Men with Balls: The Professional Athlete's Handbook
Q: There are so many lights on me in these press conferences. Is this what dying in an operating room is like?
A: Yes.
Q: I have an opinion on something. Should I offer it?
A: No! Offer nothing of yourself. These are reporters we’re talking about. They got into this business because they loved sports, only to discover that turning something you love into a job corrupts and destroys everything you once loved about it. If they can’t be happy doing their jobs, neither can you. They’re just dying to fuck you over. Even the most ordinary-sounding quote can be twisted and distorted into something controversial. How? Through the power of ellipses. Allow me to demonstrate. Let’s say a reporter asks you how you’re feeling after a tough loss, and you say, “You know, it hurts. We just didn’t play well tonight. It’s easy enough to point fingers and say, ‘It’s Jay’s fault,’ or, ‘Mikey didn’t do this,’ but we have to get through this as a team. We’ll start winning if we get it together and keep working to achieve a common goal.”
That’s what you said. But here is how, through the power of ellipses, you might be quoted: “It’s Jay’s fault . . . Mikey didn’t . . . get it together.”
What’s that? That’s not what you said? You were deliberately misquoted? Tough shit. No one cares. That excuse has been used too often to be effective. As far as the general public knows, you are now officially a malcontent who brazenly accuses fellow teammates of shitting the bed. That little goddamn ellipsis wields all the power of a MAD magazine fold-in.
Q: Why would a reporter distort my words? Isn’t that unethical?
A: Probably. But a good reporter is also a judicious editor. Your quote was boring. But through the magic of editing, it is now scintillating! Ellipses remove context and add flavor. I’m . . . gay . . . for them!
Q: So, what should I do?
A: Follow your teammates’ lead and offer up nothing but trite clichés that are virtually tamperproof. Failing that, mumble. It’s worth being branded as “surly.”
Q: Is Jim Gray really 3'2"?
A: Yes.
Q: Do most sportswriters believe in evolution?
A: No.
Q: Do they enjoy masturbating to videos of dogs being put down?
A: Yes.
Q: Are any of them secretly members of the Aryan Brotherhood?
A: Yes. To be sure your local columnist or golf broadcaster isn’t a member, simply lift up his comb-over and look for a shamrock tattoo with the number 666 on it. If you see one, don’t fuck with him. He’s hardcore.
The dregs of humanity: your guide to the average sports columnist.
All major newspapers and sports Web sites employ beat writers that do the yeoman’s work of attending press conferences, covering games on a day-to-day basis, and interviewing you in the locker room while your cock is still hanging out. These are the only people in sports media who serve any useful purpose. They are tireless, dedicated professionals who lay the journalistic foundation for the rest of the sports media industry by following teams back and forth across the country and reporting the basic facts about you and your team. After paying dues for decades, many of them go on to become excellent investigative reporters and feature writers.
And all of them are total suckers.
The real money is in being a columnist. Sports columnists are the ones who get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to type up the same opinions you can get from caller 42 on The Jim Rome Show. Many, like Ron Borges, will even lift them verbatim. It’s a nice tribute to the common man. None of the opinions your hometown columnist offers will be the least bit insightful or original (just like the content of this book!). He may even contradict himself within the same column. Why does he get paid so much to be so inane? Simple: columnists are hired by editors to boost the overall self-esteem of the general sporting public. Most fans read the work of an idiot like Jay Mariotti and conclude, “Christ, I’m smarter than this asshole.” And they’re right. That helps make them feel more confident and better informed.
Unfamiliar with the distinguishing characteristics that make these gents such miserable human beings to be around? Not to worry. I’ve listed them here for you.
Height: 5'4"
Weight: Either 100 pounds or 400 pounds. There is no in-between.
Salary: Six figures at a newspaper. Working at a newspaper is a union job, and newspaper columnists are the only people on Earth who earn more to do nothing than your local Teamsters.
Favorite Food: Pasta primavera that’s been sitting in a hotel pan for four hours or more, Caesar salad made entirely with Caesar dressing and croutons, muffins, brownies, blondies, bacon paste
Preferred Stance: Inside press box, hunched over laptop, sweating, occasionally snickering to self
Wardrobe: Pleated Haggar pants, American Eagle Outfitters denim dress shirt
Favorite Brand of Cigarettes for Smoking Three Packs a Day: Pall Mall
Teeth Color: Grayish mustard
Skin: Thinner than a pubic hair
Hair: None
Musk: Turkish bath, with just a hint of Beefeater
Preferred Name While Cross-dressing: Sheila
Turn-ons: Children, sound of own voice, Sanka, fresh tray of eggs Benedict at Quality Inn breakfast spread, old Smith-Corona typewriters, free promotional golf shirts, radio show call-ins, mute hookers, a Xanax prescription refill, talking with others about back pain
Turnoffs: Sports, you performing well, criticism, effort, the sinking feeling that the rise of self-publishing electronic media will lead to his inevitable and just demise
Marital Status: Thrice divorced
Children: Two, whom he never sees
How to Get Him to Like You: Don’t bother trying to curry favor with your hometown columnist. His job is to bitch about you no matter what you do. If you don’t talk to him, he’ll crucify you for being media-unfriendly, and actually assume readers will care about such a characteristic. If you give him a decent quote to work with, he’ll thank you, and then crucify you for speaking your mind. You can’t win, nor should you even try. Turn the page to see what I mean.
Credo: “No cheering in the press box.” Peter King once said he never roots for a team, but that he roots for a story. This is a hard-and-fast belief among all sportswriters. They don’t care about your game. They care about using your game as a way to indirectly talk about themselves. It’s a bold, innovative way of being completely useless, and it helps explain why Peter King so often writes about playing with his dog and going to the proctologist.
HEAR IT FROM A COLUMNIST!
I’m the star here, asshole
by Mike Lupica, New York Daily News columnist
Hey, you.
Yeah, you.
Let me explain something to you before you walk out onto that field for the first time, okay? I’m gonna tell you a little something about how this whole industry works. And take it from me, because I’ve been around here a whole lot longer than you have. So I think I have a pretty goddamn good idea of what I’m talking about.
I’m the star here, asshole.
You hear me?
I AM THE STAR HERE.
I know you think you’re a big deal now that you’re a pro. I know you think the universe revolves around you. Well, I have news for you. Let me just cut you down to size now and save you the time. The fact is that I can walk into any neighborhood in Santo Domingo and find another asshole who’s just like you, okay? You are just one more asshole in the long line of players parading in and out of this city.
You’re not Lupica, that’s for goddamn sure.
(pokes you in the chest)
You merely play sports. But I make sports into art. I am a composer. I am a recorder of history. I tickle the imagination. When people centuries from now want to find something that captures the quintessence of the times in which we currently live, they’re not gonna watch some highlight of you rounding the bases like some jackass. They’re gonna get it from Lupica. I c
reate, okay? I am a creator. I am the creator. So I don’t want to see you trying to upstage me with some bullshit home run pose. And I don’t want to hear you mouthing off some uninformed opinion to the rest of these slobbering idiots in the press, like you actually know something. You do the hitting, and I’ll do the writing. You got me? Know your role.
Oh, you wanna challenge me? Yeah, you don’t wanna do that. Cross me and I’ll write a piece so scathing you’ll need to rub Vaseline on your ass for a month. I’m the kind of guy that reads crossword puzzle answer keys and then writes his own clues, so you don’t want to try and match wits with me. The Yankees displeased me once. Once. You know what happened when they did? They got the full frontal force of Lupica crammed right down their throats. Look at this dagger, which I actually wrote on June 26th, 2007.
“Bronx Bombers? The Bronx Bomb is more like it.”
BOOM! See how I modified “Bombers” to “Bomb” to reverse the connotation? Holy shit, am I good. I’m just gonna sit back and read it to myself one more time.
(snickers)
God, I kill.
You wanna screw with that, jerkoff? If you think that’s bad, wait until I excoriate you on national television. One second listening to my voice and your scrotum will tighten like a beggar’s purse. And I’ll keep lecturing you until the myelin sheaths have been completely stripped from your nerves. It’s my gift, and you don’t want a taste of it.
(peers over glasses at you)
I’m sorry to break this to you, buddy, but the fans aren’t here to see you. That’s the hard truth. They’re here to see you in order to prepare themselves for the majesty that will spring forth from my keyboard the next day. I’m the show here, asshole. You’re just the fuel driving the engine. Athletes come and go. You’re here now, but soon you’ll move on. Or you’ll retire. You’ll have no lasting impact on this city. But I will. I am a goddamn institution. You are nothing. You’re less than nothing. You’re an accessory. A trinket.
What’s that? I’m the asshole? What, you think I give a shit what some two-bit Neanderthal like you thinks? There’s only one opinion that matters here, kid: Lupica’s. I’ve spent years building up an immunity to any sort of criticism. You’re not the first person who wanted to push me down a flight of concrete stairs, and you certainly won’t be the last.
Get it straight now, and maybe I’ll spare you my legendary wrath. But if you want to try and be Mr. Big Shot, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I’ll always be more important than the event I cover. You’re superfluous to the whole enterprise.
So don’t get too full of yourself.
That’s my job.
The sports network for people who don’t like sports: ESPN.
If you’re unfamiliar with the history of ESPN, simply tune in to SportsCenter tonight. They’ll almost certainly be celebrating an ESPN milestone of some sort. You’ll see old footage of Chris Berman that only Chris Berman enjoys watching. Then you’ll see footage of that crazy Stanford-Cal band play. Is it just as exciting the 56,872nd time you’ve watched it? Sure is!
In the old days, ESPN was an upstart company dedicated to serving sports fans with round-the-clock sports coverage and a SportsCenter anchored by Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann that featured actual highlights of that day’s games. But times have changed, and so has ESPN. As you are probably aware, ESPN is now a gigantic, soul-sucking collective that stays alive only by feeding itself its own shit. They currently have partial to total broadcasting control over the three major sports leagues in America. But that’s only the beginning. By the end of this century, ESPN management hopes to control the forty-eight contiguous states, along with parts of Southeast Asia and the Bering Strait.
The company has already begun its own human-clone farm to provide for its massive energy needs. The cloned fetuses are harvested into large cryogenic chambers and kept alive but unconscious. Large tubes are then inserted directly into the fetuses’ eye sockets, pumping vital plasma into the company’s bionic central nervous system. With any luck, ESPN will get most unsuspecting sports fans to become part of their gigantic human plantation project by 2067. At least, that’s the current timetable.
What’s this mean for you, the athlete? It means that getting on SportsCenter is harder than ever. Being in a SportsCenter highlight used to be a rite of passage for young pro athletes. It was a sign that you had finally made the big-time, and that a lucrative deal with Taco Bell or any of the Yum! Brands restaurant franchises awaited you. Those highlights have grown ever more scarce on the show as of late. Highlights only appeal to sports fans, and ESPN could give two shits about them. What ESPN craves is . . . branding! Branded sets! Branded segments! Branded events! Branded brands! Ever heard of ESPN presents the ESPN World Series brought to you by the Ford Motor Company sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline in association with ESPN? It’s coming soon, and everyone at ESPN agrees by coercion: you’ll love it!
* * *
DID YOU KNOW?
Employees who break the rules at ESPN are often punished by having to spend one night alone in a coffin with the remains of Walt Disney.
* * *
After all that branding, the only highlights you now see on SportsCenter are highlights of other highlights. You might catch the last three nanoseconds of a dunk, or a really big football hit that’s been taken completely out of context from the game in which it took place. Otherwise, the show simply doesn’t have time. I asked a senior producer at ESPN, who will soon be found dead, to take me through a typical hour of the show. Here was the template he gave me before asking me to tell his children he loved them:
11:00 p.m. — Introduction of SportsCenter introduction
11:02 p.m. — Highlights of what you can expect during the show, including one story that looks interesting and will occupy five seconds at the end of the broadcast
11:03 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:05 p.m. — The real SportsCenter title sequence, featuring a giant SC logo striding atop a giant graphic phallus, with all kinds of crazy rings and shit shooting over it
11:06 p.m. — Voice-over guy with no gravitas says, “This is SportsCenter.” You are blinded by greatness.
11:08 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:10 p.m. — Ten-minute Stuart Scott slam poem that only serves to reinforce his middle-class upbringing
11:20 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:22 p.m. — “Coors Light Cold Hard Facts,” in which analysts Mark Schlereth and Merril Hoge (combined number of concussions: 248) give you their hardcore, producer-coached opinions
11:24 p.m. — Thirty-second teaser for what’s ahead on the second half of SportsCenter
11:25 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:27 p.m. — Linda Cohn broadcasts from a remote location in Rhode Island to tell you what a fun week it’s been watching the X Games, and that these guys are athletes
11:29 p.m. — Top Five College Football Plays of the ESPN Era!
11:32 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:34 p.m. — Five-minute recap of Pardon the Interruption
11:39 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:40 p.m. — Cut to ESPN commercial break within commercial break. Airing next week: the ESPN original movie Game of Shadows, starring Mario Van Peebles!
11:42 p.m. — “What2Watch4” segment takes you through all your programming choices on the ESPN family of networks for the following day, without pesky prepositions!
11:44 p.m. — “Budweiser Hot Seat!” This segment gives the anchors a chance to really put the screws to an athlete or coach. Tonight’s guest is Mario Van Peebles.
11:46 p.m. — “Fact or Fiction” segment! This differs from “Cold Hard Facts” because it allows retards like John Kruk to be unnecessarily strident about things that they think are true or false.
11:48 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:50 p.m. — Chris Berman appears. Introduces the other four people in the studio, using the same jokes he’s used for
the last twenty-nine fucking years. Everyone laughs. Throws it back to Stuart.
11:52 p.m. — Cut to Ed Werder outside the Cowboys practice facility, waiting for something to happen
11:54 p.m. — Cut to commercial
11:56 p.m. — “SportsCenter Xpress” takes you through all the day’s games in two minutes or less! It’s highlights for people on the go! Wasn’t that thoughtful of them?
11:58 p.m. — “Did You Know?” And you did.
12:00 a.m. — We start all over again!
I tell you, it’s the tightest show on sports. You have to work extra hard to get your break on that show. A plain old dunk, home run, or touchdown won’t do. You’re gonna have to be creative. I suggest drop-kicking an opponent, breaking a hallowed record through suspect means, or spitting on someone. That’s the kind of stuff advertisers really gravitate toward these days, and it’s your only hope.
* * *
DID YOU KNOW? BONUS!
Due to corporate obligations, future installments of SportsCenter’s “Did You Know?” segment will focus exclusively on just what gives Budweiser such a crisp, clean taste.
* * *
There is one saving grace of ESPN, however. Because ESPN is in bed with the principals of every major sport, it behooves them to give you softer treatment than an Upper East Side mother gives her offspring. Did you get arrested once? What arrest? Stuart Scott doesn’t remember any arrest! That must have been some crazy dream you had!
It’s like sodomy for your ears! Your guide to the average talk radio host.