Cheese-heads have some cheek

America At Large: Perhaps it's time for a little perspective here. Television commentator Joe Buck nearly had an attack of apoplexy when Randy Moss pretended to drop his drawers in the end zone at Green Bay last Sunday, and once the game was over his colleagues in the Fox studio fell over one another as they jousted to see who could express the most righteous indignation.

Half the sportswriters in America have spent the ensuing days howling at the moon, and sometime in the next 24 hours NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue will announce Moss has been hit with a five-figure fine for his attempt at bathroom humour.

Lighten up a bit, fellows.

Personally, I'm no fan of on-field demonstrations by athletes in any sport.

I didn't like it when the US Ryder Cuppers ran out onto the 17th green at Brookline in 1999, and I don't like it when a football player stands around beating his chest over a fallen opponent as if he'd just slain a dragon. I don't like it when soccer players rip off their shirts after scoring a goal - or at least I didn't until female players began to emulate that ritual.

Overzealous end-zone celebrations by players who've just scored touchdowns fall into the same category. New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who discourages such demonstrations, wearily reminds his charges to "Try to act like you've done it before".

Arguably the NFL's most talented receiver, the Minnesota Vikings' Moss is no stranger to self-promotion and has been repeatedly fined in the past. He has been elected to five Pro Bowls, and currently sports a 1960's-vintage Afro that makes him look like an old picture of one of Michael Jackson's brothers.

In the regular-season finale at Washington just a week earlier, Moss had reinforced a well-earned reputation for selfishness by walking off the field to the locker-room before time had expired - even as his team-mates were lining up for an onside kick that might have regained possession of the ball in the waning seconds.

Moss has battled injury much of this season, and was limping around on a bad ankle during Sunday's play-off game at Green Bay. This didn't prevent him from catching four passes for 70 yards and two touchdowns in the Vikings' 31-17 upset of the Packers, a win which sends them to Philadelphia and a meeting with the NFC's top-seeded Eagles on Sunday afternoon.

It was after his second score that Moss tested the barriers of taste. After catching the touchdown pass from Daunte Culpepper, he bent over and pantomimed the act of dropping his trousers to moon the crowd. (The fact that the game was at Green Bay's hallowed Lambeau Field only exacerbated Middle America's outrage. Randy might as well have mooned the Sistine Chapel.)

"What I did was just play a little bit," said Moss in his defence. "I wasn't trying to be mean or anything like that. It's just a celebration, that's all. Nothing big."

My initial reaction was that the gesture was rather silly, but no more or no less so than at least two dozen other end-zone celebrations I could recall.

But the next day, in Indianapolis, Moss received some support from a most unexpected source: Colts' coach Tony Dungy.

Dungy's reputation for moral rectitude is well-established. A straight-laced football man from the old school, he aligns himself with Belichick in discouraging histrionics on the part of his players. Moreover, he leapt to the forefront of his profession earlier in the season in condemning a ridiculous bit of self-promotion by ABC television, which prefaced a Monday Night Football game with a nude locker-room skit involving Eagles receiver Terrell Owens with a blonde bimbo named Nicollete Sheridan, who happens to star in another of ABC's programmes, Desperate Housewives.

Dungy, perhaps surprisingly, came down on Moss' side in this one. He explained that in the case at hand, Randy had merely been giving the Wisconsin Cheese-heads a dose of their own medicine.

"Anybody who's played in the NFC Central knows what that's all about," chuckled Dungy. "Green Bay fans have a reputation of being great, and they really are, but one of their traditions is that when they beat you they wait around the parking lot so they can moon the bus when you leave. Having lost seven times in a row up there, I've seen it seven times, and I'm sure Randy's seen it a lot, too. It was just a nice 'Here you go' back to the fans who moon the buses."

Dungy confirmed that the traditional Lambeau salute is not enacted in pantomime, as was Moss'. Scores of fans line up in freezing weather to expose their bare bottoms to the defeated visitors on the way out of town.

"They go all the way," said the Indianapolis coach. "It's kind of a unique send-off.

"As soon as (Moss) started up, I knew exactly what he was doing," said Dungy. "It's probably not the kind of thing that you'd want to be seen on national TV, but knowing the origin of it, I found it pretty humorous - and I'm sure the Minnesota players got a kick out of it."

The entire episode consumed a matter of a few seconds. It might have been silly, but it wasn't "sexual", and it certainly wasn't obscene.

A few weeks earlier Broncos quarterback Jake Plummer was fined by the NFL for making "an obscene gesture" after he flipped the bird to hostile fans as he came off the field following an interception in Denver. (A week later San Francisco 49ers quarterback Ken Dorsey had to come out of a game after breaking the middle finger of his right hand. I couldn't resist pointing out that had Jake Plummer incurred a similar injury it might have saved him $5,000.)

"I was having fun," Moss said. "It was more a fun thing than a hatred thing. My team-mates loved it. I'm probably going to catch hell, but the Green Bay Packer fans know: I don't forget shit."