Go, laundry!

I don't want this to turn into a pure sports blog, but this article about free agency by Mickey Spagnola cannot be missed by any fan of professional sports.

When the Cowboys introduced one of their three primo prizes Thursday, four-time Pro Bowl guard Marco Rivera, his first two answers to media questions included instinctive references to his belief in "the Packer organization". The guy sweated blood for Cheeseheads for nine years. Why wouldn't he think of himself as a lifelong Packer?

Do you think Dexter Coakley wanted to leave Dallas?

But the system is the system. You don't care where the guy comes from. Put a player in a white Cowboys' jersey and a helmet with the star, you'll cheer for him. Yankees fans see the pinstripes. We're cheering for laundry.

It's hard work being a progressive dinosaur. We want our guys to be our guys forever. But that genie is out of the bottle, and he isn't coming back.

Maybe that's why owners and their personalities are becoming more visible. They're relatively constant compared to the players and coaches underneath them. Reggie White will always be a Philadelphia Eagle to me, to my wife he's a Green Bay Packer. Jeff Cirillo is a revolving door Milwaukee Brewer. Who is Randy Johnson playing for this year? Sam Casell? Shaquille O'Neal?

We're in the Age of the Hired Gun now, something I find hard to get used to. Even in memory, do I remember Deion Sanders as a Cowboy, a 49er, a Redskin or Falcon? Speaking of Falcons, how many people remember a young party animal too drunk to play quarterback for Jerry Glanville?

So we've started watching the men who bring the hired guns to town. Snyder, the Seligs (oops, they're gone too), Jerry Jones. And we laugh with Emmitt Smith when he told David Letterman after Jimmy Johnson was let go, "I can't believe he fired the coach." That would be Dallas Cowboy and Arizona Cardinal Emmitt Smith.