The Redskins Blog

An Interesting Day At Redskins Park

I was disappointed that I missed the snake.

Toward the end of open locker room, a small snake slithered out from under Chris Wilson‘s locker, and … here, I’ll let John Keim of the Washington Examiner tell it:

“Somebody do something!” linebacker Chris Wilson said.

Stephon Heyer made several attempts to pick it up and carry it outside, though Mike Sellers chastised him because, “You don’t know if it’s poisonous!” Chris Samuels made the same point.

But Heyer managed to pick it up (it fell to the ground once and coiled up) and took it outside, gently setting it on the ground and letting it free.

Rich Campbell of the Free Lance Star was onhand to snap a picture; I missed the entire thing. This was a source of immense disappointment to me — snake in the locker room! OMG! total blog gold! — and I was kind of bummed out as I headed to my desk.

That all turned around when someone passed my desk and mentioned that LaRon Landry had a monkey waiting for him in the lobby.

The white-faced capuchin was just over two months old, wearing a leash and a diaper and clinging to a stuffed bear, chaperoned by two of Landry’s friends, and he cheep-ed happily when Landry showed up.

“Just a thought over the offseason,” Landry explained, when I asked why he’d gotten the monkey. “I didn’t want nothin’ too big. He’ll get up to fifteen pounds, live 35 to 50 years. When I die, he can die with me.”

Someone asked if Landry changed the diaper himself, and he nodded like any proud parent. “You got to. You can potty-train them at about a year.”

Reaction to the monkey ranged from amused disbelief — “I thought that boy was lyin’,” Kareem Moore said — to grudgingly respectful disbelief, as in the case of Jason Campbell. “I thought he was jokin’ like crazy,” Campbell said. “He was dead serious.”

And then there was outright disbelief, as in the case of Carlos Rogers. Rogers apparently hadn’t believed Landry when he mentioned the monkey the first time, and the two had concocted some kind of bet on the subject.

Faced with the diaper-wearing simian evidence, Rogers flatly refused to believe it. “He’s lyin’,” Rogers said. “He didn’t have it when I told him. When he said he had it, he didn’t have it. He just got it.”

This dispute wasn’t settled today — both Landry and Rogers had to leave — but I’ll keep an eye on it.

Meanwhile, Jason Campbell still seemed grudgingly impressed. “I wanna know what made him start thinking about getting a monkey,” Campbell said. “What possibly could you be sitting at home and thinking, like, ‘All right, tired of the dog. What can I do to give me something different in life?’” Campbell shook his head. “He’s the first athlete I’ve known that has a monkey.”

If you’re trying to guess who the second would be, you can rule out Campbell — “I’m definitely not gonna follow suit” — and, somewhat suprisingly, Chris Cooley.

Cooley enjoyed meeting and petting the monkey, but was completely pragmatic afterward. “Dude,” he said, “I want that monkey for about a week. That’s it, though.”