BRIGHTON HEIGHTS — Local boozing veteran Dave Wisnewski “looked better than ever” during his alcohol binge for the first week of the NFL season despite not drinking for the entirety of the preseason, amazed sources still finding crushed beer cans he stowed away reported Sunday night.
“You hear all the stories about how these older guys can’t hack it,” said Wisnewski’s neighbor Sam Hutchinson, 28. “Everybody says they’ve got too much going on between the back spams, the elbow they hyperextended playing horseshoes, the dialysis—the whole shebang. Then my buddy Dave comes in here and puts up 15 beers and eight shots of Fireball in six hours like he hasn’t missed a beat.”
“Turning the clock back, this guy,” added Hutchinson.
General managers in the local bar circuit expressed uncertainty when Wisnewski, entering his 25th season of football-adjacent alcohol consumption, agreed to a modest deal to drink nothing but Michelob Ultra late this off-season.
“You see these long-time stalwarts try to ride out a few couple years of glory,” said evening shift manager Isiah Ward. “Then the grueling off-season interventions are just too much so they retire to coffee shops and go to bed at 8 p.m. You can imagine my shock, then, when Dave rolls in at 10 after fours weeks off and throws up a statline of five Coors Light aluminums, two packs of cigarettes, and six dart games in an hour, all while tidily throwing up in an unoccupied lot instead of ours. Even his mistakes show signs of veteran leadership.”
Despite the prevailing sense of surprise, some evaluators had pegged Wisnewski for a huge comeback.
“Was last season a glamorous display of beer-soaked excellence? No,” said analyst Peter Walker. “But Wisnewski still wasn’t a chump: he averaged 8.4 beers a game while only pissing himself 0.46 times for every three sidecars of Old Grandad he ordered. If he had lined up beside even competent bar mates via the PBF (Pro Boozehound Focus) metrics, he almost certainly would’ve performed near career-level rates. One guy can only do so much.”
Even with an exemplary Week 1 performance, Wisnewski insisted he would “get right back to the Xs and Os,” as soon as he figured out where he had accidentally had the Uber driver drop off him.
