Men with Balls: The Professional Athlete's Handbook

by Drew Magary

  Deeply Penetrating the Numbers

  1,032

  An estimated 1,032 active professional athletes have had a homosexual encounter. Here’s a percentage breakdown of that number by sport:

  Q:I play for the Browns and I absolutely cannot stand these drab uniforms. What’s a girl to do?

  A:You just have to suck it up for now. Don’t be such a fag.

  Chapter 4

  They’re Like Bosses, Except They Like Hitting You

  Coaches and Management

  Because life wasn’t meant to be enjoyed: your guide to the average head coach.

  Your head coach is a tireless taskmaster who spends only five seconds savoring a victory before going back to sucking all the fun out of your sport until it is no longer a sport, but rather an endless, grueling death march. It’s no wonder fans and media alike adore him. What a fun-loving free spirit is he!

  The modern head coach or manager is a different animal from years past. He isn’t involved in as much hands-on coaching and strategic planning as you might expect. In fact, you may barely see him during the week. Be grateful for this, because he can be a moody prick. His responsibility is to delegate work to an army of assistant coaches, and then to painfully micromanage each one of them as they do that work. A head coach is also responsible for structuring practices, coordinating travel schedules, managing communications between staff, handling press relations, and commissioning his own portrait. When you think about it, he’s kind of like an event planner. I bet that Bill Belichick could plan one killer business luncheon. With sandwiches from Così and Orangina and everything.

  Your coach is also in charge of handling the requisite mental coddling of athletes. The twenty-first-century pro sports team comprises multiple players who believe they are the centerpiece of the franchise, including you. The head coach’s job is to dupe all of you into believing that this is the case, while simultaneously getting you to play unselfishly without even knowing it. Tricky? You bet!

  But a good head coach knows how to pull it off by massaging your ego. How? First, he brings your ego into a serene, candlelit room. Then, he puts on a very relaxing Enigma record. Then he sprays a fine eucalyptus mist into the air. At this time, your ego will start to feel very loose and relaxed. Then, he oils up his hands real good and rubs your ego all over, starting at its core and then branching out to its furthest extremities, including the portion of your ego that helps suppress your love of Nora Ephron films. Then, after a brief pause, he turns your ego on its back and furiously pumps it up and down until it becomes engorged and finally achieves full release.

  Needless to say, Phil Jackson is excellent at this. Andy Reid? Not so much.

  All coaches today face an inescapable catch-22. In order to win a championship, a coach must win your respect. But in order to win your respect, he must have won a championship. In fact, he must have won many of them. After all, Barry Switzer won one Super Bowl. And we all know Barry Switzer has an IQ below room temperature.

  In order to gain the respect necessary (not a lot, just enough) to get you to play to your potential, all head coaches fall into two distinct camps: the Disciplinarian, and the Player’s Coach. Disciplinarians, or “hard-asses” in the common vernacular, are coaches who try to earn your respect by being complete and utter dicks. Typically raised by a drunken father in a rural portion of Pennsylvania, disciplinarians enjoy taking their sad, isolated childhood out on you by constantly questioning your commitment and riding your jock like a stray crab. But, should you do something extraordinary, the disciplinarian will show a mild form of approval, such as an ass slap or a quick nod. The idea here is to get you to believe that you can, through hard work, melt the disciplinarian’s heart and get him to love you. It’s sort of like Jane Eyre, and you’re the jailbait governess. So fucking hot.

  Player’s coaches, also known as “spineless pushovers,” believe that they can win your respect by treating you like a man. Considering that most athletes live in a state of suspended adolescence, this is not a well-thought-out strategy. The player’s coach will offer positive reinforcement, leave his door open at all hours, play pranks, take you white-water rafting, set few curfews, and carry about as much authority as a substitute homeroom teacher. He may also have a candy dish in the office. Get there early in the day and you can probably snag a handful of Snickers Minis. Norv Turner is widely praised by players for his frequent candy-dish refills.

  Disciplinarians are typically hired after player’s coaches have been fired, and vice versa. Some coaches try to cross over between disciplinarian and player’s coach. If the players are threatening to mutiny, he may take a softer approach. If the players become unruly and start lighting random fires around the locker room, he’ll try to crack the whip. This approach never works. Players respect consistency. If your coach is an asshole, he should always be an asshole. If he’s a bleeding-heart pussy, he should always be a bleeding-heart pussy. Never the twain shall meet. If your coach tries to play Bad Cop / Different Kind of Bad Cop, feel free to take the rest of the season off. That guy’s a lame duck and he knows it. Fuck him.

  If you’re looking to impress your head coach in order to get more playing time, I strongly suggest never asking him about his family. Your coach has been married for thirty years to a wife he mentally abandoned twenty-nine years ago. He also probably has three or more children, all of whom are complete train wrecks. A much smarter approach is to pepper him with questions about strategy and what you need to do to improve. Most coaches are, at heart, teachers. Which means they like being real fucking know-it-alls.

  Your coach woke up at 3:00 a.m. after falling asleep at 2:00 a.m. on a cot in his office with his hand on the DVD player remote. Why? So he could try to absorb more information about your sport than any other person on Earth. He does this even though research has shown the brain can only take in so much information in a single day, and without proper rest, intensive work can be counterproductive. So, if you want to kiss his ass, make him feel that all of that needless effort was worth it.

  He’ll appreciate it when your owner fires his ass three weeks into the season.

  * * *

  DID YOU KNOW?

  The average tenure of a professional head coach or manager is 10.2 months. Hate your coach? The good news is that he’ll be out the door shortly. The bad news is that Larry Brown will be replacing him. And man, is that guy a ballbuster!

  * * *

  HEAR IT FROM A FOOTBALL COACH!

  I will control you with my mind

  by Bill Belichick

  Hey, (your last name). Over here. Yeah, you. Come here.

  I want you to drink this.

  What is it? It’s uh . . . a supplement. It contains vital electrolytes. You need it. It’s good for your circulation. Look, just fuckin’ drink it or I’ll cut your ass.

  (You drink it.)

  Okay, good. Feel okay? You don’t feel faint, do you? I’m gonna try something, okay? I want you to relax. I’m going to concentrate really hard, and I want you to let me know if you feel anything.

  (He scrunches up his face real tight like he’s having a bowel movement. You involuntarily move into a three-point stance.)

  Ahhhhhh! Good. Good, it worked on you.

  I’ve been studying principles of nanotechnology for about seventeen years now. Right when I began coaching the Patriots, I had a breakthrough. Together with a team of Danish engineers, I was able to create robot microbes that control bodily movements based upon my brain waves. We even designed them to reproduce on their own. What you just swallowed was a mixed solution containing 4 moles, or 6.02 x 1023, of these microbes. Don’t worry. They’re relatively harmless. What they’ll do is embed themselves in your muscles and cause them to flex at my command. For example, JUMP!

  (You jump.)

  See? Pretty fuckin’ cool, right? Now stand on your toes like a really jacked ballerina.

  (You stand on your toes like a really jacked ballerina.)

  Nice. Try not
to fight my commands. This is a beta version of our latest upgrade. If you try to fight them, they may turn against your muscles, colonize them, and begin devouring them. And then you’re no good to me.

  Now, I’m not gonna use this technology for anything weird. I’m not gonna have you shoot the queen or anything like that. But I needed to develop a technology that eliminated freelancing and ensured that you did everything I told you. After all, I am not the world’s most charismatic fellow. When I was in Cleveland, no one listened to me. I had no presence. I spoke in a horrible monotone that acted as a sort of audible Sominex. And I smelled a bit off. I needed something that would cut out any mental mistakes players would make and completely satisfy my freakish thirst for control. And these little bastards have done the job quite well.

  You might be wondering how I can control the movements of all eleven players on the field at once. Well, the answer again lies in nanotechnology. I’ve had trillions of these nanobots implanted into my cerebellum. This hood hanging in the back of my sweatshirt helps hide the deformed growth caused by the implant. See?

  (He shows you the growth. It is the size and shape of a large mango, and has hair, teeth, and a single eyeball.)

  Don’t look into the eye. You may become lost forever. Again, that would make you no good to me. Jasper here — that’s what I call him — helps me simultaneously coordinate the movement of all the players on the field. And with this Power Glove (he dons a lacrosse glove covered with thin wires and metal plates) I can make the nanobots that reside in your spittle fly into the bodily orifices of our opponents. Once there, I can make them do all sorts of naughty things. One time I made Zach Thomas bite off his own ring finger in a fumble pile. That was fun. I’ve also equipped them with very small cameras so that they can fly into our opponents’ eye sockets, turning them into unwitting double agents for our cause. I don’t spy on anyone. They spy on themselves. You should see the MILFs some of them bring home.

  Anyway, glad you’re part of the team. From now on, all of your bodily movements will be recorded into the database back at CentComm and placed on a large visual graph. If you would like to see this graph, it will cost you 20 percent of your base salary. Sorry, that’s team policy. In the meantime, I wouldn’t walk through any airport metal detectors if I were you. The nanobots don’t like it.

  Now run wind sprints until you vomit.

  (You run wind sprints until you vomit.)

  Good.

  HEAR IT FROM A BASEBALL MANAGER!

  Good job, everybody

  by Joe Torre

  (claps hands)

  Good job, everybody. Nice job. Good job out there. Really nice job.

  (pats you on the ass)

  Good job. Way to hustle.

  Want some sunflower seeds?

  Attaboy. Good job.

  “You’re like the more athletic, better son I never had.” A guide to your team owner.

  There are ten things you need to know about your owner, and here they are.

  1. HE IS RICHER THAN YOU ARE OR COULD EVER HOPE TO BE. Did you ever wonder where that $375,000 game check you get every week comes from? No, it didn’t come from the magic money pixie, as Rickey Henderson may have told you. Your owner is the megarich superfuck who deigns to pay you your little pittance every year. He’s got a yacht that’s worth six of you, and he owns gated compounds on each of the seven continents, along with a starter colony on Mars. Think the Pegasus is just a mythical creature? Wrong, bucko! He’s got a stable of them in Nepal. He may be watching you from the sky on his winged steed as you read this.

  The average owner is at least a billionaire. Consider how rich that is. If your owner took a $1,000,000,000 check and put it into a regular savings account at a local bank at a lousy 2 percent annual interest rate, he’d have more than $800,000 a month to spend and still keep his billion dollars. Is that the very definition of fuck-you money? Why, yes, I believe it is.

  Most of today’s owners earned their fortune by being pioneers of industry. Some, like Mark Cuban, earned it during the first dot-com boom. Others, like Home Depot founder Arthur Blank, realized that Americans crave an airplane hangar–sized warehouse of home improvement products with no store directory, a parking lot that resembles the third stage of Armageddon, and, from what I can tell, no store employees on hand at any time. Either way, the average owner has stockpiled the kind of cash that goes beyond obscene and makes the American Dream seem even further out of a normal man’s reach. It’s the kind of money that makes even millionaires feel inadequate and unhappy. It’s a nice place to be.

  2. HE IS ECCENTRIC. You don’t become a billionaire and remain a normal person. It just doesn’t happen. I strongly urge you to avoid looking at your owner’s toenails, or asking him what he keeps in that turret sticking out of his mansion. You don’t want to know what he does with his spare time. He’s got a lot of it, and he’s got a lot of strange ideas that society wouldn’t approve of. Ever reanimate your dead father? One owner has. Stay away.

  3. HE IS SHORT. Your owner didn’t become rich by being happy. By being 5'6" or shorter, he carries around a chip on his shoulder the size of Mama Cass. He hopes that the financial stature he has attained will compensate for the physical stature he has always lacked. But the hard truth is that nothing makes up for being pocket-sized. Your owner will always resent his pathetic, halfling physique. That’s why, as we speak, he is constructing a series of underground concentration camps, where he hopes to imprison and murder all the Tall Ones. By 2026, they’ll be dead, and he’ll be the tallest man on Earth! Who’s laughing now, huh? WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?

  4. HE IS NOT BLACK. He is very white. He may blend in with the wall occasionally. So be aware. Don’t bad-mouth a guy who’s got a complexion perfectly suited to indoor camouflage.

  5. YOU ARE HIS TOY. Remember that Richard Pryor movie? That’s you. The rich man pays you to run and jump. So run and jump, piss boy. And if he wants to put you in an inflatable Wonder Wheel and roll you down a steep hill, you let him. You’re his property now, so you’d better get used to it. Your owner may also ask you to attend a key party and give his wife the good, hard reaming she’s always begged for. It would be unwise to turn him down.

  6. WHEN YOU SPEND THREE QUARTERS OF A BILLION ON SOMETHING, YOU CAN DO WHATEVER THE FUCK YOU WANT WITH IT. In the old days, most team owners bought the team, then happily turned over all of its operations, including personnel decisions, to “football people” or “baseball people,” who were then given carte blanche to do as they pleased. The idea was that team owners were too inexperienced to buy a team and then actually become involved in it. So owners paid people who got to experience all the enjoyment of running a team with none of the expense of having to buy it.

  But sometime around the early nineties, owners stopped being dumb. They realized that, since they were the ones who paid so much money for a franchise, they were in a position to exercise some semblance of authority. This has led to a boom of hands-on owners. Hands-on owners are owners who eschew hiring traditional general managers and do all the fun stuff like making draft picks and personnel decisions, while bringing in cap gurus to handle payroll and the other boring, administrative bullshit no one wants to do. Hands-on owners will also grope any female employee within a five-foot radius.

  7. HE GOT RICH BY BEING A CHEAP BASTARD. You don’t get rich by spending money. Your owner grew up dirt poor and understands the value of a dollar, which is why he’s so reluctant to share one with anybody else. He may be paying you a grand salary, but know that his blood boils every time he has to sign that check. If he could pay you in loose kidney beans, he would. Following Bill Belichick’s example, many owners have already taken exploratory steps to replace live players with highly skilled androids by 2029. Did you really think Tim Duncan was from the Virgin Islands? Fool! He’s their first prototype. Next time you play against him, look closely at his left arm. You will see ASIMO stamped just above the crook of his right elbow. When no one is looking, Duncan has b
een known to sprout helicopter blades and fly away.

  Evidence of your owner’s pettiness can be seen elsewhere if you look closely enough. If he was forced to pay for a portion of your home stadium, it’s probably made entirely of particleboard. And that cooler in your locker room? It’s filled with nothing but Sam’s Club drinks. Ever drink a twenty-two-cent diet cream soda? Don’t.

  8. HE’D LOVE TO COACH YOU IF COACHING WEREN’T SUCH A SHITTY JOB. Your owner probably dreamed of buying the team and then coaching it to multiple titles. Then he found out that coaches work 140 hours a week and barely have time to eat a hot meal. Now, instead of coaching the team, he prefers to coach it in his imagination, then to undermine your real coach at every conceivable turn. Many owners subvert their coach’s authority by signing players the coach doesn’t like, or reversing team rules he has implemented, or drawing obscene graffiti on the coach’s office door. If you think your coach and your owner are at odds, remember: your owner is the one who owns the team. He’s the one who will always be here. Side with him. It is often said that coaches are hired to be fired. This is 100 percent true. All fans dream of firing the idiot coaching their team, and your owner is the one fan who gets to really do it, which is why he enjoys doing it again and again and again.

  9. HIS FAMILY IS COMPOSED OF NOTHING BUT FUCK-UPS. Team ownership used to be a family business. A team was handed down from father to son, or nephew, or son-in-law, or anyone but a woman. But the proliferation of estate taxes and forked-tongued lawyers has made that sort of tradition obsolete. Your owner’s immediate family consists of two or more siblings who have no speaking relationship, a wife who will soon inherit the team and run it into the ground, and a series of nephews and grandchildren who all have no-show jobs at the team complex. Jobs like Team Enthusiasm Coordinator and Director of Awareness. None of these relatives will show even the slightest trace of motivation or initiative. Your owner would never let his prized possession fall into the hands of these feuding idiots. So, if your owner is old and infirm, take note. Those two queers from Google could be sweeping in any day to buy you.