Sports Meme Power Rankings: Stop Taking The Mediocre Place You're From So Seriously

By Spencer Hall - Featured Contributor

Follow @sbnation on Twitter, and Like SBNation.com on Facebook.

May 20, 2010 - 1. HOLDING STEADY AT ONE LIKE THE PHOENIX SUNS WAVING A CAPE AT LAMAR ODOM AND SCREAMING "OLE!": The NBA Playoffs, Part One: Everyone Hates Orlando.  There's wiring short-circuiting all over this series: a ref chucking a ball at a fan, Marquis Daniels' stepfather getting tased for refusing to leave the game, Stan Van Gundy's veins pulsing at a dangerous rate in front of the eyes of various medics, Bob Ryan making his usual sensible critique of the city...

"This is a really backward useless city," he says. "…It’s a terrible place to live and it’s a stupid place to live even in the good times. "…It’s a useless backwards place and it’s not getting better." And of Florida, he said: "We should give it back to Spain."

I'd love to argue with Bob here, but he's at least right about Orlando. Like most of urban Florida, it's a long waste of suburbs, strip malls, and vacant downtown areas inhabited by strange wandering men on bicycles who cannot come within 500 feet of most schools. It's not even on the water, the one advantage you want in a Floridian city because a.) beaches, and b.) lucrative smuggling operations.

Bob Ryan also wrote this while fending off giant rats in a freezing, 250-foot apartment in Boston, so take heart, offended Orlandoans. Remember: the only fair attitude to take when arbitrarily comparing sports cities: they all suck in their own special way. So Boston, you're a cold, overpriced rat-buffet full of meathead Red Sox fans convinced the city is the navel of the universe while ignoring the filthy lint accumulated therein. Orlando, you're a boring soulless sump with a Disneyfied crust and a populace who does disturbing things during free throw attempts. 

I'm typing this from my car in the abandoned, crack vial-littered wasteland that is Atlanta. We have an airport, Tyler Perry's house, and homeless people. Hope to see you in traffic someday, so I can rob you at gunpoint and take your stuff, where it will be taken by someone else, who I will then buy it back from at a steep markup. Our economy is brilliant. 

Now stop taking the terrible place you live so seriously. Take a lesson from the Orlando Magic, who clearly aren't taking the playoffs against Boston seriously at all since they're down 2-0 and sinking rapidly despite playing the NBA's Golden Girls.

(You're damn right Kevin Garnett is Bea Arthur here. ) 

(And all this off-court excitement is good, because little on the floor has been interesting unless you're a Boston fan.) 

1a. The NBA Playoffs, Part Two: The Lakers Have Found The Accelerator. The Suns continue to hemorrhage points at a rate of 133 a game to the Lakers, who have discovered that if you have taller, better people on your basketball team, you can probably beat even the most talented Canadian cyclops in a game of basketball. Bright Side of the Sun uses the word "embarrassing," and it is more than accurate: 

They didn't show it against Utah or OKC or for large parts of the season, but when they are playing like this with Ron turning down bad shots and hitting good ones, Pau and Lamar destroying in the paint and Kobe looking healthy again and, most importantly, playing together as a team ... the Suns simply have no answer. They are who we thought they might be but hoped they weren't.

Again, the off-court events have been far more interesting than anything happening on the court if you're not a Laker fan who enjoys watching the Suns get gutted by very tall men who move quickly. 

3. UP LIKE THE EYEBROWS OF A THOUSAND NBA FANS: Delonte West's Love Life Is Boring. Yup. Totally Boring. This is so very hard to discuss, because when a rumor pops up once, you can waft it away like a random burst of swamp gas. Maybe it was just something we drove by, you say. Then: the smell returns, and stays, and repeats, and soon you're faced with the possibility you may have a real, legitimate stink on your hands needing address. 

Leave it at this: if this rumor is true, then consider no one a victim, because as he's detailed in previous interviews, Delonte West is a smooth Brigadier General in the Army of Love:

"I did a few romantic things in my day, but I'm not the world's most romantic guy. But I can tell you what I would consider a special night. First, at my lady's work, I would send her a card giving her instructions for the night. Send it to her about midday, so the rest of the day, she has time to think about exactly what I had planned. I would pick my date up. She wouldn't know where we were going. It's got to be a hot day, so I can drop the top in my SL [Mercedes]. I've got the white SL 500. I would tell her, she would have to wear white. She must have on a white dress, because I'm going to have on white. I'd have told her in the note, she has to wear her hair a certain way, just the way I like it. So, I pick her up in my white convertible. From there, I'd have the music pumping on the radio. The Jim Jones pumping, you know, 'Summer in Miami' song pumping. Got to keep a little gangsta, you can't be too soft. You can't be in there playing some guy that's crying, talking about don't leave me and love me baby, wah wah and all that. So Jim Jones pumping and then from there, wind blowing through the hair, boom, we get straight to the point -- we eat afterwards because I don't want to kiss no onions. I don't want to kiss you tasting like onions and steak and mushrooms and everything."

If someone's mother decided to have a Mrs. Stiffler moment with him, you couldn't blame anyone. His powers are undeniable, and his technique flawless. 

4. UP LIKE THE BACKHAND OF A RAGING ANDRE DAWSON: Hanley Ramirez Takes a Leisurely Stroll.  Hanley Ramirez, as seen in an interview with David Attenborough in 2009: 

Hanley Ramirez of the Marlins took a leisurely jog in left field, earning a benching, the scorn of a nation, and an explanation from biologists that Ramirez was not "dogging it," but was instead moving as fast as he could towards a particularly tasty hot dog someone had dropped from the stands. In other news, Hanley Ramirez has been outed as a charismatic and talented tree sloth, something the Marlins plan to embrace after his apology. His very, very slow apology, delivered after Andre Dawson made him cry. 

(I'm not certain he made him cry, actually, but if Andre Dawson lights into you, you'll cry no matter how old you are. I met him when I was 12, and even smiling in a ludicrous thick-corded white sweater and glistening gheri-curl he scared the crap out of me. So yes; I'm totally certain Ramirez wept openly.) 

5. THIS WEEK IN PEDs AND UNSURPRISING NEWS: Floyd Landis Admits Doping. That might indeed need some editing, sirs, since the deposed 2006 Tour de France champ has admitted doping after years of denials and has implicated Lance Armstrong in the case, too. If Lance Armstrong remains the ever litigant guy he is, then a Nike branded cruise missile full of defamation papers is screaming towards Landis' home at this very moment. In the meantime, let me repeat that even if you're high on methamphetamine, tiger penis extract, an extra two pints of doped blood, IV coffee drip, cocaine, and 14 other sketchy PEDs the Tour de France is still the hardest single sporting event in the universe, and might be one of the few athletic achievements that the use of PEDs can't taint. 

6. THIS WEEK IN PEDs AND SURPRISING NEWS: Santana Moss Gets "Fingered." There really has to be a better verb to use here. Just say "implicated" for those of us who still can't make it though Butts County on the interstate without giggling, since headlines like "Landis Fingers Armstrong" and "Report Fingers Receiver" are just...

/giggles for five minutes 

Okay. Composure regained, let's mention that Santana Moss was IMPLICATED in an ever-expanding HGH probe um INVESTIGATION, something he's saying exactly zero about, thank you very much. As always, the best commentary on this matter comes from Twitter, this time via user @docfunk: 

7. DOWN BUT HOVERING LIKE AN ESPN HELICOPTER OVER HIS HOUSE: The New LeBron James Orbiting PR Death Star And Speculation Machine Sponsored By Nike And The Death Of The Rust Belt. This week's Lebron speculation still clogged Sportscenter nightly with open pleas to come to New York by many including Buzz Bissinger, whose New York Times piece on LeBron garnered some discussion in the blogosphere. 

Bissinger joined the discussion with...um...verve? 

He's got the hang of this already. 

8. UP LIKE A JET-SKI RIPPING AIRBORNE OVER THE WAVES CREATED BY A 500-FOOT BILLIONAIRE'S YACHT: Mikhail Prokhorov Makes His Debut. Kia's paying for good advertising these days: The "How You LIke Me Now" ad with the children's toys hijacking the Sorrento and tearing ass around California for a weekend's frolic still slays me because it features a SOCK MONKEY DOMINATING A JET-SKI. 

Conspiracy theory: Mikhail Prokhorov, Nets owner, shadowy Russian oligarch, and jet-ski fanatic, is inside that sock monkey suit and was in fact the stunt double for this commercial. Just look at him: he's a man capable of anything, including spectacular stunts performed on a personal watercraft while wearing a sock monkey suit. Sure, he was upstaged by Madame Pollin and the Wizards' draft lottery coup, but he's clearly the Owner Default Storyline for 2010 in the NBA. 

Additionally, he had his picture taken with Jay-Z, and that is all you need to be a top story on the internet for one week in 2010: 

9. DOWN LIKE THE CHANCES OF THE BIG TEN INVITING LOUISIANA TECH TO THE CONFERENCE: Expansion Rumors Settle Down Somewhat. After fevered speculation, the Big Ten conducted their annual meetings this week with little fuss as Jim Delany said the expansion process would take "eleven months at the longest." This settles down things a bit, and allows for college football fans to get back to their other offseason hobby, assaulting each other's educations, class, families, religion, drinking preferences, and grammar anonymously. 

10. HOLDING STEADY AS ALWAYS:  The Ever Present Brett Favre PR Death Star and Country Bear Jamboree. This week he promised to return if the Southern Miss baseball team made the College World Series. This ensures that the games leading up to Southern Miss's final round prior to the College World Series will all be 22 inning endurance matches with no clear victor until the last possible second, and that ESPN will cover every single bleeding second of each.  

Dropping from the rankings: Hockey because no one rioted or got punched too seriously; horse racing stories of any sort now that the Triple Crown's not happening; US Soccer; Dallas Braden. 

Follow @sbnation on Twitter, and Like SBNation.com on Facebook.

Tweet 2 comments