Groupies.
Players love them, wives hate them.
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| Marquis Daniels, winner of the "Unknowingly Shower with the Groupies" contest. (Getty Images) |
Besides being readily accessible and dressed to impress, the good thing about groupies is they know when to console losers.
The lucky winner of the "Unknowingly Shower with the Groupies" contest? Marquis Daniels. Marquis Daniels? All he did in Game 3 was play four minutes and commit one turnover. Perhaps they were Auburn fans?
They were escorted out the locker room without any consequences, which is a bit shocking because as Dallas guard Darrell Armstrong said, "We should have somebody do the same thing in a WNBA locker room. But if a guy did that, he'd be arrested."
Ah, the old double standard -- what applies to women does not always apply to men. We’ve fought enough battles with women over the years to know not to travel down this rocky road.
Some of you scoring at home might wonder what these women looked like and why they would pick Daniels, a reserve who has played sparingly in the playoffs. Surely there are many answers, but one could be that Mark Cuban pays his players very, very well. Daniels is making $5.3 million this season. That may be mind-boggling, but not when you consider Keith Van Horn is being paid $15.6 million to hike up his socks, offer a stone-faced look on the bench for 40 minutes and then miss a couple of three-pointers each night.
It’s possible the women were looking for a place to hide from pesky security. Why the term "pesky"? Because according to one of the stories linked above, "As for the uninvited shower guests, the players took the intrusion in stride. The women, according to well-placed sources, were invited to stay."
That statement is funny considering all the bluster put up about how groupies are annoying, infringe on the players lives and put a strain on marriages. Granted, neither article provides names of players seen leaving with the ladies "dressed to impress," but considering this is Miami we’re talking about, we’re guessing they were solid 9s.
It’s really too bad writers don’t have groupies. Imagine this scene -- women clamoring at the media door exit clutching copies of "Elements of Style" and a printed out copy of a writer’s latest work, hoping for an autograph.
Having covered the NFL, NBA and Major League baseball, we have to say there’s no comparison to soccer. By far, that sport has the most amazing, whiplash-inducing groupies on the planet. We’re not talking about MLS. We're referring to international soccer.
We once covered an AC Milan friendly at Giants Stadium about five years ago. The game featured the likes of Zinedine Zidane (in his prime -- not the current, watered-down version), Luis Figo, Roberto Carlos, plus many others that have slipped out of our increasingly poor memory (we blame it on too many Red Bull and vodkas from 2000-2004).
After we wandered down to the "mixed zone" for interviews, members of the media were actually behind groupies, angling for room. This is not to say we were complaining (when was the last time an athlete said something remotely interesting after a match, anyway) -- it was just ... comical. And fun, too. We always perk up when we hear accents, and then try to throw out a line in that language. Let’s just say our Spanish failed us that night. One woman flat-out told us, "I speak Portuguese, not Spanish."
More recently (this week), we sat down to lunch with a woman linked to several athletes -- Jeremy Shockey and Tony Gonzalez to name two. Of course she denied the stories that appeared in the press, and having dealt with many, many liars over the years, we actually believed the reports of her association with said athletes were bogus and simply "ratcheted up" for the sake of being interesting.
This woman in question, Vida Guerra, the model/actress/singer who will appear on the cover of this month’s Playboy, flat out told us she would never date an athlete because she sees how women act around them. She said she can’t imagine how women would act around the athletes on the road -- when girlfriends and wives aren’t around (except Doug Christie’s wife, she’s always around). Guerra actually sounded afraid of groupies.
The Dallas Mavericks don’t appear to share the same sentiment.
