Thanks to tampabays10.com for this image.

I didn’t know who Marquis Cooper was before Sunday and that makes me angry. At myself. Marquis is the kind of NFL player we should all know. His college coach, Rick Neuheisel, describes him as having a “smile [that] could light up a room”, and as being an all-around good-natured, hard-working, regular guy. Just the kind of guy you want to hang around, charismatic, with an interesting occupation, and fun hobbies.

He loved to fish. I love to fish! We could have kicked back and traded stories, like the time a bluefish coughed up the hook it swallowed, sending it hurtling ten feet in the air directly towards my hand, where it promptly took up residence until three pale mates extracted it. He could brag about the 30-inch salmon he landed. I could tell him about life as a sports blogging/podcasting wife and mom and he could tell me about life as a relatively unknown NFL player in a sport filled with larger-than-life celebrities. I can say with absolute certainty that it would be more fun to talk with Marquis Cooper than with Terrell Owens, and I think Owens is a pretty funny guy.

I can identify with Marquis Cooper. And that is precisely why I find it odd that I know more about athletes with whom I cannot identify than about those with whom I can. During the regular and post-season I spend more time watching NFL football than anything else on TV, by a mile. I probably log about 12 hours of game-watching a week, well above any other type of television programming. It would take me nearly a whole season of ‘Seinfeld’, before it was syndicated, to log the same number of hours. A twelve-episode marathon in one weekend dedicated to any one show is a lot to digest, and we do that every week in the NFL. There must be some missed opportunity in those programming hours. Missed opportunities to tell me about guys like Marquis Cooper.

Enough with the celebrity, I want the substance. I want to know about the guys who have to work harder just to stay in the league, and the guys who find a way to make an impact no matter how small their roles. Show me the guys who fight with all their might to survive in a sport that takes its toll, not caring if you’re special teams, a rookie, or an every-down guy. Less PacMan and more David Tyree. (Let’s face it, without the helmet catch the world would not know David Tyree.) With so much time devoted to this passion, I owe it to myself to know more about the guys who are the filling in the NFL pie.

I’m not going to wait to be spoon-fed. I’m going to make a point of uncovering these unsung professional athletes and will write about them here. This is my commitment for the year, and it’s in honor of Marquis Cooper and Corey Smith, two players, as a fan of the NFL, I ought to have known better.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Fantoo Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.