Talk of the town
QUINTET COMFORTABLE IN FRONT OF MICROPHONES
By John Ryan
Mercury News
URL:http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/sports/football/nfl/oakland_raiders/4995075.htm
SAN DIEGO - Players know the way to stardom. They have to stay focused. They have to bring their A game. They have to do what got them here.
Otherwise, they'll never win Media Day.
Oh, yes, the Raiders and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers will play the Super Bowl in five days, in a relaxed denouement to the real show of Super Bowl week. The main event commences today at Qualcomm Stadium, where the Buccaneers and the Raiders face the press for an hour each.
Crowds will swarm around Rich Gannon, Jerry Rice, Tim Brown, Rod Woodson and Bill Romanowski, as they always do. But everybody's looking for a new story to tell, a new source of entertainment. And the Raiders have plenty of candidates off the beaten path.
Handicapping the race:
• Frank Middleton, the even-money favorite.
It has been two weeks since Big Frank burst on the scene for real, two glorious weeks of bombast and belly laughs.
It started with questions about his blocking tactics, courtesy of New York Jets defensive tackle Josh Evans. It continued with Middleton issuing challenges through the media and then, just to make sure he had been heard, confronting the Jets' sideline before the game. He hasn't let up.
Now he faces his stiffest test yet in hundreds of reporters hanging on his every word. Test? It's a dream come true for the man who could laugh through an audit.
``I have fun everywhere,'' Middleton said. ``I laugh during the game. When I stop having fun, I'm going to stop playing.''
One well-known national reporter covered Warren Sapp during the defensive tackle's first two seasons, when he was developing a reputation as one of the league's mouthiest players. The reporter has since become familiar with Middleton and now says of Sapp, ``I don't think he's in Frank's league.''
• Jerry Porter, 2-1 odds.
He is smart. He is talkative. He is good-looking. He is candid -- overly so, sometimes. And he personifies any bad feelings the Raiders might have regarding Jon Gruden.
Porter says he believes Gruden held him back for two years. Porter's performance this season -- 51 catches, 688 yards and a team-high nine touchdowns -- shows either that he was ready for more in 2001 or he made an incredible leap in 2002.
He certainly did on the field. But who cares about that? More important -- at least today -- his postgame and midweek press briefings have lately become must-hear sessions. He is particularly able, and willing, to take the Raiders' complex offense and explain it in terms Joe Notepad can understand.
The only hole in his multimedia game is his response to the inevitable question of how much he benefits from being around Tim Brown and Jerry Rice. When he got that query last week, he asked the out-of-town reporter with a smile, ``Where are you from?'' That was a perfectly playful way not to raise a ruckus. When asked Sunday, he turned away and didn't want to answer. Eyebrows went up.
Porter has heard that question, oh, maybe 10,000 times in the past two seasons. It really is a silly question at this point. But remember, Media Day is the event where someone asked Doug Williams, ``How long have you been a black quarterback?''
• Napoleon Harris, 5-1.
A communications major at Northwestern, he has designs on a second career in broadcasting. Maybe a role like Michael Irvin's on Fox Sports Net's ``Best Damn Sports Show Period.'' (Hey, he's young. Hopefully he'll find a better use of his talents.)
Harris handled the media gantlet gracefully before the season, when he was thrust into controversy after the Raiders cut Greg Biekert to make room for him. Although he has outgrown that rookie stigma on the field in the season's second half, you can't give a rookie this much of the stage.
Can you?
• Jon Ritchie, 15-1.
Ritchie has always held an inexplicable sway over Raider Nation. Perhaps it's the blood that streams from welts on his forehead that resemble goat horns by season's end. Then there are his poetry musings and music.
His biggest problem will be finding someone among the ink-stained wretches who knows what the heck he's saying. ``It was a little shocking, the alacrity with which he departed,'' Ritchie said of Gruden.
We just don't hear this kind of vocabulary and sentence structure in NFL locker rooms.
• Randy Jordan, 30-1.
Jordan said it best in the victorious locker room Sunday night. ``When I don't have words, you know it's an emotional time,'' he said.
He's right. He is one of the team's top spokesmen and probably its friendliest. At 32, and having lived the life of a fringe special-teams player (he relishes his role as that unit's captain), he brings a dose of real-world perspective that many players lack. He's also one of the Raiders' longest-tenured players, having arrived in 1998.
If he were your neighbor, you'd enjoy talking over the hedges. But today isn't about making acquaintances.
It's about making stars. |
