Not Mean Enough

Happy belated birthday to Roger Staubach, born 70 years ago Sunday. The updated Mean Joe Greene Coke commercial in Sunday’s Super Bowl was a reminder that Staubach, the Heisman trophy winner in 1963 and the Super Bowl MVP in 1972, was the original choice for the role in that 1979 Coke commercial.

“Somebody asked me about that and said that I turned it down,” Staubach told me, “but that’s not the case. I would have loved to do it. Some creative guy must have evaluated the concept and said, ‘Hey, we need a mean guy. It would be better to have Joe Greene than Staubach because Staubach’s a nice guy.’ 

“It probably made more sense, gave a more cuddly feeling to it, to have this big old tough football player give his jersey to this little boy. It turned out, I guess, it was the right decision, but I would have loved to do it.”

The Innocents Aboard

Just before I administered a spelling test to the second grade, one enterprising little boy told me that because he had trouble remembering how to spell two of the words, he helpfully wrote both of them on the inside of his privacy folder (which stands upright on his desk to prevent peeking by other students during the test). How’s that for self help?

Later that day, one of his classmates wasted so much time during a reading comprehension exercise that I told her to put it in her backpack and finish it as homework. She tried to hand it back to me, saying, “My mom told me that I can’t be taking school work home.”