DOTCOMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN
Wilma McNabb said she blogged from the heart and was sorry it brought scrutiny on her son
MIAMI - It's tricky, being the parents of a franchise quarterback, in what might be America's most overheated football media market.
Wilma and Sam McNabb have always been proud to play a visible role in their son Donovan's life, proud to show America the kind of solid, thoughtful, middle-class background that not every athlete in the spotlight possesses.
But lately, they have seen the downside of involved parenting. When you express opinions, and your son is 30 years old, it opens the door for your son's critics to infer that he is weak, especially if your son remains silent. And never mind how unfair that might be.
"If people perceive it that way, I think it's an injustice," Wilma McNabb said last night, right after addressing the same subject on Comcast SportsNet's "Daily News Live." "We're not the only parents that follow our sons. I see the Mannings are with their sons. I know them. I know the Waynes, Reggie Wayne's parents. As I told people, when we travel from game to game, we know the parents we're going to see - we see Dhani Jones' parents and Brian Westbrook's parents. We're all that way. It's just that Donovan is in the news all the time, and then I'm doing the Chunky Soup [appearances and commercials], so they see us out a lot.
"He is a family man, he has a wife and a child. If you perceive [weakness] because we support him, then I think that is an injustice."
On camera and then after the "DNL" appearance, Wilma McNabb said that while she doesn't regret anything she said in a much-discussed blog entry a little more than a month ago on DonovanMcNabb.com, she regrets bringing even greater scrutiny to bear on Donovan. Her words were parsed as coded signals from the Eagles' quarterback, who hasn't spoken at length in public since suffering a season-ending knee injury on Nov. 19.
McNabb and the Eagles public relations department decided he wouldn't speak until after the season ended, to not be a distraction to the team. Then, just before a scheduled news conference was to take place, the week after the Eagles were eliminated from the playoffs by the Saints, coach Andy Reid canceled the appearance, saying he felt McNabb needed to concentrate on his rehab. McNabb is scheduled to make a series of appearances today in Miami, as he does every Super Bowl week, on behalf of Campbell's Chunky Soup. To Philadelphia-area reporters, McNabb's breaking his silence today looms as a bigger story than the game itself.
"What I said in my blog was from my heart, it was my thoughts," she said. "What bothered me the most was that it got the attention it got. I really didn't think anybody was readin' it - I've been blogging for the past year, when I leave a game, and what have you. I've been doing it in different manners, however I felt. I just got my own Web site [MamaMcNabb.com] and I was doing something on Donovan's to get it going . . . That's the thing, the attention that it got. I apologize to Donovan that it got such a big hoopla, but what I said was what I felt."
What Wilma McNabb wrote, as the Eagles won their final five regular-season games and captured the NFC East title, was that the team's success was "bitter sweet," because her son was missing it. She also wondered aloud about how fans might react to winning a Super Bowl with Jeff Garcia at quarterback, and whether that would spark talk of trading Donovan. Over the past month, with Donovan not talking, those musings have fostered speculation about Donovan not wanting Garcia to return. Garcia, who turns 37 on Feb. 24, is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent.
Wilma McNabb said last night that she understood the Eagles are unlikely to trade her son because some fans might be excited about Garcia. She said she was only worried about Donovan having to deal with even more offseason media uproar and unpleasantness, on the heels of the Terrell Owens mess.
"I said, 'Will they crucify him' in the media," she said. "I meant it could be an unpleasant situation. It would just be another media fiasco."
After her "Daily News Live" interview, Wilma kept the earpiece on for a minute or so, listening to what the panelists had to say about her in the wake of her appearance. Finally, she removed it and handed it to a technician.
What did she hear?
That "it was a learning experience for me, and I probably won't do that again," she said, smiling. "That's what they said." *