Dancing Around With The Press » Brats & Beer

August 31, 2008
posted under: Ted Thompson

However much Ari Fleischer’s retainer fee is, it’s too much for the Packers to be paying at least as far as Ted Thompson’s press conferences are concerned: The man can be pretty good on his own.

There were two interesting exchanges with reporters today, the first began with a question (I think from Jason Wilde) about the team bringing in long snappers to try out.

Q: Did you work out snappers today or will you do that tomorrow?
A: I’m not sure how I’ll answer that. We never really comment on who we may or may not have in for a workout, but if we haven’t worked somebody out already, we probably will. Is that vague enough?

Unreported in the official transcript, Wilde came back after the answer with the observation, “You look proud of yourself,” which was followed by an aw-shucks moment from the normally stoic TT. “No, you tried to trick me,” the general manager replied.

At the end of the presser, someone else brought up statements made recently by Brett Favre to the New York media.

Q: Brett Favre continues to take shots at you publicly. Does that disappoint you?
A: No. I’ll say this and we’ve said this before; we wish Brett the best and we are trying to get ready for the start of the season.

What the transcript doesn’t show is the long pause between “we wish Brett the best” and the rest of the answer. TT was thinking something right there — something like “that a-hole needs to zip it” — but he never let on. And until someone writes the book on this thing, we’ll probably never know.