This is a funny article, because of the Phil Mickelson revelations and the fact that somebody in a major publication finally mentioned Curt Schilling's fake bloody sock! Turns out he's a jerk. Who knew? Good stuff.
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Who are the most roundly despised men in pro sports? We asked their peers-and they came out swinging By David Gargill and Nate Penn
GQ: The Five Who Just Missed the Cut
Jeff Kent
Says one reporter: "He's got two moods-sour and angry." Another recalls spotting him eating alone at a restaurant during a road trip. "Five minutes later, eight of his teammates walk in, and they nod, and he nods. Then the eight teammates sit at a different table. He literally doesn't need friends." "I hate when guys say, 'Oh, he's misunderstood,' " says John Lopez, of the Houston Chronicle. "Jeff Kent's not misunderstood. He's a prick." Lopez notes, however, that Kent's hard-nose style actually inspired the 2004 Astros, a perhaps overly mellow group: "They needed that injection of prickness."
Randy Johnson
"The only time I've seen him smile is when he thinks he's embarrassed somebody," says one sportswriter. Another recalls something called Rule 51, named for Johnson's uniform number and in force during his years in Arizona. According to Rule 51, Johnson would personally select the defense for each of his starts. "He wanted things to be just right the days he pitched," says the sportswriter, and teammates accepted this "because he was their meal ticket." Says another sportswriter, "He's just a very sour guy. He's like a tall Kent."
Rasheed Wallace
In Portland, Rasheed, the Blazers' best player, pissed off teammates by getting kicked out of games so often. Along with Bonzi Wells, he would at times engage in less-than-professional behavior as well, making headlines on one occasion for playfully firing a basketball across a practice court and directly into the nuts of Blazers center Ruben Boumtje Boumtje. "Bonzi and Rasheed ran off the court laughing. They thought that was the funniest thing," says Jason Quick, of the Portland Oregonian. Freed of Bonzi's influence, Wallace won a ring in Detroit.
A-Rod
"The issue with Alex is his insecurity," says a writer who's covered him. "He needs people to tell him he's great. It struck me that he'd be looking around sometimes, fishing for guys to tell him, 'Oh, you're the best.' " The sportswriter recalls A-Rod's vain attempt to bask in the reflected glory of Hank Blalock after the latter won the 2003 All-Star Game with a late-inning homer. "Alex was patting him on the head like he was a little kid, and it really pissed Hank off." Another writer disagrees: "People say he's phony, but I don't see it."
Danny Fortson
Fortson may believe that playing in blowouts is beneath him: According to one sportswriter, during the fourth quarter of a game in which the Mavs were enjoying a huge lead, he disappeared to take a dump and never came back. Don Nelson and Jerry Colangelo have assailed him in the media for thuggery; reportedly, Forton has tried to take out players' knees in practice. But beat writers say he's a nice guy and a great interview: "I don't think he's the Antichrist by any stretch," says one. -David Gargill and Nate Penn
10. Lleyton Hewitt
To our minds, Lleyton Hewitt's obsession with Rocky is reason enough to put the Aussie tennis star on the list (the dude fires himself up on the court by shouting, "C'mon, Rock!"), but it's his race-baiting during the 2001 U.S. Open that really seals the deal. Serving in the third set against American James Blake, Hewitt was called for multiple foot faults by a black linesman. Incensed, he approached the chair umpire and, pointing first to the offending linesman and then to Blake, said, "Look at him and you tell me what the similarity is."
"It was a terrible act," says tennis sage Bud Collins. "Everybody knew what he meant."
"The thing is, he's a big foot faulter," adds former pro and current analyst Mary Carillo. "So the idea that all of a sudden, in the heat of a match, he's getting called for it out of racial bias was ridiculous.
"He makes guys crazy," Carillo adds. "They try hard to ignore him, but he's always barking on the other side of the net." In his 2005 Australian Open match against Argentine Juan Ignacio Chela, Hewitt so enraged Chela with his frenzied celebration of an unforced error that Chela fired a serve directly at him, then spat at him during a changeover.
"We all know how Lleyton is," said another Argentine player, Guillermo Coria. "He can be the best player in the world, win every tournament, but I would not want to be like him." Hewitt, Coria added, is disliked "by every other player on the international circuit."
Hewitt isn't even popular in his native Australia. He has been booed in his hometown, and after the incident with Chela, one Australian paper proclaimed, "Many regretted [the spit] did not find its target."
9. A. J. Pierzynski
Google the phrase clubhouse cancer and the ?rst two results will be stories about Chicago White Sox catcher A. J. Pierzynski. Teammates and members of the media use those words and others-unprofessional, immature, arrogant, aloof-to describe him. His baseball misdemeanors are legion: chirping at the opposition, bitterly contesting balls and strikes (very stupid for a catcher, who must win goodwill for his pitcher), and venting his frustrations on opposing first basemen. "He doesn't have a lot of baseball etiquette," says one ex-teammate. "He'll deliberately step on your foot at first base, then say, 'Man, I didn't mean to do that!' "
The most telling of the many, many (seriously, you wouldn't believe how willing people were to talk about this guy) Pierzynski anecdotes we heard took place during spring training in 2004. Pierzynski, crouched behind the plate, took a pitch to the groin. Rushing to his aid, trainer Stan Conte asked him how he felt. "Like this!" Pierzynski grunted, then savagely kneed Conte in the balls.
"You just want to choke him," says the ex-teammate, who has also played against him. "You want your pitcher to hit him in the head."
8. Phil Mickelson
Last August at the PGA Championship at Baltusrol, in New Jersey, a reporter turned to a golfer on the tour and said of Phil Mickelson, "Man, the fans here love Phil." The golfer replied, "They don't know him the way we do." It blew our minds a little when we heard this, since Mickelson ranks among the most admired golfers in America. But today the same reporter makes his case bluntly: "Phil Mickelson literally has no friends out there. He annoys everybody."
Mickelson has earned many nicknames on the Tour, but our favorite is FIGJAM (Fuck, I'm good-just ask me). "There are a bunch of pros who think he and his whole smiley, happy face are a fraud," another reporter says. "They think he's preening and insincere." Mickelson has aggressively pursued a family-man image that is crucial to his success as an endorser. In 1999, when he nearly won the U.S. Open, Mickelson wore a beeper onto the fairway to alert him when his wife went into labor. If the beeper went off during the final round, he announced, he would simply walk off the course. Some of Mickelson's peers, smelling a PR stunt, badly wanted to call his bluff. "Everybody's saying, 'Oh God, I want that beeper to go off,' " recalls one writer. (It didn't.)
In 2003, Mickelson violated multiple taboos when he told a reporter that Tiger Woods was playing with "inferior equipment" and that he envied Mickelson's longer drives from the tee. Woods was infuriated. "You just don't say shit like that in golf," says a reporter. (To be fair, another reporter says, "Phil was right.")
Shortly before the 2004 Ryder Cup, though, Mickelson abruptly switched from Titleist to Callaway equipment. He left himself little time to get used to the new balls and clubs. "It wasn't in the best interest of the team," says a reporter. "The only thing that it was in the best interest of was his ?nancial gain." The contract paid a reported $7 million to $10 million annually. "What it did was set up a bull's-eye on him if he played poorly," says a different reporter. "Which he did."
Most recently, Mickelson blew off the 2005 Tour Championship, though the PGA was in the midst of negotiating its new TV contract. One reporter says, "The Tour was trying to come up with a plan that would make the networks happy, so it wouldn't have to give back a lot of money, and here's the number three player in the world skipping the premier season-ending event. Other players said, 'How about helping the rest of us who aren't as rich?' " Adds another reporter: "It's like not showing up for somebody's wedding."
7. Bonzi Wells
Not yet 30 years old, Bonzi Wells, shooting guard for the Sacramento Kings, has played for three NBA teams. "If you've got that much ability and you're traded three times that early in your career," says ex-NBA player and current ESPN commentator Tom Tolbert, "there's obviously something wrong with you."
Words like fumigate come up when people try to explain why GMs trade him. "It doesn't bother him if his unhappiness infects the entire team," says Memphis sportswriter Geoff Calkins, who recalls that when Grizzlies coach Hubie Brown was contemplating retirement (citing health reasons), "part of the calculus for Hubie was 'It's not worth it,' and a big part of that was Bonzi. He helped bring Hubie down."
When Brown's successor, Mike Fratello, pulled Wells from a game at the end of last season, Bonzi threw a tantrum involving, characteristically, both profanity and projectiles. "This was in the final weeks of the season," says Ron Higgins, another Memphis sportswriter, "when the Grizzlies were desperately trying to make the playoffs. Other players looked at him like, What the hell are you doing?"
Recalls sportswriter Jason Quick, who covered Bonzi in Portland: "He would flip off a fan and the next day say, 'I blacked out.' He's such a con man. When the TV lights went on, he'd put on that million-dollar smile, then be an ass when they left." He spat, infamously, on Danny Ferry. He bitched constantly at his coaches. He was fined for bad-mouthing his own fans in Sports Illustrated. He made a veiled threat after a reporter wrote a negative story about him.
"He told me, 'Don't be surprised one day if you show up to practice with a steak over your eye,' " Quick remembers. "And I said, 'If you want to do that, I'll be a rich man.' He said, 'I'm not dumb enough to do it myself. I'll have my posse do it.' "
6. Michael Iaconelli
We give you America's biggest basshole. As one rival puts it, Iaconelli, a loud, brash New Jerseyite, has "disgraced" the predominantly southern, rural, Christian sport of angling. "When he catches one," says celebrated fisherman Denny Brauer, "you've got the fist pumps, the running around the boat, the lying flat on the boat. He'll stare at the fish, yell at it, point at it. He'll shake his finger at it."
Iaconelli has repeatedly defied the sport's time-honored codes. Among them:
Respect a man's water. "He sees somebody catching fish and pulls right in front of 'em," angler Brent Chapman explains. At an event on the Potomac River in June 2005, Chapman says, Iaconelli observed him hauling in a six-pound bass. "He proceeded to start fishing right in front of me. I asked him, 'Are you really gonna fish here?' He proceeded to yell profanities at me."
No wakes means no wakes. "A lot of times, he has eight to ten boats following him," says Brauer. At Lake Wissota in 2005, Brauer adds, "He would come charging into our area with his group and just totally ransack the whole little basin for an hour and then be gone. He ruined the water."Lose with honor. At the Bassmaster Classic-the Super Bowl of angling-in Charlotte in 2004, Iaconelli "was suffering from a bad day of fishing," says rival Bernie Schultz, "and he deliberately fished out-of-bounds to get himself disqualified. It's very difficult to even get qualified for that championship, and he turned it into a circus act. It was an inexcusable way of keeping himself in the forefront with the media. I know it was calculated. I know he did it purposefully."
"Iaconelli is a big-city angler and a product of the street," Schultz adds. "Our sport should be portrayed more like golf or tennis or sports of that nature."
5. Kobe Bryant
"I'd be the first to tell you that Kobe has not helped himself with a lot of what's gone on," says Greg Anthony, former NBA player and current ESPN analyst. "He's never been the type to do things that would endear him to his teammates." Maurice Carter, one of Bryant's former Laker teammates, agrees: "He's to himself. You're not in Kobe's life outside basketball; you just have to accept that." But it's not the off-court cold shoulder that rubs his teammates the wrong way; Bryant's on-court behavior is the real problem. "As a player," explains Anthony, "?rst and foremost, it's shot selection. You've gotta understand that when you're not playing the game the right way, it's going to negatively impact you toward your teammates. And there were a lot of complaints about Kobe being sel?sh, not caring about anyone other than himself. Even his coach said he was uncoachable. If your coach is saying it, you can rest assured the players are saying it."
Shaquille O'Neal was the focal point in Phil Jackson's vaunted triangle offense, but Kobe's refusal to take a backseat to the Diesel sunk what could've been the most dominant basketball dynasty ever. "I've talked to Scottie Pippen and Michael," says Anthony, "and if Michael Jordan played with Shaq, he would have found a way to let Shaq be the man."
"They could have won six in a row," says one NBA insider, but Shaq and Kobe "wouldn't even speak to each other. I mean, that's almost unheard-of. You're talking about teammates, the two best players at the time-not only on the team, but in the league-and they had no personal relationship. None. And I'm not talking about a day but an entire season!"
And who could blame Shaq-"the best teammate in the world," according to Carter-for shunning Bryant after Kobe inexplicably told Colorado police that O'Neal had paid up to $1 million to discreetly remedy situations like the one Kobe found himself in during the summer of 2003. "That's outlandish," says Carter. "And why he said it, I have no idea." Greg Anthony adds: "That's something you don't ever do. You never discuss someone else's personal business with anybody. That's an unwritten rule that he broke, and there's a price to pay when you do something like that."
4. Curt Schilling
"Between the white lines, it's all real," says one reporter who has covered Schilling. "But outside the white lines, there's a huge gap between the man and the image he projects." Take, for instance, Schilling's self-glorifying display during Congress's steroid hearings last March or his absurdly patriotic open letter to America on ESPN.com after 9/11, for which his teammates mocked him on a late-night bus ride with a chorus of "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy."
"They know what he's about," says the sportswriter. "I'd say a large percentage of them like him-every fifth day. He wears on people."
On days he doesn't pitch, Schilling is notorious for striking TV-ready poses on the dugout stairs. (His manager in Philadelphia, Jim Fregosi, dubbed him Red Light Curt.) "He's somebody who's always positioning himself in terms of what's best for Curt Schilling," says ESPN's Pedro Gomez, who described Schilling as "the consummate table for one." (Speaking of which, Schilling also has a reputation for sneaking into the clubhouse late in games to get a head start on the buffet.)
So avid is Schilling's longing for the spotlight that some of his peers raise doubts about his now legendary turn in the 2004 postseason, when he pitched on an ankle tendon that had been sutured in place. During Game 6, cameras cut repeatedly to the bright red stain on Schilling's sock. It was blood, right? "The Diamondbacks people think he definitely doctored that sock," says the sportswriter. The ex-teammate laughs: "All around baseball, people questioned that. It was funny how the stain didn't spread."
3. Kurt Busch
After Kurt Busch won the 2004 Nextel Cup Series, his sponsor, Newell Rubbermaid, considered dropping him as an endorser. Dropping the champ? "It's unprecedented," says Eric Pinkham, the company's motor-sports director. But, he adds, "there have been far greater champions in NASCAR, and we wish we'd had one."
Last November, after being pulled over outside Phoenix, Busch said to the officers on duty, "Aren't you supposed to be directing traffic somewhere?" When the officers asked Busch to perform a field sobriety test, he said, "I'm not doing this gay test!" and was summarily cuffed and arrested (though later released). "We weren't trying very hard to find out about anything, frankly," says a source for Roush Racing, Busch's former team. "But when we saw what the sheriff told the AP, we said, 'We gotta get into it.' Forget that he tried to spin it that he'd never had a drink. The whole police interaction, that whole level of flouting authority, is just so far out-of-bounds for the expected behavior of a NASCAR driver."
During a race last October, he goes on, Busch said of his team's owner over the radio, "Tell Jack Roush to stick his head up his ass." And according to the Roush source, "Busch relentlessly criticized his teammates over the radio. He'd call 'em out during the race and tell 'em they're going to be fired." At one point this spring, Busch's entire crew threatened to quit, until his crew chief, Jimmy Fenning, calmed them down. When everything went Busch's way on the track in 2004, the press began to think that maybe he'd grown up. "That was always our spin with him: He has matured," says our Roush source.
"But after winning the championship, at our team dinner, with wives and other guests present and the whole extravaganza being put on by NASCAR, his toast was 'To NASCAR-they can lick my salty balls!' Like I say, unrepentant."
2. Barry Bonds
At no time in recorded history have coaches and teammates spoken admiringly of Barry Bonds's interpersonal skills. Bonds himself concedes that at every level he's played, from high school to the pros, people have said he's had a bad attitude. His coach at Arizona State described him as "rude, inconsiderate, and self-centered," adding, "I never saw a teammate care about him." In 1989, beat writers dubbed Bonds, then a budding star in Pittsburgh, his team's "MDP"-most despised player.
"He has the world's biggest chip on his shoulder," says a reporter who's covered him. "He's got a screw loose. One day he'll be smiling and friendly. The next he'll be Asshole Barry." The fact that we know of only a handful of occasions on which Bonds has brawled with Giants teammates (e.g., Jeff Kent, 2002; Jason Christiansen, 2005), the reporter says, is a credit to the Giants' PR machine. "There have been hints that there have been more altercations and more problems behind closed doors." To what degree Bonds's alleged steroid use has affected his performance, not to mention his moods, is anybody's guess. Ours is that at the very least, he comes by the attitude naturally.
1. Terrell Owens
Congratulations, Terrell!
(If it's any consolation, we still love you.)
