifmanis5]

I live in Manhattan now

 

[pappymojo]

I bought sneakers there
ran in a half marathon
in Manhattan now

 

[Corsi]

In tough times like these
Recall my half marathon
We all should. Often.

 

[Leather]

The Marathon Sports store, at the finish line ... bought five pairs of shoes there, including the one I used for the 2010 half-marathon I ran.

Can we just stop for a minute and admire the terrible prose here?
 
1) The completely unnecessary and distracting useage of the ellipsis.  The correct punctuation would probably have been a semi-colon, but even simply inserting an "I" would be clearer and less cheesily melodramatic.
2) The redundant useage of "I" after the comma.  "The shoes I USED for the 2010 half-marathon I RAN."
3) The unnecssary comma before "at the finish line." 
 
Jesus.  Even applying some simple, 9th grade level editing gives us: 
 
"I bought five pairs of shoes at the Marathon Sports store at the finish line, including the one I used for a 2010 half-marathon."
 

Friendly, helpful and encouraging to a decidedly out-of-shape guy like me.

 
What was? The pair of shoes?  The Marathon?   Obviously he's referring to the store, but even then it doesn't make sense.  Did the store itself speak to King?   What is the fucking subject of this sentence? 
 
I get that he's trying to wax poetic here, but that doesn't mean you get to just scrap the rules of grammar.   It's like he didn't even bother to proof read this stuff, yet he's passing it off as a labor of love.
 

That Atlantic Fish restaurant ... ate there four or five times.

 
Are there missing words in his head that he edited out and replaced with the elipsis?  Again, a semi-colon or an M-dash would work here.  An elipsis does not.
 
And before the defenders try to take me down a peg by saying "Oh, who cares, dude, we all know what he means!"  Fuck that.  He's a professional writer, for god's sake.   This is like a musician showing up with an out-of-tune instrument. 
 

That Abe and Louie's ... drank there a few times. That Lenscrafters ... made the glasses I'm wearing right now.

 
And, ok, what the fuck?  Who the fuck cares?  WHO THE FUCK CARES?! 
 
How is this supposed to help people who weren't there, or don't have a personal connection to Boston, relate?  By imagining fat Peter King wandering around the scene of the tragedy?  How self-absorbed can one guy be?
 

In fact, when I picked up a pair there once and tied Bailey outside,
they said, "Bring her in!" And so Bailey, my golden retriever, came inand sniffed all the lab techs.

Jesus.  King is off the fucking wagon.
 
Does he really think that relaying a benign anecdote about his dog from three years ago is going to help A) readers not in/from Boston come to understand the tragedy; and/or B) help readers in/from Boston heal a little bit?  Because that's the point of these columns, isn't it?   To, for once, discuss what's important in life, and how tragedy like Monday's, no matter the geographic location, is really something that should affect us all, because it could have been anyone there, at that moment.  It could have been me at a Twins game, it could have been you walking down the street to work.  And we should all stop and think about what this means, and how sad it all is that we live in a world where something so unexpected could happen at any time,  and that we should work hard to make sure that we all get as many moments on this planet and with our loved ones as possible.
 
But no.  King is pissed off because now, whenever he walks down that block, instead of thinking about how Bailey got to hump a salesman's leg, he has to think of a bombing.  What a drag.
 

And the street ... Boylston Street, where the marathon ends. That's whereI waited for my late brother, Bob, when he ran the marathon 12 years ago, cramping badly at the end.

Again with the elipsis...but moreover, you see, King is just like the victims, because he too has a sad memory of a marathon;  his late, cramping, brother.
 

That's where I waited four years ago for my brother-in-law as he finished, in crowds so thick we couldn't get within 50 yards of the
finish line.

 


Ok.  So King's focus through two paragraphs has been on two things: 1) his personal memories of the area of the bombing; and 2) his family members that have run in the Marathon. 
 
And I'll just stop there.  I give up.  What a fucking shit face ass clown.
 

 

[mandro ramtinez]

I have wanted to say this to a bunch of posts on Facebook about the tragedy and it could not be more appropriate for PK:  "Hey Peter, it's not about you."

 

[Dropkick Izzy]

Hey Dr, that's his dead brother Bob, you insensitive bastard.

 

[Corsi]

That's where I waited for my late brother, Bob, when he ran the marathon 12 years ago, cramping badly at the end.

 
This sentence grammatically means that Peter was cramping badly at the end of the Marathon.  Poor guy.  Wonder if he had just eaten a batch of bad clams from Atlantic Fish?

 

[Corsi]

Also, what does the first sentence of the column even mean?
 
 

Monday, and Boston, struck us all in different ways. 

 
He couldn't even be bothered to write the first sentence correctly?