I am a huge Alabama football fan and am glad they won the National Championship game last night. However, I have truly grown to appreciate the University of Texas football team and what they stand for. In an earlier entry, I posted here about Colt McCoy and his interview last night after the game.
My husband just pointed out this article he read about Texas Head Football Coach Mack Brown that talks about the lengths he goes to in order to stay above reproach. This is copied directly from Rick Reilly’s Go Fish column off of ESPN.com from yesterday.
If you’re in Pasadena right now and want to take a picture with Texas football coach Mack Brown, you might find it a peculiar experience.
Brown has some very specific rules for taking pictures with fans. He knows that today’s sports celebrities live in an age when one misunderstood iPhone snap can suddenly have you back managing an Applebee’s. So if you want a shot with Brown, who tries for his second national title Thursday night in the BCS Championship Game, you’ve got to follow his three rules:
1) He never takes a picture with a female without a “Hook ’em Horns” sign up. That way everybody knows where his hands are and what they’re doing.
2) If he’s with his wife, Miss Sally — and he usually is — she takes the pictures. Nobody else. That way nobody can come up behind him and make him look stupid, or salacious, or drunk. Nobody can pretend their hand is his and put it somewhere that isn’t Vatican-approved. Nobody can flip anybody off, nobody can set him up. Miss Sally won’t cotton to that kind of behavior. “Sally knows her way around every camera, cell phone, video camera, you name it,” says Brown, 58. “If it’s out there, she knows how to work it.” (Wish there were somebody like that at Best Buy.)
3) He never takes a picture with only one female. “Always two or more,” he says. “It just looks better.”
Hey, Mack. Tiger on line one.