Sports in Hell (21 page)

“People talk about the seventies and the cookie-cutter ballparks,” says Todd Belzag, a statistician with Elias Sports, “and they go, ‘What the hell were we thinking?' Well, I think we'll look back twenty years from now and go, ‘What the hell were we thinking? Why were we putting this hill in centerfield?' I mean, in Fenway, they couldn't afford the street behind so they put the wall up in left. But don't tell me they can't afford it now.” Exactly. In other words: Don't piss in my ear and call it rain.

I think we'll look back twenty years from now and go, “Can you believe, at one time, baseball was more popular than pro bass fishing?”

Me, I'll take football. The best player in football history was Jim Brown, a granite pillar of a man. The best player in baseball history was Babe Ruth, a Jell-O parfait of a man. The best arm in football was John Elway's. The best arm in baseball was John Elway's.

Football has cheerleaders. Baseball has batboys. Football has Tom Brady. Baseball has Don Zimmer. In uniform, no less. Football has Commissioner Roger Goodell, handsome, rugged, and sturdy. Baseball has Commissioner Bud Selig, who looks like a flu-ridden CPA who won some kind of contest to get on the field.

In football, an upset means something. The worst team beats the best team maybe once in twenty-five tries. In baseball, the worst team beats the best team two out of five. What's to celebrate? Fans get so excited in football they tear down the goalposts. Fans get so excited in baseball they sometimes look up from their BlackBerrys.

If you're at a football game, there are eleven different matchups you can watch on every play. Set your binoculars on the wide receiver trying to juke the cornerback or the center trying to bull the noseguard. In baseball, try setting your binoculars on anybody other than the pitcher or the batter.

Football players come off the practice field looking as if somebody had used their helmets to boil lobsters. Baseball is so taxing that sometimes guys can get in only 18 holes before a game.

So let's call baseball what it is—a nap aid. And the next time somebody tries to make you feel guilty about hating baseball, remind him what ESPN college football commentator Beano Cook said when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn announced that the freed U.S hostages from Iran would all receive free lifetime baseball passes:

“Haven't they suffered enough?”

W
hen I got into journalism, I dreamed of winning Pulitzer Prizes, sending off breathless dispatches to a waiting nation, and meeting scar-faced sources who carried Glocks in their trench coats.

Never once did I think I would spend much of my time interviewing hairy, naked men. In over thirty-two years in this business, I have unwillingly conversed with more naked men than Jenna Jameson and the National Association of Proctologists, combined.

As a boy, I did not anticipate interviewing Yankee slugger Jason Giambi as he mindlessly cupped, adjusted, and recupped the only piece of clothing he often wore in the clubhouse, his lucky gold lamé thong.

I did not know that I'd one day spin out of my kneeling position
at one New York Jets' locker and turn straight into Kimo Von Oelhoffen's ass.

I did not know I'd be riding along in a van, laptop open, interviewing golfer John Daly, only to look up and see him holding his—
quel est le mot juste?
—Big Bertha in his hand, laughing hysterically, displaying it like a Hebrew National kielbasa on
The Price Is Right
, and cackling, “This is why they call me Long John Daly!”

(And, if I may opine, rightly so.)

Sometimes it was worse than just naked. I'll never forget when I was twenty-five, having to interview legendary Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight over breakfast at the Denver Tech Center Marriott. Except Knight didn't show up for breakfast. After waiting a half hour in the coffee shop, I managed to con a bellhop out of his room number, went there, and was greeted by a sliver of Knight, three-quarters asleep, through the four-inch gap he'd opened. “Coach Knight?” I stammered. “We were supposed to do an interview at eight?”

Grumble, hiss, grumble
.

Finally, the door opened. I was greeted by the great man's bare ass as he turned into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Make it fast,” he growled.

Apparently, I was to interview him in the shower.

I did.

It got worse. After the too-revealing shower interview, the toweling off interview, and the brushing of teeth interview, Knight shoved the bathroom door in my face so that he could take his morning constitutional. He left the door open a few inches and said, “What else you got?” Apparently, I was about to do a Man on the Seat interview.

“Uh, well,” I stammered into that awful cavern. “Do you, uh, do you ever see yourself coaching in the NBA?”

And as he proceeded with his morning duty, he said: “No, I don't think so. See, I'm a guy who enjoys working with the younnnnnnngggggerrrrr type player, who—mmmggghh—still wants to learn somethinnnnnng about the game.”

Therapy has not eased the pain.

I have done so much of this type of reporting, I have formulated my Four Rules for Speaking to a Naked Man:

1. Don't acknowledge it. If you acknowledge it or mention it in any way, you're gay. If
they
mention it, it's funny, and you're still gay.

During his unforgettable play-off run in 2004, Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz hit yet another crucial home run to win a monstrously huge game. There must've been a hundred of us waiting at his locker afterward. The hulking Ortiz came out of the shower and began wading through the sea of humanity, wearing only a towel and a scowl. Suddenly, he stopped, spun around, looked down on this tiny, middle-aged, bald radio guy, leaned over him menacingly, and growled, “Did you just look at my NIPPLES?!?”

The little guy was frozen with fear. He gulped for air and finally squeaked, “No.”

Ortiz suddenly broke into a huge grin, slapped the little man on the back, and said, “Why not?”

2. Always write on a legal pad. The pad is your friend. It serves as a barrier between you and “it.” “It” moves, the pad moves. Under no circumstances do you want to see “it,” even out of curiosity, even accidentally. Things get destroyed, like your self-esteem. Most of these guys have units that could serve as LAPD battering rams.

3. Be alert. Just because they're nude doesn't mean they're neutered. I once interviewed Pete Rose across a shower curtain in the Cincinnati Reds manager's office in 1985, as he chased Ty Cobb's hit record. I was asking him, as he lathered, how much he lost at the horse track that year. There was a pause in the steamy room. Then he suddenly began yelling, “You can't crucify Pete Rose!” And then he threw his shampoo bottle at me. This is why the built-in shampoo
wall dispensers of today are such wonderful inventions, in my opinion.

4. It's your job. Get over it. You want an interview, you've got to be OK with talking to guys with taco bits stuck in their junk. This is how they are. They're used to constant nudity, like nurses or masseuses or White House interns.

    Some guys refuse to be interviewed naked, such as Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan—who wouldn't even come to his locker until his tie was knotted—and former running back Eddie George. “I never felt like it was appropriate,” George says. “Now, maybe if I was endowed like some guys I've seen, I'd come out stark naked, put my knee up on a table, face the crowd, and go, ‘OK, who's first?'”

Other guys seem to relish it, like Johnny Damon of the New York Yankees. I'm still not sure I've ever seen Damon clothed in a clubhouse. The man is naked more often than the David.

You might think, “What a great job for a female reporter!” but you would be wrong. It's without doubt the hardest part of the job for women sportswriters. Most pro athletes are just slightly right of Charlton Heston and believe women have no right to be in a locker room at all. The rest just act like the cast of
Porky's 6
.

One of my friends was one of the first female American sportswriters—Betty Cuniberti of the
Washington Post
. One night early on, she was covering the Yankees and reportedly entered the clubhouse to find one of the team's stars, buck naked, swinging his schlong like a lariat and cackling, “Hey, Betty, know what this is?”

To which Betty—wonderful, unflappable Betty—answered, “Well, if it were bigger, I'd say it was a penis.”

Former Washington Redskins lineman Dave Butz once told then–
Washington Post
writer Christine Brennan that if reporters were going to interview him while he was naked, then they should be naked, too, including her. Tit for tat, as it were. He probably had a point, but that policy could get awkward.

But that got me to thinking, What if everybody in a sport WERE naked? The whole time—before, during, and after? The competitors, the refs, the hot dog vendors, Bud Selig, everybody? After all, the world's first organized sporting competition—the Greek Olympics—were conducted in the nude. What happened to that? Why couldn't there be an all-nude sports?

I was about to find out why not.

There are thousands of all-nude competitions all over the world, but most of them are “naturist” colonies, which seemed to violate our vague and very self-serving rules of the quest, one of which was that anybody could try to qualify for it. Besides, I once did a column on a nudist colony just north of Tampa and I have seen naked tennis. It is not pretty. While serving, there's no place to stick the second ball. And you are constantly hoping the winner doesn't jump the net to shake hands.

TLC found a man called The Ancient Brit, who had made it his life's goal to climb all the Scottish peaks over three thousand feet, nude. I figure the low altitude is to ensure against frostbite. He's also led nude kayaking trips and camping adventures. He offered to lead us on any sort of nature trek, sport, or climb, complete with any pictures we wanted, as long as we were both nude. “Really,” he wrote, “I've got no problems with you taking pictures of me naked. No problem at all.” And he attached about fifty pictures of himself, which, when we opened them, made us gasp.

The man was hung like a Clydesdale. Honestly, it was a baby arm. Just thinking about it now gives me a facial tic.

That's about when TLC discovered what was billed as World Naked Bike Race Day. Actually, it was two days—March 8 for the Southern Hemisphere and July 14 for the Northern Hemisphere. The idea is to stage an all-nude bike race through some of the world's largest cities to find out who …well, to make a statement about … uh, to prove … what, exactly?

“It's a symbol of how naked bicyclists are in the big city when drivers refuse to share the road,” said a poster to the website (
www.worldnakedbikeride.org
). “We're naked and helpless and invisible. But not on this day.”

OK, so it's not exactly a Vietnam protest. But it's something, right? Besides, I'm a bicyclist. When it's nice out, I like to do my errands around town on my bike. Nobody's ever knocked me off my bike or forced me into a ditch, but they've come very close.

I went to the website's FAQ page.

Can I get hurt riding naked on a bike?

Only if you don't wear any sunscreen
.

But what about, you know, hurting Coach Johnson?

No, it won't! No hurting or damage will occur if you ride your bike in the normal manner. It will feel just like riding with clothes, but cooler
.

But what about hygiene?

Some people fear that they will catch something from the seat or make the seat dirty just by sitting on it naked. Unless you (or your seat) have particularly terrible hygiene already, there won't be a problem …

Reassured about my down under from Down Under, we set off.

We were to meet on the midsummer's day of March 8, 2008, at Archibald Fountain in Hyde Park, downtown Sydney, at noon. Not sure how I felt about hearing “bald” and “hide” in regard to my first nude bike race, but there it was.

First thing I did was rent a bike, but when I said to the rental clerk, “So a lot of people renting for the big nude race tomorrow?” he looked at me like bats were flying out of my nostrils.

“Sorry, mate?” he said.

“World Naked Bike Race,” I said. “Tomorrow.”