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May 16, 2006

The Curse Of T-Shirts With Slogans

McNabb has officially lost it: he's wearing passive-aggressive t-shirts with slogans.

Diligent Eagles geek that I am, I made a point of not only reading the news reports from this past weekend's minicamp, but also watching the press conference videos posted on the Birds' site. (It's really the only way to be sure of what's being reported; sometimes the blathermonkeys distort the context or tone of things in their accounts. But that's an argument for another post.) Generally speaking, it was good to have some fresh Eagles content from the main characters in the drama: Coach Reid, the coordinators, Dawk, and, of course, Donovan McNabb, making his first public press appearance since his black-on-black crime comments from Super Bowl week.

I'll admit to being more than a little curious about what 5 was going to say. The local media hadn't had a chance to ask him about TO in months! You can imagine they had a lot of ground to cover!

For the most part, the McNabb press conference was pretty boring. He trotted out the usual keep-them-at-arm's-length-with-bad-jokes routine that increasingly smells to me like someone who's using humor as a last-gasp/ desperate attempt to hide his insecurities. But hey, who am I to judge, I don't even know the guy. And, as noted numerous times before in this space, the Philly sports press are a miserable and hateful lot -- he has every reason to keep the guard up.

If I noticed anything watching the video, it was that despite his tough posturing about "I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to win ballgames," he repeated this one tacky catchphrase a couple times: "If you can't trust your family, who can you trust?" Okay, okay, it was cheesy, but given the much ballyhooed locker room discord from last season, we'll cut him some slack.

Or at least I thought I was going to cut him some slack. Until I read that said cheesy aphorism was also silkscreened on the t-shirt that McNabb was wearing.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

McNabb is wearing t-shirts with slogans? Slogans that are "supposed to send a message"? To training camp? Oh no. He's completely lost it.

Never mind that the whole "t-shirts with slogans" thing is a little high-school football camp of McNabb. We'll let him slide there. And never mind that it seemed a bit of a heavy-handed gesture in the wake of last season. I'm just freaked out because it calls to mind the last Eagles quarterback who showed up for camp wearing a t-shirt with a slogan; here I speak of course of Randall Cunningham and his t-shirt that read "Dangerously Committed." Get it? Randall usually wasn't all that into it, but that one year, that one year he was really into it. He was going to try his best. All the time. Just like it said in his contract!

The thing is, everyone knew Randall was crazy. Seriously. From-another-planet/ total-space-cadet crazy. But McNabb? I mean, we all knew that he had something of a penchant for occasionally behaving like a delicate little emotional flower. So maybe he was a little sensitive. We didn't know he was going crazy as well.

Dude, Donovan, forget the media. They're inside your head. They don't mean anything. You don't need to show them your t-shirt to make them believe you want the team to get along. Worse still, you definitely don't need to bring up "family" on your shirt, because the world has seen entirely too much of yours (I know, I know, the good people at Campbell's need to sell soup.) It makes you seem weak, and more than a little bit weird. I don't wear t-shirts about team spirit to work. People would laugh at me if I did. Think about that.

Thus we have today's poll question (where "today" equals "our first-ever"): which Eagles QB's shirt was more crazy/ pitiful? Cunningham's admission that he was kind of out to lunch in previous years (but not that one year), or McNabb's desperate attempt to demonstrate how everyone on the team loved each other and how they were one big happy family who took group baths in oversized bowls of Chunky Soup? Feel free to provide additional color in the comments section.

Go Birds.

Posted by thatkid at May 16, 2006 12:08 AM under Philly , Sports

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