People in Sports Revered in Death or Retirement Wo Were Jerks

Just wanted to put John McEnroe in here. Oh, wait, he's never been revered.

 

I'm not a Mets fan, but perhaps my all time favorite press conference is when McEnroe goes to town on the reporter who the day before scored a hit instead of an error, ruining a Mets' pitcher's no hitter. That was hilarious.

 

Like most of us sports nerds growing up in the 1980s, young BYM2 was a baseball card collecting freak. One Saturday afternoon in 1987 my mom took me to a baseball card show at some hotel banquet room in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. The main draw of the event was that Pirates second-year outfielder Barry Bonds would be signing autographs. I remember we arrived later in the morning because my mom had to run into work. Good news is there wasn't much of a line for Bonds when we arrived -- of course, Bonds wasn't "Barry Bonds" yet either, having hit .233 in his rookie season the year before. Once it was our turn in line my mom, who knows dick about baseball, did something I've never let her live down. Attempting to interject something into situation, she looks at Bonds and says, "I know you! You're a pitcher!" I turned white, then red. To Bonds' credit, he laughed it off and said, "No. No, ma'am I'm not." Meanwhile, she pressed on, adamant she saw him pitch. He kept laughing, not in an insulting way but in a, "Ha. This is kinda' awkward" way.

I have unlimited of stories of Bonds being a total dick - and five years later he probably would have been just that - but at that moment he handled that about as well as you could.

 

My childhood babysitter played with Hamm on the Washington Freedom for a year or two and got married a couple of years after that. She invited Mia and Nomar to the wedding and I understand they actually came. Don't know if that means she's not an asshole, but she didn't big-time her lesser teammates.

 

From the world of track, a guy I trust completely has worked with Michael Johnson and Carl Lewis. He said Johnson was a total jackass, and that Lewis was one of the classiest, nicest guys he's ever worked with. And my buddy has been in the business for years and worked with a lot of really big names.

 

Hamm has always struck me as being very shy. You do wonder how many "jerks" are really just shy people who never felt comfortable being a celebrity.

 

Nomar seems much the same way, except he didn't mind showing up on SNL a couple times, so I lean strongly towards "just a jerk" with him. Of course, he's been all sunshine since he retired as he sucked his way up into multiple media gigs.

 

Be careful about meeting your heroes.

 

I think that is often true of athletes who didn't grow up speaking English. Even when they get to the point that they are fluent in it, they aren't completely comfortable and they can come off as standoffish.

It also depends on the situation. My mother handled travel arrangements for a star athlete's charity golf tournament for over a decade. She really didn't know much about sports, so she was always asking me who these guys were that she had just planned their trips. "Who is Marcus Allen? He's so nice. Who's Chris Chelios? He's awful. He just wastes everybody's time and cancels at the last minute every year!"

 

Based on covering him, I'd disagree. Nomar was uncomfortable not just with the spotlight, which he was even as a minor leaguer, but with social interaction in general On a road trip shortly before he was traded to the Cubs, he didn't speak in the clubhouse for seven days. Not just to the media, to anybody including his teammates. That's not being an asshole, that's something else entirely. PS: The only warm conversation we ever had was on the afternoon he discovered I liked soccer.