Last Night's Winner: The Reporter Who Asked Brett Favre About His Wang

In sports, everyone is a winner—some people just win better than others. Like Brian Costello. If Brett Favre furnished us with his cock, then Costello rounded things out with an enormous set of balls.

Costello, of course, is the fellow who asked the following at Favre's press conference yesterday:

Brett, there's an internet report today that accuses you of sending some inappropriate text messages to a female employee of the Jets during your year there. Would care to respond to those allegations?

Favre's response, the one that launched a thousand dick jokes:

I'm not getting into that. I've got my hands full with the Jets.

There is really very little in journalism as worthless as a press conference, especially an NFL press conference, which has become so pure a piece of stagecraft that it's now used to sell crappy beer. And there is no more captive and pliant a segment of the sports press than the football media, which carries so much water for the NFL it's a wonder they don't all run on the field with squirt bottles during timeouts. All of which is to say that it takes an awesomely ballsy outsider — a baseball writer, say, in town to cover a division series — to ask the question Brian Costello asked yesterday. No one wants to fuck with the mise-en-scene.

The Vikings responded by scrubbing the exchange from the press-conference transcript in the spirit of the old Politburo airbrushers, and the fact that hardly anyone in the mainstream press batted an eye says a lot about the football media's tolerance for public bullshit. It's simply taken for granted now that the NFL's PR juggernaut will try to pretend the bad thing away, particularly when that bad thing probably made a lot of sexual-harassment lawyers sit up yesterday. (Psst, Stephen A.: It's not just a story about Brett "trying to get with some girl." Just ask any woman who ever stood within 10 feet of Bob Packwood.) If the story is getting any kind of airing today in the more respectable precincts of the media — despite the league's best efforts to bowdlerize it into oblivion — we have the man from the Post to thank. The NFL has its hands full now.

Brett Favre allegedly sent sex photos to Jets sideline reporter [NY Post]