Florida State Rhodes Scholar stymies local sports satire staff

THE SSNN NEWSROOM — A late breaking report indicates that the staff of a sports satire website has been struggling with the same story for about four weeks, with no end in sight.

The trouble at Serious Sports News Network began on November 23, 2008, when national news broke that Florida State senior safety Myron Rolle had been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and was going to miss the first half of the Maryland game.

“We were all high-fiving ourselves when we heard about it,” said an SSNN staffwriter. “It was one of those deals where we were like, ‘Hell yeah, this is such an obvious story, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. It’s so easy! There’s so many different ways you could go with it. It’s like manna from heaven. It’s like Christmas come early. Except, of course, we’re all Jewish (Obvy; after all, we’re hilarious).”

The staff thought it would be such an easy story that the entire department participated in a lottery to determine who would get to write the piece. When the results of that were disputed, the entire staff agreed to write the piece together.

“Sometimes, something is so wonderful, you just want to share it with your colleagues and your friends,” the editor said. “But it turned out it wasn’t that easy. We just couldn’t get it going at all.”

The staff initially decided to go with the “criminal” angle.

“We were going to do some sort of story about how when he went to Oxford, he was going to continue his studies in criminology, you know, since he goes to Florida State, and must be a criminal,” the editor said. “Then we were going to sort of shift gears and do a whole thing about what he really could have been doing during the first half of that game that he had to miss to get his Rhodes Scholarship, you know, was he out stealing cars, or was he kidnapping people and holding them for ransom, something like that? But those ideas just weren’t starters.”

So the staff decided to continue brainstorming, choosing to focus on the fact that Rolle is getting ready to be a neurosurgeon.

“We had one idea that had some potential,” the editor said, “where we were going to say that after he became a neurosurgeon in England, he was going to come back and reverse the lobotomies that had clearly been performed on the Rhodes Scholarship committee. But again, no dice.”

The editor said that whenever the crew went to write, nothing came out.

“We just sat there for hours, agonizing, just trying to get the words to flow, but nothing would come out,” he said. “It’s like our hands were paralyzed, like our brains just melted whenever we had the chance to get anything going. This shit is harder than it looks.”

The editor said the closest they came is a potential story about Bobby Bowden hearing about the scholarship, and not realizing that it was a Rhodes Scholarship, just thinking that it was like some sort of normal $500 a year scholarship, but still freaking out about it because that never happened to them before.

“We had him like bouncing off the walls and high-fiving strangers and being like, ‘Hell yeah, we got a dude who got a non-athletic scholarship, we are so smart, we are so smart,’” the editor said. “But, and I hate to sound like I’m beating a dead horse here, but you don’t want to read that crap, right?”

In the end, the staff just decided to let it go for awhile, and focus on other stuff, but they are committed to doing a story about Myron Rolle, eventually.

“We’re thinking we might do something where he got all the way to the Rhodes Scholarship ceremony, and they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry Myron, we actually meant Byron Role, that chemistry major from Clemson,’” the editor said. “I don’t know, though, man. We’re freakin’ stuck. This is just one of those things that you never, ever, ever, never, ever, never, ever thought would ever never ever happen. So maybe we’re a bit blindsided.

“It’s like, what next? A Clemson Tiger becoming a Rhodes Scholar? Ha!”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!