Merry Christmas. Here’s a special Christmas greeting to someone who actually gets it.
Charley Walters writes a column for the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. Known as “The Shooter,” he pitched for the Minnesota Twins in the late 1960s.
Walters is a terrific columnist, not because he’s going to challenge Thomas Boswell for a writing award, but because he’s a great reporter who writes from the point of view of the people who play the game and the ones who actually buy tickets and watch it.
He’s right a lot more often than he’s wrong. In fact, his insights are often sensational and, you guessed it, he’s seldom wrong.
On Thursday, he wrote a column with Tommy Kramer, the former Vikings quarterback. It’s the first place I’ve read or heard that the Brett Favre-Brad Childress “blow up” was a crock of media-created bullshit.
“Tommy Kramer watched the Vikings suffer an embarrassing loss to the Carolina Panthers on Sunday night, and Kramer, who for 13 seasons was a free-spirited quarterback for Vikings coaches Bud Grant and Jerry Burns, has followed the subsequent headlines depicting the sideline disagreement between Vikings coach Brad Childress and his star QB, Brett Favre,” Walters wrote.
“‘Bunch of nothing is all that is,’” Kramer said Wednesday. “‘Those things happen all the time. Childress was just trying to protect Favre because (offensive left tackle Bryant) McKinnie was getting pushed back by (defensive end Julius) Peppers like he was on roller skates.’”
Thank you, Charley Walters. And thank you, Tommy Kramer.
The Minnesota Vikings have lost two of their last three games because their offensive line can’t block anybody. Against Carolina, Phil Loadholt and Bryant McKinnie were terrible. That 26-7 shellacking had little to do with Favre or even Adrian Peterson (another whipping boy). It had everything to do with an offensive line that has not been very good and if they aren’t better on Monday night, the Vikings could get thumped in Chicago.
Here’s a little Sports Journalism 101: The Favre-Childress story is what’s known around the NFL as a “Tuesday story.” In a sport like football, where teams practice six days to play one, there is so little to write about in the middle of a week late in the season, that journalists fabricate stories in order to earn a living.
The Favre-Childress feud was a fabrication from the moment the two had a discussion on the sidelines and, once again, when these gutless newspaper reporters snivel, “Don’t shoot the messenger,” they’re wrong.
The world would indeed be a much better place if we did shoot the messenger from time to time.
There is so much undeniable bullshit in the mainstream media that it’s becoming embarrassing. What makes it worse, is that far too many people read it, hear it and believe it.
It was Thomas Jefferson who wrote: “As for what is not true, you will always find abundance in the newspapers.”
The alleged Favre-Childress feud is a classic example of Jefferson’s insight.
And it was also a great source for Walters to write the contrary opinion. As the business model of the daily newspaper drives them all closer to extinction, we get a mob mentality and we seldom get the contrary opinion. Heck, we seldom get the one-phone-call opinion anymore. Nice work, Shooter.