On The State of Professional Sport in America

Well, well, where do I start? You know, I used to think people who hated professional sports, and sports in general, had a good point with all their well-known claims about too much money, too big of ego, etc. but were secretly just jealous. Jealous of how into it sports fans get, and how much fiscal reward the athletes and their handlers get. But, after witnessing an entire summer of non-on-the-field sports news news, even I must concede these fuckheads are way, way out of control and the world would probably be better off if the entire NFL and NBA were chucked into the deep blue sea never to be seen again.

The King of Fuckheads, by a slim margin, has somehow turned out to be NBA star LeBron James, who actually encourages people to call him King, even though he's as yet never even won a single title, and serfdom has been outlawed for several centuries anyway. He also has a back tattoo on his back that says CHOSEN 1 (why not spell out ONE instead of the crammed in numeral, I ask? So CHOSEN could be bigger? Even that's a classy decision!). Not only did LeBron call a 1 hour TV special to announce who he'd liked to be hired by, if they wanted him to play a child's sport for them and make really good slam dunks, he called it knowing he was going to stab his hometown in the back on national TV and select a team that just happens to be in a state with no personal income tax. All of this has been raked over and over by the media and fans alike, but I am still stupefied that the level of personal branding has escalated so greatly in the past few years that WE NOW HAVING MEGA ATHLETES CALLING ALL THE SHOTS. If this is the highest evolution of professional sports, someone please shoot me in the head.

That of course brings me to Brett Favre, who again this off-season waffled on retiring, to the point the Vikings decided on Monday to fly three other veteran players (all white guys, BTW) to his home in Mississippi on a private Vikings jet to basically beg him to get his football and come back to MN to play some football. I don't know who looks worse here, the wussy Vikings or the insane QB who chose to drag his bullshit out far past the point of reason. And who is even worse? Everyone of us poor schmucks who watched this drama unfold and clicked on every link following every micro-news tidbit.

Jesus, sports. I wish I could quit you!

(By the way, the gold Desert Eagle handgun pictured above is quite similar to the gun NBA star Gilbert Arenas pulled on his teammates in the Washington Wizards' locker room to help settle a point on a gambling debt this past season)