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I was watching the NFL when I first felt it.
I felt thin.
Christmas turkey, New Year's champagne, Godiva chocolates, mom's fudge, the wife's cherry wink cookies -- I laugh in your face.
I am the king of thin.
I could pose for those male model catalogues, all lean and lanky in earth-tone shirts, my square jaw shaven but not that shaven, just slightly shaven to a manly, heroic kind of stubble. Like those rawboned studs, I look ready to mount up and clear brush and bring in cattle and pull Charlize Theron from a Class V rapids, after which the grateful damsel rescued from distress would say, "Don't you ever shave?"
I tell you, stand me sideways and I wouldn't cast a shadow, I'm so thin.
This pleasing realization of my streamlined silhouette came to me as I isolated on a key matchup in the first weekend of NFL playoff games.
It was No. 76 against No. 97.
I don't want to say they were fat, but between them, they outweighed Ethiopia.
Nor were they alone in their gargantuan girthdom. The guys who wore numbers in the 80s don't eat because they actually have to run. But everybody else from the 50s up bumped against each other until one of them fell down, feet scratching at the sky, unable to roll over. I assume these men live their lives under orders to get their body fat up to 110 percent. So they eat anything that doesn't move for 5 seconds, including sycamore trees.
Offensive linemen Kendyl Jacox (64) and Wayne Gandy play in an era when fat is in in the NFL. (Stephen Dunn / Getty Images)
The last time I saw so many fat guts, I had fallen asleep on the remote, and the TV wound up on the rare ESPN show that isn't poker.
It was sumo wrestling.
That, or Kornheiser and Wilbon wore really strange costumes for 30 seconds of shouting-head debate on Suzy Kolber-or-Michelle Tafoya.
Anyway, proud of my new svelteness, I thought of Nate Newton, now famous for having been arrested twice toting huge loads of marijuana, the last, 213 pounds' worth. He used to be famous for toting his own huge load, 350 pounds of
Cowboys lineman. There had been other NFL fat boys. The
Lions of the 1950s had Les Bingaman, a defensive lineman listed at 6-3 and 272 pounds, probably a hundred under his real weight. A Bingaman contemporary, Art Donovan of the
Colts, ran near 300 pounds and said, "You know you're big when you sit in your bathtub and the water in the toilet rises."
Still, it was Newton who explained the Fat Age best. "Fat's in; steroids are out," he said before a Super Bowl. The NFL had created antisteroid rules still in effect today. (We pause for muffled laughter.) And he said, "Fat is what got me in the league. All those pretty steroid boys, they're gone. Now it's who's got the most jiggly." Newton claimed that if William Perry was "The Refrigerator," he was "The Kitchen."
Tall, lean and sculpted once was the NFL's favored body type for linemen. Three hundred pounds of jiggly was unusual 10 years ago, with maybe 40 such wide loads in the league. This season, according to a count of last-week rosters, an astonishing 441 players weighed 300 pounds or more. Curiously, the
Redskins had five at exactly 300 pounds. Yeah, sure. Now put the other foot on the scale.
So it's hard today to tell the sumo wrestlers from the football players, though the football players, praise be, dress better for their bump-and-grind work. And sometimes those of us who are remarkably sylphlike wonder how anyone can get so fat.
The Hardee's Monster Thickburger. (Erik S. Lesser / Getty Images)
As luck would have it, just before Thanksgiving and in time for the run of holidays, NFL players provided a partial answer. They joined Hardee's to promote the fast-food restaurant's latest trademarked sandwich, the Monster Thickburger. In 10 NFL cities, players were to work at drive-through windows with proceeds from Monster Thickburger sales going to the player's charity of choice.
The Monster Thickburger is a weapon of mass destruction. It carries 1,420 calories. It is two one-third pound slabs of beef surrounded by three slices of cheese and four strips of bacon slathered over with mayonnaise under buttered sesame-seed buns the size of cow patties. Add medium french fries and a medium soft drink, it comes to 2,340 calories. It costs $7.09, and it is not true, not at all, that the Hardee's people soon will offer a Thickburger frequent-buyer coupon that would give you 10 percent off your first triple-bypass surgery.
But they should.
