Men's Journal

Through the miracle of the internet, fans were able to wallow in their obsession like never before, relentlessly dissecting every uncomfortable sports moment. The result? Ten years of unintentional comedy gold.

By Matt Taibbi

At the close of the 2000s we look back on what, unsurprisingly, was the funniest sports decade yet — unsurprisingly for the simple reason that, thanks to the internet and 900-channel expansion of ESPN, every move by every coach and every athlete was microanalyzed to the point of rank absurdity. As hard as team officials and their network partners tried to sanitize the product to please advertisers, inevitably some uglier truths about pro sports spilled out, becoming food for ironic consumption by the masses to be relived over and over. What a boring 10 years it would have been without these agonizingly uncomfortable moments:

Barry Bonds Blows Up

The assholedom of Barry Bonds was a physical thing of enormous dimensions, something sportswriters got to watch grow steadily throughout the early part of the decade (along with his rapidly expanding, medicine-ball-size head) as Bonds assaulted the record books with a battering ram of steroid-fueled egomania. By the mid-2000s Bonds’s sense of self-importance could barely fit in the locker room; watching him struggle to put on a fan-friendly face was like watching one of those obese curiosities on Half-Ton Teen roll over just enough to let a nurse change the bedpan. And then one day in March 2005, during a spring-training media session in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Barry Bonds ego-blob finally exploded in great gobs of angry goo-spunk in response to questions about the BALCO scandal. “You guys wanted to hurt me bad enough, you finally got me!” he hissed at reporters, then instructed cameramen to pan over to his mortified teenage son so that they could show “the pain you caused my whole family.” It was like a hallucinogenic cross of post-ouster Mussolini and the “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore” speech, with a tinge of Naomi Campbell thrown in — next to the late Anna Nicole, the best train-wreck reality show of the decade.

Shaq and Kobe Make Up

Just as Reagan and Thatcher were the great love story of the ’80s, and Beavis and Butt-head the most endearing ’90s romance, Shaq and Kobe were the ultimate celebrity couple of the self-obsessed, media-centric 2000s. For years after Kobe ran Shaq out of town, the seemingly annual Lakers-Heat game on Christmas Day allowed all of America to bask in their transcendent mutual hatred. Christmas 2005 was the best, with Kobe and Shaq ignoring each other during the ritual pre-tip greetings. When ABC’s Lisa Salters asked Shaq about the co-snub on camera after the game, he just stared blankly at her for what seemed like forever before finally, grimly responding, “Merry Christmas to everyone out there.” After that, Bill Russell launched a Jesse Jackson–style unsolicited peacemaking mission that resulted, on January 16, 2006, in perhaps the fakest hug in television history; Kobe in particular looked like he was trying to pick up a refrigerator covered with razor blades. Shaq seemed more sincere, talking tearfully about the symbolism of making up on Martin Luther King Day. “Dr. Martin Luther King was an ambassador of peace,” he noted sagely. Two years later, after Kobe’s Lakers lost to the Celtics in the Finals, Shaq would continue to honor King’s ambassadorship by performing his gloating “Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes!” rap.

Tiger Hits the Skids

You wanted to say it all of these years: Fuck Tiger Woods! Fuck him in the fucking ear with a fucking fire hydrant! Fuck his $100 million Nike deal and his goofy red shirts and his mute Swedish trophy wife and his Buicks and his 320-yard tee shots and his smug, unsmiling, genetically-engineered-to-be-boring facial expression — fuck all of it! When a guy who spent his entire life carefully cultivating the image of the ultimate endorsement vehicle, who smothered his soul with a couch pillow in order to sell you Gatorade and golf balls — when that guy suddenly blows up in a rash of late-night police calls and starts spilling reams of vice and family rancor into the tabloids like some ancillary character of The Osbournes, it can’t help but be immensely amusing to the rest of us. The inevitable E! channel documentaries featuring weeping testimonials from rows of cow-faced porn sluts (“He made me dress up like a caddy!”) and pancake-house waitresses (“He covered me with boysenberry syrup!”) and Trashy Girl lingerie models (“He fondled himself during the liposuction treatment he bought me!”) and whatever other extramarital roadkill they dredge up will be comedy classics — as will his similarly inevitable, Sonny Liston–esque end as a stoned, potbellied greeter in Vegas.

Grady Little Visits the Mound

One of the most profound sports developments of this decade was the new breed of Bill Jamesian stat geeks, who took over front offices not just in baseball but in all the major sports and replaced forever the gut call with quantitative analysis. Any thoughts the old tobacco-chewing guard might have had about beating back this cultural tidal wave effectively ended that cold October night in 2003, when a half-mummified Grady Little dragged a hunch to the Yankee stadium mound in the eighth inning of the ALCS game 7. “Grady Little out of the dugout!” called Joe Buck. But Little appeared to have gone blind between innings, not noticing that Pedro Martinez’s fastball had lost movement over the previous two disastrous at-bats (vicious rakes by Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams) or that his ace flashed a look like he’d just dropped a turd the size of a cabbage when asked if he felt good enough to keep pitching. The truly hilarious moment is the encouraging pat on the pitching arm Little gave Pedro on his way back to the dugout; Pedro quickly looked away, like he half-expected the arm to fall off on impact, then tossed a fatalistic stare in the distance like Christ in the first moments of the Passion. The Yankees went on to score twice more, inevitably tying the game as Little inexplicably left Pedro spitting up blood on the cross for two more agonizing at-bats, and just like that the quirky hunch was gone from sports forever.

Serena Williams Gets Graphic

It was a strange decade in tennis: From the standpoint of between-the-lines play, the sport was never better. We were privileged to watch Roger Federer, probably the greatest male player of all time, dominate like no athlete ever had in any sport. We got to watch a remarkably competitive women’s circuit that included two all-time greats, Venus and Serena Williams, who also happen to be sisters. But from the standpoint of spoiled-brat off-court hysterics and venomous on-court enmities, tennis took a pronounced nosedive. For 30 years the sport had cranked out extremely entertaining drama queens and boorish assholes at a ferocious clip, from Ilie Nastase to Jimmy Connors to John McEnroe to Monica Seles to Andre Agassi, but by the middle part of this decade tennis was wholly the province of mute Slavs and polite Europeans who didn’t scream obscenities at umpires, give eight-year-old fans the finger, grab crotch, or do anything but be the overcoached childhood-deprived ball-hitting machines they are. Then Serena Williams came along on the last grand-slam final of the decade and turned it all around with her stunning “I swear to God I’ll fucking take this ball and shove it down your throat!” tirade against a line judge. There has never been a funnier 30 seconds of Dick Enberg silence.

Terrell Owens Breaks Down

Owens was this decade’s quintessential self-promoting celebrity, who for most of his career moved effortlessly between two worlds: one, the red-carpet superstar circuit reserved for A-list performers of the type he really was when he actually played, and two, the rapidly-disassembling-celebrity circuit occupied by the likes of Britney Spears and, well, Britney Spears. That the media had played an enabling role in TO’s steep psychological descent had been clear as early as his Eagles days, but when then Cowboy TO and his dingbat third-rate publicist Kim Etheredge were forced to call an ad-hoc press conference to deny an apparent suicide attempt, suddenly Dr. Frankenstein and his plainly unraveling, self-injuring monster were left staring at each other in as awkward a moment as sports has experienced in decades. Here was a supremely gifted athlete in the grip of a narcissistic breakdown who was clearly mainlining media attention as a substitute for whatever was really missing in his life; the only way to really help this guy was to ignore him, but…fuck that!

Rush Limbaugh Talks Quarterbacking

Limbaugh’s guerrilla attack on football during a 2003 NFL pregame show was a gruesome collision of bad politics and bad marketing, with ESPN’s transparent ploy to use America’s leading pill-addicted fat racist to snatch a little extra right-wing demographic exploding in horrific fashion. An often overlooked contributing factor to this Matterhorn of negative comedy was ESPN’s ill-fated decision to throw to a Brady Bunch–style split-screen format just in time for Rush’s tirade against Donovan McNabb, whom he described as being overrated by a media culture “very desirous that a black quarterback do well.” That allowed us to watch in real time as the eyes of Tom Jackson and Michael Irvin dilated to dinner-plate width. Also forgotten is the hilariously uncomfortable contribution of the panel’s fourth member, the blowdried Steve Young, who blew it for white people everywhere when he not only failed to jump across the set and choke Rush to death mid-rant, but ultimately also sided with Rush in the argument and called for fellow Caucasian Koy Detmer to take McNabb’s job. Six years later, it’s still maybe the most painful two minutes on YouTube.

The Pistons and Pacers Brawl

Forget about this decade — this is one of the top three unintentionally funny scenes in sports history, and it would be the runaway number one if we somehow had access to a split-screen view of David Stern’s reaction. In a league that was increasingly stage-managed down to the smallest detail, designed to provide hoops fans with a pain-free escapist environment where doughy white families could enjoy lots of merch and $7 hot dogs, scrap for free T-shirts shot into the crowd by furry mascots, and stare hopefully at the Jumbotron during the KissCam medley, Ron Artest’s foray into the stands was a hilarious intrusion of reality. Athletes everywhere must have cheered like soldiers on V-E Day during the key end sequence of the fight, when Artest and Jermaine O’Neal decked two semi-obese fans in Starter jerseys who’d wandered onto the court with their chests puffed out, looking to mix it up. In that one moment, you saw the NBA for what, on one level, it really is: black poverty and desperation sold as ritualistic gladiatorial spectacle, as a palliative to petty bourgeois white boredom. And here white boredom made the mistake of jumping the ropeline and got a taste of real excitement. I personally have watched the O’Neal punch sequence at least 600 times, and I still laugh every time, particularly at two things: the fact that O’Neal felt the need to get a running start (he barrels into the fat fan like A-Rod sliding into third), and the sound of the SportsCenter commentator’s eloquent “Hmm!” as O’Neal’s fist hits its target. We may never see anything like it again.

—-

This article originally appeared in the February 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.

Print this article