Request: Mark Sanchez (The New York Jets Quarterback)

[drummer]

Okay, everybody else gets to make silly little requests for some celebrity or other, so I don't see why I cannot.

I'd rather like to see a good photo, showing the soles of Mark Sanchez, quarterback of the New York Jets.

I saw this nice face-shot of him:

which is just the sort of face that gets me hooked, and then, after a little searching, managed to find this (which I imagine is some publicity photo):

and, for the guys who love foot-gear, this:


but what I really want to see is a nice view of his soles.

I don't suppose anybody has such a shot, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

[drummer]

I'd rather like to see a good photo, showing the soles of Mark Sanchez, quarterback of the New York Jets.

Apparently, footbuddies, I am not the only guy interested in his feet. Today, when I was poking around, idly, looking for them, I turned up this article, by John Morton. It's so good, it's worth quoting in full:

In an unprecedented move, team scouts requested USC quarterback Mark Sanchez complete drills with his shoes off. "We just had to see them!" enthused Texans' scout Archie Pod. "They're a work of art."

Baseball scouts look for the "good face". Basketball scouts love a nice "bubble". Football scouts know their feet, and no matter the position, footwork matters. Pod says it's chapter one in the official, unpublished scouting manual. "You definitely want a guy that can move his feet." Adding "I won't say it's a must, but you don't see too many pros that aren't ambulatory."

Sanchez isn't just walking, he's strutting. Attending scouts traded hushed silence with oohs and coos. And Sanchez embraced it. "I'm just trying to make a name for myself, mister, and if that means letting some pervert fondle my toes, I've fifty million reasons to let him." Fondle they did. Scouts measured his arch, the radial symmetry of his ball, the chubbiness and uniformity of his toes, even the smell. One scout asked Sanchez to put on an unused pair of penny loafers, "and then he said, take them off - slowly." Sanchez did.

Not every attendee was so enamored. "It's a pedestrian foot. Naïve." Quentin Tarantino continued "It's definitely a bit craggy, an athlete's foot - probably smelly."

"Not at all!" gasped Jaguars scout Morton Neuroma. "We brought in an outside expert from Germany. He insured us that Mr. Sanchez's feet registered less than one odor unit on his olfactometer." Through a translator, Olfactory Expert Verrückt Wettlauf mused enigmatically "For them I'd be crushed like Goethe's Violet."

Events ended with Sanchez lacing up his shoes to an audible groan from onlookers. Scouts compared notes and Sanchez walked off towards USC's locker room. The sun shimmered in the Los Angeles smog, slumped shoulders and clipboards split towards separate exits, and the sense something special just happened hung in the air, if only for a second. Neuroma reflected "not a speck of fungus on those beauties. Not an atom."

Unfortunately, I notice that the date of that article is April 1, 2009, and so I cannot help wondering if the whole article isn't an April Fool's joke.

And further down, among the comments, I found this:

Wait a minute... Is this a joke?

Look at those names:
Archie Pod: foot arch
Morton Neuroma: foot aroma
Verrückt Wettlauf: In german means “crazy gamble” or can mean “crazy race”

Hmmmmmmm