I'm Gonna Beat This "Deserves" Routine Into The GroundI'm cheering for the Detroit Pistons to beat the Boston Celtics: Flip Saunders deserves a championship. So does Rasheed Wallace, who already has one but deserves another just for his great facial expressions.
In related basketball stuff - on the Strib's opinion page today an annoying and pretentious Celtics/Garnett fan compared Kevin Garnett to Philip Roth and Mark Twain:
I used to read his remarks in the Star Tribune as happily as I read Mark Twain or Philip Roth: for the brilliance, the subtle self-knowledge and, yes, the humor.
Humor? Repeatedly? I admit the number of the Strib's Timberwolves stories I have read probably exactly matches how many playoff games they played in 2004, but no way was Garnett consistently humorous.
Sure, pro athletes can sometimes come up with a great line - I'm thinking of Patrick Roy's comment about Jeremy Roenick's mouthing off (couldn't hear him because he had two Stanley Cup rings plugging his ears.) I also remember the Broncos beating the Purple in Metrodome in the mid-nineties on a last second play. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I believe a John Elway pass bounced off of somebody's helmet and Ed McCaffrey hauled it in the end zone for the winning TD. After the game, McCaffrey deadpanned that the play had been planned all along. (Randy, chime in if you remember this play. You called me right after the game laughing about McCaffrey's interview.)
But for the most part, pro atheletes generally just spit out the same old platitudes about "giving 110 percent" and "individual accomplishments don't matter to me." When they try to be funny ... well, you know what "locker room humor" is, right? The truth is that there have only been two genuinely funny - funny enough to be mentioned in the same sentence as Mark Twain - professional atheletes in my lifetime: Muhammad Ali and Charles Barkley.