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I came across Robert Weintraub’s Slate polemic against Brett Favre worship. Reading about sports in Slate is sort of like listening to Michele “Mee-Shell” Norris from NPR’s All Things Considered doing color commentary at a rodeo, but I read it anyway.

Favre is certainly a great football player and I have no reason to believe he is any worse of a human being than any other professional athlete with a history of womanizing and performance-enhancing drug abuse. However, I agree with Weintraub that there is no excuse for the continual petitions directed his way from sportswriters and commentators. (I’m not as sure as Weintraub is about the reasons for the genuflection.) An extraterrestrial whose only exposure to Earth was through the NFL might assume that “Favre” was a mighty dragon-slaying hero of old, or perhaps the household god of a large group of blaze-orange-clad snowmobile operators. Indeed, commentators talk about Favre in a manner usually reserved for the recently-deceased.

The Slate article was a bit vitriolic in places, but it was most on the mark in its skewering of sycophantic, unctuous Sports Illustrated columnist Peter King, who Weintraub calls “Favre’s Boswell.”

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading King’s column, you don’t know that it is perennially peppered with

1. self-consciously “insider” nonsense,
2. “coffee nerd” advice, consisting primarily of thoughts on which coffee-flavored milkshake is best at Starbucks this week*,
3. pointless anecdotes about his daughters’ flagging high-school and college athletic careers,
4. pathetic commentary on the state of popular music, and
5. King’s uncompelling political opinions.

Even worse, Peter King arbitrarily bolds the names of celebrities, making his column read like Parade magazine or the Onion’s Jackie Harvey. Finally, at least twice a month, King slips into a style reminiscent of a teenage girl’s diary, rhapsodizing about his latest encounter with Favre as would a shy girl after getting passed a note from the most popular guy in school.

* Man, I don’t even drink coffee, but I know that Starbucks is to actual coffee nerds what T.G.I. Friday’s is to legitimate food snobs, or what commercial classical radio (“Vivaldi and opera overtures, all the time!”) is to legitimate music snobs. Sure, it’s better than McDonald’s, but no “coffee connoisseur” patronizes Starbucks exclusively.

Randy Moss, as pictured pantomiming a moon to the Lambeau crowd in my previous post, provides the perfect knot to tie together the threads of media Favre-worship and Peter King’s slobbering gibberish. In King’s 1/10 column, he demonizes Moss in order to lick the wounds of his hero Favre:

Moss will be fined by the NFL. I guarantee it. I don’t know the amount. Maybe $10,000. But this was classless. Simulation-mooning Lambeau is like mooning the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Nonsensical. After the game, no one could figure out why he’d done it.

"It wasn’t mean,” he told me and a few other reporters at his locker. "I was having fun. It was more a fun thing than a hatred thing. My teammates loved it. I’m probably gonna catch hell, but the Green Bay Packers fans know: I don’t forget [shit].”

Evidently he was upset about things Green Bay fans had said to him on previous trips to Lambeau, though he didn’t elaborate. Whatever his motivation was, it wasn’t cool.

Moss “didn’t elaborate?” Did he need to? Perhaps King ignored the insults, obscenities, and signs hurled at Moss by drunken oafs wearing wild game on their heads. Perhaps King forgets November 14, 2004, when the University of Wisconsin tuba section — in a stadium-sanctioned display at Lambeau — marched across the field and mocked a sidelined Randy Moss? (That’s what I’d call “bush league,” and “classless,” Pete.) I don’t see how an individual player doing something goofy and perhaps vulgar (but not indecent) is any worse than having the official third-quarter entertainment taunt an injured player. Furthermore, as this web site points out, Moss’ “mooning” display is tame compared to most of FOX’s prime-time fare.

What’s really unclear is what precisely King was trying to say with his comparison between Lambeau Field and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Was he saying that both were extremely important to a fairly small percentage of the US population? That both were filled with people who were easily offended by cheeky gestures? That neither had ever known the slightest impropriety until a dastardly, fully-clothed athlete turned and bent at the waist and knees? I’m sorry, Mr. King, but once you elevate Lambeau Field to the level of any religious institution, you’ve lost any shred of credibility or perspective.

Moss is not rightly in trouble with the media because he is a malicious pre-felon or an iconoclast who has nothing better to do than tear down the “sacred” traditions of Lambeau Field. Moss is neither of these things — rather, he is a gifted, emotional player who works hard and has some stupid (but harmless, at least since 2002) outbursts when he is frustrated. Rather, Moss is in trouble with the media because he has called them out for their onanistic focus on his more-or-less inconsequential antics, telling them that they’ve blown things out of proportion.

I’ve watched a lot of Vikings games, and last Sunday was the first time I’ve seen Moss celebrate a touchdown. He usually opts to toss the ball to a referee or to a fan in the stands. Less-talented, endzone-dancing loudmouths like Terrell Owens and Chad Johnson get a pass from sportswriters. However, Randy Moss — perhaps the best wide receiver ever to play the game — strikes a pose to cap Minnesota’s near-flawless win over the heavily-favored Packers, and suddenly he’s a terrible, terrible person. The perpetual fawning of Favre-worshipping knobs like King sets up a chain of dominoes, and the media’s inability to admit that they vastly underestimated the Vikes knocks them down. We’ll hear about little else this week in the sports press.

Other football news: in a move that recalls a rich man stealing sheep from the poor, EA Sports decided that owning the exclusive rights to the NFL wasn’t enough and that they needed exclusive video-game rights to the Arena Football League, too. The AFL commissioner claims that EA will help to “grow the AFL” and add value to the brand. Nonsense. There is no positive reason for EA to develop a game for a league that most Americans don’t realize exists; rather, this move is solely intended to extinguish an avenue of competition for Sega, 909, and Microsoft. If “AFL 2006” is really any good, I will recant, but I’m not holding my breath.