Then Call Me Ben Portis

I want to be his cousin too

Rick Snider at the Washington Examiner had an interesting piece on Clinton Portis yesterday. It seems as though there is another Portis playing football in the area, Josh Portis, the (currently) second-string (PDF) quarterback at University of Maryland (feer the tertle lol) and Clinton and Josh are somehow related but can't say for sure how. Clinton:

“[Portis is] a rare last name,” Clinton Portis said. “I’ve never met any other Portises. [The two] will keep the household name [alive]. I’ll hold my end down on that.”

I know you will dog (excerpt from the crucial but now-gone Esquire piece here).

Josh's bio (op. cit.) lists Clinton as his cousin which tells me they may have a better idea of how they are related than they are letting on, but maybe not. My mother (hi mom!) is the genealogist in the family and she once told me there was one original Folsom clan in the country so if your name is Folsom we are probably related. I don't go round calling them my all cousins, but I could I suppose. Portis is a unique name. Portishead even uniquer.

In the slang dictionary Both 'cousin' and 'cuz' have entries that can connote a generic familial relation and when I was a little boy we ran around with second and third cousins and family friends and just called them all cousin. But I gave that up as I got older but then again none of those cousins grew up to play in the NFL except for Kerwin Bell, the Throwin' Mayoan and I never realized until just now that if I had just kept in better touch I'd probly still be in the league right now.

If I had a famous name I'd be hot on the tail of my namesake. All I got were things. Folsom Prison. The Folsom Point (almost the name of this blog). Folsom Field (almost went to Colorado University because of it but Bill McCartney creeped me out), Folsom Research, the Folsom Street Fair which is held in SOMA San Francisco at the end of Leather Pride Week, the world's largest leather event and its euro spinoff Folsom Europe. They are both non-profit and feature open sadomasochism in broad daylight but the proceeds go to a good cause so I've got that going for me. My father and deceased grandfather and I do have a celebrity namesake but sadly we cannot correspond with him in this life.



Cousin Clinton Portis: Jonathan Ferrey / Getty Images from here and here (alt. location). Josh Portis from here.