Until 2004, singer-songwriter James McMurtry was known mainly as a highly-respected chronicler of hard-bitten heartland characters living hardscrabble lives on the fringes. Then he released the single “We Can’t Make It Here,” a scorching indictment of the Bush administration and the power elite, earning the unassuming Texan increased fame and a newfound “unabashed activist” label.

Four years later, the man novelist Stephen King has called “the truest, fiercest songwriter of his generation” is back with a new album (Just Us Kids, Lightning Rod Records) that finds him skewering Bush and company with even more fervor but with the same eloquent terseness. We caught up with McMurtry after a recent rehearsal as he and his band, The Heartless Bastards, prepared to head east on their latest tour. He shared his thoughts on the process of songwriting, the drudgery of touring and the reason why Leonard Cohen must die.

We know you’re originally from Fort Worth, Texas, but you now live in the Austin, right?
Yeah, I was born in Fort Worth, but I spent very little time there. I moved when I was about seven years old.

Are you a local celebrity there? Do you get recognized a lot?
Yeah, it’s become so in recent years.

How do you feel about that?
Well, I guess it means I’m doing my job.

Before we get to the new album, we’re required by law to ask you at least one question about your father (Pulitzer Prize and Academy Award winner Larry McMurtry). Are you able to enjoy and appreciate each other’s work?
Yeah, definitely. I grew up with him. My folks divorced when I was about seven. We all wound up in Virginia in different parts of the state. I lived with my dad, so I learned to get along with him pretty good.

When it comes to your songwriting, you said that you’re not so much an artist as a mythbreaker. Could you explain that?
I don’t remember saying that, but it is something I try to do. I was always in sort of a quandary when I did those Farm Aid shows because what I never hear anybody writing about is just how much drudgery there is involved in farming. I tend to look at the dark cloud behind the silver lining. Farmwork involves hours and hours of hard work and lots of debt and that sort of thing.

When it comes to your actual songwriting process, how do you do it? Do you set aside some time and say, “Okay, I have to start writing some songs” or do you just get hit with an idea?
I have a scrap pile that I work from. If I hear a line in my head that I like, I try to get it on the hard disk somewhere so I don’t lose it. Then when it comes time to make a record, I usually book some recording time, then I have a deadline to finish these things, and whichever songs get finished are the ones that get on the record.

The new album, Just Us Kids, might be your most ambitious work musically. The music is quite textured and complex. Do you chalk that up to good producing?
Well, I try things and some of them work.

You say this isn’t a political album, but the political criticism you level seems even more pointed and direct than on Childish Things. Has your anger with this current administration increased in the past few years?
I don’t know. I don’t remember how mad I was [in 2004]. I’m pretty mad now, but I can’t lay it all on them because we let that happen. We let them get in power.

This album will probably expand the use of the “activist” label that we so often see attached to your name these days. How comfortable are you with that label?
It’s okay. I just think more people need to be activists in some form or another. We got in the mess we’re in now because not enough of us were activists, myself included. I stayed out of the parade. I thought the political scene within the states was gonna stay within the realm of normalcy and that Ronald Reagan was as crazy as it was ever gonna get. I never thought I’d miss that guy.

You got some hate mail in response to your 2004 hit “We Can’t Make It Here.” Are you ready for more of that with this album, or do you think that kind of reaction is pretty much played out?
Oh no, I’m getting more of that now.

Already?
Yeah. Part of it is that a lot of people misinterpret “Cheney’s Toy.” They seem to think that I’m saying that the soldier is Cheney’s toy. That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying Bush is Cheney’s toy.

You seem to make that pretty clear in the song.
Well, I thought I left enough clues in there, like “stay the course” and “daddy’s boy” and “bring ‘em on.” A lot of people just don’t read the newspaper. Even the lyric “You’re the man.” That was reported early on that that’s what Cheney tells Bush to keep his ego inflated. “You’re the man,” you know? He’s not at all. He’s just the salesman. These are Cheney’s policies Bush is selling. They’re not his.

Is it even tougher having this type of political stance while living in Texas?
It’s not tough living in Austin at all. Austin’s a little blue dot in a sea of red. But we got a lot of people moving in from Dallas and Houston, so it’s becoming more like the rest of Texas. But it’s still enough of a liberal enclave that you don’t really feel it here.

So you won’t be needing to move to any East Coast city any time soon?
I don’t think so. It’d have to be somewhere in the middle [of the country]. It’s a lot easier to tour from the middle.

Let’s get back to the new album. How do you get the likes of Ian McLagan and pat mAcdonald to play for you?
You call ‘em. Mac lives right outside of town here. I see him around town all the time. Pat opened a couple of shows for us and we just really liked him. I had his number so we called him. It turned out he still had a storage locker left over here from the “Timbuk3″ days, and he came down to empty it out, so while he was here we corralled him into playing on the record.

In two different song titles on your new album, you wish death upon pat mAcdonald and Leonard Cohen. So please tell us, why must they die?
“You’d a’ Thought” was one of the first songs we recorded, and it reminded me of Leonard Cohen a bit. I was writing the song while I was supposed to be recording it, so everybody was sitting around waiting on me to come in, and finally I got there and I said, “Well, if it wasn’t for Leonard Cohen, you wouldn’t have had to wait so long.” So that became the running joke. And “God Bless America” was done in pat mAcdonald’s tuning. He does this Drop C tuning that’s really cool. So we put “(Pat mAcdonald must die)” on that one. There were three or four other “must dies” that didn’t make it onto the album.

There’s no chance of making Ian McLagan a permanent Heartless Bastard, is there?
No, he’s got his own record right now that’s coming out soon, so he’s got a full plate right now.

Are you pushing any particular song or songs for radio play?
Yeah. “Just Us Kids” is a single and it’s already number one on the Americana format. R&R has a chart for Americana and we’ve been number one there for the last two weeks. Since the record isn’t even out yet, we’re doing all right with radio.

You have a certain degree of fame, critics love your work, you’ve got a sizable group of hardcore fans, other musicians respect your music, but are you ever tempted to sacrifice some artistic integrity and try to write some standard issue, corporate country album with a couple of hits with catchy hooks, just to make that huge financial score?
I used to be tempted to do that and I even tried. In the 80′s I had some friends in Nashville that I tried to co-write with for exactly that, but it just never worked. I didn’t have whatever you need to get that done.

That’s not something that just anyone can do, but we thought you might be able to figure out a way.
Yeah, I mean, if I could pitch a song to one of those hats and make a zillion dollars, I’d do it.

Many of your songs don’t follow the formulaic verse-chorus-bridge template. Have you ever gotten pressure from one of your labels to write in that style?
I’ve never gotten much pressure. In the Columbia days I’d get pressure from managers sometimes to try to write a hit, because that’s what you really needed. But on independent labels, I’ve sold enough records to suit ‘em, so they haven’t griped. It’s worked out for me because you get a better royalty rate with those guys. You don’t have to sell quite so many records to make a living.

You’re headed out on tour in mid-April. How do you feel about getting ready to go out on the road again? Are you excited, nervous or do you just want to slit your wrists at the thought of touring again?
It’s exciting, but I’ve been most of the places that we’re going, so I see it as a job, as well as an adventure.

What kind of support will you be getting from your label on this tour? Will you still be loading up your own gear after the show?
Oh yeah, definitely. Indie labels just don’t have the money to pay. You’re not going to get tour support in the traditional major label sense, because they don’t have it. And even if they did have it, you’d have to pay it back. So I’d just as soon load my own gear. If I have to get a label to pay somebody else to do it, then that’s a few more dollars I have to pay back before I get anything in my account.

Will anybody be handling the McLagan’s piano parts and mAcdonald’s harmonica parts in the live shows?
No, we restructured the songs for a trio.

Any chance of seeing your son Curtis playing with you at any shows?
No, he’s doing his own thing. He doesn’t tour. He prefers to make money, so he gets a job in the summer.

When you’re on the road and you have some down time in a big city, how do you kill the time?
Well, there really isn’t any down time. If you get a day off, you sleep. It’s really pretty hectic. I mean, guys that have buses, they might have down time because they drive after shows. They got a driver, so they can sleep on the bus after the show. With us, we’re in a van, and I don’t like to drive after a show. I prefer to get up in the morning and drive. You get up early and drive 300 miles, then you might have an in-store performance or a radio appearance to play. You almost always have something to do.

On a good day you don’t have any of that. You go to the hotel at check-in time, you go to your room, you have a glass of wine, then you go to sound check. Then you go eat, then play the show, then get up the next day and repeat the same process.

So that’s the glamour of touring, huh?
Yeah, there’s not a lot of down time. There’s one stretch on this tour where we play 15 days straight. That’s gonna be kind of tricky. You gotta be careful because you can’t drink too much. You don’t want to play hungover. I’d rather play drunk.

What’s the setlist looking like for this tour?
We’re thinking of trying to put the whole record together in sequence, then put in some other stuff in the second hour. I don’t know if that’ll work out.

When people have yelled out requests at your shows, you have answered by saying, “He knows what he wants to hear, but he doesn’t know shit about putting together a setlist.”
(Laughs.) I stole that from David Bromberg. But now I modify it. Now I say, “Yeah, you know what you wanna hear, but you don’t know what you’re gonna hear.” That pretty much says it.

Do you ever think your live audiences are a little too reverential at times?
Oh, sure! There are some places where it’s still like that.

At times, you are rocking out and people are just standing around.
Yeah, like they’re waiting around for the literary masterpiece.

How do you feel about where you are career-wise right now?
Better than I did six year ago. It seemed like it was really going nowhere and my agent was really having to pull teeth to get gigs. Fortunately, he hung in there and now he’s pretty jazzed up because we’ve turned a corner. So there are some prospects now. I got a European licensing deal for this record. You gotta have a licensing deal for every market because they’re all different. Maybe we can get over there and make some Euros this time.

In 1989, you appeared as Jimmy Rainey in Lonesome Dove. Any chance we’ll ever see you in another movie?
If the part comes along and somebody wants me, I’d love to get some Screen Actors’ Guild … they’ve got some really good health insurance. That’d be cool.

If they made the James McMurtry biopic today, who would play you?
I don’t have any idea. I’m not old enough to worry about that yet. And I’m not big enough to worry about that either.

What would you do if you could no longer be a musician?
Well, I’m outta luck now because the trucking industry is going down. I would have figured I
could always drive. That’s pretty much what we do anyway.

Tell us something about James McMurtry that most people, especially your fans, might not know about you and that might surprise them?
(Pause.) No, I don’t really wanna tell you anything about that!

Interviewed by S.R.C., April 2008. Just Us Kids was released on April 15. To hear several free tracks from this album, visit James McMurtry’s MySpace page. Tour information can be found at JamesMcMurtry.com.

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Brian Murphy

I am an orphan.

I thought long and hard about it, and this seems like the best way to get it out there for everyone. It’s still a fresh wound and very painful to talk about, but my therapist seems to think that confronting it head on is the best way to get my life back on track.

My week was moving along perfectly fine, and I was living my typical carefree life as if all were right in the world until a bombshell was dropped on me. As I was leafing through my mail out in front of my house Tuesday, I got an invitation to attend a party at my father’s house. Hmmm … interesting, I thought, not knowing what was coming next.

I am hosting a Pampered Chef Cooking Show at my house, and I want you to join in the fun! You’ll try innovative, high-quality kitchen tools and learn easy cooking and entertaining tips that will impress your family and friends. And you won’t believe how simple the delicious recipes are. Plus, we get to catch up while we shop … and eat! I can’t wait! Bring a friend, too. The more the merrier! Please let me know if you’re coming.

I read the invite at least two dozen times. Four exclamation points aside, anyone who knows me knows this is not something that I should ever, under any circumstance, be a part of. But then I noticed a major detail that had eluded me up until this point – the date this “merry” get-together was being held is April 26.

My knees weakened. I felt a shortness of breath. The harsh reality that my life, as I knew it, would never be the same hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to sit down on the curb for fear of passing out. I struggled for answers as I realized the man who raised me – one of the biggest sports fans in modern history – is hosting a homo party at his house on one of the most sacred days of the sports calendar, the NFL draft.

I am not proud to say this, but I am honestly missing a funeral for a loved one because I will be spending the weekend engrossed in the NFL draft. I will be working at Redskins Park, taking photos of the new players and conducting interviews to see the reactions to the newest additions to franchise. Meanwhile, the man who I thought was my father will be attempting to sell kitchen tools and food products. I felt dirty. I’m talking like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura dirty, you know, when he figured out Lt. Lois Einhorn, whom he had just made out with, was really a dude. No shower could erase this pain.

I was hoping to focus my column on Tiger Woods showing signs of actually being human after failing to catch someone named Trevor Immelman at the Masters last weekend, and then undergoing arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, shelving him for the next month.

Or maybe I’d have devoted this week to the upcoming playoff battle between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Washington Wizards, who in the ever-enjoyable words of Charles Barkley are the “dumbest team in the history of civilization.”

Barkley had some choice words after Wizards guard DeShawn Stevenson called LeBron James “overrated,” and Wizards star Gilbert Arenas openly hoped to face the mediocre Cavs in round one of the NBA playoffs in his latest blog.

“I think the Washington Wizards have got to be the dumbest team in the history of civilization,” said the Chuckwagon. “I think for them to rile up LeBron, who is the second best player in the NBA, I think that’s just stupid.”

Or I would have spotlighted the NHL’s wonderfully-exciting playoffs – starting with the seventh-seeded Calgary Flames and their playoff-tested captain, Jarome Iginla. He’s proven once again why he’s the ideal role model for aspiring young hockey players because he plays every shift like the game is on the line. Iginla’s effort shows why he is universally respected, as opposed to someone like Philadelphia Flyers forward Daniel Briere, who is apparently allergic to his own defensive zone, preferring to let his teammates do all the hard work while he cherrypicks on the other side of the rink.

But every time I sat down to write about anything sports related, I got distracted (how distracted? We’re talking Sean Avery standing between me and my computer distracted) by the thought of my father in an apron offering cooking advice on my holy day.

So if you see me on April 26th, and I have a single tear streaming down my cheek as the New England Patriots forfeit their draft pick, just know it’s not because of my love of cheaters – no, it’s because I’m just a bastard learning to cope in this cruel world.

Brian Murphy is an award-winning sportswriter, and still doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. Contact him at murf@the5holes.com.

(Click to enlarge.)

Jeremiah was raised in the deepest part of the darkest jungle. That’s why he smells like adventure. He currently lives in Elkins, WV with his wife, Becky, and son, Isaiah, who is epic and destined to rule the world one day. You can contact him at jeremiahwentz@hobotrashcan.com.

Joel Murphy

As a child, I spent an absurd amount of time in my bedroom recording my own “radio shows.” I would sit there with a tape recorder and perform bits or introduce songs with my high-pitched, prepubescent voice. Sometimes, I would try to get my brother to be a guest, since he could do impressions (his Goofy and Marge Simpson were both killer), but most of the time I was by myself, filling up countless cassette tapes with “The Joe Show.”

In high school, my best friend Justin Foster and I started a “radio station” at our school (which in reality consisted of us broadcasting through the school’s PA system on Friday mornings before the bell rang for homeroom). Justin and I co-hosted a show, with our friend Mike Adams doing the news.

My interest in radio continues to this day. Now, my brother and I co-host the Hobo Radio podcast, which is a nice bit of symmetry considering how much I had to beg my brother to be on a part of my shows when we were kids. Unfortunately, I can’t get him to do his Marge Simpson impression anymore.

I tell you all of that to tell you this …

My interest in radio and my desire to have my own show can be credited to one man – Michael Sorce, or as he’s known in the radio world, Don Geronimo. While many of you out there spent your formative years listening to Howard Stern, I grew up listening to The Don and Mike Show. Tomorrow, Don Geronimo will broadcast his final show. So today, I wanted to pay tribute to a man who has been a big influence on my life.

My mom got me hooked on The Don and Mike Show as a kid. She would play their show in the car in the morning when they were still broadcasting on WAVA (my mom even won one of their on-air contests when I was a kid – she won a set of Don and Mike pillowcases for winning a photo caption contest). Even though many of their jokes were over my head when I was younger, I always enjoyed listening to them. (It helped that, like me, Don is a big fan of Batman.) I followed them from WAVA to WJFK and listened as they became a nationally syndicated show. I followed them through countless producers and general managers and even through the brief stint where Leah Remini from The King of Queens co-hosted the show with them. Every “radio show” that I’ve ever done has been heavily inspired by their show and by Don especially.

Everyone else from the show (Mike, Buzz Burbank and Robb Spewak) will continue on doing The Mike O’Meara Show, but it will never be the same. Don Geronimo was the heart of the show and his willingness to bare his soul on the air on a daily basis is what made the show so intriguing. While many DJs attempt to share their personal life on the air, often times it seems contrived or disingenuous, but Don had a way of sharing his life that made you feel like he was an old friend catching you up on things over a few beers.

He made his wife Freda and his son Bart a part of the show – but not as characters, just as themselves. Don pulled back the curtain and talked about the behind the scenes aspects of the radio business. While Howard Stern tries to make it seem like he invented radio and pretends that everything he does is 100 percent original, Don was open about the segments and bits he lifted from other shows, often saying, “If you steal a bit from me, you’re stealing it twice.”

Don’s wife Freda was killed in a car accident in 2005. The love he had for her always came shining through over the air and I think that attempting to come back and do the show after such a tragic event took a toll on him. He had always talked about retiring from the radio business and moving to Ocean City, Maryland with Freda. This year, he finally decided to follow through on those plans, even though he is doing it without her.

It’s hard to put his retirement into perspective. On the one hand, I don’t really know Mike Sorce. I’ve never met the man (although I did buy tickets to the show’s Donkey Basketball game years ago and saw Don in person outside of FedEx Field when he was doing a live pregame show before a Redskins game). I have no idea what he is like off the air.

But, the odd thing about the intimacy of radio is that in a way, I do feel like I know him. I know more about Don’s personal life than I know about members of my extended family. I’ve grown up listening to the man. Like I said, he always made you feel like he was a friend sharing stories with you over a beer, so in a way, his retirement makes me feel like I’m losing a good friend.

For completely selfish reasons, I wish Don wasn’t leaving the show. When I moved to Boston, two things helped me to feel less homesick about leaving Maryland – crab chips and The Don and Mike Show. The show isn’t actually syndicated in Boston, but I’ve been downloading the podcasts and listening to them on my iPod. It makes me feel like I’m back in Maryland, listening to their show as a kid while playing my Super Nintendo.

Deep down, I know that moving on with his life and stepping away from the spotlight is probably the best thing for a man still dealing with the grief over losing the love of his life. I sincerely hope that he is able to find happiness away from the radio business. He deserves it; he’s given so much happiness to the rest of us over the years.

So, even though you will probably never read this, I wish you the best, Don Geronimo. I’ll miss hearing about your life. I’ll miss your conversations with your son Bart and your “earth-dog” brother Jim. I’ll miss you busting Robb’s chops and interrupting Buzz as he tries to get through the news. I’ll miss your stories about the glory days of radio. Thank you for being a part of my life for this long. Thanks for the inspiration you’ve given me to be open and sincere in our podcasts and this column.

I barely listen to the radio these days. Most of the on-air personalities are annoying, loud douchebags who think they are funnier and more charming than they actually are. They all play the same carefully-selected sets of songs and tell the same carefully-selected jokes and stories. Don Geronimo was a throwback to an older generation of radio and I’m quite sure there will never be anyone quite like him on the radio again.

I wish you all the best, Don Geronimo. I’ll be listening to your farewell broadcast tomorrow afternoon. And I’ll be stealing all of your best bits and using them on our next Hobo Radio podcast.

Random Thought of the Week:
Paris Hilton was recently in Africa with her boyfriend Benji Madden and asked the locals how much it would cost to buy a cheetah. Dear God, please let this all end with Paris Hilton and the Madden brothers getting eaten by a cheetah. Please.

Joel Murphy is the creator of HoboTrashcan, which is probably why he has his own column. He loves pugs, hates Jimmy Fallon and has an irrational fear of robots. You can contact him at murphyslaw@hobotrashcan.com.

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Ned Bitters

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are solely those of Ned Bitters and do not necessarily reflect the views of HoboTrashcan.

This week’s inductee into the “Overrated Hall of Fame” is … white America’s racial tolerance.

With Barack Obama on the verge of winning the Democratic nomination for president, every pundit and his mother are writing articles and giving interviews describing Obama’s impending win as a sign of how far white America has come in terms of conquering our racist views. This is true, but only to a point.

Should Obama win the nomination, that’s not going to mean that we’ve finally shucked our centuries-old racist mindset. While any sane American can point out scores of ways in which many whites still see blacks as inferior, nowhere is this latent racism more discernible than in the world of sports.

No, I’m not talking about the actual world of the athletes. (Although Gary Sheffield can, and quite bluntly. And intelligently.) If you are a black man and you can hit monster home runs, defend Kobe with some well-placed elbows or knock the shit out of Tom Brady on a blitz, you will be paid as well as or better than your slower, gawkier, less muscularly-defined white teammates. If you can manage not to hang with Pacman Jones or Chris Henry, you’ll get your big fat endorsement deals. Hell, even the very black Ray Lewis, despite alleged ties to a murder, gets paid to sell Under Armor. So we have come a long way from the days of black baseball superstuds Willie Mays and Hank Aaron having to shut up and just play ball so that white America, already reeling from the tumult of the civil rights movement, would keep coming through the baseball turnstiles during the turbulent 60s.

Of course, the coaching ranks of the major sports are still disproportionately white. It’s still news when a black man is hired to coach a team in one of the Big Three pro sports. (Should a black man ever get hired to coach an NHL team, well, they can play his first game anywhere on earth, because hell will have officially frozen over.) But that’s not where I’m going.

I’m talking about fans, the white fans who make up the bulk of the sports watching public. We like to think we’re pretty evolved on the racial front when we watch our teams and feel love and loyalty toward the blackest of our black stars. But we’re full of shit it we think we don’t see color and don’t let our entrenched racism, however mild, affect how we view certain sports issues.

Let’s start with drugs. When an athlete gets busted for using any kind of drug, the public reaction differs depending on the race of the athlete. Take Ricky Williams. He’s been nailed countless times for having weed in his system, and many white people express nothing but contempt for the man. You hear phrases such as “let down his teammates,” “wasting his talent” and “blowing a golden opportunity.” But let a white athlete get caught with some herb floating through his blood, and the apologists come out of the woodwork to defend him. Bill Lee, an iconoclastic free-thinking pitcher in the 70s, flaunted his marijuana use in interview after interview, and he was seen as just a lovable scamp who thumbed his nose at the old school sports power structure. On a lark, his highness threw a terribly ill-advised blooper pitch in the 1975 World Series, which Tony Perez promptly dispatched over Fenway’s Green Monster, and this unforgivable gaffe is viewed as no more than a heartwarming part of baseball lore. That’s because he’s white. If Lee were black, he’d still be vilified as the dopehead who screwed around in the biggest game of his life.

It’s the same way with alcoholics. Met party boys Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry had well-publicized problems with alcohol and drugs. Despite their on-the-field brilliance and epic World Series win, they are still seen as undisciplined dolts. Some people can barely contain their glee when talking about how far Doc and Darryl fell. But admitted alcoholic Dennis Eckersley is seen as Mr. Inspirational for the way he overcame the bottle to become one of the greatest relief pitchers of all time … save for one hanging slider that a gimpy Kirk Gibson sent deep into the Los Angeles night. Good thing The Eck was white. If Doc Gooden had given up that dinger, it would be a different story, something involving the phrase “dumbass recovering alcoholic.”

When pro players become pro playboys, partying long into the night and finding their way into the tabloids on an almost weekly basis, our reaction differs depending on the race of the good-time Charlie. Mickey Mantle might have broken every home run record in the books if he didn’t show up for so many day games reeking of alcohol and bar smoke (and probably pussy … but you can’t blame a guy for that). White folks love the stories about Babe Ruth spending his nights whoring and binging on shitty foods. Joe Namath never won another Super Bowl, maybe because he spent more time studying under the covers (and under the surgeon’s knife) than he did studying the Cover Two. Jeremy Shockey is the hero of every lunkhead crewcutted white boy at every bar on an NFL Sunday afternoon, and all he’s done is hamper what could have been a Hall of Fame career with his late night shenanigans. Because they’re white, their self-destructive antics are looked at with a knowing smile and a bit of wistful admiration. But let a black athlete get a reputation for partying, and he’s just another out-of-control animal who can’t control himself. (Ain’t that right, L.T.?)

The same double standard holds true for weight issues. Cecil Fielder disgusted people when he let himself turn into the black version of John Goodman. He could barely run or swing a bat, and his girth led to an early retirement. No one showed big fat Cecil any white love once he stopped hitting those mammoth dingers. But fat fuck John Daly is beloved by almost all of white America despite his unquenchable thirst for gambling, McDonald’s, Budweiser and unfulfilled potential. He recently slept in and missed a tee time. (Oh, the venom he’d have gotten for that one if he were black!) Yet he’s the lovable galoot with the big belly and the big drive whom we just can’t help pull for. Some might cite the roly-poly Tony Gwynn as an exception to this, but Gwynn sounded white when he talked, which gave him a pass. Cellulitic nightmare – and whiter than white – John Kruk has parlayed being a fat bastard into an ESPN career and a Nutrisystem endorsement deal.

Announcers are not exempt from applying a double standard based on race. Blacks are often referred to as gifted, natural athletes. This implies that the black athlete has reached the top of his sport due mainly to lucky genetics. However, white guys are often described as hardworking, hardnosed, gritty and grinding, which implies that the white guys work harder, practice harder and have more internal drive. As a devoted fan of the hapless, mostly white Pittsburgh Pirates, I can assure you that this is not the case.

Announcers also imply that black athletes play dirtier than whites. The black guy who wipes out the diminutive white second baseman with a hard slide is maybe playing a bit dirty, but the piece of shit southern redneck (excuse the redundancy) who goes into second base with his spikes aimed at the shortstop’s knee? He’s just a hardnosed player who will do whatever it takes to win.

Announcers also like to laud black players as “good family men,” but you never hear a white athlete described this way. The implication is that most blacks are indiscriminate fuck machines, so the supposed compliment is really a slur. How many white athletes have you heard described as “a good family man”? They must all be, if it doesn’t get pointed out.

I could go on and on. (Yeah, I know, I already have. Eat me.) Brett Favre goes to rehab for pain pills, and he’s just a game guy, a real tough nut who had the balls to admit his problem and seek help. Let a black athlete try that, and the whispers will start. “Hell, that’s just a coverup for something worse. Probably crack.” Roger Clemens has congressmen writing support letters for him after his pathetic congressional hearing, but had Barry Bonds been the one stammering through his testimony, not even J.C. Watts would have come to his defense.

I’m sure that white people can come up with exceptions to every point I make. For example, fat bastard Jerome Bettis was involved in a seedy parking lot blowjob controversy, yet he continued to get affectionately fingerfucked by the NFL and white America for years. But we still are more racist than we’d like to think.

Me, I think I’ve evolved to the point where I’m past all that backward-assed thinking. So let me end this column and go browse YouTube. I feel like watching some great hockey fights. Maybe I’ll catch that classic between Georges Laraque and Mike Grier. Man, those black hockey players can really bring it in a fight.

Ned Bitters is, in fact, overrated. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.