In a partly horrifying, partly impressive discovery Wednesday afternoon, Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez walked in on newly hired head football coach Paul Chryst in the middle of his office constructing a vast fort out of chewing tobacco tins and personal spitters.
Aside from the hundreds, maybe thousands of chaw tins, the makeshift spittoons ranged from cans of Diet Coke and Coors Light to Solo cups and Budweiser bottles, the latter of which Chryst claimed were utilized for “structural integrity.”
“Yeah, I really caught my stride around noon, got into the zone and built straight through my second of two daily lunch periods,” Chryst told Cardinal reporters. “When a couple of the fort bricks—I call my spitters ‘fort bricks’—aren’t fitting together right, or seem unstable, I slather a bit of the tobacky-juice in my mouth onto a pair to really cement ’em together.”
While Alvarez admitted to feeling repulsed and skeptical at first, both socially and professionally, he really came around when Chryst passionately divulged his plans for a weekly conference between the two called “Camp Randall Office Fort Chug-’N’-Chew Movie Night,” inadvertently spraying lipper shrapnel across the room as he did so.
“He may be a maverick, and a little stinker at that, but I love how he has begun to innovate, apply himself and take initiative with things early on in his tenure here,” Alvarez said as he stood in a corner of the coach’s office, arms crossed, surveying his underling’s progress. “We targeted Pauly on our short list and stole him from Pittsburgh for a variety of reasons. This is certainly not one of them—I assure you that this is not one of them—but I’m not mad about it.”
“He’s like a little kid in a toy store, look at him,” Alvarez continued. “You can’t help but share the joy when you look at his smile… what kind of tyrannical, cold-hearted dictator would put an end to that?”
As Cardinal reporters left the scene, Chryst tossed in a “chew-merang” of his own as he offered up “a pinch of that sweet, sweet [long-cut, spearmint] Skoal X-tra,” which they politely declined, in addition to rebuffing his follow-up offer of a “cold one for the road.”
At press time, Chryst—a horseshoe-sized fatty installed in both top and bottom lip—had slid a Home Alone 2: Lost in New York DVD into the fort’s entertainment system, diving into the blanket-and-pillow amalgam that Alvarez currently occupied before launching into a soliloquy centered on the exceptional John Hughes franchise and how Home Alone 3 deserves its merits but could never stand up to the Macaulay Culkin-starring first and second installments.
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