Saturday, January 15, 2005

Mooning USA

Randy Moss is a punk and a cancer, but he has brought mooning to the forefront of pop culture discussion, and to that I say "hell yeah!" For instance, on ESPN's "Pardon The Interruption Show" this week, they've been asking their guests if they have ever mooned anyone:

Sean Salisbury: "Hey, I went to college. Enough said."

Troy Aikman: "I take the Fifth."

Peter King: "Yes, on a bus while playing for my high school baseball team. I was suspended for a game and worse, had to face my father."

Here are one man's favorite mooning memories:

- My first exposure: Walking home from school in the fifth grade and being mooned by the Heritage High School soccer team, passing by on a bus. (It just dawned on me that my brother may have had friends on this team.)

- By a year, the above predated the best-ever mooning episode in a movie: The Charlestown Chiefs mooning opposing fans from a bus in Slapshot.

- Early eighties, Leek Lake Minnesota, heading out to the woods near the gravel road to "catch a few cars" with my buds.

- Year after year, continually getting mooned by same buds in the boat while they're pulling me waterskiing.

- 1990, at a party at my friend Bob's apartment in St. Paul. My former UND roomie Kasey was there. We drank a bunch of beers and yukked it up. Then Kasey left. Soon the phone rang, it was Kasey and he asked for me. "Put the TV on channel 6!" He said. I tuned to channel 6, which was tuned into the security camera in the front lobby. And there was Kasey in the lobby mooning me.

- Finally, Moss's actions last week weren't even the best NFL mooning event ever. That honor rests with Jim McMahon, who actually dropped trou:

During the playoffs (McMahon) had worn a headband. That was fine by the NFL. But commissioner Pete Rozelle took exception to McMahon's added touch, a handwritten ADIDAS across the front. Get rid of it, Rozelle commanded. McMahon did, replacing it with one bearing a handwritten ROZELLE. The commissioner shrugged, laughed, and that was that.

McMahon arrived in New Orleans for Super Bowl XX with a sore butt, an injury from the NFC Championship Game. He wanted Hiroshi Shiriashi to treat it with acupuncture. No way, the Bears said. But traditional treatment failed, the Bears relented, McMahon got Shiriashi, McMahon's rear end improved -- and it became a star in its own right when McMahon mooned a helicopter hovering over a Bears practice.