I heard he’s a real jerk…

“In this day and age it’s not uncommon to hear about athletes being arrested, not to mention being just plain jerks. I mean between Barry Bonds, Mike Tyson, and the Cincinnati Bengals we could pretty much start a T.V. network showing only athlete arrests and angry interviews. This week we were even treated to a not-so-rare Lawrence Phillips (former 1st round draft pick) sighting as he works his way through each and every crime on the books.

However, the sports world also has its good guys. People like Kurt Warner, Albert Pujols, or Jim Kelly who are the Mother Theresa’s of their profession. These guys sign seemingly every autograph requested of them, donate half their paychecks to some worthy cause and still have time to play their sports with pride and class. So, when you hear a story or rumor about one of these guys, you tend not to believe it. You give em the benefit of the doubt. They’ve earned it.

Naturally when an acquaintance says he’s heard Emmitt Smith is a jerk, my buddy John and I were a bit skeptical. It’s not that we’ve heard anything to the contrary; we’ve just never heard anything bad about the guy. And like I said, in this day and age that’s kinda sayin a lot. “No, seriously guys, this guy I know, his dad manages a bank that gave a bunch of money to some charity event that Emmitt was doing” (notice the fact that Emmitt is at some charity event in this story? Yup, the guys a real jerk) “So when this manager asks for an autograph Emmitt doesn’t say a word. He just turns around and ignores this guy! So then, when the manager asks him again for an autograph (yeah, cause that’s gonna go well for him) and Emmitt turns around and says ‘You’re still here? Do I need to call security?’ And this guy wouldn’t lie.”

Here’s the thing… this is like 4th hand information by this point. And, even if it all went down exactly as this guy “who knows a guy” said, Emmitt still isn’t a jerk. At worst he had a bad day. Despite John and I poking holes in the story left and right, this guy wasn’t hearing any of it. In his mind Emmitt Smith was the devil’s evil twin.

The next day, John sends me a now historical text message: “Once again I got in an argument had I had no idea what I was talking about. I did some research and saw video of a blind, 10 year old girl who ran over Emmitt’s foot with her wheel chair! Then he turned around and punched her square in the face! What a JERK!”

And so the game began… The rules were simple. Pick a sports figure who was or is above reproach and say you heard they did something horrible. Needless to say we are still playing this game, but here are the highlights.

Me: “You know, I heard that Stan Musial ran a nursing home bus off the road… I was still a fan until he put it in reverse to get another shot at the survivors”

John: “Walter Payton and Reggie White faked their own deaths for the insurance money”

Me: “Joe Montana hands out poison lollipops for Halloween”

John: “Marshall Faulk just got arrested for trying to kill the pope ” (funny, I never knew Marshall was Muslim)

Me: “Well I heard that Pete Samprass was Saddam’s right hand man!”

John: “Last night Troy Aikman broke into a pet store and drowned all the kittens.”

Me: “Man I hate to be the one to break this to you but last night they raided Isaac Bruce’s house and found him mixing cocaine into a shipment of baby formula!”

John: “That SOB! After I heard about Michael Jordan buying the airline tickets for the 9/11 terrorists, nothing surprises me.”

Me: “Dude! They just arrested Ken Griffey Jr. for exposing himself to a pack of girl scouts and eating a case of their cookies!”

John: “I heard he ate a brownie…”*

*Edit: Please note, cannibalism is nothing to joke about.