This is a tale of wasted time and impeccable timing. We headed to The Red Dot of Doom on First Avenue to do a quick-hitting story for the .com about the MP109 press conference. Kevin McHale gets points for taking questions for as long as he did (maybe 45 minutes or so). He loses points because it appears as though the status quo is the way things are going to go. Really. Nothing new. He’s coming back. Dan Barreiro asked him the question of why he deserves the chance to come back and fix the mess when Flip Saunders and Dwane Casey didn’t. And really, there’s no good answer to that question. … The Raging Violet, really the team’s only asset, won’t be traded. Dead Man Walking is still alive, as McHale said he wants him back to coach the team despite a 12-30 finish. McHale wants to make some trades, but with 12 players under contract — many of them ugly long-term deals that he either approved or traded for — trading more than garbage for garbage seems nearly impossible. He wants the young guys to get more playing time. Sounds good, but really that should have been the plan this past year. He wants to stay because he wants to clean up this mess. Sounds nice, but it’s only getting messier. Their best hope rests on the long odds of Ping-Pong balls. If you thought there was apathy this year, wait until next year.

We finished up duties over there at around noon and dashed (OK, walked briskly … OK, just walked) over to the Minneapolis Central Library, where Vikings coach Brad Childress was scheduled to read some poetry. He was one of several readers, and much to our delight, we arrived about 2 minutes before his time slot (he was right after Ta-coumba Aiken, a public artist and muralist; and he was right before Nate Dungan, lead singer of Trailer Trash … yeah, this was an interesting mix). So, we really weren’t sure what to expect. This is what we received: The selected poem, “The Bridge Builder,” impacted Childress because he reads it as being about how adolescence isn’t easy and that somewhere along the line a wiser, older person, “Got you through tougher times.” He first heard the poem (which you can read right here) from his high school football coach, who had it memorized. Childress didn’t memorize it, but he did do a nice job of reading it. Our only grumble, really was the lame, “I’m not sure I’ll quit my day job,” line Childress pulled out at the beginning of his time on stage. Other than that, the Vikings’ coach acquitted himself well. Bonus points for having the guts to read in front of a crowd. So sorry, no jokes out of this one.

But we did have a thought on the way back to the office. Childress’ “kick-ass offense” comment has basically taken a pretty decent — if a little antiquated — expression of excitement or greatness and turned it into something that, at least locally, at least when talking about sports, can only be used ironically. And that’s just a shame.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 1:13 pm and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.