This day was inevitable. Ever since he went down with his second concussion in as many games, Eagles fan knew that Brian Westbrook’s days with the Eagles were numbered. A $7.5-million salary for 2010 only cemented that.
Make no mistake, Westbrook was one of the franchise’s best players. Yes, he was a bit surly, and, yes, he wasn’t always the model player (I’ll never be a fan of a player boycotting training camp while his teammates are sweating in the hot sun), but there is no questioning his heart or his production on the field.
As an Eagles season ticket holder, I got to see up close how special of a player Westbrook was. His cuts on a dime, one-handed catches and blitz pickups were second to none during his best years. My responses for predictions about close Eagles games were always the same. “Eagles win with a late Westbrook touchdown sealing the deal.” Since he did that to Buffalo in 2003, that was always how I looked at Westbrook: a game changer every time he touched the ball.
I’ll never forget my most memorable Westbrook play, one I didn’t even see happen.
I was sitting in the press box at Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, covering the 2003 fall race for the local newspaper I worked for. All day I had been following the Eagles-Giants game on my computer and all day I saw the Eagles offense do absolutely nothing. With less than two minutes left, as New York lined up to punt I leaned over to a friend and said, “With how poorly (I probably used a word I won’t write here) the Eagles offense has played, unless Westbrook returns this punt the game is over. He could do it.” A minute later, after I refreshed the page, the message, “Westbrook returns punt 84 yards for touchdown,” scrawled across the page and I let out a cheer that drew all eyes to me. I could care less. Westbrook just won a game the Eagles should have lost.
It’s never an easy thing to watch one of your favorite team’s best players deteriorate before your eyes. Not a player as special and proud as Westbrook. Will he play again? Maybe, but he’ll never be the same. But for his time in green and white, he always brought Eagles fans to the edge of their seat. Even when they were following the game on the Internet.
) You name it and I’ll probably write about it. And at least once a week. Promise (no, seriously, I really do).
District basketball madness
This isn’t the first time it happened and it certainly won’t be the last.
Thanks to Mother Nature, Saturday is going to be one interesting day. On top of the three games featuring local teams scheduled for tomorrow, the four teams that were supposed to play today will now be playing tomorrow. So that means I’ll be at three games tomorrow. I’ll be at Pleasant Valley to watch East Stroudsburg South play Freedom in the girls playoffs at 2:30 p.m., race back to the office to write that story and then I’m off to ES South, where I’ll cover both ends of a double header featuring Pocono Mountain West playing Whitehall at 6 p.m. and Mountain Valley Conference champion Pocono Mountain East meeting Freedom at 7:30 p.m. Like I said, it’s going to be interesting.
Perhaps the most intriguing story right now in the district playoffs, is that Pius, which hasn’t lost since the beginning of last month, will be without leading scorer Sean O’Neill when it plays Moravian Academy at 2:30 p.m. at Pocono East. Royals coach A.J. DePue was unsure of whether or not O’Neill, who is averaging 17.7 points per game, would be available in the future, but did confirm that O’Neill will not be in uniform Saturday.
On a good note for Pius, it rolled past the Lions 69-30 in its last game on Feb. 19, but that doesn’t mean the Royals should go into Saturday’s game overconfident.
“(Moravian coach) John Donmoyer is such a great coach so you know as good as we looked he’s going to have some kind of game plan to slow us down,” DePue said. “I’m not overlooking Moravian because as much as we won by they could slow us down. You can never look past a team in the playoffs.”
Helping offset the absence of O’Neill will be sophomore Jay Maletz, who has started the Royals’ past three games and averaged 11.3 points per game in those games.
“Jay has been a great surprise,” DePue said. “He’s only a sophomore and we put the pressure on him as if he were a senior and he has not disappointed. He’s playing some of his best basketball right now. You could argue that he could have started all season. I’m the kind of coach that will reward seniors, but Jay could be starting all season.”