I met Delicious through The Veteran. Delicious was playing football with The Veteran before Vet invited me to play.
The story, as The Veteran relates it, is that Delicious started appearing at The Vet’s pickup basketball games. Delicious arrived on in-line skates.
When angry with his play, he would yell out "Jimminy Christmas!" instead of swearing because there were children nearby.
Delicious and I developed somewhat of a rivalry–solely at my instigation. I needed someone to challenge me to get up to speed and Delicious was the fastest guy so when we all went out for happy hour the Fridays before our Saturday pickup games, I would trash talk him, telling him he was going down tomorrow.
The next day, he usually beat me a few times but it helped me improve my game.
Delicious is usually the only person left on the field who, after four hours of playing football, will still be running his routes at full speed. He runs the sharpest routes of any player I know.
Delicious acquired his nickname one day when we were playing Saturday pickup football. It was during the Winter and he was wearing a bright yellow windbreaker-type sports jacket. He was lined up wide and The Natural was at quarterback.
Natural completed a pass to Delicious and afterward explained that he couldn’t help but throw to him because in his yellow jacket he "looked so delicious."
Natural meant, of course, that he looked like such a delicious target but that was lost on The Clamp. "You can’t call a grown man Delicious," The Clamp declared indignantly.
It occured to me that Delicious may well be wearing bright colors intentionally, so as to present a more obvious target for his quarterback and therefore, get more balls thrown his way.
Being perfectly willing to steal a great idea when I see one, I promptly bought a bright yellow shirt.
In Minnesota. we have a cultural icon by the name of The Menards Guy. He pitches for the Menards hardware stores in cheesey, low-budget TV commercials. Being a Wisconsin boy, you’d think that Delicious would like cheesey commercials. But you’d be wrong–Delicious doesn’t like cheesey commercials, not these commercials, anyway. And to be fair to cheese, it’s not so much the cheesiness of the commercials that Delicious objects to as it is the fact that they are advertisements for Menards, which he hates.
Well, he doesn’t really object to the stores so much as the man behind the stores, whom he hates with a passion.
Delicious is married to Bottom Line.