Just back from the New Jersey Sports Writers Association annual banquet, and I wanted to pass along a few of the funny remarks from the honorees.

Bronze: This goes to Mets 3B, and Norfok, VA native David Wright…”I was texting with my father all morning, and he said ‘I don’t care about you’re award, but you better not come back home without Joe Theismann’s autograph.”

Silver: Joe Theismann himself takes the silver. “Going into the 1970 season, the Notre Dame sports information director calls me into the office and says ‘Joe, how do you pronounce your last name?’ I said (Thees-man). He said ‘I think it’s Theismann.’ So I called my father. I said ‘Dad, how do you pronounce our family name?’ He said, ‘Son, you’re 22 years old and go to the University of Notre Dame. You don’t know how to pronounce our family name? It’s Theesman.’

Anyway, they changed the pronunciation that year to Theismann (rhymes with Heisman) as a promotional tool to get Theismann the prestigious award. As it turned out, Theismann finished second that year to Stanford’s Jim Plunkett. So five years later, Theismann is having dinner with his parents. And he says “Dad, how do we pronounce our family name?”

“Joey,” his father responded. “That’s easy. Theismann.” (rhymes with Heisman)

Gold: A no-brainer. Former New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne, who had three gems.

• “I remember Preparation A.”
• “My social security number is in Roman numerals.”  
• “Hi, I’m Brendan Byrne. I used to be an arena.”

Share This Post!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.