I Heart Braylon Edwards
Tonight on Monday Night Football, WR Braylon Edwards will play in his first game for the Jets. The team acquired him last Wednesday, right around the point I was waking up from my surgery. Needless to say, the news didn’t reach the ICU that day.
On Thursday morning, after shivering in pain for a few hours, I got a brief reprieve thanks to a few extra shots of morphine. Audaciously, I asked to watch some television. I flipped on SportsCenter, which I watched on and off in between passing out.
I noticed on the bottom line ticker a headline titled “EDWARDS TRADE”, giving the details of a trade for Braylon Edwards. I have no idea how long this lasted, but I’d pass out, wake up and tune in just in time to see the second half of the “EDWARDS TRADE” ticker. So I knew Browns WR Braylon Edwards had been traded, but I had no idea to which city he was headed.
Still, I had some inkling it was the Jets — they needed a big, stud receiver, and had a habit of going after controversial players in hot water in their current cities. As the 2004 third overall pick that had recently punched a 130-pound friend of LeBron James outside a Cleveland nightclub, Braylon Edwards knocked all the boxes on the Jets’ shopping list.
Soon enough, I’d stay awake long enough to find my suspicions confirmed, though it took a day for me to really believe that it actually happened, and wasn’t just a hallucination.
Now he’s suiting up for the Jets, and I hope he produces a lot of memories for us Jets fans (and, for once, they aren’t memories that require hired help to wade through), but for me, Braylon Edwards will always be linked with my heart surgery. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad — if he plays well, it’ll be a fun footnote, a one-sided connection of sorts that people bizarrely develop with athletes; if he’s a bust, I’ll fucking hate him.
