Sex, Drugs - Rock and Roll
From Lance to Jose to the Original Whizzinator, 2005 just about had it all.
Eric DuBose, a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles, earlier this year was stopped while driving under the influence in Florida. The arresting officer suspected something was wrong as DuBose struggled when asked to recite the alphabet. DuBose said: “I’m from Alabama, and they have a different alphabet.”
Sometimes it seems as if pro athletes are from a different planet, translation required.
Take Jose Canseco. Here’s a guy who has been on the fringes for a long time, essentially blackballed by the baseball establishment. Here’s a guy who earned an athletic reputation as a slugger and a moral reputation as a slug. But this past year Canseco sat in a U.S. Congress hearing and managed to come off as the most honest and upstanding among a blue-ribbon group of current and former ball players called to testify about the thorny subject of performance enhancing drugs.
Testifying under some variation of the hypocritical oath, Rafael Palmeiro testified he was cleaner than Tiger Woods’s smile after a visit to the hygienist. Underneath, though, it turns out Raffy was rotten. Where’s Mark McGwire these days, anyway?
In 2005, Sports Illustrated asked 50 PGA Tour players if they’d agree to abstain from sex for a year if it meant they’d win a major tournament. Thirty-eight per cent said they’d make that deal, although one reportedly wanted to know first: “With my wife?”
Sex (check). Drugs (check). Rock and roll?
Sheryl Crow and Lance Armstrong have become a duet: “His line of work is so much cooler than mine now,” she said after attending his final Tour de France tour de force. “It’s so much more fun and the personalities are so much more interesting than in rock and roll.”
Interesting? Among the things we learned this past year that we really didn’t need to know is that Mark Cuban, the gazillionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks, doesn’t wear underwear. At least that’s what he told Playboy magazine and why would he lie about something like that?
Maybe it was the NHL lockout that opened up all the air time, maybe it is the proliferation of on-line gambling venues waiting to fleece the thundering herds of sheep, but poker gained a foothold on all-sports television in ‘05. For those who might doubt the bona fides of a card game as sport, here’s the clincher: Some players have taken to calling Ace-King in the hole “an Anna Kournikova” — looks good but often can be beaten.
(Kournikova last January inspired serial stalker William Lepeska to swim across Biscayne Bay in Florida in search of her mansion. When discovered by police near her place, naked, flushed — though apparently not royally — he screamed: “Anna! Save me!”)
Not to be outdone by a mere card craze, the World Chess Boxing Organization recently crowned its first European heavyweight champion, Bulgaria’s Tihomir (Tiger) Titschko. He beat Andreas (Doomsday) Schneider of Germany in a new hybrid sport that features alternating rounds of four minutes of chess, followed by two minutes of boxing, maximum six rounds at the board and five in the ring. Checkmate or knockout? Name your poison, but don’t bleed on the board.
Unavoidable question: Has Mike Tyson heard about this?
The things you learn reading the sports pages: Hands up, for instance, if you’d ever heard, until Onterrio Smith of the Minnesota Vikings was caught with one in his airline luggage, of The Original Whizzinator. Not everyone needs a fake penis designed to help one pass a urine test, but if you ever did … well, now you know.
What planet do you figure Mike Danton of the St. Louis Blues was on when he tried to arrange to have his agent, David Frost, killed?
Ricky Williams, the Miami Dolphin, spent time touring this planet and possibly others before finally deciding the money was better back in the NFL. Among the places he visited that we can locate on a map were the Australian outback and India, where he spent several weeks huddling up with one Swami Sitaramananda, apparently working on a new playbook.
Earth to sports world: Happy New Year.
by Garth Woolsey
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