Peter King Is Hanging Up His Nugget Dispenser
The NFL's most obedient stenographer is ending his long-running column/weekly novella of football scoops, dim-witted social commentary, and customer service complaints. How did any of us survive it?
Considering I spent years tormenting myself by poring over Peter King’s weekly nugget dump of a column for the amusement of hundreds of thousands of blog readers, I should say something now that said column is coming to an end. Befitting PK’s style of endless equivocation, he announced his retirement this morning by stating he’s not actually retired and will likely still pop up periodically in various media outlets, only his regular column is no more. Quasi-semi-retired-esque!
No, I’m not doing one last fisking for old time’s sake. I haven’t been a regular reader of Lord Nugget for some time, so I don’t think I could weave together all the running jokes about the dumb shit he regularly drones on about. We’ll all have to fondly remember the references to all things lofty, Wichita being the most neutral place on the planet, coffee-flavored water, breathless updates about the Acela quiet car, and Toone P. Wiggins. I don’t doubt he hasn’t gotten any better as a writer or a reporter, but if I were to do such a thing, I would like to do it justice. But even more importantly, I don’t feel like it. It was a labor of love though a labor all the same.
One nice thing about the incestuous nature of the digital media landscape is that no one really ever needed to read PK, at least for the last 15 years or so. Sure, for a while Peter was still considered the unofficial “dean” of the NFL press corps - which of course should tell you all you need to know about the dismal state of sports media - but hardcore football fans could count on any meaningful scoop contained within PK’s column to be aggregated in a dozen different outlets within an hour of publication. Why subject yourself to 15,000 words of drivel for two or three useful items that will be everywhere in an hour? And yet some careless fools still did it, and not even to make fun of the column on a blog!
Some of the more smartass Kissing Suzy Kolber readers would likely ask how I feel now, years later when Peter King is lurching comfortably into retirement, still well paid, still inexplicably well regarded in that pit of vipers known as journalism. Of course it sucks to see, but Peter was always going to win. He represents and dutifully serves powerful interests and has done so for decades, whereas I am nobody and have nothing backing me up. It doesn’t matter that much of the public recognizes PK as a transparent hack. It doesn’t matter that he helped smear Janay Rice in the middle of a national scandal that brought the issue of domestic violence to the forefront. For years, he engaged in racist dog-whistling in his writing and eagerly granted anonymity to scouts and executives who wanted to do the same. But when PK launched his own site at TheMMQB, thus creating potential staff writing jobs, oh you should have seen all the little Millennial hyper socially progressive journo careerists who otherwise scold scold scold about identity microaggressions suddenly giving King a free pass. Just like all of them shat on BuzzFeed like there was no tomorrow until the company started its own news division, employing their friends, and potentially, each of them. Corporate journos are the scum of the earth, but they do know where their bread is buttered.
I think the last time I paid attention to PK was in 2021 when the league and its access media apparatus was ousting Jon Gruden from the coaching ranks in one of those obviously coordinated dogpile/scapegoat campaigns the press has done repeatedly within the last few years then lies about. Someone on Twitter had asked Peter if Gruden could ever get a coaching job again, even if it was in college. Peter put on his best pearl-clutching tone, exclaimed that the things Gruden said in those emails have no place in the sport, and rhetorically asked whether anyone would trust their kids with such a monster. If one takes a second to recall that Peter notoriously has and still adores Bill Parcells, who has dozens of quotes that are more “problematic” than anything Gruden said in those emails, well you can understand why I lost my shit over that one. After all these years, PK could still shock me with his slimeball behavior.
If you hate the media, as I have learned to do, in a morbid way you have to (wait for it) hand it to PK. While some members of the press are more clever in covering for their toadying for power, PK just lets it all hang out there. The man has no finesse. He gives up the game and makes all of the rest of them look even worse. Doesn’t help that PK pompously reveres the “craft” of reporting, despite carrying out a lucrative career as an industry propagandist. He even ended his final column today with that eye-rolling -30- shit that nostalgic print media types love to trot out to make themselves feel like they are the keepers of the flame.
Peter spent a few decades carrying water for billionaires and fucking over whoever he needed to. Now he gets to fuck off into a pleasant semi-retirement while Sports Illustrated, the publication that made him into a media star, was sold off for parts years ago and these days publishes AI-generated filler content by fake writers. Who says crime doesn’t pay?
Remember when Magary let Peter King pour Allagash White over his head and then his brain literally exploded?