Oakland Raiders head coach Jon Gruden apparently has some pretty strong feelings about one of Hollywood’s most prominent actors.
Gruden took an unprompted shot at Tom Cruise while discussing his salary with Peter King of ProFootballTalk, saying he’d never been a big fan of his films — but he still gets paid.
“I’m not making $100 million, just so you know,” Gruden said. “Well, I never thought Tom Cruise, never thought his movies were any good but he’s making plenty of money. There’s a lot of things that I don’t understand. No disrespect to Tom Cruise. I’m sure he’s a great actor. But you know what? You just go about your life as hard as you can. You try to find something you love and you do the best you can at it. I never got into coaching for the money. I got into coaching because I wanted to be a quarterback coach. What the salary cap has become, what free agency has become — it’s amazing.”
This one takes a bit of parsing. Maybe his point was that some people don’t deserve to make a lot of money but do anyway. Maybe he just really wants the world to know that he thought Jerry Maguire was garbage. The world may never know. All we know is that Gruden thinks Tom Cruise movies make a lot more money than they should.
Gruden hasn’t even coached a regular season game since returning to the sideline and he’s already proving an incredibly quotable figure. It’s good to have him back on the sideline.
