I Wish I Was a Little Bit Taller
But wait, I heard you all ask, when I described Flinder Boyd last week as a WYWG-Favourite, what’s so great about Flinder?
Apart from his name, obviously.
Well, I told you before but as you obviously weren’t listening, I’ll tell you again.
Flinder has a blog and it’s genuinely fantastic. He intersperses silly but amusing posts, such as his recent email and YouTube campaign to play for Arsenal, with intelligent, candid, funny, and occasionally poignant posts about his life as a “d-list basketball star”.
For example, this piece, where he compares being an unemployed athlete to waiting for a bus and wonders why he does it.
Or this post, about losing the final game of the season:
We headed to the locker room dejected, and waited for confirmation from the other game that we had, in fact, been relegated. I slowly pulled off my sweat-soaked jersey and shorts and headed to the shower with the other players surrounded in silence, under a cloud the scent of abject failure.
Standing there naked with the water pouring over my head I heard a scream from the other side of the locker room. I turned my head swiftly thinking there was a fight between players. Then I heard more screams and the walls reverberated with excitement. The general manager came running to the entrance of the shower yelling the final score of the other game. They had lost, a last second shot had sealed their fate, and only a monumental collapse from the only team more pathetic than us had saved our season.
As the news came in, one guy on his way to the shower took a 5 gallon jug of gatorade and drenched the coach as we looked on from the shower and cheered. The general manager came in with a bottle of champagne and sprayed it everywhere. One guy grabbed him and threw him in the shower soaking his suit as we jumped up and down around him in celebration.
There we were, 10 grown men, naked, smiles as wide as a 6 ton truck, screaming at the top of our lungs and high-fiving each other in the middle of the shower after losing by 25 points at home. Celebrating the fact, that although we were inept and useless there was still one team more hopeless than us.
Where else can you read insights into an professional sportsperson’s life like that? Nowhere else, is where.
Some other recent hits:
This post where he elicits an email from the Dorchester Hotel that implies he might be able to bring his pet donkey with him to stay.
This post where he likens the L.A. Clippers to “a bald-headed step child”, and explains why it’s good to root for a terrible team:
But imagine if we actually beat a good team, guess what? Party time! If we beat a bad team, guess what? Party time! So do the math, 82 games in the season even if we just win 20 and lose 62…guess what? 20 parties a year, every win is celebration time for the fan of a bad team. Who needs a championship when you can party 20 times a year. Of course your expectations have to be low, and if you support a team like the Clippers you don’t only judge a single game in terms of a win or loss, you judge it if they beat the spread. For instance, the Lakers are supposed to beat the Clippers by 10 points and we only lose by 7, fantastic. Not a win, but we can say things like, ‘man, we had that game, just a little bad luck at the end.’
This post where he explains why Thierry Henry’s “hand of frog” wasn’t cheating, with terrific video examples of both a). cheating, and b). a handball.
This post a detailed explanation of the problems facing City Hall in its attempts to fund local sports facilities in London, completely serious apart from the reference to Boris Johnson as “BoJo”.
What’s that you say? I’ve just posted links to every single post he’s made in the past six months?
I rest my case.
Oh yeah, and there’s some posts about music; I completely ignore those.
