One of the items hovering on our ever-shifting topic list during Hall of Fame weekend in Canton was the fact that, on Friday night, Peter King of SI.com and NBC and Sirius NFL Radio and probably a few others we’re forgetting received the 2009 Dick McCann Memorial Award from the Professional Football Writers of America.
So we take this opportunity to congratulate Peter King for receiving this award.
Peter has been a great friend of the site for several years, helping us shift from outsider outpost that no one admitted to reading to our currently fuzzy mainstream insider-outsider status.
Adam Schefter, who’ll debut at ESPN in one week (and simultaneously enter Twitter rehab), has penned for SI.com a tribute to King that reads far better than anything we could produce, so we’ll merely link to it and cherry pick some of the stuff that we liked about it the best. (Which is basically what we do with pretty much every article we ever mention.)
“He has been a serious contributor to the NFL for more than 20 years, because he has reached out to our fans and helped make our game the most popular sport in America,” Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said of King. “He has moved through all of the avenues of reaching out to football fans -- newspaper, magazine, television, radio and the Internet -- and our league has been the beneficiary of his dedicated body of work.
“Passion is an overused term in athletics today, but Peter has it. He brings it to work with him every day.”
Added Commissioner Roger Goodell: “I always look forward to Monday mornings to read the ultimate quarterback of NFL journalism. Nobody does it better than Peter.”
But here’s the best quote that could have been uttered about King (and we say that only partially because the guy who said it is sort of our boss now): “He may be the single most unselfish and caring human being I’ve ever encountered in the world of sports,” NBC Sports & Olympics Charmain Dick Ebersol told Schefter.
Wow.
There’s a lot more good stuff from Schefter on King. Click it, read it, and then (as always) get your ass back here.