You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will

by Cowherd, Colin

  Copyright © 2013 by Colin Cowherd

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-8041-3789-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3790-4

  Jacket design by Michael Nagin

  Jacket photographs: Deborah Feingold

  v3.1

  For my parents, Charles and Patricia,

  who gave me the curiosity to write what you are about to read

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  Addiction or Fiction?

  Torn in the USA

  Conservative Backlash

  The Cult of (Bad) Personality

  Drunk and Stupid: No Way to Go Through a Football Game

  Hanging in the Imbalance

  For Adults Only

  Leaving Las Vegas

  IQ, Low-Q, No Clue

  Michael vs. LeBron: Swish or Swoosh?

  Hey, NBA—Let ’Em Play

  Manning Overboard

  Pace Yourself

  Pick Your Poison

  Daddy Dearest

  Diamonds Aren’t Forever

  When Small Grows Up

  I Value What I Need

  The Drain Game

  Whistle-Blower

  Conspiracy of Dunces

  Primal Time

  Bean There, Done That

  The Gracious Host

  The Sport That Shouldn’t Be

  Southern Exposure

  Reduction Junction, Love Your Function

  My Pitch for Pith

  The Long Invasion

  For Us, Bias

  A False Positive

  Nature vs. Nurture

  Luck, Meet Genius

  Home Alone

  Swing and a Miss, and a Miss, and a Miss

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Introduction

  We were running late to the game, which probably didn’t mean as much to my dad as it did to me. He was a workaholic who was chronically behind schedule, so this was nothing out of the ordinary for either one of us. Besides, this wasn’t his first live sporting event, only mine. And so it was my heart that sank when we arrived at the parking lot at the high school gym in Hoquiam, Washington, and found nearly every spot taken. From the passenger seat of my dad’s Buick Riviera, I looked out the window and imagined every spot inside the gym was taken as well.

  Of course it was packed. It could be no other way. Within those walls were the great Harlem Globetrotters, the ones I’d seen on Wide World of Sports a couple of months earlier. Who wouldn’t want to be there?

  The Riviera added to our problems. It wouldn’t fit into any of the smaller parking spaces, so our late arrival to the lot was merely the beginning. As we wound our way in and out of the parking lanes, unable to find a spot big enough to dock Dad’s boat, I could feel the minutes pass. Seconds late became minutes late. As my dad made a sharp turn into an alley behind the gym, the way I viewed sports changed forever.

  There, right in front of us, was the Globetrotters’ bus. We were face to face, squared off like mismatched fighters, the Riviera and the grille of the parked bus. A pair of players leaning on the bus suddenly stood up straight when they saw us.

  And that was the moment my view of sports changed forever.

  My eyes went to something shiny in one of their hands. It was a can of beer. As a kid who approached sports with the innocence of a Clair Bee novel, where every athlete was a hero on and off the field, forever capable of hitting a home run for a sick boy in the hospital, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. They were sharing a cold one right before “Sweet Georgia Brown.” How could that be? This wasn’t the way it worked. My mind reeled. It was a Miller, although I have no idea why I remember that or why it ever seemed important to the eight-year-old me.

  Both ’Trotters looked straight through our windshield and directly into my eyes. I had caught them, and they caught me catching them. My innocence was swallowed along with the last swig of the champagne of beers. They weren’t smiling like they did on television. There were no friendly laughs or buckets of confetti. They glared at my dad and me with a look that said, “You shouldn’t be here, and if you say anything, you’ll regret it.”

  My dad quickly slammed the Riviera into reverse, backed out, and eventually found a parking space. We didn’t talk about what we saw. He was probably as disgusted as I was mystified.

  First impressions have a powerful influence over an eight-year-old. Seeds are planted and grow from there, often wildly out of control. Tiny shards of truth come together to create an experience that makes the world look like it’s being viewed in a funhouse mirror.

  That moment in the parking lot lasted only seconds, but the impression it created is still imprinted deep in my emotional archive.

  The alley.

  The beer.

  The stares.

  I guarantee you one thing: What the rest of the crowd saw that night in the cramped gym in Hoquiam wasn’t what I saw. They saw a show. I saw the truth.

  The game itself held no virtue. My hometown was so small, we probably didn’t even get the real Globetrotters. It was something that resembled the Globetrotters on discount, an outlet-store version of the real thing. Maybe the East Harlem Globetrotters. Meadowlark Lemon wasn’t on the floor, that’s for sure, and I recall the shooting percentage being far lower that night than it ever was on my television. They quit taking half-court hook shots before they made one.

  Still, it was basketball with confetti and a ladder, and that has a strange appeal to a kid. I watched and probably laughed a few times, but I made sure never to make eye contact with the players I saw standing next to the bus.

  My Globetrotter experience didn’t reshape my views on sports—it created them. I had no previous experience to measure it against, so it stuck. It’s still there to this day.

  The unvarnished truth is the only kind I know. Brutal honesty is the only option.

  There’s got to be another angle. Don’t believe the press release. It’s all being shaped for our consumption.

  Most important, form your own opinion.

  A few years after the Globetrotter incident, my best friend’s brother, Brad Jones, was invited into the Oakland Raiders’ locker room. His most lasting impression wasn’t the size of Art Shell’s arms or the shininess of Otis Sistrunk’s bald head. Instead, I sat listening with rapt attention as Brad breathlessly relayed the story of watching quarterback Kenny Stabler and receiver Fred Biletnikoff, both Pro Bowlers, playing cards in their jockstraps. He may have said they were smoking, too, but maybe that’s just a detail I created to embellish the scene. Either way, this was yet another glimpse backstage into the grimier side of athletics. As it turned out, the sports world wasn’t one long after-school special playing on an endless loop. It was a flawed world inhabited by flawed humans who did shocking things like drink beer before a game and play cards in their jockstraps.

  There are really two games: the one you see and the one you don’t. The way I see it, the best way to use access to both worlds is to illuminate and reveal, not idolize and adore.

  It’s better to be wrong than to be played for a fool.

  Sometimes I wonder, is my mind playing tricks on me?
The brain will do that, you know. First impressions become distorted over time. Memories can be unreliable. My childhood was filled with divorces and uncertainty, but sports were a constant. I had a lonely upbringing. My sister ignored me; five years older, she understandably didn’t want to hang out with a hyperactive little brother. My father, an optometrist, was, like most men of his generation, an emotionally distant workaholic.

  Games and standings and statistics were my constant companions, bringing solidity to the fluidity of my life. They were always there for me, baseball in the summer, football in the fall, basketball in the winter. I sought attention, and knowing the backstage stories—the beer-drinking ’Trotters and card-playing Raiders—meant access and a measure of popularity for a kid growing up largely ignored in a small, rural community.

  Those were the stories I wanted to tell then. They’re the stories I want to tell now.

  The backstage stories helped to shape my worldview. I knew stuff that nobody else did, and I liked the feeling. I lived in the rainiest corner of the country, but when I think back to my childhood my mind recalls only a string of sunny days. There are no dark clouds in my memory, which has to mean something, doesn’t it? Is it a metaphor for the path my life would eventually take? A defense mechanism? Who really knows?

  My first eye-opening sports experience was real, though.

  The alley.

  The beer.

  The stares.

  Hell yes, it was real.

  And hell yes, it changed everything.

  Addiction or Fiction?

  Eight large glasses of water a day. Remember that? To be a healthy human being, you needed to drink eight large glasses of water a day. This was a fact, no debate allowed. Doctors, school nurses, anybody with a stethoscope—even a toy stethoscope—stated it as a matter of biblical certainty.

  Even as a kid, I knew this was bullshit. The Surgeon General could have stopped by my house with the yellowed food pyramid chart from the wall of my junior high and I still wouldn’t have believed him.

  Eight large glasses of water a day. Who lives like that, a dolphin? Two large glasses of water at every meal and you’re still coming up far short. Are we supposed to bring a garden hose to work?

  Where’s Colin?

  He’s in the bathroom, where he has spent the majority of his life.

  Years after this was accepted as fact, a report by the British Medical Journal, backed by the American Journal of Physiology, walked back the ironclad truth of eight glasses a day. It found that liquid, not water, was the important part of the equation. A cup of coffee counts. An apple counts. A baked potato, 75 percent water, counts as much as a glass of water.

  So the eight-glasses-a-day thing wasn’t really true. And neither was the hype over a high-fiber diet. Decades after that craze, we were told that excessive fiber could reduce your life span. As a kid whose mother forced him to eat Raisin Bran every morning, I was hoping they’d come to that conclusion far earlier.

  My point is this: you don’t have to be an expert to know that some things don’t make sense.

  The water thing never rang true to me.

  Neither did the idea that Tiger Woods was a sex addict.

  After twenty-four years of covering sports, too many aspects of the Tiger-as-addict story failed to ring true. The nonsports media swarmed on this story and showed their ignorance of the sports world and the modern athlete every step of the way. They helped to legitimize the idea that Tiger was “suffering” from a disease, that he had no control over his actions, and that he should, in fact, be viewed with pity and not scorn.

  Oh, please.

  Can someone bring me another glass of water? I think I’m a glass short today.

  Tiger’s fall from grace began when he wrecked his SUV outside his mansion in Florida. From there we learned that he was an inveterate skirt-chaser who ran around on his wife and screwed everyone from Vegas party girls to the waitress at the local coffee shop.

  This, of course, presented a public-relations problem for Tiger. Sordid details about his life were splashed everywhere. Sponsors dropped him almost as fast as his wife, Elin Nordegren, did. In an instant, his image was changed forever.

  What did Tiger become in the public eye? Deceitful, unfeeling, misogynistic.

  There wasn’t much to say in Tiger’s defense. Every news story made him sound worse. Women came forward like an advancing army, each one willing to tell her story for a price.

  How would Tiger get rehabilitated in the public eye? How could he transform the public image of the unfeeling horndog back into something resembling the endorsement machine who entered every tournament as a heavy favorite? Only one way: by becoming a victim. And who could possibly accomplish that feat?

  Who could turn America’s most notorious cad into a sympathetic figure?

  Nike, of course.

  He lost all his major endorsements. Except one.

  Nike.

  And how could this happen?

  Only one way:

  Tiger had to go from villain to victim.

  What was he if he wasn’t a bad person who did terrible things to the people closest to him?

  He was a sex addict.

  He couldn’t help himself.

  The whole sex thing was out of his control. He wasn’t a guy who just wanted to use his clout as the most powerful athlete in the world by having sex with as many women as he could. No way—he was a sex addict whose life was consumed by his compulsion.

  So off he went to the rehab clinic, where he would undergo intensive therapy intended to cure him of his addiction to having sex with beautiful women who weren’t his wife. He would be sequestered out of the public eye, free to work on his debilitating disease and come to terms with his behavior in private.

  And while he was in there, I certainly hope he had his eight glasses of water a day.

  Sex addict. Give me a break.

  First, sexual addiction is not even a medically accepted diagnosis. You could look it up—I did. The controversy surrounding the mere existence of this “disease” devalues any fact-based contention that Tiger was, in fact, an addict.

  But let’s go ahead and play along. (After all, that’s exactly what the nonsports media world did.) Let’s assume for the sake of argument that sexual addiction is real, and Tiger Woods—the most famous and richest athlete in the world—was afflicted with it.

  Sexual addiction, by its very nature, is defined as being so intense and compulsive, it derails your life. It’s an addiction, so it’s difficult for anything else to intrude on the act of feeding the addiction. And yet, from the time Tiger Woods was married (October 2004) to the day of the SUV incident that exposed his infidelity and led to his diagnosis, he won six majors and twenty-five events.

  Does that sound like someone whose life was irretrievably disrupted? Does that sound like someone who couldn’t focus on any other aspect of life but the addiction?

  The truth is, he was never better than when he was in the throes of this debilitating, paralyzing disease.

  And you know when Tiger stopped winning? When he went into sex rehab.

  The only reason his addiction became an issue is because his wife found out. It wasn’t because it was interfering so greatly with his life that he couldn’t putt or hit a fairway. The first sign of addiction was his wife finding a text message.

  Second, Woods clearly had something to gain by entering a sexual-addiction clinic: his image. At this point, his career was being handled almost exclusively by the brilliant marketing minds at Nike. As other sponsors bailed, Nike not only hung on but took control of his flailing career to craft a shrewd recovery plan.

  You can almost see them sitting around a big table in a big boardroom and one of them saying, “We’re in the brand-building business, and we’re going to save him.”

  Addicts are sympathetic. They’re at the mercy of their addiction, so how can they be villains?

  Third, it’s an acknowledged fact that rich, famous, athletic m
en get much more sex—and get it far easier—than the rest of us. Woods wasn’t the local mailman or traveling salesman, having to work overtime and concoct crazy stories to get his fix. He wasn’t even the run-of-the-mill celebrity—the kind Dr. Drew helps in his Pasadena, California, rehab center. No, he was a one-man conglomerate, the world’s most recognizable athlete, a guy who made $40 million a year from endorsements alone.

  Tiger Freaking Woods.

  He had dozens of people at his disposal, all eager to curry favor by doing El Tigre’s dirty work. He could make one phone call and set up any sexual encounter he could imagine—and that’s exactly what he reportedly did.

  According to media reports, Tiger had fifteen affairs in five years of marriage.

  Now, I don’t want to sound flippant here, and I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, but in my experience covering sports, that number is a low one for most star athletes, married or not. Framing Woods as some out-of-control, wild-eyed sexual monster doesn’t ring true.

  You know what he sounds like? The backup small forward for every NBA team.

  Tiger wasn’t a sex addict. He was simply a virile young man in a hollow marriage. He plays a sport with a lot of downtime, and he was looking for hookups.

  That’s not an addiction.

  Regrettably, it’s too often just the life of an American professional athlete.

  We have to understand the unique place professional athletes hold in the culture. They’re often compared to actors, but the median salary for an actor in America is $39,500 a year. Not every actor is George Clooney. Corporate CEOs might be rich, but they’re usually 60 years old. Politicians might be powerful, but most of them are older and not always attractive.

  Professional athletes have everything: youth, wealth, looks, power. And they have the added bonus of travel, which allows them the sexual freedom no other industry can offer.

  Over the past couple of decades, professional athletes have made giant leaps, right over the heads of not only regular citizens but also the swankiest celebrities. Compare that sub-$40,000 actor’s median to the median salary of the NFL’s 1,800 players: $770,000.