Stallworth transcript
A transcript of today's media conference call with new Patriots receiver Donte' Stallworth, courtesy of the Patriots:
Q: I heard that when you and Kelley Washington were together at Tennessee, you guys had a little bit of an intense rivalry and competed against each other. Do you feel like that maybe pushed both of you to be better players?
DS: The competitiveness between both of us was strictly business. There was a situation where we went skydiving together and he tried to hide my parachute from me when we were jumping off the plane at 30,000 feet. I'm just playing. [Laughter] He's a competitive guy and I'm a competitive guy. We got along fine. When he first got there, he was just trying to get acclimated to everything and once we started communicating more, that competitiveness between us made us better and it was all better for the team.
Q: Can you just outline the whole draft situation with Kelley? I know it’s been pretty well documented.
DS: He and I talked during the draft [process]. He was trying to decide if he was going to leave school or not. I had pretty much made up my mind. I felt like I was ready to play in the NFL and we pretty much talked throughout the whole process. He basically came to me asking me for advice on what I would do if I were in his shoes. I told him that I thought he ought to stay in school. He ended up staying, which I thought was a good decision for him, but he ended up getting hurt. During that whole process, things got really overblown with the fact that… I don't remember exactly what the story was, but the bottom line was things got overblown and there is no rivalry between he and I. I was hanging out with him a few months ago down here in Miami. He’s an ex-teammate of mine. We've hung out. There's definitely no problem. We communicate every so often, and obviously we will be doing a lot more communicating now that we are teammates again.
