Chile's Corner
PLAYOFFS?!?!?
By Chile Hidalgo
You can count on a few things when any subset of my five ex-roommates from Allston (of which Dave is one) get together. We'll probably have a few drinks and could very well end up drinking the dregs of whatever the host has stored in his liquor cabinet before the evening is out. The evening will probably start with some sort of sporting event on television and end with the best choice of shows available at 2 in the morning (past choices have included an Easter cartoon in Spanish, an infomercial for a set of swords, and replays of the game with which we started the evening). We'll make fun of Doug, one of the roommates.
And if there's any mention of playoffs in any sport, one of us will incredulously yell out "Playoffs?!? You're talking to me about playoffs?" in their best Jim Mora voice.
And we'll all give a chuckle and do our own variations of "playoffs?" in our own Jim Mora voice. Invoking Mora is funny every time. Much like making fun of Doug. Unlike making fun of Doug, however, it seems like other people find the Mora clip nearly as funny as we do. I've even thrown it out there in mixed company to good results. At some point a couple of years ago, ESPN started running the clip a couple of times during the weekly pregame shows. Hearing people mention it and seeing the clip one or two times a year is one of the little things that gets me excited about football season.
A middle-of-the-pack coach commenting on the chances of a middle-to-bottom-of-the-pack team making the playoffs shouldn't have this kind of staying power. After all, this happened five years ago. The film of the press conference is already starting to acquire that aged look of 1970s and 1980s ESPN Classic football games. But Mora's losing it after being asked a seemingly harmless question -- something to the effect of "how would you rate the Colts' chances of making the playoffs?" -- was so unusual and unexpected that we're still talking about it years after the fact.
Mora's answer is one of the great sports quotes out there, up with Allen Iverson's "you're talking about practice?" press conference a couple of years later and Patrick Roy's "I can't hear what he's saying because I have two my Stanley Cup rings plugging my ears," about a yapping Jeremy Roenick. Part of the reason I remember those quotes so many years after the fact has to do with the fact that they're unscripted and out of the ordinary.
By dint of contrast, I'm sitting here writing this while watching Monday Night Countdown, and Mark Schlereth has just shown us all how competitive he is by racing an 11-year-old Broncos fan up some sort of inflatable climbing wall. Stuie Scott said "Stink just held back a small boy to win that!" about 12 times in a row. And as I was typing this, the Rock (of WWE fame) just appeared at Invesco field in Denver (with someone dressed as a giant pompom jumping up and down behind him) and asked the crowd via an ABC-provided microphone if they were ready for some football. With any luck, someone pretty sweet will be Mik'd Up! and we can really round out this column in style.
Incidents like Mora's playoffs rant are funny, but they're also memorable because they happen so infrequently. I spent a long time thinking about other notable quotes, and couldn't come up with any others besides two that Dave reminded me of, Shaq's one about winning championships at every level except high school, college, and the pros when he signed with the Lakers and Kevin Millar's "I'm telling you, don't let us win tonight" before Game 4 of last year's ALCS. And that's it.
I'm not sure what that says about sports today, but I'm fairly sure it's not good. Here's to hoping the Steelers go 0-6 over the next few weeks and someone asks Bill Cowher what he thinks of the Steelers making the playoffs.
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