It started when my Ravens friend Caroline sent me this gif of Mark Sanchez running into his own player's ass, fumbling the ball, and not even trying to stop the Patriots player who ran off with it:
I shared it with other Ravens friends, and we all had a good laugh at "
Hotdog" Sanchez's inability to do ANYTHING right. My friend replied with standard "Man, he sucks" comments, and one of those comments got me thinking...
"How long will it be until Hotdog Sanchez is finally
booted from the NFL into obscurity?"
We find ourselves five years into the future in a sleepy southwest border town in the United States. Former Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez is now teaching PE at the only all-girl Catholic school in the area. He's changed his
look a little - shorter hair, a scruffy beard, let himself get a
little bit of a potbelly - and pretends that he doesn't speak English
very well, so he blends in and has an excuse for not talking to outsiders very often. Mark has a little
adobe house in a lower middle-class neighborhood where he lives alone
except for his pitbull mix "Rex," an unspayed female who spawns litter
after litter of adorable puppies that Animal Control volunteers
spay/neuter and return to him so he can give them to various people
throughout the small town. Almost everyone in that little village has a
pitbull puppy that came from Rex.
One day, a football scout's car died in this town. The scout had just been passing through but decided to walk
around town while the mechanic waited for the car part. He stopped by
the girls school, thinking he'd see if there were any good soccer players he
could tell his wife (a college scout for Holyoke) about, when he saw
Sanchez's 4th-period gym class practicing field hockey outside. The
scout - a man named Gary who loves his job - swore to himself that there was something
familiar about this mild-mannered, average-looking teacher, so he sat on the
bleachers to give his brain time to figure it out. Most days there's usually a group of men, mainly drunks and unemployed field hands, lazing away their
afternoons staring at under-aged girls while passing around a bottle of
tequila someone made in his garage. On this day, Gary asked around casually about the
teacher, and the men revealed that Sanchez - Señor Marco, as everyone
calls him - came from New York ("la gran ciudad" they called it) several
years ago with just his dog and a green duffel bag. He seemed haunted by
something, failure most likely, but then again, who in this town WASN'T
haunted by a failure of some kind? He was nice, although clumsy, and
his students loved him. Gary thanked them for their conversation and
made his way back to the garage once the girls' game was finished.
It wasn't until he was zipping down the highway at 85mph, blasting
Journey that Gary realized who the youngish man coaching that field hockey
team was. The realization that someone so famous could fall so far so
quickly almost made him swerve off the road with shock. He meant to call
someone, a colleague perhaps, and tell them the news. He meant to turn
around and go back to that nameless, sleepy town, track down Mark
Sanchez, and ask him how he had gotten to this place after his
spectacular fall from grace in the NFL. Gary meant to do a lot of
things...but then his boss called and said there was a 20-year-old kid
in Taos, New Mexico who could run faster than Larry Fitzgerald and catch better
than Jerry Rice, so Gary pushed Sanchez's new life off to the side of
his mind, intending to return to it later. He never does, of course.
Ever since he left the NFL, Mark Sanchez has been easily put out of
mind, and frankly, he prefers it that way.
