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Sapp blasts off
© St. Petersburg Times LAKE BUENA VISTA -- The familiar voice roared, loud and unrestrained, and for a moment you wondered if the walls could hold it. The big man moved quickly down the hall, his noise rolling ahead of him, and the narrow hallway sounded like a subway station.
Warren Sapp is talking again.
This is the sound of Sapp, delightful and destructive, funny and infuriating. It is a full-volume force of nature, a blunt object to the senses. It is either the sound of music or of misery. You decide. That's the thing about Sapp. He is outrageous and unapologetic, outspoken and opinionated. He talks too fast. He laughs too loud. He says too much. He goes too far. He steps on too many toes. He amuses a lot of people with what he says, and he makes a lot of others uncomfortable.
Also, there is this. He tells the truth. "I never back off facts," Sapp said, sitting on a folding table. "Stop me if I'm telling you a lie." Say what you want about Sapp. Suggest he should lower the volume. Suggest he should increase the production. Suggest he should keep certain comments to himself. Hey, when a man sends out strong opinions, he has to expect strong opinions in return. Be careful, however, not to dismiss his raw, scalding honesty. Besides, isn't it fun? Take, for example, Sapp's full-scale nuclear response to the barbs of Giants defensive end Michael Strahan. Sapp had suggested that Strahan's record-setting sack of Brett Favre last season should carry an asterisk, and Strahan responded by calling Sapp "a jackass." Strahan also chided Sapp for not being able to get beyond the first round of the playoffs, of wanting to be him and for "having a McDonald's" next to his house. "This from a guy with those two big old front teeth," Sapp said. "Tell him we have a good dental program in this league. That Mr. Ed-looking (extremely bad word)." And off we go. This is great stuff, this war of words between two of the best known defensive players in the league. It is also great stuff, because normally, such a debate would be buried beneath a mountain of cliches and, eventually, both players would get together to make an AT&T commercial. Not this time. This time, we have a long-distance smackdown going on.
Sapp is absolutely correct. It was a bogus sack. An absolute rule of thumb: A player cannot get a sack on a running play. The Packers called a running play. There were no receivers going out. Brett Favre just rolled out, slid and let Strahan pick up the record. Strahan doesn't think Sapp should bring that up. He thinks Sapp isn't the right person to bring it up? Who does, then? "He had 21 1/2 sacks," Sapp said. "That last one doesn't count. He should have been man enough to say it. I promise you, I wouldn't have taken it. I wouldn't. I wouldn't even have been on the field. I'd have said, 'I had my shot, and I missed.' "Please. If I told every d-lineman in the world that I will put you in the game, and you're down 15 with two minutes to go with no timeouts, nobody wants to go in. There's no possibility of a sack. The game is over. People kneel down. They run the ball. It's a nine-on-seven drill by then. "Who was the intended receiver? You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know this. I'm from Florida, and Cape Canaveral is right around the corner from my home. But I don't build rockets, and I don't tell them how to fly. But I know what belly weak looks like, and I know what a sack looks like. Thank you." Understand this. To a defensive lineman, getting a sack is like climbing a mountain. Getting one handed to you, then, is like hitching a ride on a ski lift. "It's a cheat," Sapp said. "It's cheating all the great defensive linemen who have played the game, the hunters like Deacon Jones and Dan Hampton and Reggie White. I ride in the company of men. Because I want to be with them one day, or ahead of them. "I don't see the issue here. Who besides him is calling it a sack? He talked about me going out of the playoffs in the first round. Wow. He didn't even get in. It's a beautiful thing when someone is ranting and rambling about nothing. In that Super Bowl two years ago, do you remember him making a play? I don't." Part of the problem, of course, is that it is Sapp who is talking, and Sapp does a lot of it. Part of the problem is that Sapp is coming off a six-sack season. If he had, say, 15 last year, people would act as if he were Nostradamus writing in quatrains. For instance, remember when Sapp took a lot of grief for ripping offensive coordinator Les Steckel. He was right, you know. Steckel was awful. Remember when Sapp said that heads would roll if the Bucs didn't make the Super Bowl. The Bucs didn't. The heads did. Remember when Sapp said Keyshawn Johnson should spend more time in the offseason program? On a team trying to build an offense, who is to say he's wrong. (Although I think more of Johnson's Sunday afternoon production than Sapp's.) Ah, but Sapp is a convenient target, and lately, a good deal of people have been holding his outspokenness against him, as if he were stopping to make his comments on the way to the passer. It is true that the more sights a player provides, the better he tends to sound. Frankly, Sapp wasn't satisfied with Sapp last year, either. "I wanted to slit my wrists," he said. "That's how I felt. I wanted to slit my wrists. I couldn't help my ballclub. I couldn't push off scrub linemen, let alone talking about the ones who play pretty good." He is straight ahead, always attacking, showing no mercy. You ask Sapp if he ever has said anything he wishes he hadn't. Sapp nods. "Last year, the stuff about (Mark) Gastineau," he said. "I should have raised the bar on that, and I lowered it. I was wrong. He had made a mistake in his life and paid for it, and I've made mistakes in my life. He was the one who paved the way. He was the first sack-dance man. "That and (injuring) Jerry Rice are the two things I regret," Sapp said. "And I couldn't help the play with Rice. I was just trying to get him down." Sapp gets up, walks a little further down the hall. He stops at the elevator. "You know what I should say to Strahan?" he says, his voice growing louder, his eyes lighting up at his own thought. "I should say this. You ... lost ... to ... Dilfer." Sapp stepped into the elevator, and he was gone. Only the sound of his laughter trailed behind.
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