The Curious Case of Handjob Bob
It's just too easy to pile on Revs owner Robert Kraft; he's a widower who got a little randy and went looking for a rub & tug from a professional. That's actually the advice they give to NFL and NBA rookies: going to a pro is far better than trolling a nightclub for a little trim and ending up paying 18 years of child support, and the police generally don't even bother with that tier of the personal services industry.
The problem of course is that, although The Deuce is first rate TV, the ugly reality is that BJ Bobby was apparently being serviced by a third world sex slave who's been bought and sold more times than the average '89 Corolla. One report says that the women were locked up 24/7/365, slept on their massage tables, cooked their meals on the back stairs and were required to service 1500 men every year.
By almost anyone's standards, Bob has pretty much lapped former LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling in the Worst Person in Sports Sweepstakes. Sterling, a stupid old man from another era – if not planet – made some wildly bigoted private remarks to a friend. He was fined $2.5 million and banned from the NBA for life.
Former Reds owner Marge Schott, a foul mouthed old hatebag, aside from the usual bigoted crapola (she said they were just jokes), kept Nazi paraphernalia in her bedside table and told people what a swell guy that Hitler fellow was. So long Margie.
But Handjob Bob has left them in the dust; he was an active, willing participant in commercial grade human oppression although I'm certain we'll be hearing soon that he didn't know those women were literally slaves, he just figured they were University of Miami sorority girls with a side job.
Or maybe that he heard the Revs are in serious need of a finisher.
Still, two things render this topic not-yet-ripe-for-comment:
First, we don't know much about MLS rules regarding owner behavior. We can assume that, like everyone else, they have a morals clause with some kind of sanctions for bringing the league into disrepute, but we just don't know. That said, wouldn't you love to see what the MLS I/O rights to Boston Massachusetts might be worth to some billionaire hedge fund whale who actually likes soccer?
Secondly, Garber can't do anything until we hear what Roger Goodell is going to do. Don can't (not that he will, but work with me here) demand that Kraft sell the team and then have the NFL fine the guy $10,000 and suspend him for three months. And vice-versa.
At the end of the day, Don is going to have to more or less mirror whatever Goodell decides to do or risk looking stupid. And it'll be quite a while before Roger does a damn thing.
One suspects the most likely outcome is that Bob will be forced to turn over both teams to Uday and nothing much will change, but until then there's nothing much to say aside from offering you 3-1 odds that the alias Kraft gave the hostess was "Tom" and not "Brad".
Just a hunch.
Speaking of Contemptible Swine
Anthony Precourt won't be attending Saturday's opening game in Columbus.
Which actually isn't that unusual; he's never been to one before.
And the last time he actually did find his was to MAPFRE stadium – November of 2017 – he didn't feel he was treated with the appropriate amount of respect.
He was wrong.
Enjoy your weekend, Frat Boy. Columbus sure as hell will.
True Crime
Apparently HBO is going to be making a movie out of the book American Huckster, which will star Will Farrell as Chuck Blazer. Hopefully, he keeps his clothes on for once, since the body prosthetics and makeup needed to turn him into a 450 pound man would bankrupt the network and, not coincidentally, gross us all out.
Either way, I won't be writing about it. I've already expressed my opinion about the book, which – short version – is an execrable pile of crap which was written by a couple so-called journalists who wouldn't know a soccer game from a Jai Lai match.
It served mostly as an emotional purgative for Chuck's live-in failed actress girlfriend of 20 some years, who swanned around the globe in private jets, sleeping in five star hotels, being whisked into stretch limos and carried off to the best restaurants on the globe bedecked in designer gowns and then, when the train got derailed, she found a cheap tabloid scribbler to tell how horrible it all was.
If she found helping him dry his body after a bath by lifting huge folds of fat and using a hair dryer on them so utterly disgusting, well, there was always a door nearby. She chose to call room service and order the charcuterie and a bottle of Dom instead.
In any case, the book itself – I'm embarrassed to say that I actually read the thing – consists mostly of descriptions of FIFA corruption which didn't involve him at all, and then concluding the section with: "This is the kind of thing, the kind of people, that Blazer was associated with", but they never get around to explaining how he was guilty of any of it.
Blazer's main crime was in fact tax evasion; he stupidly decided that he could send his salary and commissions to a shell company in the Caymans and nobody would notice. But backdoor accounting tricks are not the fodder for riveting filmmaking.
In fact, there's a terrific story to be told about Blazer, an immensely complicated bundle of contradictions who found himself surrounded by an unimaginable amount of corruption and theft, saw others pocketing literally hundreds of millions of dollars and found a way – call it the 10% solution – to morally justify to himself activities whereby he could participate but pretend that his hands were clean.
The problem was, he surely knew better and he died a broken – and broke – man.
Unfortunately, HBO will surely focus on the apartment where he kept his ex-wife's cats, his penchant for nightly opulent meals and the fact that he couldn't fit into most cars.
So I just don't care.
Let Me Introduce You to the Future of US Soccer
Something that I – and roughly a million others over the next five decades or so – will be writing about is Olivia Moultrie.
She was the first girl ever to play for a boys DA Academy team. She started attending college showcase camps when she was ten and she was invited into the US U14's that same year. When she was 11, she accepted a full scholarship from North Carolina.
This year, now barely 13, she told Coach Dorrance she has changed her mind.
Another college? No, a representation deal with the Wasserman Media Group and a multiyear endorsement deal with Nike.
And if you'll forgive the terrible music, take a second and watch her play the game:
The amazing thing isn't her skills, which are ridiculous; rather it's her vision and her soccer IQ, which are way, way off the charts. For anyone.
Some people are concerned because she spent last summer in Europe training with the likes of Bayern Munich and PSG, but the FIFA rule forbidding international transfers for players under 18 also applies to women, although this might be the first time anyone has had reason to notice.
Plus, we've got our own problems here at home since there is currently no NWSL allocation rule that covers her situation, and in any case they don't allow signing players under 18.
But now that she's a professional, she cannot play for a college team – not that there'd be much point – and thus the system itself is going to have to figure it out since, obviously, she has to play somewhere. Her father, K.C., who has been training her full time – she dropped out of fifth grade to devote more time to soccer – clearly must have something in mind, but he's not sharing.
This all becomes even more complicated when you add in the fact that no NWSL team, by itself, can even begin to pay her what she would command in an open market, and asking her to sign for the league max of a bit over $40,000 a year (which no one actually gets anyway since it would mean paying everyone else on the roster minimum wage) would be an insult.
Of course, star US women are paid – rather well – by USSF to play in the NWSL when not otherwise needed, but unless they put her on the USWNT right now, that doesn't apply, and that would seem more than a bit premature. Olivia may be tough but she's really not physically ready to bang bodies with women like Kelly O'Hara or Tobin Heath.
However this all shakes out – and I do wish I had more confidence in the dullards at Soccer House to get it right – when the 2023 women's world cup rolls around, she'll be all of 17 years old. Too soon?
Maybe, but so far at least, age hasn't seemed to hold her back much. Stay tuned.
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