The Knuckles: Gun Cleaning Goons and Ornery, Obnoxious Owners
Every once in a while, the list of nominees for The Knuckles is plentiful enough to make whittling it all down to three winners something of a chore. But there’s a comfort to be gained from instances like that. Because it’s never about quantity when it comes to earning an honor as prestigious as a Knuckle. It’s about quality.
This week, a group of familiar faces comprise the honor roll, ranging from a dim bulb former baseball player/steroid abuser, to a superstar basketball player without a shred of self-awareness, to an NFL owner who is more interested in turning his team into a reality show running on a constant loop than winning.
So fasten your seatbelts, you fans of famous figures in the sports world doing or staying stupid things in public. You’re sure to get a kick out of this week’s winners. So with that, let’s get right into another star-studded edition of The Knuckles.
BRONZE – Jose Canseco: Low hanging fruit here. But sometimes, some folks are so irretrievably stupid, they absolutely must be recognized for it.
Consider the case of serial moron Jose Canseco, who made headlines earlier in the week for blowing off his finger while cleaning his gun. Let that sink in for a moment. Actually, take all the time you need.
Look, it’s tough to not feel bad even for a raving lunatic like Canseco. The pain was surely excruciating and you wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
But even a know-nothing has to be aware that when one cleans a gun, one should probably make sure it’s not loaded. Right? I mean, that sort of foresight can be complicated and difficult to summon but still.
And on top of that, when you heard about this for the first time, raise your hand if you didn’t think or say something like, “oh man, that’s horrible,’’ and instead thought or said something like, “well of course he did.’’
That’s the sort of reaction a person like Jose Canseco inspires. And as a colleague of mine pointed out earlier this week, at least now Jose can tell anyone who asks how many innings there are in a baseball game without having to say a word.
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SILVER – LeBron James: Let’s all thank LeBron James for remembering just how little humility he really has, and making sure to remind us.
Thursday night, LeBron finally made his return to Cleveland officially as the Cavs opened their regular season at home against the Knicks. Nike celebrated with a vintage ad only they could have produced that either gave you goose bumps or made you throw up, with little middle ground available. The NBA and TNT also threw a party outside Quicken Loans Arena in downtown Cleveland before the game, featuring a bevy of famous bands and people like Kendrick Lamar, Imagine Dragons, Kevin Hart and Josh Gad. Fine.
But it was LeBron’s very own comment on Thursday morning following the Cavs’ shootaround. Let’s just say that perspective isn’t likely a word that lives in his vocabulary.
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The last person to ever refer to a season opener like that was no one. I get it that LeBron is important and that his returning to Cleveland is important (in the proper context) and I also get that he gets that his return are both important. But please, let’s take a deep breath.
There’s nothing wrong with LeBron being something of a dick on the court and even sometimes off of it, within reason. All the best players, from Kobe to Jordan to Bird and beyond possessed the kind of edge and, at times, mean streak that allowed them to be killers. LeBron has managed to become a similar kind of assassin without much of the edge of those other all-timers. He’s mostly just a nice guy who gets lots of questionable advice and is arguably the most incredible physical specimen to ever play the sport.
So when he opens his mouth and such an insipid comment comes out, you don’t chalk it up to him being salty and sarcastic and calculating. He’s just kind of a knucklehead.
Oh and by the way. The biggest game ever? The Cavs lost. To the Knicks.
Hey, at least LeBron is a snazzy dresser. Damn…
GOLD – Jerry Jones: Jones, not just the owner and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys but the team’s PR director, equipment manager, groundskeeper, beer pourer, ticket taker, caterer and resident carnival barker, added team physician to his list of job titles on Monday night during the team’s loss to the Washington professional football entry.
Jones has made a habit of talking publicly about every possible thing that pops into his head regarding the Cowboys for years. He consistently and continuously undermines the cavalcade of coaches who have taken his money only to be rendered sock puppets the minute they set foot in the front door of Valley Ranch. He can’t help himself. As such, the result of his endless meddling amounts to one playoff win in 19 years and one 8-8 season after another, usually peppered with horrifyingly humiliating, terribly timed, self-inflicted gaffes.
Anyway, in that Monday night game, browbeaten quarterback Tony Romo, who has been terrific all year as the ‘Boys ran out to a 6-1 start, took a knee to his twice surgically repaired back and had to leave the game. Since this happened about 4.2 seconds after Jones finished up an actual live, on-air interview with ESPN play-by-play man Mike Tirico – during which he hilariously wore a headset from his private suite at Cowboys Stadium – it was a bit jarring to see how fast he got down to the sideline and then into the Cowboys’ locker room. At that point, he probably ordered the most potent cocktail of painkilling drugs ever known to man to be immediately shot into Romo’s jugular vein.
Then, faster than you can say ‘facelift,’ Jones was on the sideline, informing Cowboys’ head coach (in title only) Jason Garrett that Romo would be coming back into the game momentarily. Because if you can make your handpicked coach and entire training and medical staffs look like complete a**holes on national television, why shouldn’t you?
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It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Romo could barely walk but re-entered the game anyway, ending the momentum generated by backup Brandon Weeden on two straight scoring drives. He fumbled, but the Cowboys recovered. He threw a terrible pass straight to a Washington defensive back that somehow wasn’t picked off. And Washington ended up winning the game in overtime. The only thing funnier than Jones’s personal visit to Garrett on the sideline was hearing him explain Romo’s injury afterward, saying things like “we knew there were no structural issues when they gave him the X-rays,’’ and “after we looked at the play and saw that it was a knee kind of to the side of the back, then we felt better about it.’’
It went on during the week when he told the world that Romo might play this week depending on his pain threshold and tried to spin his insanity from Monday night. The bottom line here isn’t that this is just yet another example of Jerry Jones serving as the clown prince of the NFL, one of its biggest, hoariest knuckleheads. It’s that while he’s actually been relatively quiet thus far this season, blammo, the Cowboys ripped off a six-game winning streak. Then, the minute he remembers his flaming narcissism and starts acting on it, they lose a winnable game at home to an inferior team and suddenly appear totally vulnerable again, great start be damned.
Remember all of this when Dallas winds up 9-7 or 8-8 again and misses the playoffs for the umpteenth time since he decided he was the most important person in the organization. It all started this past Monday night.
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