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Michael Vaughn is no longer telling voters he played for the Dallas Cowboys.
Until late yesterday afternoon, the official campaign Web site for Vaughn, the incumbent who has represented District 24 in the Maryland House of Delegates since 2003, boasted that the candidate “played professional football for the Dallas Cowboys for 3 years.”
But that portion of Vaughn’s resume was refudiated in this week’s Cheap Seats column.
A portion:
“We have no record of him playing for the Dallas Cowboys,” says Jancy Briles, spokeswoman for the Cowboys. Briles says she also checked an NFL database, and learned “they don’t have a Michael Vaughn listed as ever playing in the NFL, either.”
The athletic department at Southern [University], Vaughn’s alma mater, keeps what it calls “a composite list” of alums that have “lended their services” to pro ball clubs. The school’s 2009 football media guide has 87 names of former players who made it to “the National Football League (NFL), Canadian Football League (CFL), the United States Football League (USFL) and the Arena Football League (AFL).” Guys like Gillis Wilson of the Georgia Force and Elvis Joseph of the Edmonton Eskimos make the cut.
But no Michael Vaughn of the Dallas Cowboys.
Last week, when asked to verify the 3-year Cowboys career asserted on the campaign site, Vaughn said that he really was only with Dallas for “five months” in 1980, and that no stats were available for his football career because he never got in a game. He attributed the misinformation about his football experience to the “Web master” of his site.
Vaughn then left the bio unchanged for several days.
But on Thursday, hours after the City Paper story hit the streets, Vaughn tweaked the language on the site. The pertinent portion now reads: “Michael Vaughn signed as a free agent to play professional football for the Dallas Cowboys.”
Brice of the Cowboys says that the team does not keep records of practice players who were never on an official roster. (And while we’re picking apart Vaughn’s campaign site: How old is that official photo? The guy was born in 1957! He looks, well, 23! So maybe that shot was taken when he was with the Dallas Cowboys!)
The punchline of Vaughn’s bogus football tale is that FedExField is located smack in his bailiwick, District 24. You’d think the politically correct thing for a candidate representing the home of the Washington Redskins to do would be to not boast about a Dallas Cowboys career — even if you had one.
Yet Vaughn boasted to voters about a playing career in Dallas that he never had.
Maybe the rivalry is dead after all.