Newz Forum: OTHER: Dean's List: Overblown Egos, Overgrown Heads

Barry Bonds has to be the first athlete ever to publicly defend the dimensions, mechanics and general physiological existence of his own head...

"What's all this about my head size?" he recently asked reporters. "My head hasn't grown. I've always been a 7 1/4 to a 7 3/8 my whole career. You can go check." Talk about self-incriminating. If people wrongly accused me of unnatural head growth, I wouldn't be too concerned about convincing them otherwise. And I certainly wouldn't ask them to go check. Like they've been keeping stats on it or something. Even Jose Canseco, whose freakish melon once propelled a routine fly ball for a homer, never went there. Then again, maybe this has nothing to do with steroids. Maybe this is the inevitable outgrowth of Barry's overblown ego rearing its ugly head...

If Derek Jeter is the face of the Yankees, the Yankee face, Barry Bonds is the head of the Giants, the Giant head...

If for no other reason than his apparent illiteracy, we all laughed when Canseco said his tell-all book - "Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant 'Roids, Smash Hits and How Steroids Got Big" - would be "the most educational, exciting, most interesting sports book ever written in the history of sports." And I hate to say it, but Jose, who loves to say "I told you so," will be telling us he told us so for years to come. And he'll love every minute of it...

OK, I think I finally got it. Soccer is football and football is handball. Baseball is batball, basketball is shootball, and hockey is stickpuck. Golf has golf balls and tennis has tennis balls, but basketball, baseball, and football don't have basketball balls, baseball balls, or even football balls. The names of their games, after all, is the balls...

With athletic powerhouses Kentucky, Arizona and Villanova all sharing the same name, I just don't know which Wildcats are which anymore. Must be what they mean by "March Madness." So after careful deliberation, I've come up with the following solution to this rampant informational problem: One of these Wildcats should be renamed the "Wild Cats." Surely, a pronounced pause between the two syllables would alleviate at least some of the confusion...

There's nothing free about free throws. They come at the cost of being fouled. And you don't throw the ball at the basket, you shoot it - aim being the distinguishing factor between the shot and its more primitive counterpart. So why uncontested, penalty-induced, one-point opportunities from the foul line are called "free throws," I'll never understand...

Remember Apollo's nickname in the Rocky movies? Yeah, the moronically oxymoronic "Master of Disaster." There's really no such thing. At least not in the flattering sense. The same way there's no "Ace of Accidents," "King of Calamity," or any other kind of best worst...

And I don't care what the play-by-play guy says. "Stick-to-it-iveness" is not an adjective, and it never will be. It's a linguistic catastrophe. You can't just throw "iveness" on the end of an imperative sentence, much less a piece of advice, toss in a bunch of hyphens, and expect to pass it off as a word. I'm Dean Christopher...


[Edited on 3/12/05 by deanchristopher]