Outside Features

“Holy f***ing s*** I love hitting home runs.” – Babe Ruth, to a bedridden child. 1932.

The home run is, unequivocally, the most exciting thing in baseball. Well, next to some drunken college junior jumping down onto the field and eluding security for five minutes of excitement that eclipses anything baseball could ever offer.
The home run, however, should be awesome. It's the great equalizer. It can instantly change a game and has long been reason enough for stadiums to light off a few hundred dollars worth of fireworks, sometimes even indoors (see: Kingdome, The). It's also capable of eliciting hugs between strangers, which is otherwise awkward – trust me.

I began my Fourth of July morning like many other Americans. I woke up, put my Lee Greenwood mix on the stereo and red, white and blue underwear on my nether regions, fired a few bottle rockets skyward and then tuned my television to ESPN to watch some weirdos gorge themselves at Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest in New York. And not just a few hot dogs, but more than 60 of the mixed-meat wieners and their accompanying buns in 10 minutes.
Hot dogs, and the grotesque overeating thereof, are quite American, so I'm not going to say that a wiener-eating contest (oh come on, get your head out of the gutter) has no place as a Fourth of July tradition. What I'm more concerned with is that ESPN would recognize competitive eating as a “sport.” If wasting food is a sport, then so is throwing diamonds down sewer drains or showering daily with Evian. But on the other hand, what's more American than throwing away things people in other parts of the world would die for?

Few sport-related events are as bizarre and endlessly confusing as the NBA Draft, which comes just a few weeks after the end of the nipple-twistingly long NBA season, at the precise moment when the needle on most fans' Give-a-Damn-o-Meter is fluttering between “whatever” and one of those thumbs down/fart sound combinations that was the ultimate dis of 1998.
There was a time when the NBA Draft was exciting, or at the very least, topical. It was a graduation of sorts for the best college players to cross the bridge from undergraduate poverty to instant millionaire status as fans proudly welcomed whatever All American their team of choice had selected from the pool. Then, it changed about a decade ago with the influx of straight-outta-high-school hotshots expediting the process by foregoing college all together. Also, people in countries most Americans (sadly) had never heard of started playing basketball – and getting damn good at it, too.

I wish I could have been in the meeting. I would have had some valuable input to provide, especially considering I'd be from the future, my time traveler identity concealed by a fabulously curly mustache. The meeting? I'm of course referring to the gathering of old-timey baseballers sometime after the Civil War when it was decided that a hat would be required atop the heads of all baseball players.
This is a seminal moment in not just sports history, but in the narrative of Western style. Imagine if some guy named Chester Knickerbocker Westinghouse (those were the sort of names people had back then) were to have spoken up.
“The idea of these caps is a straight crackerjack, I tell ya, but would not we be remiss if we didn't at least explore other head-adornment options?” Westinghouse, also fabulously mustached, would have said, receiving a chorus of “here, here” and “oh bully” from the assembled baseball royalty.

Mark Cuban, the crazy-eyed muscleman who sits at the end of the Dallas Mavericks' bench sweating furiously and sometimes bounding onto the court to scream at officials and attempt to chest bump bemused players, is a very rich man. According to Forbes, only 458 human males with more money than Cuban exist.
But here's the thing, those other 458 dudes don't own the Dallas Mavericks and, thus, don't possess a team that just won its first NBA championship. And what do you do if your team just beat out the most overhyped team in the history of the game? Well, you pick up a bar tab that cost about the same amount as a modest home in your hometown. That's right, the multibillionaire (his money came from computers or dial-up modems or something else that seemed futuristic in 1999) picked up a $90,000 tab (with a $20,000 tip, which, all right, I'll admit is cool) all of which went toward a giant bottle of champagne that only a man with the strength of Thor, whoops, I mean Dirk Nowitzki, could lift. The bottle also appeared to be fully gilded (which means it was covered in gold, y'all) which probably added a few grand to that tab.