tie your ginger kid down, sport

After deciding that the first episode of The Firehead Chats would revolve around redheads in sports, I spent most of this past week organizing information and contacting my interview subjects. I finally managed to get in touch with Neal, a member of the Shepherd University Football Team, and he and I will be recording an interview about his redheaded sports life this week.

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I found the speculation about Andy Dalton's football future completely ridiculous, but I also knew that while unfounded, the bias against a redheaded NFL player couldn't have popped out of thin air. A brief conversation with my father sent me in search of more information on a previous NFL player, Todd Marinovich.

Turns out, Esquire Magazine had an article dedicated to--

The Man Who Never Was

As the brief introduction states, Todd Marinovich was "drafted ahead of Brett Favre. Today he's a recovering junkie." Todd was a dream quarterback, until he crashed and burned. I'll ask Neal what he thinks about Todd being used as an example for all redhead football players.

But football isn't the only sport where a redhead stands out. Shaun White used to be called "The Flying Tomato" and has since rejected the nickname. I'll discuss why, and how Shaun embraced his red hair from another angle entirely.

I've got a rough draft of a transcript/outline completed for the first episode, will revise parts of it after the interview if necessary, and plan to record throughout this week.

Other Items Completed This Week:

• Final Proposal for the Podcast Project
• Rough Draft of a Project Schedule
• Looked into Web Hosting for the WordPress Page
• Picked up two books from the library, one on Podcasting, one on the Erotic Power of Redheads