Why does Happy Gilmore Exist?

“I am not a role model,” while an admirable sentiment, was always beside the point. Sure, parents should never raise their kids in the image of a man who has done nothing but grow really tall and ball really well, but, over the years, I’ve come across enough bad parents to fill a Tolstoy novel (I worked for a while as a teacher at a private school, in San Francisco, no less), and have never met one who pointed at Stephen Curry or Ronnie Lott or even Kurt Warner and said, “Son, live your life as he does.” It’s possible, I suppose, that Charles did help vacate some vague responsibility for athletes, but whenever I hear someone call up to a sports talk radio show and bitch and whine about how some athlete is making it tougher for the caller to raise his kids (a funny paradox: anyone who calls into a sports talk radio show should not have kids to raise…We’ll pass the verdict on pretentious basketball bloggers later), I never really believe him. In that scenario, it’s always clear that the caller who worries about his children simply sees something ugly in the athlete that he can identify in himself, and, therefore, questions his own ability to raise his kids (half the time, I don’t even believe the caller has kids at all and is just evoking “the kids,” Helen Lovejoy-style just to bask, at least for a little while, on the stoic, macho, Bro-han side of things). Nothing else makes sense.

On a somewhat related note, I have found myself wondering over the past few years why there have never been any real changes to my list of favorite athletes, only minor renovations and rearrangements—McCants replaces Vernon Maxwell, Rasheed and the Glove swap places and then swap back. And while I won’t bore you with my own personal exodus in the years that have passed since I saw Rasheed strolling around the courts at Granville Towers, just know, those traits of dysfunction that made me identify with him have all been rationalized away and suppressed, as has the dickish bravado that turned Sam Cassell into one of my heroes. Still, even after watching both those guys play out an entire career, the guys who have lined up to replace Rasheed and Sam-I-Am are just Rasheed and Sam-I-Am all over again.

During the World Cup, my least favorite player was Uruguay’s Diego Forlan. I was in Mexico City and had caught La Seleccion fever (Uruguay was in the same group with my two rooting interests: South Korea and Mexico), but I didn’t have the same problem with Luis Suarez or equally obnoxious strikers on other squads. After Uruguay beat La Seleccion, it became clear that I hated Diego Forlan because I hated his stupid face and that goddamn hair. It doesn’t need to be said that any hatred of face and hair is racialized, especially on a stage like the World Cup, and I was in the company of one of my favorite people in the world, a man who does not apologize for always rooting for the underdog: racial, civic, economic or otherwise, and it felt right to root against the blonde, attractive guy.

I think the sports talk radio caller exists on the other side of the spectrum, not politically, exactly, but in how he processes the athlete. When confronted with a “troubled” athlete, some of us root for him because we can identify the same traits in ourselves and want to see an example of society’s acceptance, but also because we want to cut down the guy who is ahead of us in the pecking order. When that usurpring desire gets too uncomfortable, the tendency is to flush out that discomfort with liberal sentiment, all of which serves to prove that while we might hate Diego Forlan because of his stupid face, we are not racist. The talk show radio caller has the same experience of identifying the trouble within himself, but instead of washing out the resulting ethical discomfort with liberal sentiment, he simply closes his eyes and identifies with the man in charge, the man who always smiles, prints money and worries about the welfare of women and children, the man who, of course, is not him.