Well, the sports world is cycling down again, drifting back into silliness bordering on madness, and we know why.
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| Bo knew, all right. Just ask Johnny Mac. (Getty Images) |
We don't have time for a big history lesson on either for you younger whippersnappers, except to say that without Bo Diddley's place in and gifts to music 60 years ago, you'd be listening to show tunes instead of Li'l Wayne. Without Carlin, Richard Pryor might not have been as good (and vice versa, since they both knew, liked and borrowed tricks of the craft from each other).
So is it any wonder that because they called it a day this month, everyone's been a little more cranky and a little less sensible? Sure, you could just attribute that to people's natural tendency to behave like weasels when confronted by, well, anything, but we think otherwise, and the only ones who could prove us wrong are the two guys who just settled their tabs.
• Willie Randolph would have been fired, but he would have been fired the right way.
• Shaquille O'Neal would have heard his inner voice say, "Nobody wants me to talk about how my behind tastes."
• Don Imus would have said what he says he wanted to say about Adam Jones because radio people are professionals and say what they mean.
• Hitler wouldn't be making a rhetorical comeback.
• The current navel-gazing spitwars between bloggers would dissipate into a festival of "let a thousand flowers bloom" rather than this weird cyberbackbiting Cultural Revolution.
• Terry Bradshaw's steroid use would not have caused Terry Bradshaw to admit to it.
• Gary Bettman would not have lost his mind and started punishing his league's owners.
• Duke would not have gone to court to have a judge agree with its contention that its football team qualifies as urban blight.
• Becky Hammon's summer job would not have gotten so many people who really don't know who Becky Hammon is into such a state.
Yes, some of these cultural brain tumors predate Carlin's death and even Diddley's, but let us not be bound by the artificial laws of temporality. The universe has been edging out of whack for awhile, and different life forms have different tolerances and sensibilities.
And not all of the current nonsense can be explained by the demises of Carlin and Diddley, of course. Tim Donaghy v. David Stern predates it all and is going to get uglier before it gets better. I mean, when you go after a man's shoes, you're not fooling around any more. Rick Dutrow was already a speak-first, speak-second gasbag and would have reflexively thrown his jockey under the hooves for committing an act of sensible mercy no matter what.
But the weight of goofy behavior cannot be explained by the glib "Well, there's nothing going on in sports right now and people get bored" nonsense. There's plenty going on, or about to be: Euro 2008, the College World Series, the Olympic Trials, baseball every day, the NHL and NBA drafts, and etc. Just because you don't pay attention to it doesn't mean it isn't happening, grasshopper.
And this theory is as good (and as bad) as anyone else's. In fact, I rather prefer it to any other because of the outsized importance of these two gents. Any time you can get the impact of someone's death to cross generations, especially these two generations, you have to take notice.
Plus, I liked them a lot, as any sentient being would. See, we can all navel-gaze from time to time when it suits us.
Now at some point, the world will snap back to what passes for normal, at least until the Mayan end of times in 2012, and we know we're nowhere near out of the woods with bad/stupid/silly/self-absorbed/arrogant behavior from the sweat set. I mean, if Chad Johnson can use "I'm crazy but I'm not stupid" as the heart of his defense, we have miles to go before we can sleep.
But this has been a busy month for knuckleheadery, and if you have a better theory, keep it to yourselves. We have enough on our plate trying to figure out the need for zombie kickball.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
