It’s not fair. This should be the most cherry of holiday seasons for Kris Humphries. A morality play on the hard court. That if you worked hard, if you were patient, life would be grand.
Kris Humphries did his time. He paid his dues riding the pine in the NBA hinterlands. One year in Utah. Three in Toronto. He did not complain when Dallas dealt him to New Jersey. He kept grinding. He found his post-game. He found true love. By season’s end, Kris Humphries was a double-double juggernaut on the court who went home to Kim Kardashian off it.
The Nets lavished him with an $8 million deal. E! feted him with a splashy $20 million wedding. And all was right in the world.
For 72 days.
Kim filed for divorce. Maybe he couldn’t take the paparazzi glare. Or maybe she couldn’t live in Minnesota. But ten weeks later, she wanted the divorce. And she wanted to keep that $2 million engagement ring, too.
People who like college sports more than pro sports don’t actually like sports. Instead, they like the other things that college athletes do well: represent a community, foster a sense of historical continuity, and create the occasional Rudy-esque story where a regular person gets the glory. All of that is well and good, but none of it has anything to do with sports.
I get it, it’s easier to identify with college athletes, we lived where they lived, we wore the colors they wore, why that could even be us out there instead of young Mr. Ruttiger. None of that is true for professional athletes. They live in multimillion dollar homes, they never have to eat at Arby’s, and we sure as shit can’t imagine playing out there with them. Rudy never made it to the NFL because a linebacker would have ripped his dick off and eaten it after breaking both his legs Theismann style. And you know why that story would unfold that way? Because pro-athletes are better than 95% of college athletes by an almost superhuman degree.
If you care about sports, if you want to see it played at the highest level, you’ll prefer watching professional athletes. Watching Michael Jordan is where you just might see the platonic ideal of basketball; the same can’t be said of some 5’7, slightly chubby point guard from a forgettable school who gets by on moxie and who plays the game the right way (“playing the game the right way” being code for either 1) I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about or 2) I really prefer white people).
Now your average college sports fan might concede these points (except the racist thing) but will then proceed to list several reasons why college sports is still superior. College athletes play for the love of the game instead of money, they always play hard, and the competition means more. As someone who values rationality you’ll want to counter these arguments. And rest assured these points will be addressed, but if you want to skip ahead, here’s the lowdown – they’re all bullshit.
The idea of college sports teams playing for the love of the game is silliness rooted in an antiquated notion of what the term student athlete represents, where the first word in that description has just as much weight as the second one. Maybe 75 years ago you had some square-jawed kid who took to the field because he just enjoyed being out there and he wanted to fight for his alma mater. That was just college though, when it was all said and done he never expected to do anything other than sell mattresses in his father’s store after graduation. That world does not exist anymore.
Billie Jean King didn’t know I was drunk. By all accounts, I was an affable fan with shades of a speech impediment.
I wasn’t black-out, per se. But it was that time of the night. You know, the whites whiten. The blacks blacken. The eyes shift from video mode to photo.
Short, choppy snapshots documenting my conversation with sports’ most famous lesbian: Her GEICO commercials. My stoner college roommate. The top-shelf open bar selection. The U.S. Open. Just call it The Open, Billie Jean King corrected me. The players do.
The Open lacks the strawberries-and-cream mystique of Wimbledon. The earth-tone majesty of Roland Garros. But what The Open does offer is size on an All-American scale.
“Dad, do you think — if I had to — I could beat Serena Williams in a fight?”
“No chance. Serena Williams has more testosterone than you do.”
“With those thighs? She’d scissor you to death,” my dad’s girlfriend added.
To be clear: I do not wish to fight Serena Williams. She is a post-racial ambassador for the game who transcended it. An inspiration to daughters, mothers, and grandmothers everywhere. I grew misty-eyed when she countered her sister Venus in the 2002 French Open finals.
But suppose the 27-time Grand Slam titlist was overtaken by a seething fit of rage. Could you fend her off?
On a tennis court, no. Her forehand is the stuff of legend. Serena’s serve clocks up to 129 MPH and fells All-American defensive linemen. Serena’s ground-game would prove formidable. Her aforementioned thunder thighs would suffocate me instantly.
I’m a bro in my mid-twenties. I endured years of rough-and-tumble fights with my brother until my innovation of the head-butt ushered in a Pax Fraternus. I run every-day and bench every other. Nonetheless, Madden is the closest I’ve come to a tackle in the last three months. I lack any martial arts training but for Intro to Karate my Senior year of college (I passed).
Steroids in baseball? Weak. Doped up Olympians? Yawn. Colluding NBA superstars taking their talents to South Beach? Not even close. The dirtiest, most egregiously corrupt sport in the United States is college football.
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Of course, it’s easy to say right now. Miami was recently smashed upside the head by Yahoo! Sports’ investigative team, laying out allegations made by former booster Nevin Shapiro. Using funds from a near billion dollar Ponzi scheme to fuel his over-the-top rock star lifestyle, Shapiro allegedly provided illegal benefits to what seems like every relevant University of Miami Hurricanes football player from the past decade.
Let’s not forget some of the other schools to get in trouble to various degrees recently: Alabama, West Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, LSU, Georgia, Tennessee, Boise State, North Carolina, Auburn, Ohio State and the school that started this latest series of crackdowns, University of Southern California (USC).
I’ve played Fantasy Football (in the business of Fantasy sports writing, we’re taught to capitalize the term) since 1997. I was 14 then and I joined on a whim because I was a big San Francisco 49ers fan growing up in the wine-country suburbs of Santa Barbara county in California.
My appreciation for the sport has grown over the years and it’s most certainly close to an obsession now. To illustrate my point, let me tell you that I’m one of those football fans who follows high school recruiting. I keep track of where teenagers choose to go to college to play football. So from high school to college and into the NFL, I follow the full trajectory of football players. I say this not to brag, but to properly demonstrate how much I enjoy the game and how sad my day-to-day life is.
Again he walked the lonely June walk. His sixth. But the first time he would rip off a drenched jersey not of the Cavaliers. He unclipped some luckless bracelet, slinked away from the TunnelVision camera, and into his first full summer as LeBron James: The Villain.
A sultry summer locked in the gym. Of endless jump shots and low post spin-moves. Months of watching his first name scroll along ESPN’s ticker as its own category, headlining his every passing thought and tweet. Months of couldas, wouldas, and What Should I Do Nows? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtejCR413c). Months to dwell on the mid-career crisis.
LeBron James is 26 years old. Half of his career remains. Legacy is still a six letter word tossed around by restless sportswriters. But LeBron James has played 627 NBA games. He is decidedly middle-aged in a young twenty-something’s game. He has an Olympiad on Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose. And just as many titles.
Year 8 was LeBron’s closest yet. But still two wins short. Still six rings short of MJ, five of Kobe. Even one ring short of Brian “The Janitor” Cardinal. And so LeBron James slips another year behind the MJ trajectory. Another year the crown sits a little heavier. Another blemish on the King’s name. In 2009, he walked off the court against Orlando. In 2010, there was Game 5 in Boston. And in 2011, The Fourth Quarter.
It should have been the dumbest tattoo ever inked. Or at least since Mike Tyson went tribal on his left eye. Seasoned shooting guard Jason Terry got carried away during a Mavericks team powwow at DeShawn Stevenson’s pad last October. The whole team was there, Stevenson’s personal tattoo artist as well.
Terry wanted to pump up the boys. But the usual Us Vs. The World rah-rah wasn’t cutting it this time. Not with Kobe, Phil and the Lakers gunning for another three-peat. Not with the Thunder a year older. And not with the Big Two & A Half already shopping ring insets down in South Beach.
So Jason Terry had the Larry O’Brien trophy emblazoned to his right bicep. Right then and there. He would have the tattoo removed if the Mavericks fell short. He would have to, the league smirked. Because this was the Dallas Mavericks. The Buffalo Bills of the NBA. The proverbial one-and-done team that always followed the same script: Dirk put up his 24 points a night, they’d win 50-something games, lock up a four or five seed in the West, and bow out early to some young upstart like the Blazers or the Grizzlies.
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