The Definitive Psrhea Top Ten
by David Kennedy

The Top Sixteen Things I Hated About Sports In 2000

For those of you who don't know, I am the producer and host of a public access sports radio talk show in Sacramento called The Sport Authority. At the end of every calender year I and my co-hosts put together our own lists of the worst things about sports during the year just ending. What follows is an amalgamation of the lists created by the four co-hosts. Unlike previous lists in this feature, this list contains sixteen entries rather than the usual ten. This is because (1) all four of us could reach a consensus on these sixteen things, and (2) unlike most sports years we were witness to an unusually large number of things to hate in 2000. This article will be written in ascending order, a departure from past lists here, because we want to express just how much more each succeeding entry pisses us off more than the preceding one.

16) I know by now I shouldn't be listing this here, but watching Shaquille O'Neal make his annual waste of the free-throw line is not just painful to watch, it is bewildering as hell. Sure, even with his epic ineptitude at shooting free throws they still managed to finally win both an NBA championship and a Player of the Year Award. And I'm happy for him - really. But does he really believe that the Lakers can maintain a 67-win level every season if he is shooting less than 40% from the free throw line. Think about it, he is getting hacked unmercifully under the basket by the opposition teams bench-enders for a reason: they would rather Shaq go to the line and fail miserably than give up two easy points in the paint. And considering he goes to the line anywhere between 9-12 times per game, and missing as many as eight times per game - that is a margin of victory right there. What's even more ludicrous is that after seven plus years in the league Shaq still hasn't put 2+2 together and figured out why he is getting so obviously fouled. Get a clue Shaq: Learn how to shoot free throws on a consistent basis and the hacking will stop.

15) Proof Positive That Men Are Still Neanderthals #1: Anna Kournikova is the most popular female athlete in the world, and the third most popular of any gender behind Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Why? Well, if we cavemen ever take the time to really look, we'd discover that it isn't because she is a very good athlete. No, for some reason we cavemen are so enamored of "Anna's stunning beauty" that her mere appearance at any tennis tournament guarantees we'll watch. Never mind that she has never - that's right, never - won anything. Which begs the question: just how is it that a player who has never won a single tournament in her natural Russian life warrants a #11 ranking worldwide, while Venus Williams, who destroyed everybody in her path from May until the end of the calender year, only gets as high as #3? Says volumes about the point system the WTA uses, which is saved from being the most outrageous ranking system there is by both the Winston Cup and the BCS. Hell, Anna is ranked well ahead of her countryman Elena Dementieva, who is clearly the better tennis player. But I digress. What's more, considering that Anna gets embarrassed by some qualifier in virtually every major tournament, you have to wonder just how it is that she got to be so self-absorbed by her "beauty". I mean, don't get me wrong, she's cute - and I sure as hell wouldn't kick her out of bed - but anybody who publicly calls Elizabeth Hurley ugly either is so conceited she's convinced or has some serious self-esteem issues. Besides, if we Cro-Magnon men would just take some time to really think with our mojos, we'd notice that Venus really has a much better body.

14) Going into 2001 I'm trying to figure out just what exactly it is I ever liked about Mike Tyson. The only thing that keeps him from being the worst bully in sports is that Bobby Knight is still alive. Unlike most people, I don't believe that he is the embodiment of everything that is bad and wrong with sports, but his existence says volumes about the "sport" of boxing, which I hold in less regard than I do pro rasslin' (at least The Rock admits what he is). Stating in a post-fight interview that he wanted to kill Lennox Lewis and eat his children was unsettling enough. Telling the media at a press conference months later that he cares nothing about them, would kill them if he could, and was not responsible for his actions now that he wasn't taking his medication was downright scary. It would have been appropriate to claim these comments were just hyperbole on Mike's part, but his actions in the ring in 2000 suggested that he was psychotic as he made himself out to be. First he hit Orrin Norris with a sucker punch after the bell sounded. Then he shoved a referee to the ground after knocking out Lou Saverece. It's difficult to decide which is worse, Tyson's animal behavior anywhere and everywhere, or the public and underwriters who enable Tyson by paying him to act like an animal?

13) Well, Okay, Bobby Knight is still alive, but he is at least finally unemployed and thus is no longer influencing young people. I finally figured out why it is that the student body at IU and the state as a whole were so up in arms and ready for a revolution when Knight was fired. They knew he was a boorish bully, but he was their bully, and his existence, while repulsive and repugnant to outsiders, gave them an identity and a staunch manly presence they didn't have otherwise. Knight's hold on the state of Indiana was as absolute and supreme as Stalin's was on the former Soviet Union. And like little lost children suddenly without their father, Indiana now has to search for an identity of its own.

12) Quality television is harder and harder to come by. With the proliferation of "reality TV" and "voyeur TV" - which not only insults our intelligence but treats us as if we can't think with anything but our hormones and libidos - trying to find a television show that treats its viewers as if they really have half a brain is hard to find. Aaron Sorkin is one television writer and producer who seems to have respect for the viewing public. Which is why the hit show "The West Wing" is the best program on television. What went virtually unnoticed for two years, however, is that Sorkin had another television program that was just as good: Sports Night. This show about a fictitious nightly sports news program - a la SportsCenter - its crew and their behind-the-scenes antics, had clever dialogue, smart humor, and a wry wit seldom seen in any form of entertainment, let alone television. Unfortunately, despite two seasons of trying, it could never garner a following, and was unceremoniously dumped. That ABC never really gave this show a chance - as evidenced by how it was perpetually taken on and off hiatus and moved around like a chess pawn -- was bad enough. But what was really upsetting is that the show clearly was too intelligent for your average "Who Wants To Marry A Multi-Millionaire" or "Survivor" viewer, who would rather have the wrong head appealed to. In essence, it made the mistake of assuming that television viewers actually had brains.

11) As a fan of the San Francisco 49ers, I have never liked the Rams, either in Los Angeles or St. Louis. But you had to respect the way coach Dick Vermeil and management put together such an awesome offense in a short period of time -- all credit in the world to them. But what sticks in my craw is that gold-digging stripper bitch, owner Georgia Frontiere, now has a world championship. Cleary she doesn't know anything about running a professional football franchise (she got the team because at the time she was a stripper who caught the eye of then owner Carroll Rosembloom, married him, inherited the team when he died, then spent the next 20+ years running the team into the ground). So my only guess is that some new sugar-daddy is rocking her world so much that her attention has been diverted away from her franchise long enough for Vermeil, John Shaw, and other real football people to run the organization. Then when they win the Super Bowl she shows up to claim the trophy like she actually had something to do with it. Yep, that would be me guess.

10) This having been an Olympic year there had to be something about the grandest sports spectacle of 2000 that was thoroughly detestable. And it didn't take long for the entire Romanian weightlifting team, seventeen Chinese athletes, American discuss thrower C.J. Hunter, and four would-be gold medallists - including sixteen-year-old Romanian gymnast Andreea Raducan - to prove me right. A staggering 41 athletes were all either expelled from the games or stripped of their medals because of performance enhancing drugs. It's not that there were athletes taking drugs that surprised me; it was the sheer numbers. Lets not kid ourselves: Unlike past Olympics drugs and the specter of drugs were prevalent throughout this one. Even when there were none found it was hinted at: muscular and manly-looking Dutch swimmer Inge de Bruin couldn't get away from them (I personally believe that fellow athletes know who are doing drugs, so when American Amy Van Dyken not-so-subtly hinted that de Bruin was juiced even though there was no concrete proof, I tend to give a certain degree of credibility to her claims). But what made this more of a black eye for the Olympics is how uneven-handed they handled it. The IOC accused USA Track & Field of not reporting as many as 15 failed athletes - an accusation which along with van Dyken's may have a degree of credibility. Why would USAT&F keep quiet? Fifteen failed drug tests is a staggering number, which means some very high-profile athletes would have been embarrassing to the United States. Need proof? Hunter was never suspended or banned even though he failed four separate tests during the summer; he just "gracefully bowed-out" with a knee injury. What's really sad was Raducan, who, at sixteen and from what was once in the not-too-distant past an authoritarian eastern European country, did what she was told to do by her coaches and superiors with no questions asked. So she unknowingly took a cold remedy laced with a banned substance given to her by her trainer. Then when she wins the gold and has to submit to a drug test, she's just as surprised and shocked as anybody, but as a child she is supposed to know what she is taking. Raducan is a prime reason why there should be age minimums in the Olympics. You can hold adults responsible for their actions, but children do what they are told and should not be held to the same standard.

9) I can think of two-hundred-fifty-two million reasons to hate the Texas Rangers. I can think of one-hundred-sixty million reasons to hate the Boston Red Sox. I can even think of one-hundred-twenty-one million reason to hate the Colorado Rockies. That's how much each of those teams shelled out for the services of Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and Mike Hampton, respectively. In each case, it doesn't even matter how they perform - it wasn't money well spent. Each team can claim all they want that they did it for something as virtuous as winning pennants -Texas and Colorado aren't even close. No, they did it for the purely selfish reason that it adds value to their already over-inflated assets. Then to add insult to injury, the players, agents and owners who signed them had the unmitigated gall to say - with a straight face - that this doesn't affect the economics of other teams and the game as a whole. Yeah, right, like the current MVP winners, Jason Giambi and Jeff Kent, both of whom got their teams to the playoffs, won't want that kind of money. Then what's really surreal is that all parties concerned know beyond a shadow of a doubt that these three players and their "fair" contracts are going to be held up as poster boys when the current collective bargaining agreement expires in October. But, hey, everybody's happy all around, right?

8) Gonna Go Out Like A Bitch: Roger Clemens, who for some reason seems to have a problem with Mike Piazza. In a mid-season inter-league game Clemens throws a fastball at Piazza's head - in a game Clemens is winning. Clemens' claims that he lost control of the pitch fall on deaf ears because he is known for throwing as hard as he does with pinpoint control - this is no Randy Johnson. This incident would have died down had not what followed three months later in the World Series: Clemens hurls a broken chunk of Piazza's bat back at the Mets catcher as he is jogging down the first base line. This time Clemens claims it was the intensity of the moment. Sorry, Rog, but even a blind deaf mute knows when your sizable surliness kicks in. Hell, even your own teammates don't like to be around you when you act like an ass. I like intensity and heart in a player as much as the next guy, and even I'm smart enough to know that every winning team has at most one person who is a bad disposition. But Rog ain't it; he's just plain cantankerous and sullen. If it had happened just the one time I would have called it mere happenstance, but that it happened twice is no coincidence. And what's even more appalling is that as good as Clemens is he doesn't need to be this way. There is a fine line between a bad disposition - which is good for a team when channeled and controlled - and a bad attitude. Clemens crossed that line. For that he gets the Bitch of the Year Award.

7) Coming to a rasslin' ring near you - the XFL. As an old-school radical from the Seventies I will always applaud any effort to bring an alternative to any established mainstream institution. That said, exactly what about this new league is going to be so extreme and "alternative" to the NFL? The game itself? Well, if that is the case, then why is it that the 1800 best players in the world are not playing in it? How it is presented? Innovative ways to bring the game to both television viewers and fans is a good thing, but if that represents the prime plot as opposed to subtext that adds to the game played on the field, then it will lose fans for exactly the reason league owners Vince McMahon and Dick Ebersol say fans are ostensibly turned off by the NFL - it won't be about the game. That said, "extreme" and "alternative" are two words I have a hard time associating with Vince McMahon. This guy is the ultimate used car salesman, the epitome of a traveling salesman selling cod-liver oil as the latest medical elixir back in the old west. McMahon is so slippery and slimy he makes Don King look totally legit. Will the games be scripted? I would be shocked if they were. But in no way do I buy McMahon's efforts to wrap himself in legitimacy.

6) What is it about young thirtysomething Internet billionaires who think they know how to do anything? You think athletes have huge egos, they are modest wallflowers compared to team owners, and the really young ones who made a mint off of the internet are worse than sixteen-year-olds: won't listen to their parents, and nobody else knows anything. The latest teenage know-it-all is Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder, who obviously read from the George Steinbrenner book written in the Eighties when King George thought he knew everything and almost ran his Yankees into the ground. But even George learned to step away from the day-to-day operations of his team and figured out that there were baseball people who had been doing this for decades and knew what they were doing; now George has four world championships in five years, and currently three in a row. In typical Steinbrenner fashion, however, Snyder went out and spent over $100 million on past-prime stars (Deion Sanders, Bruce Smith) simply because they were available and he had the money to spend on them. Never mind that not only were their best days behind them, but who these players were had nothing to contribute in the context with what the Redskins were trying to do on the field. The best the highest payroll in professional sports could muster was an 8-8 record and elimination from playoff contention weeks before the season ended. Snyder's response? Fire everybody, then go out and try to hire old retreads with name recognition (Tommy Prothro?, Marty Schottenheimer?) to fix it (to their credit Prothro and Ray Rhodes had the good sense to recognize a bad situation and turn Snyder down). In the less than two years Snyder has owned the 'Skins he has replaced the front office twice. Norv Turner brought this team in with a 10-6 record in '99 and a playoff spot despite the threat of expulsion had he not made the postseason. Then Snyder and his money interfered without ever consulting either Turner or his front office people. Snyder is exhibit one that you can have all the money in the world -- $137 million payroll in this case - if you don't know what you're doing you still won't win.

5) You would think by now that with declining attendance and television ratings, runaway salaries, and an uneven playing field that ensures only the richest teams can compete - all of which has alienated fans - Major League Baseball would figure out that just because you built new retro ballparks that are smaller, hitter-friendly and put the patrons close to the players and action doesn't mean that fans will come. And these baseball-only ballparks are getting more extreme by the year. The year 2000 saw the opening of three new ballparks: PacBell Park in San Francisco, Comerica Park in Detroit - and the most absurd, most player-unfriendly ballpark to date, Enron Field in Houston. The warning track in the outfield does more than just warn an outfielder chasing a ball that the fence is coming up; it also warns him of the twelve inches of cement - that's right, CEMENT - that rings the outfield between the warning track and the fence. So playing the outfield at this place can't get much more dangerous, right? WRONG. Anybody playing center field at Enron Field had better ask for either a bonus, hazard pay or a comprehensive insurance policy, because there is a "grassy knoll" - a hilly rise - in the deepest part of center field. This would make center field unbearable enough, but the designers went a step further: A flagpole is in deep center field on that grassy knoll - IN THE FIELD OF PLAY (you can't make this shit up). Center field is so dangerous, the player the Astros spent millions of dollars to pry away from the Mets before this season to be their new leadoff hitter, Roger Cedeno, injured his leg running up the "grassy knoll" trying to chase down a deep fly ball in May and was lost for the year. Don't get me started on the "power alleys" - there are none. The team that spent the better part of three decades building around pitching and defense constructed a ballpark with the shortest left and right field porches in the majors. That's right, Shane Reynolds, Scott Elarton, Jose Lima, Chris Holt, Octavio Dotel and the rest of the pitching staff went to the mound every day knowing that the fences were right over their shoulders. Need proof that this park was a bad idea? The Astros went from three-time division champs to the worst record and the worst team ERA in the league in one season.

4) So Jerry Colangelo's little secret is out. The Arizona Diamondbacks really aren't the big-market team they made themselves out to be from their inception. Colangelo managed to ramrod a $525 million bond through the county at taxpayer expense without a vote from the populace to get Bank One Ballpark built. Then he shells out megabucks to get star players to play in Phoenix. By year two of their existence, Colangelo has bought a division winner, he's using his big-money clout to force MLB into putting him in the glamorous NL West, and he is supposedly making money hand over fist from the sweet ballpark deal he made with the county. But in 2000, when the Diamondbacks quickly fall behind San Francisco in the standings, Colangelo goes out and trades for more high-priced talent. But an unfortunate thing happens on the way to finishing 12 games behind the Giants: his team is no longer selling out The BOB. That, coupled with the fact they now have one of the highest payrolls in pro sports means that the Diamondbacks are now awash in red ink. And it turns out they have been for some time now. In 1999 Colangelo had to go the MLB and get a $10 million loan to bail him out of his financial troubles, something he managed to keep quiet. Colangelo can't keep a lid on it when he goes to get another $10 million loan from MLB in 2000. So now we know that Jerry's team is really a big fish in a small-market pond. I have a novel idea, Jerry - go to whatever division the commissioner's office says is feasible, REDUCE YOUR PAYROLL and shut the fuck up!

3) Proof Positive That Men Are Still Neanderthals #2: For a while now I had come to believe that sports fans had become more cerebral. They didn't just want to be told what happens but they want to be told why and how. Well, I guess FOX NFL Sunday buried that notion. I realize that the NFL is trying to appeal to a young fan base in order to maintain their popularity in the long run, but do they have to insult our intelligence? Jim Brown, Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long and Chris Collinsworth act like a bunch of frat boys at an all-weekend kegger. Jimmy Kimmell is a walking cliché: Cro-Magnon couch potato. And don't get me started on Gillian Barberie - sorry, but I don't like tits with my football. She's absolutely right: it is possible to give the weather and have breasts at the same time. But if Barberie was truly there for the weather instead of for eye-candy, she would do more to cover them up than "wear" (a term I use sparingly) tight-fitting miniskirts, CFM heels with nothing on her legs, form-fitting tops or tank tops, and enough make-up to go on the warpath. There are any number of beautiful women giving the weather around the country who look, act and dress professionally, and nobody can mistake them for anything but the beautiful women they are. This show has no redeeming informative value; it treats its viewers like we think with our Johnsons instead of our brains. Thank God for ESPN's NFL Countdown, a truly informative program.

2) My annual barbeque I have every Final Four Saturday notwithstanding, I'm not really big on amateur athletics. The possibility of abuse, larceny and rule-breaking is just too enormous for a concept where somebody is making money off of somebody else's free resource. College basketball is about as smelly and smarmy as it gets. Every year there are new examples of why. Here are two that happened in 2000.

Earlier in the year an eleventh-grade high school basketball player in Maryland was kicked off his school team for not maintaining the necessary grades to stay eligible. Subsequently, having stopped studying and going to class altogether, this same student flunked out of school entirely. Despite all this, this young man was offered an athletic scholarship to Syracuse University - and he had yet to even enroll in any high school for his "senior" year.

But wait! There's more! It gets worse...

Late in the year two Illinois youngsters gave a verbal commitment to Purdue University. What's so inane about this is that the two youths had yet to ever play a single high school basketball game because they are thirteen years old and hadn't even started high school yet. When asked why they committed so early, the father of the two youths said, "We just wanted to get it out of the way early."

Don't you just love the way democracy gives you the rope by which you can hang yourself?

1) Towards the end of an NHL match between the Boston Bruins and the Vancouver Canucks, Bruins defenseman Marty McSorley snuck up behind Canuck's winger Donald Brashear and whacked him in the temple with his stick. Brashear, falling backwards and hitting his head on the ice, suffered a concussion that left him bleeding and twitching on the ice. McSorley was immediately suspended for the remainder of the season (he was subsequently suspended for more than a year) and was later successfully tried on criminal charges by prosecutors in British Columbia. That McSorley used his hockey stick to seriously injure Brashear was felonious enough to warrant this ranking, and I applaud the province of British Columbia for having the fortitude to weather public opinion, take a stand and try to charge him with one. But what really bothers me is what is left unsaid here: Brashear, a black man, beat McSorley to a pulp - TWICE IN THE SAME GAME. It was McSorley who picked a fight with Brashear both times, and McSorley who got his ass beat. But this Canadian WASP just couldn't let it go, so he resorted to doing something cheap, doing something which blacks have been paranoid about whites doing for centuries: changing the rules to their advantage as they go along. That's right, RACE had a lot to do with this incident - but nobody in the NHL wants to talk about that. This league has only nine black players, two Native Americans, and one Hispanic. That's twelve players of color who have to go up against an army of white players - even their own teammates - who think of themselves as superior and their non-white counterparts as interlopers. If this wasn't the case, then why is it that the league annually has to deal with somebody having insulted somebody racially? There is a race and sensitivity problem in the NHL that needs to be addressed and dealt with - and the NHL not only isn't addressing it, they are oblivious to any problem, insisting that there is none. Racism is instinctive, and when there is an entire identifiable subculture, in this case the NHL, conducting themselves in a way that is inherently prejudicial, then it becomes institutional, because they then become oblivious to the fact that they are even acting badly. That makes this the runaway worst thing about sports in 2000.

David Kennedy -- the creator and editor of the on-line cyberzine Psrhea and the host of the radio talk show The Sport Authority on 91.5 FM The Voice in Sacramento, CA. -- has been making noises and finding the evidence of things not seen for most of his thirty-eight years. This would be less of a problem for him if he could just find someplace that sells motrin and prozac over-the-counter -- cheap!