Zach Curley’s official wedding invitations will be mailed in the next two weeks, but the VIP invitations already went out last Wednesday. There was one sent to Disney World for Mickey and Minnie. There was another sent to the Obamas at the White House. And there was a third sent to his favorite NFL player, Robert Griffin III.
It was a plus-one, too. Lucky Mrs. Griffin.
So why invite a quarterback whom you’ve never met to your wedding?
“I just thought it would be pretty cool,” Curley, 30, told me this week. “I thought there wasn’t that much of a chance that I’d get anything back, but I sent it anyways.”
Now me, I don’t always respond promptly to such invitations. But Griffin’s response landed in Curley’s mailbox within a week. The quarterback had checked off the “Sadly Declines” box, but wrote “Happy For You!!!!” on the response card, and included his autograph at the bottom, plus an autographed trading card.
“Shocked,” Curley said, when I asked for his reaction. “Just that somebody as big as RGIII would take the time, right away, to write something back — I thought that was really cool. Obviously I’ll be a Redskins fan all my life, but he will be my favorite player from now on, until the end of time.”
Curley said he passed Griffin’s response along to The Post because he feels badly about the negative coverage that has surrounded both the quarterback and his team in recent months.
“It’s been a crappy year for the whole team, obviously, but he kind of got a bad rap,” Curley told me. “It seems like he’s just had a lot of bad press lately, and nothing’s been going anybody’s way around the Redskins. So the fact that he’s had a bad few months, and that he could still respond back to somebody he doesn’t know and will never meet, that was really special and means a lot to me. It will be one of my favorite wedding memories. And it’s still three months to the wedding.”
@marylandterps01 No prob man enjoy
— Robert Griffin III (@RGIII) February 10, 2014
Curley’s friends, naturally, are already planning on inviting Griffin to their own nuptials. Poor guy’s social calendar will probably be pretty full after this.
Oh, and you’re probably wondering about Teresa Daley, Curley’s bride-to-be. She’s a Ravens fan, wouldn’t you know. The couple lives in Ellicott City, which trends more purple than burgundy nowadays. (Zach’s father got him into the Redskins at a young age, and you can’t quit that.) Daley will continue to root for the Ravens, but she was touched by Griffin’s response, and has decided he’s now one of her favorite players.
Still, I asked if she didn’t want to send out a last-minute wedding invitation to Joe Flacco.
“I asked her that,” Curley replied. “She was unsure. I said we could. But I think she wants to invite Anna Kendrick instead.”