On the Personal Lives of Athletes

I have to say that through the years, my interest in the personal lives of athletes has been an up-and-down affair. There have been periods of time where virtually any information about a famous athlete's personal life would interest me, only to be followed by periods of utter disinterest. As I've gotten older, the periods of fascination have been outpaced by the periods of not caring, but not to the point where I've stopped paying attention. What more concerns me now is when an alleged occurence has something to do with breaking the law. Then I care, because I consider lawbreaking to be a bit more newsworthy than whether someone is having an affair on his wife or drinking with young girls at a pool party.

I say that as a lead-in to this whole business surrounding Kobe Bryant supposedly, allegedly, perhaps, maybe, could be, might be, etc., etc., etc., cheating on his wife with a Laker Girl. A Laker Girl that just so happens to have the same first name as his wife. You know how all of this got started? A dirty site called The Dirty posted a "story" about a Laker girl named Vanessa leaving the Laker Girl team right before the playoffs and how a source of theirs told them the reason she left was because the Lakers were looking to cover the whole thing up.

What the fuck?

Not a week goes by and an actual mainstream, top-level site posts about it: Deadspin. Their timeline accurately depicts how a story with no substantial proof whatsoever can somehow find legs and run its way around the Internet to the browser windows and inboxes of the masses.

The question is, why are we fascinated? Why do we care? A.J. Daulerio over at Deadspin claims that this is news because of Kobe's past affair in Colorado and his subsequent painful, public apology. But is it? Is it really? Nobody seemed to care when Wilt Chamberlain was fucking every woman he saw 40 years ago. I guess it is news if the weather is, say, sunny and in the 80s 47 days in a row. You've still got to report the weather, right? Even if it's the same every day? So I guess he might have a point there, that a repeated, unsurprising occurence deserves mention, but then again, I don't think that your local newscast would spend so much time reporting on that mundane, same-every-day weather.

Instead of reporting what athletes do on the court, increasingly the focus has shifted to what they do off of it. Is it shocking that Pacman Jones "made it rain" at a strip club? That Matt Leinart had a party that involved BEER and GIRLS? That Charles Barkley gambles? That Alex Rodriguez was seen with a woman who was not his wife? I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point.

These people aren't role models. They just aren't. We think we know them because we craft their personalities for them while we root for them. We like to think that Marvin Harrison is a stand up guy and perfect humanitarian because he fits our mold of what we think that person is; the fact that he owns a bar and gets into fights outside of it and then his gun is used to shoot at someone never enters the picture and then shocks us when we hear about it.

The fact of the matter is that we don't know these people any better than we know the person that delivers our mail. Peyton Manning could be a psychotic choking rapist for all we know. While I think that Albert Pujols is a god amongst men, a living, walking, breathing saint in this world, he may turn out to be the worst person ever. We just don't know.

I should have known better when everything came crashing down for me, when Magic Johnson announced to the world that he was HIV positive. Magic Johnson? AIDS? What? He cheated on his wife? Say it ain't so! Not a beloved athlete!

The personal lives of athletes shouldn't shock us at all. Athletes are normal, regular people who just happen to be ridiculously gifted at a particular skill set that is enormously overvalued by society. Kobe Bryant may be the best basketball player on earth, but he's just a regular human being in every other way. Given the same amount of idol worship, money and fame, I don't know what kind of person I would be. I can guarantee you that I would not be the person I am now because I just don't think it would be possible. In fact, I think it's probably almost impossible to grow up in that kind of spotlight and be anywhere near what you or I would consider "normal."

I'd probably have an overinflated ego and enough arrogance to fill the Staples Center. I'd probably walk into every room thinking that everyone in there needed to do whatever I wished simply because of who I was. I imagine that that's the kind of life a lot of these athletes lead. I don't see how it makes sense to be shocked or even merely surprised that an athlete's personal life isn't going like we think it should. They live in a completely different world than 95% of regular society, and as such, they're going to act and talk differently than we do. It's just the way it is.

Maybe John Dvorak over at Fox News was on to something with his article yesterday that talked about how the Internet was basically making us all dumber by the minute. While I don't agree with everything in the article, the following section was apropo with regard to this whole Kobe mess:

These people eat up information from the Internet and they believe everything they read. They pass along gossip as fact. They fall for every hoax under the sun (especially the very old ones).

You wonder when some Nigerian e-mail scammer is going to fleece them. I have no idea what is going to happen when it dawns on this crowd that they are useless boneheads.

Very well said, in my opinion. As a useless bonehead, I'll be doing my best to focus my attention elsewhere from now on.

Deadspin: The Dirty Kobe Bryant Business
Fox News: Dvorak: The Internet Is Making Us Dumber

Despite Late Meltdown, Lakers Have Spurs on Brink of Elimination

The Lakers won their Game 4 matchup against the Spurs last night, 93-91, but not without quite a bit of drama. As one viewer put it, the Lakers did their best to "monkey clusterfuck" their way to a loss. Let's review the final 56.5 seconds, shall we?

--Lamar Odom hits two free throws to give the Lakers a 93-86 lead with 56.5 seconds remaining.

--The Spurs run a play for Brent Barry (a good one drawn up by Greg Popovich in the timeout) and he misses a three pointer. On the rebound, Pau Gasol is fouled by Tim Duncan with 50.8 seconds left.

--Gasol misses both free throws.

--The Spurs come down and Ginobli hits a three pointer with 42.1 seconds remaining. Score: Lakers 93, Spurs 89.

--Here's where the monkeyclusterfucking really gets going: the Lakers inbound the ball, and it ends up in Kobe Bryant's hands; instead of dribbling around the court and waiting to get fouled so that he can shoot what will surely be two money free throws, he drives the length of the court, puts up a tough shot from the right block, and misses. This occurs with around 34 seconds on the game clock and 16 seconds left on the shot clock.

--The Spurs quickly push the ball back upcourt, and Lamar Odom's block of Tony Parker's layup is ruled goaltending. Score: Lakers 93, Spurs 91. 28.1 seconds left.

--After a timeout, the Lakers put the ball in Kobe's hands to run down the clock. He is double-teamed and throws to Fisher, who launches an airball that mercifully goes out of bounds off of Robert Horry's leg with 5.6 seconds remaining in the game and only 2 seconds on the shot clock. (Ed. note: Fisher's shot DID hit the rim, but the refs and/or the shot clock operator missed it.)

--After a timeout, the Kobe shoots a fallaway jumper with two hands in his face and misses. Tim Duncan rebounds and the Spurs call timeout with 2.1 seconds left.

--Popovich draws up a play for....you guessed it, Brent Barry! He tries a pump fake that gets Fisher about two inches off of the ground and then flings a shot from about 28 feet that misses. The game ends as Barry pleads for a foul call on Fisher.

That, ladies and gents, is how you go about completely pissing away a game you have completely wrapped up. You don't drive the length of the floor trying to be Superman when all you have to do is get fouled and make your free throws (that goes for you, too, Pau).

And as far as the final "no call" on Fisher when Barry had the ball, both Barry and Popovich said afterwards that it wasn't a foul, which is code for "You're damn right it was a foul! He fouled the everliving dog mess out of him!"

Ultimately, though, the Lakers are now up 3-1 and have a chance to close the series out Thursday night in L.A. BTW, as soon as I have a YouTube video of Tim Duncan's egregious four-step dunk from the first half last night, I'll post it.

Kobe Again Tries New Strategy; Again, Lakers Win

Kobe Bryant and the Los Angeles Lakers erased a 20-point third quarter deficit and came back to beat the San Antonio Spurs last night, 89-85, in the first game of the Western Conference finals. Unlike last week when Kobe decided not to shoot in the fourth quarter of a game against the Jazz, Bryant this time decided not to shoot for essentially the entire first half (he scored a whopping 2 points on three shots). Kobe, however, was calm, cool & collected after the win:

Bryant insisted he was "Just managing the game."

"Defensively is where we slipped. I've had games or halves when I've done that and we had a 15-point lead."

Sounding a little sensitive to how he'll be criticized equally for shooting too much or too little, he said if the Lakers hadn't played better defense to accompany his late scoring burst, "Everybody would be talking about I shot us out of the game. Defense is where it gets down."

Either way, Kobe's Houdini impression in the first half was just plain weird to this Lakers fan. Maybe he has become the penultimate poker player, the NBA's version of a Doyle Brunson, sitting back and determining the suckers at the table (Bruce Bowen, et al), and then unleashing a barrage of offense that he knows they cannot handle.

Of course, the Spurs did sit on the tarmac in New Orleans for something like seven hours after their win over the Hornets on Monday night, so they might have been a tad bit tired and cranky. One would think that a 20 point cushion with a quarter-and-a-half of basketball left would've been enough to insure the win. As Kobe Bryant showed, however, there may be no lead that's safe when he's on the court.

Daily Dime: Lakers Rally Past Spurs

Kobe Employs New Strategy; Lakers Win

The Los Angeles Lakers last night defeated the Utah Jazz 111-104 to take a 3-2 series lead in the Western Conference semifinals. That in and of itself isn't that newsworthy; most everyone expected L.A. to win. It was how they won that was unique: Kobe Bryant was a whopping 6-of-10 from the field and 13-of-17 on free throws (for 26 points). That's right: Kobe shot almost twice as many free throws as he had field goal attempts. Of course, Kobe was playing with a balky back and that certainly limited him offensively (and defensively, as the guy he was guarding, Ronnie Brewer, scored the Jazz's first eight points).

Even more shocking? The fact that Kobe didn't attempt a field goal at all in the fourth quarter. None. Nada. Zilch. Bumpkis. Instead, the Lakers' resident roster of David Copperfields magically appeared and contributed. Lamar Odom went for 22 points and 11 rebounds; Pau Gasol scored 21 points and had 6 rebounds and 8 assists; and Vladimir Radmanovich and Derek Fisher combined for 29 points. For those of you keeping score at home, that's all five starters in double figures, and when the Lakers have all five of their starters score in double figures, they rarely lose (17-1 in the regular season).

Oh, and Boston won too. Let's see...LeBron started off strong...then LeBron cooled off. Yep, that's how it went. Cleveland was up 14 at half and lost by 7 as James was a cool 4-of-11 in the second half.

Lassen: This time, Kobe didn't need to be spectacular
Lakers Keep Home Fires Burning