I was a captive audience for Cowherd’s radio show yesterday – I was stuck in traffic – and I didn’t have any creative ideas for this week, so I decided to try my hand at Fun With Peter King instead.  I now regret this decision.  Here’s a link to the podcast. PK’s section starts at about 23:15.

—

COLIN: I know it’s a cliche question, Peter, but what’s your favorite Super Bowl memory?

PK: Probably the one that stands out more than any of them is the postgame Super Bowl from twenty years ago when Steve Young threw six touchdown passes to decimate the San Diego Chargers…

One tenth of San Diego’s players lost their lives that day!

PK: …and to really take that monkey off his back, that he couldn’t win a Super Bowl, he wasn’t Joe Montana, what I’ll always remember is that afterwards, I was assigned to tail Steve Young for the night…

Can you imagine winning the Super Bowl – the greatest night of your life – and you’re saddled with having PK follow you around like a lovestruck puppy?

PK: …so Young did 24 interviews on the field – it was a humid night in Miami – and at one point I could see he’s really sort of struggling and he says to me “I’m really dehydrated, can you find something for me” so I go underneath the stands, find three bottles of red Gatorade and a couple of cookies and he devours the Gatorade…

…and guzzles the cookies…

PK: …he, me and Lee Steinberg, the agent, get in a car to drive to his hotel afterwards and we get about ten feet out of the parking lot in Miami and Steve Young projectile vomits all over Lee Steinberg’s legs and shoes and without missing a beat Steinberg says “Welp, never washing these shoes again.”

We also would have accepted “Steve Young: tosses touchdowns, and tosses cookies.”

COLIN: [high-pitched laughter]

PK: And we go up to his room at the hotel…

Go on…WAIT NO DON’T!!!

PK: …it’s a mini suite at the Miami Airport Hilton,

Leave it to PK to remember the specific hotel chain twenty years later.  Even Darren Rovell is impressed by this level of #brandawareness.

PK: …and we go up to his room, and he just sort of collapses on the bed and they gotta call Miami Dade Fire Rescue to come up and give him two IV’s so that he doesn’t pass out…

Steve Young, to paramedics: “Do NOT leave me unconscious in this man’s presence. He’s friends with Darren Sharper.”

PK: …he’s just so incredibly dehydrated, and the last thing is, from the back of the room, one of Steve Young’s relatives yells out “Joe WHO?” and Steve Young flashes, he gets this anger, he’s like “No, don’t do that, Joe’s a good guy, don’t do that.” So anyway, that’s sort of my good Super Bowl memory.

Okay, note how incredibly banal and boring this story was. Now imagine experiencing it at perhaps 1/4 the speed because you are transcribing it. For fun, let’s summarize PK’s favorite SUPER BOWL MEMORY.

After a blowout in which the favored 49ers led from wire to wire, winning quarterback Steve Young was dehydrated and asked PK for some Gatorade. Young later threw up, and was ill enough that he later had fluids administered intravenously. Oh, also Young discouraged a family member from speaking ill of his predecessor at the quarterback position.

That’s it. That’s the MOST EXCITING THING that ever happened to PK at the Super Bowl.

COLIN: [deadpan] I’ve never heard that story, so for me it’s the greatest Super Bowl story I’ve ever heard, frankly.

PK: Aw, thanks!

To put it lightly, I do not care for Colin Cowherd.  But if he keeps dropping sarcasm like this on idiots like PK, he’ll overtake Joe Buck on the Rikki-Tikki-Deadly enemies redemption scoreboard in short order.

COLIN: [some crap about USC and Chip Kelly]

PK: [meaningless ambivalent speculation]

The only thing notable about this section, which my sanity prevents me from transcribing, is that a journalist with PK’s broadcast experience STILL repeatedly peppers his speech with the expression “you know”. 

COLIN: [some crap about Tom Coughlin]

PK: [meaningless ambivalent speculation]

COLIN: Listen the officiating hasn’t been ideal. I can bark here on radio and yell, scream, and I have Mike Perriera on but this week Mike Perriera even acknowledged “I give up, I don’t know what’s going on” the NFL wanted younger refs, here you go, the Patriots at the end of that game, there were four calls that went anti-New England…

…slurp, slurp, slurp…

COLIN: …in your dealings with NFL teams, do they complain to YOU about officiating this year?

PK: Uh…

PK stammers for a bit here and you can literally sense his mind churning furiously as he tries to figure out whether it’s possible to answer the question in a meaningful way without potentially offending anyone.

PK: …yeah…I mean, when I was, uh, when I was in Arizona doing this Carson Palmer story a few weeks ago, Bruce Arians is just…not a fan of the officials.

BRUCE DID IT! IT WAS BRUCE! NOT ME! I’M JUST AN INNOCENT MESSENGER!

PK: And, uh, you know, this is not just now, with Arians, but Arians a few weeks ago was telling me, he said “we HAVE to have full-time officials”. My whole argument all along has been it’s not proven that it’s going to help, but I’m not an obstruction when it comes to this.

Okay, this is pretty priceless PK. I absolutely adore his insinuation that he – a humble journalist – is somehow a gatekeeper as to whether or not the NFL has full-time referees. And even, better, he makes this claim of AUTHORITY while proceeding to absolve himself of any RESPONSIBILITY for the impasse that the league and the officials are currently facing.

PK: I think everybody looks at full-time officials I heard Mike Perriera on Fox the other day say “We should have full-time referees”. THAT makes sense to me.

PK’s thought process: I saw someone who I consider to be important making this argument on television. Thus it is a sound argument.

PK: You know, if Gene Steratore, instead of going off to do college basketball games three times a week – which is basically his other job – if he is spending his whole time working on his officiating crew, I’m not positive that would make it any better but it certainly wouldn’t make it any worse.

Would it make things better? MAYBE!

PK: So that is something that in my opinion the league is going to look at very hard in this offseason.

PK sounds like a police commissioner trying to avoid making any kind of meaningful statement in an officer-involved shooting “I know there are four independent videotapes that show the unarmed suspect peacefully surrendering, followed by the officer cuffing the suspect, followed by the officer shooting the suspect in the face repeatedly with his service weapon, followed by the officer reloading his service weapon and shooting the suspect AGAIN, but we’re not going to jump to conclusions until ALL THE FACTS ARE IN.”

PK: I think they’re going to have to get some agreement with the PFRA, the officials union, because the officials union has fought it, they have a lot of guys who have lucrative jobs, other jobs, and the officiating is a part-time job. If they did get full-time officials I think they would lose some good officials, but I think the NFL might be nearing the point where they’d be willing to do that.

Ah, okay, that explains it. The only reason that the eminently reasonable NFL can’t work out a deal with the union for full-time referees is because the referees are GREEDY. They all have such fantastically lucrative day jobs that they are unwilling to turn their backs on their previous careers to trust the promise of long-term employment from a league that only three years ago locked them out over demands (such as their absurd attempt to extort the league into not reneging on their existing pension plan agreement) that amounted to four hundredths of a percent of the league’s $9 billion in annual revenue. 

Okay, there’s more, but this is all I can take. I don’t know how Drew and Ape did it. The men deserve medals.