The Enumerative: Athletes Who Thought They Were Good At Other Stuff But Actually Sucked

Welcome to our incredibly innovative feature, The Enumerative. Because lists are awesome, plus effective time killers, in this space we'll provide a top five based loosely on something that has recently occurred in the sporting world.

The story of Shaq up on the mike the other night is, to my mind, not the story of Shaq dissing Kobe. That story is ... whatever. He’s up in the club feeling nice and next thing he knows he’s onstage and letting it fly and now we’re supposed to analyze that mess?

No, the real story here is that Shaq can’t rap for crizzdang criddly crap. Granted he was freestylin, but yo, whatever he was doing up there was just plain awful. He’s got absolutely no flow whatsoever and he evidently knows of one rhyme in the English language – “me” with “me.”

Shaq has taken mercy on us and not released an album since 2001. (Man, I’m looking at his album list on Amazon right now -- did you know there’s a “Best of Shaquille O’Neal” album? Best of what? Did people out there actually pay for an album that purported to be the best tracks from, like, Shaq’s other four albums? Does Roy Jones have a “best of” album?) For that reason alone, he narrowly misses inclusion on this list -- The Top Five Athletes Who Thought They Were Good At Doing Something Else But Actually Sucked At It. But you watch out Shaq, cause you are knocking at the door, you feel me? To put it another way, as a great man once said, “brain damage on the mike don’t manage.”

5. Serena Williams. Serena fancies herself a lot of things besides tennis player -- fashion designer, actress, rap-video booty model, red-carpet eye candy. And she unabashedly sucks at all of it. Sadly, Serena seems to be a casualty of the Paris Hilton/Lindsay Lohan era and seems to aspire in her heart to be a like-minded full-blown celebri-skank. Hopefully, she’ll grow out of it, but until she does, she’s on the list.

4. Brian Bosworth. There have been so many bad athlete-turned-actors, but the Boz … the Boz was a prince amongst men. His starring turn in the 1991 film Stone Cold alone earned him his place on this list, and if you haven’t seen it, well, I don’t know what the hell you’re waiting for. It’s about a gang of bikers trying to assassinate the governor of Alabama. To stop them, the cops need to find someone bad enough ... hard enough ... crazy enough ... dammit, they need someone who is STONE COLD to infiltrate that evil biker-gang. That would be the Boz. (Side note: Boz is an interesting entry on this list, because unlike everyone else, he sucked as an athlete too. I don’t feel like that disqualifies him, though.)

3. John McEnroe. Mac has been perpetrating himself as a guitar-playing rocker rebel for years, and to say that he sucks is not to do him justice. He’s horrendous. As you may or may not know, Mac is married to Patty “I Am The Warrior” Smyth. Once on his short-lived talk show (another thing he sucked at, along with “game show host” now that I think about it) he had Patty on and at the end of the show she played a song with her band and Mac sat in on guitar. It was hilarious -- Mac was standing off to the side and seemingly playing a completely different song than the band. Eventually he just stopped and stood there looking left out and pissed. (Check out this YouTubery of Mac singing “Foxy Lady” at some Guinness-fest in Belfast -- evidently he’s playing some guitar as well, although I am guaranteeing you that’s not him ripping off all those face-melting solos.)
2. Mark Gastineau. Yes, Gastineau’s record as a boxer was 15-2, but as we all know now, all of those dudes he beat took dives. It makes perfect sense in retrospect -- I remember watching Gastineau box and thinking, “how the hell is he not getting instantly knocked out in there ... he has NO idea what he’s doing.” Eventually, Alonzo Highsmith stopped him in two rounds in a televised disembowelment that has to be one of the all-time most humiliating sporting events ever for a self-obsessed trash-talking loudmouth on the order of Gastineau. It was sort of like if Billie Jean King, instead of just besting him in a tennis match, had jumped over the net and bitch-slapped Bobby Riggs with her racket.

1. Michael Jordan. MJ tops this list only because his career-change was so shocking and prompted such international scrutiny. Just about everyone in the entire world saw His Airness sucking royally at baseball on an almost daily basis. The story just never got old. “Michael Jordan’s playing baseball! And he sucks!” He deserves the top spot too, because his transition from the court to the diamond marks the essence of what this list is about -- hubris.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.