Several Vikings hold “Kids Presser” at U of M Masonic Children’s Hospital

UPDATE: Thanks to user “SirGrizzly,” we did find some video of this event. It isn’t much, but hey, it’s better than nothing. We can’t embed it here (because the embed on the KARE-11 site is not in https format, but you can see it here. Original story follows.

Late last week, several members of the Minnesota Vikings (and one very special guest) held a “Kids Presser” for children at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital. The event gave some of the youngsters that are currently patients at the hospital the opportunity to ask questions of some members of the team.

The event was organized by Vikings’ tight end Kyle Rudolph, and he was joined by receivers Michael Floyd and Adam Thielen. Eric Wood, the former center for the Buffalo Bills that retired a couple of weeks ago due to a neck injury, was a part of the festivities as well. Wood was a teammate of Rudolph’s in high school.

The special guest I mentioned? Some guy named Brett Favre that had a pretty decent run in the NFL for a couple of different teams, one of which may or may not have been the Vikings.

The kids certainly didn’t hand the panel any easy questions, but there’s one particular question in the article from Lindsey Young of the Vikings’ official website that I thought was particularly outstanding. One of the youngsters had, apparently, just watched the episode of A Football Life featuring Vikings’ all-time great John Randle, and asked Favre why he hated Randle so much.

“I didn’t hate John Randle. [But] I hated playing against the guy,” Favre clarified with a smile. “He was unblockable, especially here in Minnesota. He was one of the quickest and most powerful guys that you played against. He and Warren Sapp would be the greatest trash talkers of all time.

“There are guys who talk trash and back it up, and those are the ones who just drive you crazy because there’s nothing you can do about it,” Favre continued. “I would tell our guys, ‘Block him.’ They would say, ‘Yeah, we’d love to. But we can’t.’ And John Randle would be saying the same thing: ‘It’s going to be a long day.’ ”

It’s an understandable question. Back in the day when that commercial first came out, before all the social media and 24-hour news cycles and all that, I thought Randle hated Favre, too. . .and I’m assuming I was way older when the famous “Randle chases a chicken wearing a Favre jersey” commercial came out than the child that asked that question is today.

As we say just about every time we find a story like this, it’s awesome to see the members of the Minnesota Vikings’ community getting out and doing stuff like this. I can say that after 12 seasons of doing this, these stories are a heck of a lot more fun to talk about than the sorts of stories that used to be the predominant part of Vikings’ offseason coverage. It’s just a shame that nobody got video of the “Kids Presser” anywhere so that we can see the guys get grilled a little bit.