Please Do Not Turn Off the Irons

It should be no secret to frequent readers of this site that we’re not overtly obsessed with college football around these parts. If we had to diagnose it, we’d guess that this has something to do with the fact that we grew up in the proximity of two big schools (Georgia and Georgia Tech) with no clear loyalty to either one, then went to college at an institution where football was relevant but certainly not an absolute requirement every Saturday.

In any case, just because we’re the tiniest bit indifferent about college football doesn’t mean that we can’t take great pleasure out of ridiculous online interviews when they come careening into our inbox like a bobsled on a track slicked up with Crisco.

Why we just chose to use a bobsled analogy when talking about college football we can’t be certain, but as you can see there’s just something about the college game that activates the A.D.D. that constantly lives somewhere in the synapses of our brain waiting to pounce at any given moment.

Now what were we talking about again?

Ahh… yes. Funny interviews. And specifically, the funny interview given (we’re not sure exactly when) by Auburn running back Kenny Irons, a player we previously did not know very much about but now feel quite fondly towards as the result of his candid and slightly unusual answers. Consider some of these gems:

Asked about something he could not live without, Irons responded,

“Candy, I love candy. I love candy bars and snacks. If they didn’t make snacks and junk food then I would be lost. I wake up in the morning eating honey buns.”

We’re not necessarily fond of this quote because it provides the revelation that Irons apparently eats nothing other than pure sugar (though we do find that fact amusing). Mainly, the line we love here is, “I wake up in the morning eating honey buns,” because it gives you a visual of Irons emerging from a deep sleep, still underneath the covers, eyes still halfway closed, eating honey buns. As if his first conscious moment of every day is the third bite of a glazed pastry.

Which, come to think of it, would not be such an awful way to wake up.

On the subject of what he’d do if he won the lottery, Irons quipped,

“I would buy a huge house. When you are young you idolize people and they have big, huge houses. They have these big houses with all these different rooms. They are so nice and lovely and they are somewhere that you can go and relax and you can have a big bed like Shaquille O’Neal. Shaquille O’Neal has a 30-foot bed. Who has a 30-foot bed in their house? Just imagine having something like that and relaxing and just saying I’m home. And you can have a lot of go-carts out in front of your house to ride in.”

Our first impulse here is to make some kind of joke about go-carts, but we’re going to have to ignore it because… Shaq has a 30-foot bed? Really? We were not aware of this. Sounds like something Irons might have learned on an episode of MTV Cribs. Now we wish we’d seen it. Do you suppose that it’s a king sized bed that’s 30 feet long from head to toe? Or is it a standard length bed that’s actually 30 feet across? That would actually make more sense, because then you could roll around a whole lot side-to-side and never fall off the bed, which would be cool for… umm… sleeping.

When asked which teammate he would bring with him on a deserted island, Irons responded that he’d take Tre Smith, because “he is the most unique person ever. He thinks of the most amazing things.” One of the things that Smith thought up:

“‘What if a team was on the 50-yard line and they had to kick a field goal to win the game and you had somebody like Carl Stewart who has a 42-inch vertical? If the team kicks the ball and they are barely going to make it and it is just going to graze inside the goalpost and you have Carl jump up and block it before it gets there, would that be OK? And would they count that?’”

We wanted to make a joke here, but this is actually kind of an interesting scenario.

When the interviewer (who really should be up for the Pulitzer even though he/she asked some of the most basic questions ever) inquired about Irons’ best talent other than football, he said,

“Drawing. I like to draw, if you consider that a talent. I like to disguise myself as other people, too. I call that a talent. I like telling people that I am somebody else. I tell people that I play water polo and if they ask me what position I play I tell them right water. I don’t even know if that is a position but I tell them that I play right water.”

God, we like so many things about this quote it’s difficult to know where to start. First of all, “I like to draw, if you consider that a talent.” Doesn’t everyone pretty much consider drawing a talent?

Also, “right water” is beyond brilliant. Beyond.

But the best thing about this passage is that he says “I like to disguise myself as other people,” but then goes on to talk about how he tells people he’s a water polo player.

As best we can tell, this isn’t really an example of a “disguise” so much as it’s an example of a blatant, bold-faced lie. And while we can’t outright condone the use of lying as a source of entertainment, we do kind of like the notion of referring to the act of lying as “disguising yourself as other people.”

In sum, thank you Kenny Irons for taking the time to do this interview. It’s almost enough to inspire us to awaken from our college football-induced slumber and check in on a few Auburn games next season… except that we just realized that Kenny Irons was a senior this past year and has now graduated.

So instead, we’ve got another tribute planned to honor Mr. Irons and this outstanding interview:

We’re going to attempt to wake up tomorrow morning eating honey buns.