Men's Journal

Illustrations by Victor Juhasz

There’s no shortage of athletes easy to despise. (Preening, overpaid, starbanging phony A-Rod comes to mind.) But even a rabid fan like me has a few opposing players he can’t get too worked up about.

By Matt Taibbi

“Why don’t you write about a professional athlete you actually like?” my editor asked me. “I mean, there must be somebody, right?”

When I first heard this question I panicked. Like a lot of sports fans, my mind simply doesn’t work this way. I grew up in Boston and root passionately — actually, pathologically — for Boston sports teams. I like Boston players. I hate everyone else. I could probably root for Hitler if Bill Belichick signed him to the practice squad.

I wasn’t always like this. In college I worshipped Charles Barkley, and even put a map of the U.S. on my wall and stuck an absurd little silhouette of Chuck’s bald head on whatever state the Sixers were playing in that day; the little drawing was marked ELCB, for “Exact Location of Charles Barkley.” I did not get laid much in college.

Things have changed since then; I’m older and crabbier and my fandom is more psychotic and inconsolable than ever. Now the highest honor I can allow a non-Boston player is a state of not being hated. In fact when I try to think of players I like, what I’m really doing is thinking of guys who are hard to hate. In the modern media climate, when a professional athlete spends a sizable percentage of his adult life on live television being a millionaire whose every move is scrutinized by hordes of bored, half-broke working stiffs, it’s nearly impossible to avoid giving fans at least some reason to think you’re a dickhead. The guys who succeed are rare and deserve some props:

1. and 2. Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera
Once upon a time, Boston fans used to walk around wearing T-shirts that said YANKEES SUCK on the front and JETER SWALLOWS on the back. You know when that was? That was before the Red Sox won the World Series in 2004. Once that crushing tribal albatross was lifted, Boston fans for the most part returned to sanity and understood that they had Jeter all wrong, that anyone who roots hard for a loafing malcontent like Manny Ramirez while wearing a T-shirt calling Derek Jeter a cocksucker is begging to be tortured in the afterlife. Both Jeter and Rivera exhibit every quality you want to see in a professional athlete. They play biggest in the biggest games. They don’t showboat. They don’t gripe about their contracts in public. You just don’t hear about these guys off the field at all. They show up, the lights come on, they kick ass, and then they go home and soak by the pool. They’re perfect. Another quality the hard-to-hate player must have is a game so fun to watch you appreciate it even as it’s killing your own team. This is especially true of Rivera, whose bat-exploding cutter is one of the 10 most beautiful things in sports. I used to get a perverse kick out of seeing it chew up Nomar Garciaparra. Nomar would do that annoying OCD routine before he stepped into the box, fidgeting with his gloves like he’s trying to get his precious wrists just right for the at bat — and then Mo would throw his buzz saw right at Nomar’s hands, like he wanted to lop them off and leave them still twitching on the ground. Incidentally, any other reliever who has “Enter Sandman” played while coming onto the field should be disemboweled on pay-per-view.

3. LeBron James
Kobe Bryant pays a lot of attention to whether or not people think he is the next Michael Jordan, but he can’t be the next Michael Jordan precisely because he wants it so bad. LeBron James doesn’t want to be the next MJ because LeBron knows that being Michael Jordan would be a step down for him. Being the greatest athlete in the world by leaps and bounds is probably harder than it seems. I know if I were as great as LeBron James, I would be an enormous asshole. But LeBron not only doesn’t seem like an asshole, he’s totally unpretentious. Even his game is unpretentious. When Kobe plays, it looks like he’s watching himself in the mirror, trying to think up moves pretty enough to lead the next SportsCenter. LeBron just walks on the court and runs the fuck through people. The only thing I can compare it to is a nature show I saw once in which a Komodo dragon systematically pulled the legs off some kind of jungle elk and ate them one after another in four gulps. It’s disturbing and fascinating at the same time. If LeBron were a dick at all, watching this kind of dominance would be awfully depressing — more evidence of the essential injustice of nature. But he isn’t, and it isn’t.

4. Hines Ward
If you’re a fan of almost any other football team it’s really hard not to hate the Steelers because (a) they win all the time, and (b) whenever you go to a sports bar anywhere in the country on any Sunday afternoon, there are always displaced Steeler fans in BETTIS 36 jerseys stretched tight over their fat guts, hooting and hollering and hitting on fat girls. The problem is, their players are good. I mean, they’re all good. Even the quarterback is a tough guy with moles on his face. But the tone-setter is Hines Ward. On most teams the star wideout is some narrow-assed prima donna with diamond rings who whines when he doesn’t get the ball, doesn’t block, and ends his career by getting popped for coke-and-handgun charges in Clearwater, Florida, after a routine traffic stop. But Ward is exactly the opposite of those things. He catches everything you throw at him, he doesn’t leap up after the play and grab his jock, and he blocks guys into next week. I tried for years to hate Ward but finally gave up last year after catching myself enjoying the sight of him thrashing the Patriots’ showboating midget cornerback Ellis Hobbs III (the kind of player who celebrates after giving up a first down) in a Steelers blowout. Hobbs trying to run with Ward looked like an ant trying to catch a hamster. It was impossible not to appreciate.

5. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
A legacy pick. It’s not just Kareem’s legendary, Oscar-worthy role in Airplane!, which remains the gold standard for self-parodying jock movie performances. It’s not just the sympathy you feel for a guy whose house burned down, who had to take gigs on Everybody Loves Raymond for money, who found himself semi-shunned by the NBA after his retirement, reduced to openly begging for coaching opportunities he never got. It was more the other thing: Kareem never turned into a raging, self-aggrandizing blowhard who wedged himself onto an ESPN set wearing purple six-button, three-piece suits and screaming self-promoting horseshit into a camera. There are some athletes who get so hooked on the adulation that they’ll do anything to replace it when they retire. You get the feeling Bill Walton would give a Clydesdale a rim job if it meant keeping his NBA analyst gig. Kareem is different. He was one of the only sports greats who never went so overboard with egomania that it all made sense to him. He used to physically recoil from fans and sportswriters who pumped too-hard handshakes or stood too close; and when people looked at him with worship and love in their eyes, he looked back at them like they were out of their fucking minds.

6. Donovan McNabb
McNabb has quietly spent the last decade being one of the best athletes in America and has taken the Philadelphia Eagles — a franchise that spent most of the previous 30 years getting their balls smashed flat when it counted by the Giants and the Cowboys — to five NFC title games and a Super Bowl. And yet Philly fans howl at him like they’re pissed he’s winning. For 10 years I’ve been waiting for McNabb to break the huddle, walk up under center, hear the boos and insults, and then suddenly call time out and start into a Bill Hicks–style tirade at the crowd: “Fuck you, you fucking rednecks! Enjoy the Kevin Kolb era!” And then just walk off the field, jump in a cab, and pay a $9,800 fare straight to the Vikings’ front office in Minneapolis, where he signs for 10 bucks and a Snickers bar just for the chance to whip the Eagles in the playoffs. It’ll never happen, but it should.

7. Roger Federer
You want to hate him for all the usual reasons: He’s a European, he has a ponytail (or used to), and he makes Andy Roddick look like an out-of-shape bank teller from Binghamton. Normally the sniveling foreign tennis douchebag is one of the more dependable villains in all of sport. In fact most years the only reason to watch the U.S. Open is to see if Lleyton Hewitt finally has an aneurysm while unleashing a tirade at a black umpire, or if Yeugeny Kafelnikov and his Prince Charming haircut get pecked to death by a bunch of Flushing Bay seagulls. But Federer fights like a lion, doesn’t bitch about calls, and on the court he’s God’s gift to tennis. If you go into a match rooting for a half-socialized loudmouth American like Roddick to beat Federer, by the time it’s over (usually after about 11 minutes) you’re embarrassed enough to start passing yourself off as Canadian. Bjorn Borg was the same way, but he forfeits points for losing his shit once he met his match in John McEnroe. The way Federer embraced and accepted Rafael Nadal’s arrival makes him even greater, if that makes sense.

8. Peyton Manning
This is very hard for me personally to admit, as I spent most of George W. Bush’s presidency both loathing Manning and living in terror of his uncanny ability to convert 3rd-and-14. But I’ve officially moved to a new stage of my relationship with him, sort of like Rocky and Apollo after the second film. Manning used to be supremely hateable because he wilted when the lights got bright and showed his teammates up by making prune faces after drops and missed blocks. But since 2004 he’s won the big one while his sixth-round “lunch pail” rival Tom Brady has pissed away off-seasons visiting the Pope, carrying a man purse, hugging goats in photo shoots, and balling movie actresses and Brazilian supermodels. Manning in his endorsement career opted for a goofy, everyman persona, while the socially grasping Brady branded himself to the yacht-and-Brie crowd, rocking a dimple-chinned, God-I’m-handsome black-and-white head shot to sell the “Tom Brady Limited Edition 800 Series Chronograph by Movado,” a watch that costs $3,000. Brady-Manning is the best rivalry in sports, but even Boston fans know now that the off-field stuff has tilted massively in Manning’s favor in recent years. Plus all he does on the field is take the hit, jump right back up, and drill guys right in the hands. Admit it, people, you’ll feel better.

9. David Beckham
Just because the inventor of the word “metrosexual” declared Beckham to be the ultimate example of the species doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate… Ha, ha, no, just kidding. David Beckham does not get on this list: I have no problem hating that motherfucker. In fact I hope his penis falls off at a rope-line event. Why don’t Europeans use their hands when they play sports? What’s wrong with those people?

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This article originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.

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