You give Albert Haynesworth, a twenty-nine year old kid from Hartsville South Carolina, or any twenty-nine year old from any town for that matter, roughly 1.4 million dollars a month in compensation and one shouldn’t be surprised by the outcome. Oh, and he got a little love note back in the spring that included a 21 million dollar show of good faith check as well. I wish I could find my little Asian song-singer friend and make Haynesworth listen to him sing songs for hours on end.
The obscene bling manifest in what athletes make today disgusts me. And spare me the “business modeling” metrics and rationale for what these turds are paid. I’ve seen the numbers and they do indeed reconcile within the NFL business model so spare me the refresher. The fact that the numbers do reconcile in the business model is actually the most pungent reality manifest in professional sports today. A middle class parent can no longer take two kids to a ballgame. I wonder how many more years it will take before parents will have to consider the family budget before even considering an outing to the minor league ballpark. Oh, and let’s don’t give the collegiate realm a free pass. Colleges exist for what purpose? So why do college coaches make millions of dollars? Our societal compass is ass-backwards in general and sports seem to be a coalmine canary collateral marker of such.
So young Albert gets fat over the summer. And young Albert doesn’t like the defense that the Redskins are set on playing. So Albert becomes a problem child…with an assload of money…from the get-go.
But Albert had some tendencies before rolling in to Washington. It seems that young Albert was a head stomper at Tennessee. Even Conrad Dobler would have taken him to task for stomping on the unhelmeted head of an opponent.
Hartsville South Carolina is about twenty-five minutes from where I grew up. A little farming hamlet augmented by the Coker family’s entrepreneurial accomplishments, mainly Coker tobacco seed hybridization and Sunoco Products, a paper/polymer products company. And Albert wasn’t the first sports prodigy to come out of Hartsville (I don’t count the kid named “Freddie” who ran track for Hartsville and who beat the shit out of me in the 880 when I was a senior in high school. He ran with a stick clenched in his teeth and I laughed at him until he smoked me. I lost two 880’s that year in the regular season and Freddie Stickmon was the purveyor of one of those whuppins). Bobo came out of Hartsville too.
Richard Merkin said the Bobo Newsom should be in the baseball hall of fame. He felt strongly enough about it to write a column in GQ declaring so. Bobo…from Hartsville. The Bobo who wouldn’t have approved of young Albert’s shenanigans.
But Bobo was no angel either. He was eccentric and a bit capricious but everyone loved Bobo. He also had run-ins with management and authority in general but he wasn’t a head stomper. Leo Durocher was made crazy(er) by Bobo. The difference is that when Leo told Bobo he wasn’t playin’ in the next lineup, Bobo’s team mates went crazy and refused to play. And Leo relented. Albert’s team mates are ashamed of him.
Bobo, the non-angel slipped away from the scene and with whatever amount of money they paid those boys back then, finished his years down in Florida, causing no trouble, quietly and compliantly drinking beer until his liver gave out. They sent his bling-less and humble shell back to Hartsville for interment. The next time LFG and I are home, I think we’ll go over to Hartsville and say hello to Bobo. I’ll extend greetings on behalf of Merkin too. As for young Albert? We won’t be looking him up.
Onward.
ADG, II
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