Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook
Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.
When you think of celebrity sports fans, you usually think of stars, especially fading stars, glomming onto front-runners to enhance their own reputations, like Matthew Modine sitting courtside at Knicks games during the Patrick Ewing era.
I once saw Jamie Foxx further that trend during a Miami Heat game, when the TNT crew asked him whether he followed his hometown Dallas Mavericks. Foxx, in Miami to shoot Miami Vice with Colin Farrell, undid all the goodwill from Ray by proving himself an A-list bandwagon-jumper, saying he used to follow the Lakers, but that he now roots for the Heat "because I'm a Shaq fan."
(To get an idea of how desperate Foxx is to associate himself only with
coolness, he did not laugh when TNT host Charles Barkley joked that
Foxx's "Miami Vice" co-star would be "Will Ferrell." Quick survey: how
many of you would be far more excited about "Miami Vice" with Will
Farrell than Colin Farrell as Don Johnson's Crockett? I thought so.)
Maybe I'm particularly sensitive to stars' lending their allegiance to big-city, championship teams because those tend not to be the teams I root for. For example, when my Indiana Pacers trot out a big star in the stands, it's Rupert from "Survivor." That's not even Matthew Modine territory. So I'm heartened whenever I see celebrities who take it upon themselves to improve the proletariat's respect for their sports fandom.
Jack Nicholson stays with the Los Angeles Lakers even when the Jamie Foxxes of the world have abandoned them, going so far as to threaten to shut down the Boston set of his latest, Martin Scorsese-directed film if anyone showed up wearing gear featuring the hometown Celtics. Spike Lee has similar feelings for his New York Knicks, staying long after every big name, including some members of the Knicks themselves, have phoned in their regrets.
But no one is doing more to advance the cause of lending celebrity to non-celebrity teams as Mr. Jessica Simpson, Nick Lachey. He may be more Matthew Modine than Jack Nicholson, but still.
The best moment of the MTV series "Newlyweds" — actually, the
only moment I saw — involved the Simpsons going to the 2005 Orange Bowl
in Miami. They and their friends were stuck in traffic on the way to the
stadium, which no one worried about because they were going to the game to see Simpson's sister Ashlee sing at halftime. That is, everyone but Lachey, who was getting agitated because he was going to be late to the freakin' NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP COLLEGE FOOTBALL GAME. Lachey squirmed in his seat like a man with uncontrollable diarrhea. He jumped back and forth between his party and the driver, to get the driver's read on whether they were ever going to get to the game. He made numerous cellphone calls to whomever he could to see if there was any magical way to beat the traffic.
When they finally got to their suite, Lachey bolted from his party to sit in front to watch the USC-Oklahoma game. Lachey, wearing the lucky dingy-gray USC T-shirt he'd worn watching every game of the Trojans' so-far undefeated season, yelled, whooped, booed, flinched and generally squirmed in his seat like a man with uncontrollable diarrhea as he caught every moment of the game. "I married a psycho," Simpson said, rolling her eyes.
Oh, Jessica, you don't know the half of it. Lachey's status as a USC fan comes from making his home in Los Angeles, but his real heart, the real reason any sports fan should respect him no matter how crappy his music, lies with the fact Lachey otherwise actively roots for teams from his hometown of Cincinnati, one of the most woebegone sports towns there is.
It's harder to tell these days what career Lachey is bucking for — singer or Cincinnati Enquirer sports columnist. Lachey confided in the May 30 edition of the Enquirer that the Reds' release of relief pitcher Danny Graves and the University of Cincinnati's sudden distaste for renegade (and successful) basketball coach Bob Huggins were distracting him as he tried to finish an album in his Los Angeles studio. When University of Cininnati president Nancy Zimpher, mistress of the pan flute, recently told Huggins to quit or be fired, Lachey interrupted work on his album — now taking place in Stockholm, Sweden — to pen another Enquirer column in support of Huggins, which ran Aug. 23. If the sports elite of Cincinnati doesn't get its stuff together, the world will never get to hear that next Nick Lachey album.
As a columnist, Lachey is no Jim Murray, what with fanboy rants that
don't exactly bring an objective eye to the situations with the Reds or
the University of Cincinnati. But Lachey's columns prove he's not afraid
to openly root for the kinds of teams, USC football excepted, that even
Rupert from Survivor, much less Matthew Modine, would avoid. I've never
heard Lachey sing a note, but as a celebrity fan who's truly a fan, his
columns are music to my ears.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
