BECAUSE WE CAN'T STOP NOW
It's cute, other sports. The NBA can compete for a while for sheer absurdity. The NFL tries, but fails because it is by design created to stamp every last crinkle and crease of individual out of its participants. (Peyton Manning is basically a talking pressed sheet of aluminum at this point; his greatest concerns in life now is rust and the threat of continued oxidation.) Soccer is really the only serious competitor for total absurdity, even if calling press conferences to deny killing a Ghanaian rapper to perform a human sacrifice is almost cheating.
We say this because yesterday, college football stormed into the party with a sack of oxycontin, a handle of Evan Williams, and eight drunk Marines on shore leave. And it decided it did not like how quiet the party had gotten. For some reason the Marines had hammers. No, we don't want to know why, we just want to get out of the way and out the back door before this gets any more interesting.
To recap: a rapper/media mogul worth about $700 million has a son on the UCLA football team. This son, a redshirt junior on the team, is kicked out of practice by the strength coach for lack of effort. The rapper arrives at the facility and confronts the strength coach. A fracas ensues, and in the fracas a kettlebell is thrown at a student intern. The rapper is then arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. Someone writes all of this down, and does not believe it.
This is the internet and hyperbole and distortion are not norms, but instead the very vocabulary of the thing itself. Carl Hiaasen once said he was getting tired of writing about Florida because the state kept winning. He could make something up, like a bodyguard being sodomized by a horny, lonely dolphin, for instance, and then realize he could not win because inevitably, like clockwork, someone would climb into the pool at Sea World to get sodomized by a dolphin. He kept writing reality before it happened, or at least daring it to rise to the level of his worst imagination.
That's what's happening here. This is a blowout of the first order. This is another touchdown in a 42-0 hammering, and it's not even two minutes before halftime. Reality wins every damn time because if you asked us to make up a story, we would never include any of the following elements because even in satire they would be considered too ridiculous to have any measured effect:
- The guy who spent most of the 1990s muttering "that's right" and "yeah" behind Mase and Big rapping over recycled disco beats going apeshit and becoming the Chopper Dave of all helicopter parents
- Puff challenging the worst possible choice in a Coaching Fight Fantasy Draft in an office literally stuffed with jacked fellow trainers and football players capable of hang cleaning him into the drop ceiling
- That strength coach being Sal Alosi, the guy previously best known for tripping a player from the sideline during his time as strength coach with the Jets
- Sal Alosi joining any club whose members include 50 Cent and Drake
- A man who could be UCLA's single biggest athletic department benefactor being arrested and dragged off campus in the back of a campus police car
- Campus police anywhere actually arresting someone for something they should arrest them for
- Combs picking the best implement in the weight room for fighting a strength coach out of instinct, which really is some stellar work in the heat of the moment.
- Jim Mora is involved in a situation where Jim Mora is not one of the aggravating parties
So while we're just attempting to write reality before it happens, let's keep going and get some of this down on paper. This is a plot by Pete Carroll to undermine the UCLA program and pave the way for his return to USC, where he will use his deep connections in the hip-hop and entertainment worlds to drive a river of wayward recruits back to USC. Jim Mora will take an NFL job with the relocated Rams franchise, Sal Alosi will be fired and rehired by Mora, and Puff Daddy will escape all charges because lawyers do amazing work, particularly when they are well-compensated and working in a celebrity-friendly town.
Someone will make a kettlebell cast in the shape of Puff Daddy's head. This person will probably be Sean Combs.
All of this will happen and there is nothing on earth we can do to prevent it.