I was talking with a buddy of mine during Week 1 about how weird it is that most NFL rookies are, like, comfortably a decade younger than us at this point. All my life I looked up to NFL players who were older than me in perpetuity, and through college and my early yo-pro phase I could take solace in the fact that the young superstars were around my age.
Now it’s officially getting scary. I’m plenty old enough to remember good ol’ nostalgic ’90s things like:
- Saving files onto a floppy disk.
- Shoving a VHS tape into the rewinder and then again into the VCR.
- Playing with Power Rangers action figures, or at least watching the magnificent Mighty Morphin’ show.
GO GO POWER RANGERS!
Sorry don’t know what came over me there. Suppose I’m clinging to positive thoughts of a better time when I wasn’t such an inhibited bundle of neuroses.
Talk about being confronted with your mortality, or at the very least your advanced aging, in the most face-slapping of ways. These Tampa Bay Buccaneers rookies looked at some of these ancient ’90s artifacts as if they were trying to read a foreign language aloud for the first time.
Running back Bucky Irving got us rolling with his puzzled examination of a VHS, only for EDGE defender Chris Braswell to come from the top rope with a medley of wildly wayward guesses as to what the hell it was.
Braswell’s birth date? October 25, 2001. He’s playing in the NFL one month shy of his 23rd birthday and is already a millionaire making more money than I’ve ever seen.
Those of us who can’t play sports professionally but love the sports and can write OK about the sports wind up just doing that. I’m not complaining. I’m just a little crestfallen that some of my childhood touchstones aren’t even on these Bucs rookies’ radars and that I’m not a world-class athlete with their very-early earnings potential.
But hey, credit where it’s due. These dudes were probably too busy clowning and dominating opponents on the gridiron all the way through high school to stop and care about what children were into back in my pre-teen years. Just couldn’t help but feel like a freaking dinosaur once this Bucs IG post hit my feed. Zero of the rookies knew what a floppy disk was. I for sure used those as late as middle school/junior high. Yikes, man. Yikes.
Above all and in all sincerity, I’m glad to see the new generation having fun in Tampa. Baker Mayfield just spoke out about how high-strung things were when Tom Brady was in town. I don’t blame Brady for at least the last year, since the Bucs had far and away the worst rushing offense in the NFL. That ground game hasn’t gotten much better since Baker’s arrival, but he’s more at a place where he’s grateful for the opportunity to revive his career, as opposed to Brady mother-effing everyone in his orbit in pursuit of an eighth Super Bowl ring.
