On his radio show last week, Dan Patrick baited Warren Sapp into saying some dumb stuff about "kids these days"—how about Cam Newton celebrating a touchdown when his team is losing?! What a glory boy!—and Sapp took the bait, hook, line and sinker: not only did he incomprehensibly declare, "These kids that play the game today have no relevance for the past. Have no conscious of what it is," but he took the rant (about behavior Sapp basically endorsed as a player) a step further, laying into Brandon Marshall, apparently for talking poorly of Shannon Sharpe:
I mean, Brandon Marshall, talking about Shannon Sharpe, who is he to talk? He's the first hundred catch receiver, back-to-back, retard! What you just did in Denver for three years, you don't know this? No, of course he doesn't...it's about personal success, pay me, and now I'll think about being a team guy.
What could Marshall do? Sapp offended his honor in public, and called him a retard, an offense that few are willing to take lying down.
Well, Brandon Marshall filmed two video responses, both of which were pretty calm and reasonably worded. You can see them here and here. Marshall undeniably burns Sapp when he says, "I can't go to him and talk about finances because he filed for bankruptcy. I can't go to him and talk about my marriage because he filed for divorce. I can't go to him and talk about being a great father, because one day I'm going to have kids, because he's not active in his children's life."
Game over, right? Marshall was so, so close to winning this war of words: had he parked the car and righted the camera, he would have looked like the bigger, smarter man. Instead we have Marshall, incensed at being called a retard, talking into a sideways video camera while he drives, and saying, "I've made my fair share of mistakes and I'm going to continue to make my own mistakes." True. Off the top of my head: Filming over four minutes worth of video while driving could be considered a mistake*. The lesson here, as always, is that anyone can lose an argument, even to Warren Sapp, if they film their rebuttal sideways, while driving. Marshall apologized, sort of, yesterday.
*Actually though, it isn't necessarily illegal, so Marshall may have won this one outright.