I’m a busy guy. I’m not special in that regard; you’re busy, too. Life moves forward at a steady clip, rarely affording any of us the chance to slow down and take in all the sights and sounds we aspire to in this big world of ours. Stuff inevitably slips through the cracks, and that’s OK. We’re human.
Which I suppose begins to explain my deep regret at only last night being made aware of this glorious — rant? sermon? pontification? exultation? — by Cowboys legend Michael Irvin. He did this three days ago. It took place on his podcast and is a rebuttal to ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith being, shall we say, aggressively unimpressed by Dallas’ performance in last Thursday’s win over New Orleans. The Playmaker was having precisely none of that, as you probably could gather from the show notes, which read as follows:
“Michael heard what Stephen A. Smith had to say on First Take this Friday about his Dallas Cowboys, and he is HOT. The Playmaker reacts to Stephen A’s NONSENSE, shares his conversation with Dak on the sidelines during Thursday night’s WIN over the New Orleans Saints, and delivers an important message to his Cowboys. HOW BOUT THEM COWBOYS!!!”
Yeah, buddy. Irvin does us the courtesy of playing Stephen A’s take around the 2:30 mark for context before he kicks off the good stuff, around 4:30, by describing his counterpart’s analysis as “Pure mess. Pure D-E-O mess. It stinks up in your nostrils!”
And we’re off to the races from there.
The ensuing 10ish minutes meander from the merits of the win itself to an extended reenactment of his postgame conversation with Dak Prescott to sound engineering to oh-so-much more, all in the name of addressing “a virus in our Dallas Cowboys computer.”
There’s clapping. There’s yelling. There’s ranting. There’s spelling. There’s a reference to a hypothetical phone call with someone in Germany. There is talk of magnets and ether and how the former interact with the latter. It’s absolutely splendid.
“I just couldn’t risk letting it sit for three or four days without debugging the computer,” Irvin explains at the conclusion, before launching into an ad read for Express. Say no more.
