Of today’s four late afternoon games that I won’t be watching, Tampa Bay/SF seems like the least attractive matchup. Though if Halloween would come a day early to Monster Park, I might change my mind. From the St. Petersburg Times’ Stephen F. Holder.
Bucs players enjoy Halloween as much as anybody, but we found talking to these guys about their Halloweens past was downright scary. And not because of the frightful reasons usually associated with the holiday.
Players’ memories covered the spectrum, some boasting of clever costumes, others recalling ones that could be described only as bizarre.
Take tight end Anthony Becht (above).
“When I was about 8, that’s when Pac-Man was real big,” he said. “So my mom, she cut a Pac-Man shape out of cardboard that covered almost my whole body. Then she made me wear these yellow tights with some yellow Converse (sneakers). And my sister dressed as one of the ghosts (from the video game). I wasn’t feeling too masculine walking around in that thing.”
If that’s the case, then what eventually happened must have crushed his manhood. Some of his neighbors remarked to his mother, “Your daughter is so cute,” Becht recalled. One problem. They were talking about Anthony, not his sister.
“I was like, “Come on, I’m a guy!’ ” Becht said. “They couldn’t see my face because of the costume. There were just two holes poked into the cardboard for my eyes. I did get a lot of candy, though.”
As an eighth-grader, tight-end Alex Smith, running out of fresh costume ideas, decided to dress as a drag queen. Turns out, it was quite the hit. Then again, that’s the problem.
“The thing was, everybody said I looked good, which is kind of scary,” he said. “I don’t know how I feel about that.”