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The Life of Silver Keeping warm on a cold night in Atlanta
Posted: Tuesday January 25, 2000 09:20 PM
First things first. Leaving Jacksonville, a cesspool of insanity, was no easy task. I was running on three hours of sleep on my way to the airport. I'm still haunted by the specter of those Titans fans in my way while I was leaving: some Titanic hats and such, proclaiming allegiance to a team they couldn't have given a rat's ass about a year ago. I'm not exactly moved by the Tennessee fans and their quest for deliverance. But we are now here in Atlanta ... where it's like two degrees. Josh and I managed to make it here with a combined 15 bags of luggage. We needed room because we had to go shoe shopping. Actually, I guess there are a few bowling balls in there and about 5,000 Jevon Kearse clips, all saying the same exact thing. You accumulate stuff on the road. Back in Jacksonville, we weren't able to have the proper sushi experience, but here we found a pretty good spot in the Nikko hotel. After dinner, we figured we'd justify our existence by doing some work. The Titans were at some outdoor place answering questions in the cold. They're shivering and by Sunday I'm sure will have some nasty virus that will keep them from playing well. Why don't they just award the next Super Bowl to Buffalo? Brilliant. Naturally we went straight to the hotel bar after that and then tried to attack the Buckhead social scene. We went to a place called (what was it again?) ... Mako's. There were some Titans players there. Neil O'Donnell was buying beer for many of his teammates and just about admitted he's having a heck of a lot more fun in this Super Bowl than he did when he was the Man for the Steelers. When he was the Man there, he had nothing to say. "I'll talk to you if you're lucky," with nothing to say. He was a bigtime quarterback with an attitude. But now he's money. He's a good guy, a huge Peter King aficionado -- as am I -- and so we spent some time talking about that. We moved on from there (let's call it post-midnight) to the Tongue and Groove. There we saw Ronnie Lott, who I covered back in the day. I gave him a hug and congratulated him for his induction into the Hall of Fame, which will happen on Saturday. He merely got mad and said that I was jinxing him. And any time Ronnie Lott is mad at you, it's time to run. We ended up at a bar called Swingers, maybe a few years past the prime retro craze, but the place was tolerable for a beer ... and not much more. Although we did watch my very esteemed colleague Alex Marvez devour a dozen oysters. By then it was time to shut it down. After a whopping five hours of sleep time we hit media day, where some dork in a giant football costume was being led around by Germans resembling Dieter (Touch MY MONKEY!) of Mike Myers fame, I picked up a bunch of players' nightlife plans. Now I'm in desperate search of the nearest Smoothie King. Tonight, I think we get a ride on the Todd Lyght express.
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