Redskins actually cutting prices

Peyton Manning has renegotiated his contract to help the Colts save some cap space. From what I hear, the club is still going to pay him an arm this year, but he’s deferring the leg until 2010.

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Just thought of a sponsorship possibility for the NFL:

“This 15-minute wait between draft picks is brought to you by Jet Blue.”

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Bad sign: The “We Love Our Coach” T-shirts at the Redskins Store have been marked down from $19.99 to $10.99.

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Sam Huff rang me up after I used an old quote of his in Thursday’s column. The quote came from a Time magazine story on Huff in the ‘50s — a cover story, in fact. But as Sam tells it, it almost wasn’t a cover story.

“I nearly got bumped,” he says. “A few days before the issue came out [in November 1959], a guy at Time called and said, ‘If the monkey dies, you’re off the cover.’

“The United States was sending a monkey up in one of those early space launches. Fortunately, the monkey came back alive.”

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After hanging up, I did some quick research. Turns out the rhesus monkey that was sent into space was named Sam — not for Huff, but for the School of Aviation Medicine at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas.

According to NASA’s Web site, the monkey was recruited “to test the launch escape system. Approximately one minute into the flight, traveling at a speed of 3,685 mph, the Mercury capsule aborted from the Little Joe launch vehicle. After attaining an altitude of 51 miles, the spacecraft landed safely in the Atlantic Ocean. Sam was recovered several hours later, with no ill effects from his journey, and went on to star in several Tarzan movies.”

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OK, so I made up the part about the Tarzan movies.

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