What up, lords and ladies?

I am honored to be elected a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Honored — but not surprised. I always knew that my amazing journalistic career would be immortalized in this way. After all, I covered two different teams in two different cities for two different newspapers. In addition, I joined ESPN in 1995, and revolutionized the way professional football was covered by arguing on TV with Sean Salisbury. So when the Worldwide Leader started to carry NFL games, I knew it was just a matter of time.

Today, that time is up. You probably expect me to do some kind of speech where I’m charmingly self-deprecating about my obvious lack of first-hand football experience, and where I make fun of my own appearance as contrasted with the average ‘roided-out NFL warrior type, and all that. But fuck that shit — self-deprecation is for losers, and I’m no loser, y’all. I’ve got some dark secrets, and I get more ass than Balaam. Plus, according to this ceremony, I am officially more important to the NFL than the careers of Art Monk, Ray Guy, and L.C. Greenwood — combined. So let’s go on a little journey through the fertile valley that is my life and career.

Unlike many of my peers, and everyone else in this room, I never even once tried to play football. I saw early on, while attending school in the rough-and-tumble suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that that was never going to happen. No, what I dreamed of was the opportunity to write about the crazy, deluded humans who are willing to sacrifice their limbs, their leisure, and their individuality for the glory of a game they see as greater than themselves.

Which, you know, is fine by me. Personally, not to put too fine a point on it, American football is a bullshit game. If I’m being honest, I much prefer the real football, the game we call “soccer” here in the U.S. The ebb, the flow, the incredible skill deployed by tiny little men both tall and small — it is truly awe-inspiring, and it is to our nation’s great shame that we have not embraced the world’s most popular game. I felt this way in 1966, when Geoff Hurst singlehandedly lifted England onto his wiry back and blasted them past Germany in the World Cup final. But while cheering madly inside my own head, my little high school self also realized that no one in Pittsburgh or anywhere else in the U.S.A. cared one little dingleberry about it. So it was “Goodbye, Beautiful Game” and “Hello, Hoi Polloi” for this ambitious young man. I started hosting my own little football show on local television while still in high school. Not to sound conceited or anything, but this program was still head and shoulders above any of the pablum being churned out by any other football show before or since.

My college years at Duquesne University were spent, I must admit, in a haze of alcohol and amphetamines. I also spent a lot of time taking dangerous psychedelic drugs and indulging every single sense I had. My friends and I used to go into the hardest ghettos in the city to score our chemicals; on one of these trips, I peeled off from the crowd and checked out some of the offerings at the radical Black Horizons Theater. There, during a performance of “The Revolution Is a Fat Funky Person,” I met my best friend and biggest writing influence, the great American playwright August Wilson. Not that any of you rockheads would know August Wilson from a Wilson football. Still, though, just so you know. Oh, I also managed to eke out a bachelor’s degree in nuclear physics.

I know I’m probably supposed to brag about how hard it was to cover the Steelers for the Pittsburgh Press and then the Seahawks for that shithole paper in Tacoma, but actually two more cake-walking writing gigs have never been had by anyone. In reality, I’m not that great a writer, nor that masterful a prose stylist. But compared to the rest of these mental midgets that masquerade as football writers in this country, I’m Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother Funky Stay High Dollar Bill Shakespeare.

And as for my ESPN career — let’s just, for today, pretend that the last 12 years never really happened. I mean, even I have some kind of shame. Pissing away my credibility gives me no pause whatsoever, but I do occasionally feel pangs for contributing to the largest sports marketing firm to have ever shambled forth like Cthulhu lurching towards Bethlehem. My ability to analyze teams’ strengths and weaknesses has allowed me to pinpoint the same damn things as every other football talking head on the face of the earth, meaning that my life has turned out just as meaningless as any character in Beckett or Camus or Jacqueline Susann. God bless cable television and its nasty little cousin, the Internet: the great leveler, the destroyer of worlds.

And yet it has all been very lucrative, both financially and sexually, and has resulted in the wonderful plaque here in Canton, which thousands of families will now be able to ignore every month on their way to another high-class meal at Denny’s.

In sum: thanks, kiss my skinny ivory-colored ass, and good night.

John Clayton is the 2007 winner of the Dick McCann Memorial Award, given annually to a football writer most people have never heard of.