I had just finished watching Bret Favre, one of the 10 best National Football League quarterbacks of all time, take his Minnesota Vikings right out of a trip to the Super Bowl.
Favre could have run for 10 to 15 yards on Jan. 24, more than the Vikings needed to get into almost-automatic field goal range.
Instead, he did a "Quarterbacking 101 no-no," throwing back across his body while running to his right, directly into a clump of jerseys from both teams. New Orleans Saints linebackerTracy Porter picked it off, sending the game into overtime, eventually won by a Saints' field goal.
One thinks that someone of Favre's stature, after 19 outstanding NFL seasons, would never make such a rookie mistake.
Hah.
Barely an hour later, I was staring at a stinging, pithy letter from Terry Noble, a local lawyer, a leading Democrat - and someone to whom I hate to lose an argument.
But I lost this one.
Terry quite rightly excoriated me for having said, in Sunday's edition, that Senate candidate Joe Sestak had "suckled at the public teat" both as a Congressman and as a career Navy officer, ending up as a vice-admiral.
I had not written that Sestak had suckled at both jobs.
Instead, what I had done was edited myself right into writing that Sestak had double-suckled.
When I write, I invariably "write long." We are supposed to shoot for 800 words, about 28 inches in length, a workable size for an editorial page article. Most columnists, including Nick Hoffman, our managing editor, "write tight(ly)" at about 650-700 words.
Not me. My first drafts of columns are in the 1,200-word range.
When I write editorial opinions, I shoot for 400 words - and, on Sunday, an additional 200-word second editorial.
Invariably, my first drafts are 600 words and 300 words.
So I use the computer's cursor as a scalpel, cutting this word or phrase, moving that one, rearranging things, condensing ... scrambling, just as Favre and other quarterbacks often do.
I knew better than to say Sestak's Navy service was "suckling at the public teat." I don't even believe that. One of my sons, an Air Force officer, certainly would take issue with that. So would his siblings.
But I condensed a longer explication that Sestak's service in the military and in Congress was too narrowly focused to make him an outstanding candidate for the Senate, where, in my opinion, greater familiarity with a broader range of issues is desirable.
I had him "suckling at the public teat" in Congress. I stand by that. He hasn't done much of substance. He is, in my view, a political hack, and "suckling" is appropriate.
One does not become a vice admiral by "suckling" alone. Sure, there's politics involved in the rarefied atmosphere frequented by admirals and generals. But just getting there requires competence, bravery and sacrifice, giving fair value for the payments received.
It's difficult to remember in this day of deserved respect for our troops, but not so very long ago, service in the National Guard and Reserves was regarded as "living off the dole" by many Americans. That image came about partly because some draft-dodgers chose Guard or Reserve duty instead of Vietnam service, then hung on during years when callups were rarely risky or lengthy.
It also lingered from the days of draft-staffed military service, when the stereotype goof-offs and malingerers that produced the "Beetle Bailey" comic strip were not uncommon in military service.
Today's all-volunteer military cannot afford to tolerate such slipshod work, but the image lingers in some instances.
None of that excuses my editing, of course, just as none of the punishing hits inflicted on the Vikings' Favre by the Saints' defense excuse his rookie mistake. But we have to live with our errors.
I did apologize, as a footnote to Terry's letter. Saying "Sorry," is all well and good, but it doesn't undo the interception, or the dumb phrase. As Favre told a teammate after an earlier mistake (a fumble), "The play's over." In other words, shut up, clear your head, move on. There's still more work to do. While we need to learn from mistakes, we can't become so fearful of making them that we hesitate to do our life's work.
That's easy enough to say, but hard to do.
It is, I believe, one of the most difficult to learn of all of life's lessons.
---
Denny Bonavita is the editor and publisher of McLean Publishing Co. in west-central Pennsylvania, including the Courier-Express in DuBois. E-mail: denny2319@windstream.net.