Just couldn't pass this up

Matt Little called his sister over the weekend and told her, "You'll never guess what I just bought." He then asked her if she had heard of the Original Whizzinator that had been in the news.

"She said, 'Yeah, some idiot paid $750 for that thing.' I said, 'Yeah, that was me,'" Little said with a laugh Sunday night.

Little, 26, owns Buster's, a sports bar in Mankato. He is the mystery man who purchased the Whizzinator that ex-Viking Onterrio Smith was so famously detained with at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in 2005. That piece of inglorious local sports history -- a device with a prosthetic penis attached to a jock strap and filled with "clean" urine to help pass a drug test -- was up for auction Friday night in Shakopee.

Little couldn't be in attendance for the auction, but he sent an agent to make the purchase for him. He said he wouldn't have bought it "if the price had been 10 grand," but overall his motivation was fairly simple.

"We're a sports bar, and I'm a sports collector," Little said. "I'd love to have the Original Whizzinator on display. ... I'm going to use it."

Use it right now? Little laughed.

"It's out in the truck," he said. "I'd feel a little weird if I had it in my hand right now."

But soon, the Whizzinator will be out in the open at Buster's and will be featured prominently in some of the bar's rather risque promotions. One would imagine it will attract curiosity seekers -- particularly next summer during Vikings training camp in Mankato.

So Little considers it money well spent, even if his sister didn't.

"I'm a promotions guy. I'll try anything once," he said. "Even saying the name, you have to laugh."

The greatest promotion of all? Little is already thinking about that.

"We're going to try to get Onterrio down here," Little said. "There might be some sentimental value. He might want to come down to see it."