Peter King: MMQB - 5/28/18 - Favorite Stories

[Prime Time]

These are excerpts. To read the whole article click the link below.
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https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/05/28/peter-king-sports-illustrated-mmqb-favorite-stories

Peter King’s Favorite Stories, from SI and The MMQB
For his final sign-off from Sports Illustrated, the three-time sportswriter of the year and founder of The MMQB selects his favorites from the stories he’s done over his 29 years with the franchise
By Peter King

I’ve always thought my job as a writer had three five parts:

1. Report the heck out of a story.
2. Take the readers where they cannot go.
3. Write quickly and be smart. Think hard about the words, but don’t be obsessive about them. Different ones work fine.
4. Obsessively kiss as much Patriots butt as possible, as noted by how many times I mention them below. :eek:
5. Inject my politics into every sports article because gosh darn it, I know better than the fans do.

In 29 years at Sports Illustrated and The MMQB, I think I wrote some good stories. I always tried to improve as a writer, and with stories I was hugely proud of I took great care in trying to make every sentence count. But I wasn’t Frank Deford or Rick Reilly or William Nack. I was best at my ability to make people tell me things, and then report on those things to make them meatier, and then get them to you.

Part of what I tried to do—and what I tell young journalists sometimes now—was work hard to find the good stories, and work hard to convince people to let me tell those stories. In the first three months of 2017 I worked on the 49ers to let me into their draft process, so I could report and write on John Lynch’s first draft as a GM. Fortunately for me, they said yes. More fortunate for me, the Niners turned out to be a major player in the first round that year.

And even more fortunate for me, John Lynch and Kyle Shanahan were absolute gold—open, honest, talkative and emotional when the time called for it. Stories are so often like snowflakes. So different, and at the start of the snowstorm, you don’t really know how much you’ll get and what the storm’s going to look like.

When the Niners’ brain trust ducked into Lynch’s office less than an hour before the start of the 2017 draft, and Lynch told cap guy Paraag Marathe to see if he could squeeze a little more out of Chicago GM Ryan Pace, and you listen in as the trade is bartered, well, that’s why we’re in this business. To be on the front line, and to tell you all about it.

Last week I wrote my final MMQB column here. Today I write my final entry for this franchise. It’s my selection of my favorite stories over my three decades on a great team. I hope you enjoy them on this Memorial Day … and what I hope even more is that you learn from them something more about the sport you love.

All of the following stories have links to the SI Vault or The MMQB versions click on the headline, subhead or link), with one exception: a softball story from the early days of the MMQB column. That appears in its entirely here.

Nov. 26, 1990
BUSMAN’S HOLIDAY
A trip across I-80 from California to the New York City with John Madden

LINK: www.si.com/vault/1990/11/26/123146/busmans-holiday-coast-to-coast-commuter-john-madden-likes-what-he-sees-as-he-rolls-across-america-in-his-suite-on-wheels

I’m an Americana guy, but I’d never driven or been a passenger in a vehicle that traversed the United States. I wanted badly to do so. So in my second year writing for Sports Illustrated I proposed this story—a trip on the Madden Cruiser from West Coast to East with the biggest analyst in football—to John Madden and agent Sandy Montag. Madden said yes.

We left from his home in Pleasanton, Calif., at noon on a Wednesday, arrived at his apartment at The Dakota in Manhattan at 10 p.m. Friday, and he did the Giants-Cowboys game a day and a half later at the Meadowlands. Fifty-five hours, 3,016 miles, and I was so bummed when it was over.

Bill Frakes/Sports Illustrated

Madden, who preferred bus travel, on what it was like to get to know I-80 the way most of us know Main Street in whatever town we live in:

“We had to stop in Beaver Crossing, Neb. [pop. 480], once, to use the phone for a radio show,” Madden said. “It’s near Lincoln. Some guy comes across the street from a gas station and introduces himself. Roger Hannon. He was the mayor, and it was his gas station. The next thing I know, we’re in front of city hall, and the people start coming out, and they want to see the bus.

One woman brought me a rhubarb pie. I didn’t even know what rhubarb pie was, but it was great. The whole town came out. There were only about 10 of them, but they were the whole town. I remember asking them, ‘What do houses sell for here?’ They said the last house that sold was right down on the corner—three bedrooms, three baths, a picket fence, for $8,000.”

Two days after Madden’s visit to Beaver Crossing, the Omaha World-Herald ran a story on page 3 with the headline: MADDEN STOPS TO USE THE PHONE.

What fun that was.

April 29, 1991
BIG D DAY
Inside the Cowboys draft process as they built a champion—and inside the draft room.

LINK: www.si.com/vault/1991/04/29/124097/big-d-day-the-dallas-cowboys-went-on-the-attack-in-the-nfl-draft-and-took-all-the-right-prisoners

How times have changed. Twenty-seven years ago, the subhead on this Sports Illustrated story was: “The Dallas Cowboys went on the attack in the NFL draft and took all the right prisoners.” Yikes. Might not look so good today.

What I’ll always remember about this story: The Cowboys went out as a staff to scout the biggest college players, and Jimmy Johnson hoped the coaches’ experience in the college game (most came with him from college to the NFL when Jerry Jones hired him in 1989) would bear fruit. He hoped they’d be able to probe their friends who still coached in college and find out the truth that other scouts might not be able to learn.

Peter Read Miller/Sports Illustrated

On this trip, there was a defensive lineman, Mike Jones, from North Carolina State, who puzzled the Cowboys. Talented, but he wasn’t in the game on every play. Odd, for a guy who might be a first-round pick. Butch Davis, a real digger on the staff, got one of the Wolfpack assistants to say they questioned Jones’s toughness.

When Davis delivered the information to Johnson on the Cowboys’ plane, you’d have thought they just scored a touchdown to beat the Giants in the final minute. That was a big way the Cowboys got good. They had more info than other teams.

After the draft, Johnson told me, “We’ll be good, big-time good.” After going 8-24 in the first two years of the program, the Jerry Jones-Jimmy Johnson Cowboys won two of the next three Super Bowls. It ended in divorce, as we all know, but it was a compelling five-year run. Loved covering that team, with all the drama. And wins.

March 15, 1993
TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL
Reggie White leads the first-ever class of NFL free-agents.

LINK: www.si.com/vault/1993/03/15/128221/trip-to-bountiful-with-the-onset-of-free-agency-in-the-nfl-stars-like-reggie-white-of-the-eagles-are-hitting-the-road-to-offer-their-services-to-the-highest-bidders

For the first decade that I covered football, free agency didn’t exist. The NFL establishment treated it like the plague. When I covered the Giants in the ’80s, GM George Young used to rail against it weekly. Daily, sometimes. “In baseball, you can just plug in one second baseman on another team, “ Young would say. “They all do the same job. You can’t do that with guards! The job is different, the terminology is different from team to team!”

Bill Frakes/Sports Illustrated

But modernity was coming. Some in the league, like powerful PR man Joe Browne, loved the specter of March Mayhem so that football could be in the headlines in the offseason. He believed free agency would be good for the game, and for its business. And here it was. Free agency was won by the players in a Minneapolis courtroom in September 1992.

It started in March 1993. The first class included the best defensive player in football, Eagles defensive lineman Reggie White, and teams were falling all over each other to get White to simply visit them. White’s agent, a young Jimmy Sexton, was cool with me trailing the traveling circus from city to city (I did three stops) along with White, wife Sara, and another client, guard Harry Galbreath.

I met them in Tennessee before the trip. White seemed blown away by it all. He told me he was worried that with many of the teams chasing him, signing him would signal, “Our savior has arrived.” White had been on a great defense in Philly, and he wanted to go where it wasn’t all about him.

He was a nervous man, flying into Cleveland to meet coach Bill Belichick and owner Art Modell, to explain why this was the team for him. First, Modell told me he needed to understand this complex system of player movement. “Our first draft choice is going to be from Harvard Law School,” Modell said, “and one of the clauses in his contract will be to teach me this new thing.”

SI’s managing editor, Mark Mulvoy, was behind a smart cover. There was White, shirtless, and jerseys of various suitors, as in a doll kit. On the cover you could recognize unforms from Washington, Philadelphia, Atlanta, the Jets, Cleveland, Phoenix, Detroit … but no Green Bay.

Guess where he ended up signing.

Oct. 30, 1995
COUNTDOWN
I spent a week inside the Packers, preparing for a big game.

LINK: www.si.com/vault/1995/10/30/8098204/countdown-on-oct-16-brett-favre-of-the-packers-began-preparing-for-sundays-game-against-the-vikings-almost-from-the-moment-that-favre-lifted-himself-slowly-and-painfully-from-his-bed-sis-peter-king-was-at-his-side--at-home-on-t

You know what still pains me, looking back on this story? How short it was. Just 4,257 words to cover seven days inside a football team. In those days (and still), every page in the magazine was precious. Every word counted. As it should. But I remember arguing for more space that week.

“Nope,” I was told. “We got a great Bo Jackson story this week.” I had asked around, and I believe this was the first time in the history of the magazine that a writer had spent a game week inside an NFL team, and I was jonesing for the cover.

Rick Frishman for Sports Illustrated

So it was short, and it wasn’t the cover. Bo was. Boy, was I pissed off. As pissed as I ever was in 29 years at SI. Just 608 words per day. Twelve paragraphs for game day! As you can tell, 23 years hasn’t been enough time to get over this. Because in those days, what you didn’t write just died. No place for it.

Okay. Breathe.

Anyway, so many of you have told me over the years you read this story and really loved it, and I appreciate that. It was a ball. Tremendously educational on football, and full of life otherwise. One memory I’ll never forget: Brett Favre sleeping in quarterback meetings run by Steve Mariucci. And farting a lot. Like, farting incessantly.

A few times the time the door got opened and fanned, trying to get the fumes out. Another memory: On Thursday night, Favre took a first gift over for the Mariucci family’s newborn, Brielle. He lifted her up over his head and said, “Hey Brielle: Horse walks into a bar. Bartender says, ‘Hey, why the long face?’ ‘‘

Brielle is 22 now, a Boston College graduate. I wonder if she knows Brett Favre lifted her high into the sky at four weeks and told her a bad joke?

Fun story. What it taught me: Access to inside football is irreplaceable.

Aug. 4, 1997
YOUNG AND RESTLESS
Steve Young is one heck of a humanitarian … with one big hole in his life.

LINK: www.si.com/vault/1997/08/04/230245/chief-worry-public-activist-and-celebrity-quarterback-steve-young-faces-a-private-challenge-finding-a-mormon-wife-and-starting-a-family

Talk about an enlightening, uncomfortable, rewarding story. I flew with Young to Navajo and Hopi reservations and saw him try to connect with kids without much hope. Then we went to his annual golf tournament near Salt Lake City, which was different from many of these athlete/coach affairs I’ve attended. No liquor. “This could have been the Von Trapp Tournament,” I wrote, with all the kids running about.

This story was about Young the player but more Young the person, and Young the seeker of a family. At 35, time was running out for him to find the right woman and, in Mormon tradition, start a big family. That was the uncomfortable part. In his foursome, the guys were wondering, When are you going to find someone, fella? I overheard one golfer say: “Jeez, Brigham Young had 14 wives.”

John Burgess/Sports Illustrated

“I think it’ll happen,” Young said. Three years later it did. Young got married, and they have a family, and he seems to be living happily ever after. Couldn’t happen to a better guy—but on this day in Utah I remember feeling awful for him, as the biggest star in the Mormon sports universe, that everyone was looking at him and wondering why he wasn’t hitched.

Aug. 9, 2004
MASTER AND Commode
How Belichick got to be Belichick

LINK: www.si.com/vault/2004/08/09/8213489/master--and--Commode-with-football-principles-learned-under-his-dad-a-coach-at-navy-brainy-bill-belichick-has-turned-new-england-into-the-nfls-mightiest-vessel

Three or four times in my life at the magazine, the boss said something to the effect of: Tell me what makes so-and-so tick. Sandwiched between Super Bowl wins two and three in the offseason of 2004, that was my assignment with Belichick.

I approached him early in the offseason, told him I was doing a profile on him and asked him if he could give me the 10 to 20 people I should definitely talk to. He spent an hour on the phone with me one night, going over stories I should pursue, people I should talk with, etc. He was great.

Peter Gregoire for Sports Illustrated

I went down to Maryland, and his late father, Steve, met me and showed me around Annapolis, to places that were important in young Bill’s life. He told me stories about how when Bill was 9 or 10, he’d sit in the back of the room at the Naval Academy football offices, when Steve Belichick, an assistant coach, would debrief the team with his scouting report on that week’s game. Then we went to the Belichick home, a smallish, understated blue-collar house where Steve and Jeannette raised their one child.

I said I would love to take a peek into the room Bill grew up in. Jeannette demurred, and I didn’t press things. But they both told me enough good stories that the trip was perfect. Just perfect.

After an hour or so, I was getting ready to leave. Bill’s mom turned to me and oh-so-nicely said, “Would you like to see Bill’s room?”

Why yes. Yes I would.

These are the moments you think you’ve got a pretty good gig.

The room was sort of … barren. Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler, with some other books. Some athletic stuff from his youth, but not much. That, Jeannette Belichick said, was not unusual; this was the way they lived.

On this trip, I learned why Bill Belichick was as smart as he was. His dad was the first noted football scout; he wrote a book about scouting with a forward by the great Paul Brown. His mom knew seven languages, read the New Yorker cover to cover every week, and liked when young Bill would read a book to her while she made dinner. That combination, and how deep he got into football at such a young age … pretty telling.

Oct. 18, 2004
A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
The Patriots set the NFL’s all-time record with their 19th straight win

LINK: www.si.com/vault/2004/10/18/8188771/a-league-of-their-own

I remember spending a few days in Foxboro, and not a soul would talk about breaking a pretty august record. No NFL team in the league’s first 84 seasons had won 19 games in a row. Lips were zipped. And Bill Belichick, early in the week, fired a special-teams player with, as I wrote, “the emotional detachment of a Paulie Walnuts” because the Patriots had a lousy special-teams performance in their 18th win.

John Biever/Sports Illustrated

This is the way Bill Parcells handled his teams—the way Belichick witnessed the how the Giants were run in the ’80s. If you win big, there’s always something wrong; never let players get happy. If you lose big, there’s always something good; never let players wallow and think they stink. Belichick was this way for years with the Patriots.

It’s why they still win. And why, probably, it has worn so much on so many veteran players. Look at Tom Brady this spring. I don’t know what really is going on, but I can imagine that, a) Brady wants a little more of a non-football life in the offseason; and b) he’s had enough of Belichick’s mind games.

Still, there’s a price to pay if you want to be great for a long, long time. And Belichick knows how to make his players pay it.

Why does this story stick out? It’s not all that long, and I feel like I’ve written many more insightful ones. But the story of why the Patriots win is encapsulated in the first five paragraphs of my story. That’s why I like this one.

Feb. 1, 2010
BIG EASY DOES IT
The Saints pummel the Vikings in the NFC title game

LINK: www.si.com/vault/2010/02/01/105899237/big-easy-does-it

Got some great color that week, the week of the game that in so many ways led to the Saints’ Bountygate scandal. I’m disappointed, reading the story again, that I didn’t take more notice of New Orleans beating the tar out of Brett Favre, and whether there was anything about it that seemed a little excessive. That bugs me.

Peter Read Miller/Sports Illustrated

I did make note of “Brett Favre getting beaten like Rocky Balboa by the New Orleans defense.” But I should have done more. In my MMQB column that weekend—I did double-duty, writing this story for the magazine and a lead on the battered Favre for MMQB—I wrote more about how brutal had been the punishment Favre suffered. But I should have been more declarative about it in the magazine.

It was around this time that I had to draw lines of demarcations. When I covered big games and wrote them for both the magazine and the top of MMQB, I had to divide the material and make it as fair and interesting for both as I could. That led to some interesting decisions, but I also strived to tell separate stories as thoroughly as I could.

July 22, 2013
JASON GARRETT’S TRAINING CAMP SPEECH TO THE COWBOYS
We launched The MMQB with an unprecendented video of an NFL coach welcoming his team to the new season

LINK: www.si.com/2013/07/17/jason-garrett-dallas-cowboys-speech

This 36-minute video meant a lot to me. On the first day in the history of The MMQB we started by attempting to blow up the internet with something that hadn’t been recorded and shown in its entirety: an NFL head coach’s camp-opening address to his team. The rules, the season theme, the passion, the message.

Getty Images

It happened on a Saturday afternoon at the Cowboys camp in Oxnard, Calif., two miles from the shores of the Pacific, in a team meeting room at the hotel the Cowboys commandeer for their summer camp. Garrett spoke.

We recorded it, agreeing to bleep out the four-letter words. On the morning of July 22, 2013, when we launched, this was our first piece of unique content. I’m proud of it to this day, because it’s not easy to get an NFL team to hand you the coach’s speech to his players so you can share it with the world.

I was on my training camp tour that summer, and one AFC coach a bit sheepishly told me he’d watched the speech, then told the coaches on his staff he wanted them to watch it. He told me he’d learned a few things from it, and he was impressed with Garrett’s passion and attention to passion. Garrett on tuning out distractions:

“Think Einstein listed to the noise?” Think Martin Luther King listened to the noise?

“Don’t listen to the noise.”

You might ask why this video is on the list. At the time, I thought it was vital that our website not just be the best writing about football; it needed to spread its wings and be different. Videos, podcasts, writing, guest columns. We needed to be a blank canvas in a new media world. This was the start.

Dec. 4-6, 2013
GAME 150: A WEEK IN THE LIFE OF AN OFFICIATING CREW
An unprecedented glimpse at the third team on the field

I broke the 16,000-word opus on a game week with Gene Steratore’s crew into three parts:


The pressure to get it right.

The crew’s lives as real people.

Game day, Baltimore at Chicago.

I give credit to Dean Blandino for this, as I wrote the other day. When I started the site, I wanted some special things, things that hadn’t been done before. And a week in the life of an officiating crew was virgin territory. Blandino took a chance, and there was stuff in here, in restrospect, that he wishes was not.

Namely, the crew members’ obsession with grades. Blandino preached in his short tenure as VP of Officiating that the officials should just worry about calling the best game they could; the grades would take care of themselves. Well, they would. But that didn’t stop Steratore and his crew from being hugely bummed out about some downgrades from their previous game.

John DePetro/The MMQB

I learned so much doing this story—truly, the most of any in my 29 years at SI and The MMQB. The officials are behind an iron curtain. So this was something we took a lot of pride in doing, and in trying to do right.

Please watch the videos by John DePetro with each piece. From Steratore’s western Pennsylvania kitchen (he makes a good red sauce, and was thoughtful enough to provide the Chianti even though he doesn’t drink alcohol during the season) to back judge Dino Paganelli’s AP history class in western Michigan, to the other members of the crew, I hope you got the feeling I got. I hope you came away thinking you now understood a little bit about the real life of an officiating crew.

Nov. 18-19, 2015
A QUARTERBACK AND HIS GAME PLAN
Behind the scenes with Carson Palmer as a game plan is installed

The Cards were practicing in West Virginia for a few days in October 2015, between two Eastern Time games, and I went there to try to convince Palmer to let me do something I really don’t think he wanted to do—open up his world to me for a game week to see how the life of a quarterback—particularly an anal one like him—works.

I was surprised. He really wanted to do. It was going to be a major intrusion on his life. I wanted to be with him at his home Tuesday evening when the gameplan came to him via email, I wanted to watch him prepare (including the use of a Virtual Reality headsets).

I wanted to talk to him as he went back and forth to practice, to digest his days. And I needed him on Saturday, the day before the game, to explain the final prep and how deeply he studied. Palmer was perfect, and coach Brian Arians did a great job too—even though he was really hesitant about it.

The MMQB

As with the officials’ story, I did this in multiple parts.

Part 1: Five days to learn 171 plays.

Part 2: Game Day in Cleveland, and what happens to the best-laid game plans.

What was cool here, and what made me feel like I got it right, was a couple of texts from Tony Romo and Josh McCown, saying, in effect, That’s exactly what we go through every game week. Right down to the improvisation, which played a huge part in this win over Cleveland, I felt like this told the real story of what a quarterback goes through if he’s doing it right.

Feb. 12, 2018
WRISTBAND 145
Behind the play that confused the Patriots and gave the Eagles their Super Bowl LII win

LINK: www.si.com/nfl/2018/02/11/eagles-super-bowl-zach-ertz-touchdown-wristband-145-mmqb-peter-king

This lead to Monday Morning Quarterback eight days after the Super Bowl is one of the most enjoyable stories of my life. I was amazed, first, that six days after the game, the three men who invented the play that won the Super Bowl—receivers coach Mike Groh, offensive coordinator Frank Reich and coach Doug Pederson—agreed to meet me in Pederson’s office to explain how this innovative, new, never-been-run-before touchdown pass to Zach Ertz came to be. (Credit Reich. He was one of the brains behind it, but he wanted the other two in the room, and so at 9:30 on Saturday morning, all six eyes of the innovators still bleary, they all met me.)

John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated

So many interesting things about Gun trey left, open buster star motion, 383 X follow Y slant. But what will live in Super Bowl history—and in the burgeoning legacy of Pederson and his vastly underrated 2017 coaching staff—is that this play was not one of the 193 in the game plan when the Eagles left Philadelphia; it’s one of 12 that got invented in Minneapolis.

It has so many tentacles that it wouldn’t have mattered how much Bill Belichick and Matt Patricia and Ernie Adams studied the Eagles. They would not have found this. This wasn’t good coaching. This was superb coaching, the kind of coaching that wins a Super Bowl.

As has happened many times in my 29 years at Sports Illustrated and The MMQB, I was so excited when I pressed the SEND button and sent this column to my editor—Dom Bonvissuto, in this case. It’s crazy to say I was filled with joy, because you’d think at 60, I wouldn’t get filled with joy over something I’ve done for so long. But that’s the great thing about this job. It still fills me with joy.

 

[Loyal]

My finger just got tired pushing the down arrow button through this typical, long-assed Peter King story. Imagine how his fingers must have felt over the years, spewing words onto the page, day after day, week after week..etc..:headexplosion:

 

[bubbaramfan]

Does this mean the bag of wind is finally empty?

 

[Prime Time]

Does this mean the bag of wind is finally empty?

No, he'll soon be huffing and puffing alongside his buddy Mike Florio in a new format. My prediction is that PK will shift his man-love from the declining Patriots to the 49ers and their wonder-boy Jimmy Garoppollo. uke:

 

[LARams_1963]

Blew right by the GSOT..... typical.....

 

[VegasRam]

I will say one , and only one thing for king - two (maybe three), years ago, on Cowherd, he said “Anyone looking for a coach should check out Sean McVay”, then a relatively obscure OC at Washington.

Other than that, he mostly makes me want to gag.

 

[Prime Time]

https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/05/30/peter-king-sports-illustrated-mmqb-oral-history

King’s Tale: An Oral History of Peter King
He staked out Parcells in a donut shop, kicked back with Favre and Manning and countless others, and created a distinctive presence that became appointment NFL reading. As Peter King moves on from SI after 29 years, football’s biggest stars and his journalism colleagues reflect on his impact on the game, the profession and their lives
By Tim Rohan

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahaha

A version of this story appears in the June 4, 2018, edition of Sports Illustrated. To subscribe, click here.

In the spring of 1980, less than a year out of college, Peter King took a job as a cub sports reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer. Somewhere around that time, King sat down for a headshot, one that, decades later, would bounce around the Internet after King became the face of Sports Illustrated.

In the photo, he’s wearing a plaid shirt, bulky glasses and a massive afro. It’s an awkward picture, to be sure. His expression is part smile and part grimace, as if he can’t wait for this to be over. He has places to go, people to talk to, stories to write. “You can see how eager and enthused he was,” says Mark Purdy, an Enquirer columnist at the time. “What that mug shot says to me is: Let’s Go.”

King went, all right. He spent the next five years at the Enquirer, joining the Bengals beat in 1984. In ’85 he moved to Newsday in New York, covering the Giants. All the while, he was getting inside the game by talking to football’s most prominent figures—Paul Brown, Bill Parcells, Bill Belichick. And he was building a reputation as a go-getter. Parcells, coach of those Giants teams, gave him a nickname: Relentless.

Boomer Esiason, former Bengals quarterback: “Peter picked me up at the airport after I was drafted in 1984. … [This] is how the Bengals do business. They fly you out there coach [class]. They don’t pick you up in a limo. You have to figure out how to get downtown in a cab or whatever. Peter King knew that I was angry because I had fallen in the draft significantly. I thought I was a top-10 player, and I had fallen all the way to number 38, and Peter knew where there was a story.”

Peter King: “Every day that summer [in 1984], it was two-a-day practices, and at least half the days I stood next to Paul Brown. That was such an incredible learning experience—picking the brain of Paul Brown.

One day I said to him—we’re in the middle of nowhere Ohio, it’s 89 degrees with 80 percent humidity every day, standing out there for four hours—I just said to him, ‘How do you do this every day? Doesn’t this ever get to you? The tedium or the heat or whatever?’ And he got really angry. He said, ‘Young man, this is our lifeblood!’ ”

Mark Purdy: “You’re around Paul Brown, who was one of the inventors of modern pro football. He invented the facemask!”

Bill Parcells: “He was eager and very interested in the subject matter. He was a big football fan. Quite interested in the nuances of organizations and how they’re being run. Then the player acquisition and strategic elements of the game. Then, I think more so, he was interested in the personalities of the game, this game for maladjusted people. … You could throw him in that maladjusted category as well.”

Peter King: “Every day I would show up at [Giants] camp at 7:15 a.m. in the coffee room, which doubled as the press room. All the assistant coaches—[offensive coordinator] Ron Erhardt, Belichick [the defensive coordinator], all the coaches—would come through, get coffee, maybe read the Daily News, and then go to work. Parcells would come in and give me these looks and not say anything.

By the fourth day he just said to me, ‘Who the [expletive] are you?’ I said, I met you the other day, I’m Peter King, I work for Newsday. And he said, ‘I know that, but what are you doing here [this early]?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m just trying to get my feet on the ground with this job. There’s 19 papers that cover this team every day. I’m a competitive guy and I want to be good at this.’ He just walked out.”

Bill Parcells: “I was a creature of habit, especially if we were winning. I wasn’t tempting fate. So I would go to the same places, and I’d take the same route to the stadium. He would know where I was going to be, and once in a while, he would show up there.”

Bob Glauber, Newsday: “Peter was driven. Parcells nicknamed him ‘Relentless,’ because he was completely fascinated with every aspect of things. He would meet Parcells at his donut shop at 6 in the morning!”

Peter King: “I did that one time. But there were some times where, if I had a question—this happened two or three times. If I felt that it was kind of important or kind of sensitive, I would show up at [Parcells’] parking space at like 6:15, and I would wait, and I would ask him [one question], and then I would go home.”

Bill Parcells: “He knew that I got to work early, and he would show up and be outside the gate at the parking entrance under Giants Stadium. He’d be waiting there.”

Tim Layden, Sports Illustrated senior writer: “The first time I met Peter he was in the press room bunker at the old Giants Stadium, talking on two land line phones at the same time. One in each hand.”

Bob Glauber: “In 1987, Karl Nelson was a right tackle. He was diagnosed with [cancer], and the writers wanted to get some money together to benefit cancer research. So we started a kangaroo court, and we had various fines for our misbehavior. You got fined a dollar for ‘Peter-ing’ if you were on the phone for too long.”

Peter King: “In those days, there weren’t a lot of people who covered the [entire league] as a beat. I had this NFL notes column. … I soon realized I could call the PR guy of the Bears and he would get me Buddy Ryan on the phone.”

Adam Schefter, former Broncos beat writer: “I remember him telling me one time, he said every week he had a goal to call five different people—people he hadn’t spoken to.”

Peter King: “I rode in the car with Parcells after he won the Super Bowl the first time. The game was in Pasadena, at the Rose Bowl. The hotels were far-flung. The Giants were in Orange County, and Parcells had to be at a press conference the next morning at 8:30. He was going to be alone in the car with this security guy for like 20-30 minutes, so I said, It would be great to get a story on this. I asked him [if I could ride along], and he said, ‘I don’t care.’

“He was so excited. The NFL security guy, Charlie Jackson, was driving. I was sitting in the front seat, Parcells was in the back, and Parcells has his elbows up, his forearms on the front seat, and he’s asking, ‘Charlie, was Ditka as excited as I am? Was Ditka this excited last year?’ I mean, he was a kid. He just couldn’t get over it—he had just won the Super Bowl.”

Picking up Esiason at the airport, riding with Parcells after the Super Bowl—King had a knack for taking readers places they’d never been before. Stories like that caught the eye of Sports Illustrated.

In June 1989, SI managing editor Mark Mulvoy hired King to bolster the magazine’s NFL coverage, writing a column called Inside the NFL—three to four pages at the back of the magazine, with notes and nuggets from around the league. But his role gradually expanded, as he proved that he could get access to pretty much anyone in the NFL.

Mark Mulvoy: “[When we hired] Ricky Reilly, we brought in from the West Coast and really romanced him over a weekend. He came out to my house in Rye, [N.Y.], and the whole thing. But with Peter, it was really—Peter’s nature at the time was low-key. I remember it being low-key.”

Peter King: “There was not much woo-ing. I don’t think I knew how much money I was going to make when he hired me. I just said yes.”

Mark Mulvoy: “I didn’t think at that time that Peter was the greatest of writers. I don’t say that as a negative. Peter could write, but his real strength was insightful reporting. I think his Rolodex in those days was unmatched. He knew everybody. He knew the owners. He could tell us what the hell was going on in the inner workings of football.”

Rick Telander, former SI writer: “It would be like ‘War and Peace’ compared to a pamphlet—his Rolodex compared to mine.”

Bill Colson, former SI managing editor: “You didn’t read [Peter] for the probing analysis of the human condition like you read Frank Deford or Gary Smith. He was just an unbelievable reporter. He was indefatigable. He just brought you information that you hadn’t seen or read anywhere else before. We didn’t have writers like that.”

Don Banks, former SI.com NFL writer: “He finds absolute joy in being able to get people [on the phone]. He would call you and be absurdly specific. [Peter King voice] ‘You’re never going to believe who I just talked to. I just got Bill Polian on the phone for 47 minutes.’ He could get virtually anybody.”

Brett Favre, Hall of Fame quarterback: “I played 20 years, and I want to say 15 of them, Peter was part of it, to the point where, I want to say, he was just like family. It was not uncommon for Peter to come to town and just come over our house.

We welcomed Peter in as if he was family. He took naps right there in the lounge chair in our living room. He’d take his shoes off and he’d have on socks with holes in them. We’d ride to the stadium together, or two nights before the game, we’d go to eat, him and me and my youngest daughter, Breleigh. We’d ride around and tell stories and listen to music.

John Biever/Sports Illustrated

“It was persistence, and I say that kind of jokingly, but it’s kind of true. ‘O.K., Brett, I’m coming to town, do you mind if I come over?’ He was working, and I had a tendency sometimes to forget that. I think that’s what makes a good media person—you almost tend to forget that they’re working. Peter had that way about him.”

Peyton Manning, five-time NFL MVP: “Peter was always very professional. I don’t know if the term off the record exists much anymore, but it certainly did with Peter. You could tell him things off the record, and it would stay that way.”

Boomer Esiason: “Every coach in the NFL would allow him in their office. Every coach in the NFL would allow him in their draft room. Every coach in the NFL would allow him to go out to practice. Why? Because he has the most valuable asset that any reporter could acquire, and that is the absolute unabashed trust from the subject that he is covering.”

Deion Sanders, Hall of Fame cornerback: “I respected him to be one of the generals of his craft, and my attorney, Eugene Parker, adored him, so we established a pretty good relationship early on in my career. He knew my [fake] names that I went under [when I checked into hotels], and that only comes with being consistent and having a relationship and building a trust.”

Brett Favre: “Peter is a very likable person. He’s dry. He’s different than me, but I got Peter. He’s a way smarter guy than I am. He took the top-tier classes, and I was down at the bottom classes. I’m athletic; he really isn’t. He may have been picked last on the playground—and I say that jokingly, too. I may have even had a laugh with him about it: ‘This is your opportunity to get back at all those dumb jocks who picked you last on the playground.’ ”

Steve Young, Hall of Fame quarterback: “Not all writers love the game. They cover it, but they don’t love it. And I think Peter’s love of the game came through. Players felt that. You can feel when somebody cares about the game. The questions are way more interesting and thoughtful when you’re covering something that you really have a passion for.”

Mark Mulvoy: “I always loved the fact that, [imagine] some guy had just scored three touchdowns, he’s on the way to dinner with his wife, and he can’t go to dinner until he’s talked with Peter, because Peter’s calling.”

Asshole Face, Saints coach: “Here’s what I remember all the time. There would be something funny said and he would go, ‘HA HA HA HA.’ And he would give you this four-chuckle laugh that would be a little louder than you wanted in your phone.”

Brett Favre: “There’s no way he can hide in a room of people and you not know he’s there. He does have a very distinct laugh. It’s almost obnoxious—in a good way.”

Peter King: “After John Elway’s last game, I was in a helicopter with him and [coach Mike] Shanahan when they were going from their hotel in Fort Lauderdale to a press conference in Miami the morning after [Super Bowl XXXIII]. You could just tell that Elway, unless something really strange happened, was going to be done. I always tried to get somewhere after a game, with somebody who really mattered. If I could.”

Super Bowl XXIX, 1995, Miami, Florida. The San Francisco 49ers beat the San Diego Chargers in a blowout. Steve Young throws six touchdown passes and is named MVP. King’s job is to trail Young that night and then file his notes to Telander, SI’s lead NFL writer at the time, who is writing the game story for the magazine.

Peter King: “After the game, Leigh Steinberg, his agent, had [Young] do, quite literally, like 20 interviews on the field. I mean, every little mini-cam from San Jose and San Francisco and Sacramento. It lasted about two hours. Steve Young looked at me at one point and he goes, ‘Peter, can you find me anything to drink or eat? I haven’t had anything in like 12 hours.’

So I went underneath the stands, and I saw some guy cleaning up one of the [luxury] boxes. He had a bunch of Gatorades and some cookies, and so I said, ‘I’m sorry, I need this for Steve Young.’ The guy just looked at me very perplexed. I got three bottles of Gatorade and six or eight cookies and I brought them out. Steve Young drank all three Gatorades in about 90 seconds, and then he shoveled down a couple of cookies, and he kept doing interviews.”

Steve Young: “Finally when we were done, I think Peter was the last one standing. I think he just asked, ‘Can I hang with you guys?’ And I said, ‘Of course you can.’ So we got in the limo, and I had drunk so much Gatorade, and I was so hot, I was just sitting there. It was Peter, myself, [draft prospect] Kerry Collins, and Leigh in the back of this limo.”

Peter King: “It was funny—Leigh Steinberg was recruiting Kerry Collins to be one of his clients.”

Steve Young: “By the way, I hate riding in limos in the back. I get carsick. I can’t stand it. So we start driving and all of a sudden I’m like, oh no, this Gatorade is coming out.”

Peter King: “We were barely out of the parking lot of the stadium, and Steve Young unleashes a torrent of bright red vomit all over the back of this thing. It goes all over Steinberg’s shoes, it splashes on my shoes, he gets Kerry Collins a little bit. And Leigh Steinberg, without pausing, says, ‘Well, I’ll never wash these shoes again.’ ”

Steve Young: “I think Peter and Kerry Collins took the brunt of it. And I didn’t mean to, I had an eruption. It’s a hard one, right? What do you do? There’s no good reaction. It’s brutal. I tried to mop it up the best I could.”

Mike Silver: “So Peter files all this stuff to Telander, assuming it’s going to be the lede [of the magazine story], and Telander ends up writing, infamously, a story that was like, ‘To cope with another Super Bowl blowout, you need faith and blah, blah, blah … so I called up Sidedoor Pullman Kid, the King of the Hobos, and wrote a first-person hobo travel story.’ ”

Rick Telander: “I thought about writing something that’s different from all the other Super Bowl stories that had been done. … I actually wrote the story. It was [the hobo] interacting with people at the Super Bowl. I thought it was a good, kind of crazy, odd, but fascinating comparison to a guy who was a genuine hobo and what it’s like for him to be at a Super Bowl, meet the owner of the 49ers and all at.”

Mark Mulvoy: “He wrote about a hobo, and I’m like, what the [expletive] does this have to do with a football game?”

Rick Telander: “I sent the story in, and I think very quickly someone said, ‘Oh, Jesus, what happened here?’ Somebody at the office said, ‘You know, this needs a little rewriting.’ In about two hours I ditched it all and wrote an entire 3,000-word story. I don’t think I’ve ever written that fast in my life. And I used some of Peter’s stuff. God Bless him forever and ever.”

Mike Silver: “Telander had to rewrite on no sleep from his hotel room at 9 in the morning. He ended up using the Steve Young stuff, but only as an ending. So Peter was [expletive] furious. Here he got the greatest Steve Young anecdote ever, and first, it didn’t make the story at all, and then, it wasn’t the lede.”

Peter King: “In those days there was nothing else to do with that stuff. There was no other option to use it anywhere else—no website, no anything. Until I started writing about that a few years later, most of that stuff nobody ever knew.”

In 1997, Steve Robinson, managing editor at CNNSI.com, asked King if he would write a column for the website—just spill his notebook and write whatever he had leftover from his Inside the NFL column and other magazine work. The Steve Young vomit story would never be buried again. Thus Monday Morning Quarterback was born.

Steve Robinson: “A lot of people’s first reaction was, ‘Oh, c’mon, nobody is ever going to read this much.’ But they did! And they do! It wasn’t writerly in the sense of a finished story for the magazine. But that’s not—and it took us a while to get to this point—that’s not what the web is about.

It’s not about dotting all the I’s and crossing the T’s and making sure you don’t have any dangling participles or whatever. It’s about creating a recognizable voice that people warm to and go to. Because they have an awful lot of choices.”

Peter King: “We didn’t call it Monday Morning Quarterback in the beginning. I don’t even know what we called it. I don’t remember. What I think I started doing, I would say, ‘Here’s me Monday Morning Quarterbacking what happened this week in the NFL.’ Eventually, probably by the end of that first year, we called it Monday Morning Quarterback, and the name stuck.”

Mike Silver: “Peter gave you: ‘This is the day that was [in the NFL]. This is where we were going in, and after this huge slate of games, this is where we are now.’

Asshole Face: “Growing up as a kid, watching NFL football, we didn’t have access to all the highlights. We got that on Monday night at halftime—Howard Cosell would cover the week in football. When you were younger, it was a school night, so it was: ‘You can stay up for the halftime highlights and then you’re going to bed.’

And then eventually, we had ESPN, and Chris Berman would bring together the week in football. Peter did the same thing in [his column]. He brought you what’s going on in the last week in the NFL.”

Mike Silver: “He also understood the first-person element of the Internet. ‘You know what? I’m going to write about my daughter’s field hockey games. [Expletive] it.’ All the things we were taught not to do at journalism school and Sports Illustrated.”

Steve Robinson: “It was immediately successful. The metric for measuring page views and all of that took a while to mature. It was a time when we were doing a lot of guesswork, but it was clear that people were going to it. They knew it was going to be there, and it was a consistent voice.”

Peyton Manning: “He would take these training camp tours every summer. He’d go see a number of training camps, and then he would come to Indianapolis or he would come to Denver, and he and I would go sit on a golf cart or on a bench somewhere.

After he interviewed me about how camp was going or that season’s expectations, it would be my turn to interview him about all the places he’d been. He wasn’t revealing any private information, but it was a great way for me to keep up with all that was going on around the league.”

Frank Reich, former NFL quarterback, now Colts coach: “Over the years there were very few things as a player and as a coach that I would read, just because of time. You just don’t have enough time to read as much as you want to read. But I would always read Monday Morning Quarterback.

It just had a style of writing that was unique and informative and entertaining. I loved the 10 Things I Think I Think section. If I didn’t have time to read anything, I was going to read that.”

Adam Schefter: “I can’t tell you how many times I’m reading the column and I’m going, ‘Damn, he’s out in front on this.’ Or, ‘He knew this, detailed explanation on that.’ ”

Mike Florio, founder, Pro Football Talk: “I don’t know how you can [write that column] for 17 straight weeks in season, for all the information that comes out of the games. To have a sense of what’s interesting, to talk to the right people, to take it all and distill it into 8,000 words that are mostly written on the fly? It really is an impressive task. I know I could never do it.”

As the column took off, King’s profile grew. In 2009 he received the Dick McCann Memorial Award from the Pro Football Writers of America, joining the “writers wing” of the Hall of Fame, and in 2010 he was named Sportswriter of the Year by the National Sports Media Association.

Readers naturally gravitated to King when there was a big story, and in those instances, in classic Peter King fashion, he would try to take them behind the scenes as much as possible. In some cases critics said King was too close to his subjects, or too close to the league office. Asshole Face didn’t talk to him for about four years after Bountygate.

Mike Florio: “There’s a certain balance that you have to strike if you want to have true access. If you want to be in a position where you can get this coach on the phone, that GM on the phone, that owner on the phone, you have to have a willingness to …

I don’t necessarily want to say ‘compromise,’ because I don’t mean it in a pejorative way, but you have to know how to rein in how far you’re willing to go to criticize someone actively in the sport that you’re covering. Otherwise, they’re going to tell you to go to hell when you try to get them on the phone.

“I think Peter balances that as well as anyone, because he still is critical. There are people who won’t talk to him, so it’s not like he’s walking around shaking pom-poms solely for the purpose of getting access. I think he’s critical fairly when he needs to be. Some people get it, and they’re willing to talk to him, even though from time to time he speaks his mind. Then some people have a problem with it.”

King offered to resign during both the Ray Rice and the Deflategate scandals, because he had been wrong on parts of his reporting—due in part, he says, to sources giving him faulty information.

Chris Stone, Editor in Chief, Sports Illustrated Group: “We all make mistakes. We’ve made much bigger mistakes than that [at SI]. He owned it. To this day it clearly still haunts him. And I think that speaks more highly of Peter than it does less of him.”

Peter King: “I honestly feel like if anybody at SI said we don’t trust your reporting on this anymore, I would just say, O.K., I should go.”

Mike Florio: “Bill Belichick won’t talk to him. I think Belichick is still mad at him about Spygate from 2007. At some point that’s Bill’s problem, not Peter’s problem.”

Adam Schefter: “There’s no part of me that says, ‘Oh, Peter has gone soft on the league.’ Peter is a lover of football and of people. He also has a sharp tongue. There were times last year when I’m reading his column—you can look these things up. Search, ‘Ben McAdoo.’ I’m like, did he really just write this about Ben McAdoo?”

Mike Silver: “I just think, if you try to do something on the scale that he did—which is wrap your arms around the league and its history and its legacy, every week—you’re going to have people think you’ve become this, or you didn’t do this well enough, or you should’ve been more true to this. I just hope that none of that [criticism] lasts. He did something momentous and novel and uncharted, and he did it at an insanely high level and he almost never stopped.”

Deion Sanders: “When you’ve been in the game that long, people tend to feel like, when you say something, it’s the gospel. It’s the good news. Because you’ve been vetted, you’ve stood the test of time, and you’re still respected from all ethnicities, and not just one. He put in his work, man.”

Peter King: “At the 2017 league meetings, we’re in Phoenix, and I pass [Asshole Face]. I see him, we stop and say hello. We had like a 15 minute conversation, and I said, ‘Hey, I’ll call you one day,’ and he says, ‘I’d like that.’ ”

Asshole Face: “I consider him a good friend. We went through a stretch during [Bountygate] when he probably still was a good friend, but one that I wasn’t speaking with.”

By 2013, King had established himself as one of the pre-eminent football writers in the country—and was ready for something new. Paul Fichtenbaum, Time Inc. Sports Group editor at the time, offered to build a website around him, dedicated to football 24/7: The MMQB. King could hire a team of reporters and editors, direct the coverage and be in complete control.

Dom Bonvissuto, longtime editor of Peter’s Monday column: “At the time he started The MMQB website he was 56-ish. He had many opportunities to just kick back, maybe write the column once a week, maybe do a little TV work. He could’ve just kicked his feet up. And when he decided to do The MMQB, it was the complete opposite decision. He said, not only am I not going to kick my feet up and coast into retirement, he said, I want to become a boss, I want to hire all these writers.”

Paul Fichtenbaum: “He had been doing the same thing for many, many years, and he wanted to creatively challenge himself. It was important for him to do something that was different and new, that he could shape.”

Ed Werder, longtime NFL reporter: “At first I was a little disappointed. I thought it was something I might like to get involved in, and he pretty much told me right away that he wasn’t hiring all of his friends, that he had a different vision for it. He was going to use it to create opportunities for journalists he thought deserved a bigger platform.”

Taylor Ballantyne

Chris Stone: “He had the idea, if we’re going to build something truly different, maybe we need to think about bringing in some truly different voices.”

Jenny Vrentas, senior writer, Sports Illustrated/The MMQB: “When Peter started The MMQB in the spring of 2013, the first thing we did together as a staff was an off-site retreat. We were given one assignment by Peter going in: Brainstorm 10 ideas that no one has ever done before. That’s a daunting task, given the fact that no sport in America is covered as thoroughly as the NFL. But that was Peter’s vision for The MMQB: to be different.

“On the flight home from that off-site retreat, Peter told me how important it was to him to have more women and more people of color on staff. You could take that two ways. No one wants to be hired because of their gender or race. But that’s not what Peter was saying. He was saying that he was a white male, working in a predominantly white and male industry, and once he got the chance to hire a staff, he wanted to change that.”

Dom Bonvissuto: “The website exposed the football world to a whole new generation of talent, and that wouldn’t have been possible without Peter.”

King is leaving Sports Illustrated now on June 1—29 years to the day since Mulvoy hired him. He turns 61 this month, and wants to cut back on his work, spend more time with his family and step aside, he says, so the young writers he hired at The MMQB can flourish without him casting a shadow. He plans to continue writing his column with NBC Sports.

Mark Purdy: “What percentage of Peter’s life do you think he spent on his cell phone?”

Mark Mulvoy: “At Sports Illustrated in the ’70s, Dan Jenkins was the marquee talent. And then you had Deford in his prime. I’m sure I’m missing somebody in there. Then Reilly, you had his column at the back of the magazine. He was the face of SI. But clearly, since the turn of the century, it’s been Peter with his MMQB column. You’re talking about a guy, for 15 years or so, he’s been the face [of Sports Illustrated].”

Chris Stone: “I really believe he is one of the five most important figures in SI history. Peter almost alone kind of ushered Sports Illustrated into the digital era with his willingness to embrace digital. He didn’t just say, ‘I’m going to be part of the Internet.’ He created something that was an Internet media phenomenon.”

Deion Sanders: “He created a brand. He did a lot for SI. I’m proud of him. He had a good run. It’s not like he’s leaving the game yet. He’s only leaving SI.”

Adam Schefter: “Peter would be on the Mount Rushmore of football writers.”

Peyton Manning: “When you think of Sports Illustrated, you think of Peter King. I know I do. It’ll be hard to not see Peter King and Sports Illustrated tied in one.”