cool brees on a hot hump day

JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON ANOTHER STEAMY SUMMER NIGHT. It's Wednesday in Austin and I'm poaching me some free Wi-Fi outside the Hilton Gardens hotel on 5th Street, a Drew Brees heave from I-35.

Speaking of Drew Brees, I had a customer in my taxi last week — a spunky blonde born-and-raised in Austin — who said she made out with Drew Brees back when they were high school classmates.

How does this come up in the course of a 5-minute downtown cab ride, you ask?

Well, when Ms. O said she grew up here in Austin, I immediately asked what high school she went to. Upon learning she was a Westlake High grad, I asked if she knew Drew.

"Knew him?" piped up one of her 2 drunk male cohorts. "Dude, she made out with him. She knew him alright."

"C'mon!" I shot back, calling 'bullshit' without actually coming out and saying it.

"It's true," she confirmed. "I went to a dance with him."

"Really?" I said glancing into the rearview mirror to see if she was the kind of girl a future superstar quarterback might make out with in high school. (She was.) "What was he like? Was he a good guy? He seems like a good guy."

"Oh, he was a great guy," answered Ms. O. "Couldn't have been nicer."

"So...?"

This is where my sense of propriety fails me. Asking too many questions. Crossing the line. Probing too deeply.

What the hell, they were drunk.

"So why didn't it work out?" I continued. "What happened?"

"What happened was we were young, he was nice...but I couldn't get past the birthmark."

With this confession, the cab erupts into a peanut gallery of "C'mon!"..."So shallow!"..."Give the guy a break!"

As billions of football fans around the globe now know, Brees has an impossible-to-miss birthmark — or is it a mole? — shaped like New Jersey running north-south down his cheekbone.

"The guy was a star quarterback in high school," I reminded Ms. O. "You couldn't get past a little thing like a birthmark?"

"Have you seen it?" Ms. O asked. "It's not a little thing. And it had hair growing out of it!"

The cab once again erupted into fits of laughter, friendly derision and good-natured revulsion. As we silently, perhaps unknowingly, took comfort in the fact that even Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks have flaws and don't always get the girl.

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