For those who missed all the speechifying Saturday in Canton—during which Rickey Jackson made Emmitt Smith sound like Cicero, and Chris Berman spent 22 minutes committing what I'm certain were several felony counts of public masturbation—we offer a summary.
This comes courtesy of Microsoft Word's profoundly useless AutoSummarize function, into which were fed all seven Hall of Fame induction speeches—by Smith, Jackson, Jerry Rice, Floyd Little, Russ Grimm, John Randle, and Dick LeBeau—and out of which came the following summary, at 1 percent of the original, which should give you some idea of Saturday's proceedings:
So thank you, guys. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Eddie. Thank you. Thank you.
I started playing. I always wanted to play football. Thank you. Thank you.
Growing up, I dreamed of playing college football. In college, I dreamed of playing professional football. Thank you.
Thank you, Jackie Sherrill. Thank you, Joe Moore.
Thank you, mom. Thank you.
I coached a lot of great players. Thanks, Coach. Thank you.
Many, many people, in fact, were thanked over the course of the seven speeches: coaches, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, in-laws, wives, kids, coordinators, teammates, Hall of Fame committee members, doctors, trainers, an equipment guy, entire municipalities, personal Lords and Saviors, God, Joe Biden. And then, in the midst of all this rampant thanking, came Chris Berman. His Rozelle Award speech, a tipster informs, contained an "unbelievable" and "staggering" amount of "self love." Alas, I've yet to locate a transcript, and a full video is nowhere to be found. Boomer's ode to himself has been lost to the winds, it appears, and for that I guess we should all be thankful.
2010 HOF speeches [ESPN]