Collinsworth addresses 25-year-old clip
Posted by Mike Florio on September 12, 2009 9:00 PM ET
A
video has emerged of a 1984
Monday Night Football interview featuring a young Cris Collinsworth, sporting what appears to be the remnants of a home perm.
Links to the clip now appear at places like
With Leather,
********, and
The Big Lead.
To his credit, Collinsworth isn't running from his past. He has issued a statement regarding the situation. It came without a request for comment; we're told that he wanted to address the situation affirmatively and proactively.
"As a family man I am extremely embarrassed by an interview I did when I was in my early twenties about dating," Collinsworth said. "My comments were insulting, immature, and foolishly intended as a joke. They do not reflect how I lived my life then . . . or now. I was asked to do something humorous about dating, and it has been a major embarrassment to me since the day I said it. I apologize to anyone who has ever had the misfortune to see it now or a quarter-century ago."
(We assume that the apology is sufficiently broad to cover the fact that he subjected us to the remnants of his home perm. If so, apology accepted.)
And we hope that most people realized from the get-go that Collinsworth was being facetious, since the monologue had that "
chicks dig me because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it's usually something unusual" vibe from Bill Murray in
Stripes.
Still, kudos to Cris for taking the initiative now that, somehow, the video has surfaced.
Are we fully objective on this one? Probably not. For starters, we sort of enjoy being part of the NBC family now, so our human nature is going to kick in as it relates to other members of the NBC family. Also, we ran into Cris the morning after the Hall of Fame game, and he was incredibly gracious to my wife and my son, who would have his first official middle school football practice that night and who received meaningful and enthusiastic encouragement from Cris about the sport.
So let's take the video for what it is -- a 25-year-old clip from a guy who was 25 years old at the time and who, like most 25-year-olds will do from time to time, said something that he thought would be perceived as funny (and might have been indeed been regarded as humorous at the time), but two-and-a-half decades later it isn't.
And I can't really say much about the apparent remnants of a home perm. In 1984, I had a mullet. With a rat tail.
