ORLANDO – It wasn’t yet winter break, but the walkways at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex at Disney World were teeming with people. The Pop Warner football national title game was about to kick off on an oddly muggy day in early December, and everywhere parents were leading their children by the hand.
There was a special guest for the coin toss. Mickey Mouse, the Don of Disney World himself, walked up the 50-yard line, his entrance accompanied by the most distressingly overproduced and poppy version of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song ever heard. But over the din, loud thwaps could be heard from a nearby building.