Moment of Silence After the Storm, Not Before it
Dan Ryan
Saturday June 21, 2003
Yeah, yeah, yeah, “the calm before the storm”, then blares the REO Speedwagon classic. It’s still cool. It still works. It’s also damn inappropriate at this given moment, though. By now, the script and the moment of silence will belong to who it should – Fran Papasedero.
A moment was all it took for Papasedero’s Lexus to go out of control and fatally spit out a 34-year old coach and father and make everything we’re celebrating this weekend – the TV contract, the better salaries, the growth of the sport and the Rattlers and the Storm’s impressive 2003 seasons – pretty much trivial.
Papasedero was coming off his best season as a coach at 12-4. He would have been in Tampa on Friday watching Travis McGriff grab some hardware as the AFL rookie of the year. He was coming into his own as a coach, even though that meant taking a back seat to Jay Gruden in the public eye, but quietly assembling a team that included veteran Cory Fleming, rookie Thabiti Davis and McGriff for Gruden’s targets, and gambling on AF2 product EJ Burt on the line.
It worked. Except for two losses to the teams playing Sunday and two more losses during a six-week stretch when Gruden was injured, the Preds were dominant. That doesn’t mean much now, either.
Storm coach Tim Marcum felt like he’s lost a member of the family, echoing the words that Gruden, Earnest Allen and spokesman Dan Pearson were saying 60 miles away.
Perfect quote from Marcum, as always. Families come together at moments such as this.
Dan Ryan has been involved with all forms of arena football since 1988, including writing for ArenaFan when Joe Kauffman and Tim Capper aren’t killing his columns because they don’t get his jokes or perspective. His day job is at Bethune-Cookman University, which has produced both an NFL Hall of Famer (Larry Little) and an Arena Football Hall of Famer (Stevie Thomas) and his hobby is tracking how many f-bombs Adam Markowitz drops in the chat room on game nights.
