When I think of football mixing with comedian Bill Cosby, and really I’m not sure I actually ever have, up until this moment. But Now that I’m forced to, the weight room scene from the film “Friday Night Lights” is running through my head. When Boobie Miles attempted to make Mike Winchell laugh by doing his Bill Cosby impersonation.
Well, the 1980s mainstream Bill Cosby anyway. And then you remember Miles blowing off his workout.
Moving on, Cosby received the National Football Foundation’s Gold Medal during the college football Hall of Fame dinner Tuesday night. Therefore, he made a few jokes about his playing days at Berklee College in the 1950s.
The reason why I’m here is the current athletic director said to me, ‘Oh Billy, do you know what this means?’ And I said no because I haven’t done anything. We played Division 12. I would have like to have had a helmet in those days. In my day, Cornell was the school that had great helmets. Our athletic director was the calculus professor who knew nothing except calculus. I asked him to get me a helmet so you could tell I was the fullback. After listening to all these people, every one of these fellas that I’m going in with, I want them to know that I’m tickled to go in with them.
Thank you so much for giving me the Gold Medal, which will take some doing to explain to my wife what I did to earn this because there’s no film on me.
Receiving the NFF’s “Distinguished American” was Tom Brokaw, the man who informed us that the Americans who went to fight in WWII are just plain better human beings than the rest of us. He, of course, mentioned the event that that inspired the “Greatest Generation.”
Let me just say that I’m privileged to be on this stage with all these great athletes and people who have made so many contributions to my favorite game, which is college football. When my high school teammates found out that I would be honored by this organization, they wrote to me and called that it was fitting that it happened on Pearl Harbor day, a day that shall live in infamy. It’s a real privilege to me to be just a small part of this today.