Randy Smith
Sunday afternoon I settled in my Man-cave to watch the first real football game of the season. I know the initial NFL exhibition contest between the Colts and Packers in the Hall of Fame game was more show than competition, but it was at least football in full pads and boy was I ready. I turned my tv on to see Chris Berman interviewing Packer quarterback Aaron Rogers.
I paid no attention to what they were saying but thought it highly unusual that an interview like this would come in the middle of the game. Perhaps it was halftime and I had the game time wrong. Then I saw the message crawling at the bottom of the screen. "NFL announces the Hall of Fame game between Green Bay and Indianapolis has been cancelled due to field conditions.
Oh no....I thought. They must have had some awful weather up in Canton Ohio to cancel the Hall of Fame game. I thought again, hey this is football. You don't cancel games due to weather. It wasn't weather. It was paint that dried as hard as concrete at mid-field and in both end zones. Now, fans have "Paint-Gate" to discuss until the season starts.
As hours passed following the cancellation, thoughts went from disbelief, to anger that the world's largest and most profitable sports entity, had allowed a game to be cancelled because some guy painted the field with the wrong paint. After workers treated the field with some sort of solvent, it became more like tar than concrete, yet still unplayable.
How does this happen? Young players who were just trying to make one of the teams didn't get a chance to play, which will likely cost them a shot at making an NFL roster. StubHub was forced to return money from thousands of tickets that were sold, and I'm sure ESPN had to forfeit money lost from commercial sales.
Comedians have already started having a field day with "Paint-Gate." One said, "There is no truth to the rumor that Brett Favre stole all the Packers' jerseys and held them ransom until he was allowed to play in the game." Still another said, "Tom Brady did it."
Seriously, the NFL will survive "Paint-Gate" just as it survived "Deflate-Gate" last year. People make mistakes everyday and every minute someone is doing something they shouldn't do. It's just that......this one was made on one of the world's biggest stages, in front of millions of NFL fans and the entire Hall of Fame group. The guy who painted the field or was responsible for getting the wrong paint will likely be forced to move, change his name and perhaps enter the witness protection program. This was -football- he was messing with for pete's sake.
While everyone is waiting for the presidential candidates to respond to the media about the game cancellation, I think we all know what one of them will say..."You're fired!"
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Randy Smith has been covering sports on radio, television and print for the past 45 years. After leaving WRCB-TV in 2009, he has written two books, and has continued to free-lance as a play-by-play announcer. He is currently teaching Broadcasting at Coahulla Creek High School near Dalton, Ga.
His career has included a 17-year stretch as host of the Kickoff Call In Show on the University of Tennessee’s prestigious Vol Network. He has been a member of the Vol Network staff for thirty years.
He has done play-by-play on ESPN, ESPN II, CSS, and Fox SportSouth, totaling more than 500 games, and served as a well-known sports anchor on Chattanooga Television for more than a quarter-century.
In 2003, he became the first television broadcaster to be inducted into the Greater Chattanooga Area Sports Hall of Fame. Randy and his wife Shelia reside in Hixson. They have two married children, (Christi and Chris Perry; Davey and Alison Smith.) They have four grandchildren, Coleman, Boone, DellaMae and CoraLee.