Matt Taibbi the sportswriter...

... is now a political writer, but he played pro basketball in Russia, is a rabid (Boston) sports fan, and wields language to slice and dice like no other. Below are excepts from a column he scribbled for Men's Journal from 2008 to 2010. He can be a smidge negative and unsweet and politically incorrect, but he fearlessly satirizes the self-inflated and greedy and what's more important than that?! He's hilarious. And sometimes he just wrote about lovable, goofy characters like John Madden....

He was tough to take in the end, when his heart clearly wasn't in it, but Madden was a solid entertainment vehicle for years. Watching the early-'90s Madden tele-diagnose a tense Niners-Cowboys playoff game raised frenetic incoherence to new levels. It was like watching a giant-size Elmer Fudd on a strychnine high.... He may have done too many commercials (by the mid-2000s, I was rooting for athlete's foot in the Tinactin spots), but you never got the sense that Madden was a bad guy, that he stiffed waiters on tips or (was demeaning to women).  

There are probably camel herders in Kazakhstan who've heard the whole (A-Rod – Madonna) story by now. The problem with A-Rod is that he's... a confluence of supreme athletic excellence with insatiable narcissism and an agent who would interrupt the Gettysburg Address to announce that his client was exercising his opt-out. We're talking about a guy who announced that he was signing a deal with William Morris to "broaden the scope" of his celebrity at a time when even Kalahari Bushmen were getting tired of hearing about the Cynthia – Madonna – A-Rod – Lenny Kravitz love rhombus.

In general, sports coverage is entertaining, useful, and competent. The problem is that there's too much of it, and it's too loud. When sportswriters aren't pimping asinine story lines, they're writing hysterical screeds about steroids or greenies or gambling, like they're real problems in the grand scheme of things.... suddenly you're picking up the paper in the morning to see a yammering loudmouth like Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times screaming "An Ethical and Moral Disaster!" about the Donaghy (NBA betting) scandal. Not just an ethical disaster, mind you, and not just a moral disaster – an ethical and a moral disaster.

Once upon a time most athletes were working-class kids who would have labored for free meals and $1,000 a year. Then the mass media age came, and next thing you know, even backup catchers are in the news more often than the Secretary of the Treasury. Pro athletes are drowning in so much money and attention.... And we increasingly get to play the role of the psychiatrist who listens to them lie back in their furs and complain about it all.

Instead of remembering where they were when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, young people of this decade will recall where they were when Jahri Evans signed a contract for $57 million – which also happened to be the same day they whispered to themselves,"Who the hell is Jahri Evans?" The thing is, nobody knows who Jahri Evans is. Even guys who played with him during the Saints' Super Bowl run need a minute to place the team's starting right guard. "Good for him. I love his albums," Reggie Bush said when asked about the Evans deal. Okay, I made that last part up.

The prototypical '70s coach, John Madden, was a bellicose, overweight loudmouth. The prototypical '80s coach, Bill Walsh, was an effete, self-congratulatory innovator/genius. The top '90s coach: Bill Parcells, another fat, loud asshole. His successor last decade was Belichick, a glowering, maniacally suspicious introvert. 

Lax on-field regulation, easy scores, and grotesque stat inflation – the 2000s NFL was the perfect sport for the financial-bubble era.

It was bad enough when sports franchises started selling the rights to name supposedly timeless and iconic new stadiums and playing fields to fly-by-night corporations 10 minutes from bankruptcy and/or indictments like Enron and Pro Player and TWA and National Car Rental and PSINet, turning the arenas for pro sports into genuinely comic symbols of America's boiler-room stock-scam economy. But pretty soon the networks started selling naming rights to their broadcast features, letting companies buy everything from the strike-zone graphic ("The Amica Strike Zone!") to the electronic review system in the U.S. Open tennis ("The Chase Bank Review!").... I estimate we're five years away from some enterprising executive coming up with a formula for selling naming rights to the actual play-by-play. Are you ready for the "IBM third down and seven"?  

It took the entire 100 years since the legalization of the forward pass for football coaches – all of them collectively innovating at the speed of a Greenlandian glacier – to embrace the idea of using the maximum five allowable receivers at the same time. Even in the 2000s, the spread offense was used almost solely by teams with excellent quarterbacks like Manning, Brady, and Brees.... But this decade, coaches will finally catch on.... The spread will be used by everyone, even teams with absolute morons under center.

No matter how much teams juice their players, or steal signals, or turn off the hot water in the opposing locker rooms, the games still come down to which team can block in the fourth quarter. What you see on the field is actually happening: honest competition. And you can't say that about the action on C-SPAN.... In the U.S. Senate it is not against the law, or even against the Senate rules, for a lawmaker to own stock in companies whose share price is directly affected by his legislative behavior. It's not even considered bad form. Unlike the NFL, where you can't come within a hundred miles of rigging the game's outcome without breaking a rule, the United States government is a landscape of complete and total moral chaos.... That we don't care nearly that much about Congress, or the presidency, or our tax dollars, or healthcare for war veterans, or the future condition of the planet we'll be leaving to our children – well, that's kind of embarrassing, I guess, and it sucks. But what the hell. None of that shit is as fun as football.

This is America, after all: If you don't suck, we'll forgive you!

It used to be that if you, the NFL player, wanted to say something insanely stupid to the whole world, you needed to hire a greaseball agent to call a press conference on your front lawn so you could expound extemporaneously on your personal philosophy.... Now, thanks to Twitter, there is absolutely no filter....

Talking to (Scott) Boras about baseball executives is like talking to a lion about red meat.

If you actually pay attention to your life as a sports fan, you’ll probably notice, as I have lately, that you spend most of your time trying to cope with the disappointment and shame of (a) desperately seeking an escape from the reality of your day-to-day life through the fantasy of sports, but finding instead that (b) in 99 cases out of 100, you’re spending the off-season nursing agonizing memories of crushing defeats. “Why couldn’t the wind have pushed that field goal a little to the left?” or, “If only Fernando Freaking Rodney hadn’t hung that one slider!” ... The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who, depending on your point of view, was either the funniest human being of all time or the most relentlessly depressing motherfucker who ever lived, perfectly described the awful dynamic of sports misery well over a century before Bill Buckner. Schopenhauer believed that the essential calculus of existence was skewed toward pain and misery. He constantly chided human beings for their baseless, ultimately self-defeating optimism, which leads ostensibly rational people to voluntarily sign themselves up for the pain of misplaced expectation in addition to the pain they’re already getting in huge doses, just by virtue of being citizens of the perpetual misery factory called Earth. Happiness and pleasure are the temporary absence of the horrible norm, he insisted. We revel in those moments, but they are fleeting, temporary, and, as it happens, seldom comparable in duration, intensity, or scope to the miserable.... It’s hard to think of a better description of a business in which each year, only one team out of 30 or 32 actually wins.... If you’re a sports fan, the system is set up so that you always lose. In the end, that’s actually what they’re selling you: loss and pain. But you don’t know that, not at first. Because they get you when you’re a kid. When you’re stupid. When you don’t even know what pain is yet. Here’s how they got me: When I was five years old, my father took me to a World Series game. It turned out to be the greatest baseball game in the history of the sport. No lie, I was really there. Game six, the 1975 World Series.... The pro sports leagues, they can’t sell you the winning feeling every year. They can’t even promise you’ll experience it once a decade, or even in your lifetime – hello, Detroit Lions and Chicago Cubs fans (not anymore!). What they can promise you is pain and disappointment, and lots of it, lots of watching other cities pick Michael Jordan (six championships for Chicago!) instead of Sam Bowie.... the sharper the pain, the more intense your desire for even a temporary reprieve will be, and come April you’ll be tuning in again for that almost-daily chance at having it all go away for a few hours. Meanwhile, between innings, your local TV network will be selling you lots of shit, including a vast array of very fattening foods that by an amazing coincidence have the curious property of temporarily allaying psychic pain by flooding your bloodstream with temporarily stupefying endorphin-inducing fats and oils.... Men laugh at women for buying Cosmo and Marie Claire and all those other magazines full of pictures of impossibly thin models with perfectly fitting clothes and $1,800 handbags, wondering why the other sex has such a bottomless appetite for self-abasement. Then those same men spend 340 nights a year following, with racing pulses and gritted teeth, sports teams doomed to disappoint them in 98 percent of cases. What we don’t realize until it’s too late is that we are watching the same show. They’re selling us disappointment, and we can’t get enough of it. Just so long as there’s a next year to think about.