Where Have You Gone, Lil’ Penny?
So I came up with this great idea for a column. Why not write about the way two of the greatest athletes of their respective sports are carving out their Hall of Fame plaques right before our eyes? Good idea, huh?But in between the time the idea hit me — while desperately trying to avoid talking to certain neighbors at the Memorial Day picnic — and the time you’re reading this, my subjects suddenly became sports columnists’ darlings. Dwyane Wade decided to sprint toward the NBA mountaintop, and Albert Pujols decided to keep launching baseballs up and over the monstrous peak of Barry Bonds’ head, a strained oblique notwithstanding.
Now, Wade is drawing the requisite comparisons to Jordan and Magic (Google News rounded up more than a thousand articles that mentioned both Wade and MJ in just the last week), and Pujols is being hailed as baseball’s 21st-century Cal Ripken, a controversy-free savior of the game.
Here’s the thing, though — outside of us sports freaks and their hometown fans, nobody would bat an eye if Flash and Poo Hole (how’s that for the world’s worst nickname?) walked right into their local Starbucks. In snapshot, at least, these two cats are as good as it gets in 2006 pro sports, but both of them I feel still fail the Girlfriend Test–you know, does your girlfriend know who these two are? (And if you’re a female reading this, and you know who Pujols and Wade are, where the hell were you when I was on the market?) And until we get a Lil’ Dwyane Action Figure or a Pujols-as-Grandmamma campaign, they’re going to remain the province of ESPN alone.
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In the wake of Kobe’s Vail Adventure and Barry Bonds’ Clear-and-Cream Follies, advertisers don’t much want to hitch their wagon to some athlete who’s popular today and running a busload of nuns off a mountain highway tomorrow. |
Wade and Pujols’ bounce-along-the-bottom Q-rating is symptomatic of a larger cultural pendulum swing away from athletes in recent years.With Michael Jordan long gone and Tiger Woods having taken on the status of death and taxes — always there, like it or not — we’re not seeing as many athletes ascend to the pop-culture heights that Montana, Gretzky, Magic et. al. once held.Let’s start by looking at the current celebrity roster. Shaquille O’Neal has seemed so un-Shaq-Daddy-like ever since he left L.A. that you wonder if Phil Jackson has the center’s soul imprisoned in a snow globe somewhere in Brentwood. |
Donovan McNabb hasn’t been the same since he ah-leg-ed-ly puked up Chunky Soup in last year’s Super Bowl. Sure, injuries play in with both guys. Bu there’s Derek Jeter and the rest of the Yankees coasting on momentum alone since October 2004, and the Red Sox burned right through their goodwill like they were Phish fans in the parking lot with the concert starting.
And the new crop of athletes isn’t exactly brimming with charisma. Michael Vick’s like that old comic book hero Quicksilver, so bored with the snail-like pace of normal humanity that he can’t even fake interest even when he’s getting paid to shill product. Steve Nash has only gotten a personality graft recently; he sounds so much like Napoleon Dynamite that I’m sure he’s saying “flippin’ sweet!” every time he nails a trey. And Dirk Nowitzki looks like he ought to be an evil mastermind in “24,” plus he’s got that Eurotrash-whine side of his personality that brings out the xenophobe in all of us. And now he admits to likeing David Hasselhoff. (Though so do we, right?)
Plus, in the wake of Kobe’s Vail Adventure and Barry Bonds’ Clear-and-Cream Follies, advertisers don’t much want to hitch their wagon to some athlete who’s popular today and running a busload of nuns off a mountain highway tomorrow. And after we all got so burned by McGwire and Sosa — after our heroes of 1998 suddenly misplaced fifty pounds of muscle and the ability to speak English, respectively — we’re a little less likely to bestow open-mouth kisses on the new colossuses of sport. (Except Danica Patrick. Though I bet you’d taste motor oil.)
For advertisers, there’s also the problem of having your god flame out before he ever gets within sniffing distance of the Promised Land. Lest we forget, both Pujols and Wade have only earned the “I-M-M” in “immortal.” Ask Penny Hardaway about the dangers of being deemed a legend too soon. Better yet, ask Harold Miner, ex-Heat guard and current-I dunno, car salesman? Back during his day in the ’90s, in one of those ultra-”real” black-and-white commercials, he presciently proclaimed, “I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan. I want to be the first Harold Miner.” (He succeeded…in every sense.)
To some degree, this really shouldn’t matter. The last thing the world needs is another Space Jam or Kazaam. And if my life were an ’80s movie and my family’s safety depended on a player driving the hole, drawing a foul, and converting the and-one, I’m picking Dwyane Wade. Similarly, if German terrorists were holding my family hostage and said I needed one upper-deck homer, I’m gonna send Pujols after those Nowitzki-looking bastards.
But while interest in sports has never been higher, the respect for the athletes themselves has never been lower-thanks both to an omnipresent, voracious media (sorry) and the athletes’ own offenses, as documented above. It’s high time Wade, Pujols, Vick, LeBron and the rest take their game off the court. I want to see ‘em hawking burgers, doing cameos in summer blockbusters, hosting Saturday Night Live. I want them to give the girlfriends of the world a point of recognition so they’ll stop demanding we change the channel to a Lifetime movie. I want their games to be more than games … I want them to be events.
So, Dwyane and Albert…think you’re up to saving sports in the 2010s and beyond?
Tags: Albert Pujols, Dirk Nowitzki, Dwyane Wade, Michael Vick, Steve Nash
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