Tales from the Media hordes

MICHAEL CHOW/THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC/AP PHOTO Mexican TV reporter Ines Gomez Mont is swept away by Patriots centre Lonie Paxton.

GLENDALE, Ariz. – Without much competition, this is flat-out the dumbest day in the sports typing business, the so-called Media Day at the Super Bowl. Where else, for instance, does a woman in a wedding dress propose marriage to Tom Brady?

To ask the question, though, she needs to shout down the guy with the hand puppets or the other fellow in the turban pretending to do a fortune-telling act and poor Brady, for an hour, needs to sit there and take it.

There are precisely 4,786 media members with credentials to cover Sunday’s football game and not every one of those with the brand new plastic photo-ID necklace is here to ask a stupid question. Some of us are merely here to watch others ask the nutty stuff.

It’s all part of the Super Bowl act and clearly the god-almighty National Football League likes it this way and, by virtue of being a gate-keeper for the precious media badges, encourages the temporary insanity. That’s probably because it makes for good TV and, well, it’s harmless.

The Latin lady with the wedding dress? Brady half-played along and gracefully samba-ed out of any kind of encouraging answer, causing her to wonder, therefore, how she could legally remain in the county. Later on, a woman identified by a sash at Miss Nevada asked Brady, possibly seriously, how many wedding proposals he receives in a good year and Brady kind of rolled his eyes and asked if anyone wanted to talk football. Maybe, but that’s what the rest of the week is for. As for the bride – and the bet here is she isn’t the blushing kind - she also carried a T-shirt that said "The Real Miss Brady" which seemed to work against her own joke. It would have read better as Mrs. Brady, but what the hey. Let’s not get too pedantic where true love is involved.

She was working with an old pal, namely Miss Azteca TV, or whatever she is called, a spectacularly cantilevered and poured bombshell – there is no other word – who paraded around at last year’s Super Bowl earning herself a whole pile of Youtube moments. Look her up. Like everything else on the web, it beats working, right?

Anyway, she and a couple of the TV Aztecta all-stars were living in the same hotel as a handful of Canadian types. We are now lumped with the "International" media – possibly on the same kind of grounds that causes a pancake house to be thought of as International.

So down in the breakfast room last year, at the horrible Deauville Arms on Miami Beach, there she was at the next table one morning, before 7 a.m. She had on her full football-coverage working clothes – namely spike-heel sandals with shoelace-type things that tied up to the knee; extremely tight hot pants, a very tiny bikini top and a little half-torn "shirt" that, intact, would have equaled the acreage of perhaps two Kleenexes. This before 7 a.m., mind you.

What, you ask, does such a creature eat for breakfast to maintain the framework needed to carry off such a warbrobe? The betting here was half a grape and a sip of water, but no. Back she came from the buffet with a big honking plate of bacon and eggs, a bowl of Fruit Loops, OJ, coffee, milk, bagels and cream cheese. Maybe some yogourt, too. Then she called over the waiter looking for the ketchup bottle.

The moral of the story? She surely didn’t look like one of us, or go about her job exactly the same way, but by God she could eat like one of the 4,786.

- Dave Perkins