Who Has The Best Hair In Sports?

Time for your weekly edition of the Deadspin Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we’re talking bachelor party planning, bad smells, pizza, and more. 

Are you in Denver right now? WHAT A COINCIDENCE, so am I! Why it’s like we’re practically family. Anyway, I have a reading at the Tattered Cover tonight. Come out and try to guess if I smoked legal weed BEFORE the signing, or if I had the willpower and professionalism to wait until afterward.
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Also, there is NO Funbag next week, because I’m gonna be on vacay. Will you live without it? Possibly. Will you die? Again, possibly. Time for your letters:
Cody:
Settle this debate and/or rank it: Who has the best hair in all of sports? A few of us in the office say Bryce Harper, a few say Ronaldo. What say you?
Harper’s coif really is majestic. I know there isn’t a hair out of place on Ronaldo’s skull, but what fun is that? Harper’s hair has FLOW. You could surf down it. Whenever he dives for a ball, his mane flies around his big fat head in a glorious whip. It’s like that hair is enchanted. He’s baseball Rapunzel. He could probably throw out someone at second using his hair alone. Groupies probably ask him for hair tips before boning him.
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I have no business ranking sports hair, given that my hair looks like I spent all morning rubbing a balloon on my head. But fuck it, let’s list some of the notables:
BRYCE HARPER. Again, top hair. Such a fine sheen to it, too. His scalp would make a fine stole for any rich Manhattan socialite.
ODELL BECKHAM. I dedicated a whole podcast to the widehawk, which I declared stupid at the time. But I’ve changed my mind, especially because former Deadspinner and current squirrel blogger Greg Howard told me I was a racist prick. Anyway, I do love it when any football player takes off his helmet to reveal a goddamn houseplant on top. It’s like a magic trick. And it’s not like that hair isn’t working for OBJ. Ladies seem to like it just fine.
We’re at the point now where the wide Mohawk haircut—clean-shaven on the sides, business at the…
MEL KIPER. Literally the only thing people will talk to Kiper about outside of football is his hair. It’s probably in his contract that for every 10 minutes of draft chatter, his colleagues are entitled to make one gentle swipe at that M&M shell on his head.
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NOAH SYNDERGAARD. Every time I see him, I wanna put on a Puddle of Mudd record.
MIKE FRANCESA. That hair is the perfect, eternal symbol for what a vain, oblivious asshole Francesa is. You can tell he takes so much pride in looking like a mob boss who does business in a butcher shop supply office. I bet he has his own jar of combs and Barbicide sitting on his bathroom vanity.
ROGER FEDERER. How fucking old is that guy? Thirty-seven? He hasn’t aged a goddamn day since joining the tour. He’ll play five sets and still look like he’s about to go out dancing right after. It’s ridiculous.
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RANDY MOSS. He keeps it tight these days, but he can do anything with that hair. I remember when he let the Afro blow out. It was so, so badass.
HOPE SOLO. So full and lustrous, even when tied into a ponytail! It’s Wonder Woman hair, basically.
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You know what’s sad? No one does their hair like Dick Versace anymore, not even Dick Versace.
Such a huge loss. I’m waiting for the wet fleece look to come back one day.
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Matthew:
About eight friends and myself are renting a lake cabin for a long weekend, mostly for a friend’s bachelor party but also just an excuse to get together. The cabin isn’t remote (20ish minutes from the nearest grocery store), but I’d prefer not having to make a run to the store every day. I also want to avoid us getting shit-housed the first day and being too hungover the next day with no food available. Any advice for meal/food/beverage planning? Or any advice for the weekend in general?
LOL “too hungover.” You’re at a bachelor party. All the food and booze will be gone by the first night, no matter how much you buy. Everyone at that party will be primed and loaded for self-destruction. The second I get away from home, my mouth becomes a giant cosmic vacuum, consuming every drop of alcohol and every Frito-Lay product in sight. And it widens further for every old friend I add to the proceedings. I’d do the first grocery run and then appoint some other schlub to do the next one once you’re stuck eating raw coffee grounds because the cabinets are barren. Then that guy will drag ass and you’ll huff and puff and go again yourself, because your friends are worthless layabouts.
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In all seriousness, it does help to make a meal plan, even if that plan gets abandoned within two hours of your arrival. Don’t just go to the store blind and be like “Raisins! Those seem useful!” Make a list with basics like beer, liquor, mixers, water, coffee, bacon, fruit, eggs (a LOT of eggs), salt & pepper, milk, ice cream, cereal, bread, cold cuts, butter, olive oil, chocolate, potatoes, meat, and nuts. Buy a bag of granola and pretend it’s some kind of superfood that can magically satiate a group of 200-pound guys for an entire meal cycle. If you wanna be SUPER-anal, you can even make a little meal grid and sketch out what you guys plan on serving for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner. My mom makes a meal grid. You do not fuck with that grid. She’ll cut you if you foil the grid by bringing home KFC.
By the way, I’m fully on board with the non-Vegas bachelor party. The two best guy trips I ever had were when we rented a beach house and another time when we rented a ski condo. Those are virtually foolproof options. All your money is guaranteed to go to good causes (eating and drinking). Even if the weather betrays you, that just means more time to drink and goof with Dave about the time he stuck his balls in the airplane sink.
I’ve done two Vegas guy trips where everyone loses at the tables, gets cleaned out eating at a high-end chain restaurant, and hangs out with strippers mainlining anti-depressants. It loses its charm quickly. Rent a house somewhere cool instead then stock up on food and drink like you’re going to college again. You won’t regret it.
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Brad:
Do you ever fear that you or your house has an atrocious smell that you can’t detect because you’ve grown used to it? I remember going back to my college apartment after spending the summer months at home and being shocked by the aroma. It wasn’t terrible, but it was an unusual smell.
YES. Every time we get back to our house after a vacation, I’m always like, “Aw man it’s so nice to be back HEY WHAT’S THAT SMELL?” I won’t lie, it can get a little musty. And then it goes away after being home seven seconds. I worry that it will only get mustier, and that the old man smell is beginning to set in. I worry that young people will come by and be like “Old Man Magary’s house smells like dead worms.” It’s coming, man. I’d try to pinpoint the source of the mustiness but I know already know it’s me. I know that the house is now perfumed with my lingering, fetid musk. All the Febreze on Earth won’t be able to stop it.
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It does smell better than a dorm room though. The smells that a teenage boy can live with never cease to appall. It’s like someone pissed in vomit. You could have taken a shit under my college bunk bed and I probably would have too lazy to clean it up.
Mike:
Why doesn’t pizza have a side dish? Burgers have fries. Sandwiches get chips. Hot dogs work with either one of those, or if you’re at a cookout, maybe even some yummy potato salad. Pizzas are made up of bread, meat, cheese, vegetables, and sauce - the same as a sandwich - and yet, pizza has no potato friend. I thought it might be because it’s too much starch, but pizzas get served with breadsticks and sauce all the time, which is just more pizza but easier to hold. And chicken wings don’t count. That’s an entirely different food eaten alongside pizza. They could just as well be nachos.
Pizza doesn’t have a side because there’s no goddamn room. The pizza itself takes up 60 percent of the real estate, and pizza slices take up even more room on the plate. When you think about it, it’s bizarre that you would take a very large piece of a circle (the pizza) and then try to fit it onto a much tinier circle (your plate). It’s not efficient.
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Also, pizza requires no real side dish because A) It’s filling and B) It already has meat, starch, dairy, and vegetables already included. Does this stop my wife from ordering a side salad? No. No it does not. I required by the bonds of marriage to plunk down $10 for a side salad that I will forever resent. You know what would have been a better side? A meatball sub. Let’s not order a salad and try to kid ourselves here. You’re living in a fairy tale if you think that salad is gonna make up for the digestive crimes I’m about to commit.
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Peter:
Are butt hairs pubes? Are they a subcategory of pubes, like ball hair? Or are they their own thing? If the latter, where is the border between pubes and butt hair?
A butt hair is a butt hair. I know pubic hair can technically include any hormone-induced follicular growth: on your balls, your armpits, your face, etc. But come on, pubes are pubes. Once you’ve entered the crack, you’re in a whole other sector of the body. Maybe you get a stray pube on your taint every now and again. But once you’ve sailed into the butt’s domain, all hairs therein belong to your anus. Oh the knots they can tie! It’s like a band of sailors live down there.
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John:
What is your stance on bringing young kids to breweries? This seems to be the trendy thing to do in Colorado now. Every time I try to go to one of my favorite breweries on a Saturday afternoon, several “trendy” parents have brought the whole fam out and are letting their kids run wild around the deck while they act oblivious and just chat with their friends. I hate feeling like I’m drinking in a playground, and it’s gotten to the point where I don’t even want to go out to these places anymore. This is fucked up right? Am I crazy for thinking these people shouldn’t be bringing their kids to a spot where mid-thirties alcoholics like me are trying to get a little day drunk?
A brewery is just a restaurant. As far as I’m concerned, people can bring their kids to one. It’s not like non-brewery restaurants don’t also serve booze. Also, a brewery menu is almost always certain to include kid-friendly shit like fries and chicken tenders and funfetti mozzarella sticks or whatever the fuck else. The inner Midwesterner in me is always drawn to brewery menus. OOOOH, NACHOS! THAT SOUNDS BIG! And look at all the beers on tap on the back! I could spend hours looking at all those before ordering a Miller Lite.
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That said, anyone who brings a kid to a restaurant is obligated to supervise them. If there really are parents at your local Gordon Biersch letting their kids have the run of the joint, they should be taken out to the public square and lashed. There’s nothing worse than being forced to look after a child that isn’t your own. You should be allowed to trick that kid into walking into a pizza oven just to teach its negligent parents a lesson.
HALFTIME!

Tyler:
I have a friend who claims he doesn’t wipe if he’s about to jump in the shower. This is certifiably insane, right?
Eh, not necessarily. Excessive wiping can cause “anal fissures” (do NOT Google the term), and washing your ass instead can help prevent and/or treat them. (Really, this means every American shitter should also include a bidet, but I understand that’s pricey and will yank every Europhobic tripwire in the national consciousness.)
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I think it’s okay to leap right into the shower if you know it’s not a massive cleanup job back there. I mean, if you’ve got an Almond Joy sticking out of there, you should go ahead and do a preliminary wipe to get out the big stuff. Then you can finish the job in the shower. Yes, I’m aware that this means you might bear witness to the sight of visible poop particles on your shower floor and drain. But who else is gonna see it? No one, that’s who. That soapy poop foam is between you and your shower. It will keep your secrets.
This is the part where I confess that I was showering yesterday, had to poop, and leapt out to shit, with the shower still running, before zipping back in to clean up. Don’t judge me until you’ve pooped a mile in my shoes.
Chris:
As I get older, I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten a lot better at swatting flies. I regularly bat them out of the air with my hand or flick them off of surfaces. When I was a kid, it seemed like killing flies was much more of an endeavor. Is it possible that climate change and pollution have caused flies to become dumber and slower, or am I developing some kind of precision old-man hand-eye coordination?
No, you’re just killing flies that are already old and slow and dying. There are flies that don’t even move when you kill them, and you’re like, “Look how fucking stupid this fly is, he’s not even trying to get away!” You can kill them barehanded. That fly was probably already in fly hospice by the time it managed to get inside your relatively well-insulated home.
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We had a leaky hydrant in our neighborhood the resulting standing water bred a SHITLOAD of young, active flies. I couldn’t have killed these guys with a MOAB if I had had one. It was infuriating. I was so used to old, lazy flies that it angered me when these young, MILLENNIAL FLIES came into my domicile and made me look like a chump. By nightfall, I was taking full swings with the swatter: enough force to take out windows and vital fixtures. My wife was concerned. Fuck young flies. Send them to military fly school.
Ryan:
Barron Trump just moved into the White House. What are the odds he leaves the White House with the most jack off sessions for any one person in White House history?
A billion percent. Plus his got his old man’s horny gene. Preteens are horny enough, but imagine factoring in Trump-level horniness on top of it. That house’ll have a new coat of paint on it by the time he’s finished. I support Barron in his endeavors. I hope he fucking trashes the place every time his old man is out golfing and sucking down Big Macs.

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Chris:
I sprinkle sea salt on ice cream when I have a bowl of Breyer’s or whatever supermarket brand we have on hand. Is that weird? I don’t douse it, but just a pinch over the top.
Nah, it’s not weird. If anything, you are merely perpetuating the hold that BIG SEA SALT has over the American dessert space. It’s gotten out of hand, frankly. Like I remember trying a salted caramel from some chocolate shop once and being like, “This is AMAZING!” Now you can get salted caramel corndogs at the Kum ‘N’ Go. It’s gone too far.
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But yes, a touch of salt can enhance the flavor of a lot of desserts. Whole other FLAVOR ELEMENT on your palate. Sometimes we sprinkle it on top of brownie batter right before baking the brownies up. My in-laws do not approve. My in-laws are like, “Did you that weird thing where you put salt in the brownies again? We don’t want them.”
Nelson:
Why do teams continue the terrible tradition of wearing championship T-shirts and caps immediately after clinching? Immediately after the team’s crowning achievement, with millions watching, they force these apex athletes to throw on generic, ill-fitting championship swag, which always kind of sucks! Wouldn’t it be much easier, minimalist, and just cooler to remain in the traditional unis throughout the next few hours?
I assume the reasons that athletes immediately don title swag are because A) Everyone else does it, and so it becomes part of the title-clinching tradition that athletes dream about, B) The swag is its own kind of trophy, albeit ugly, C) It feels good to change into clean clothes after sweating through a uniform a dozen times over, and D) They have an exclusive agreement with Adidas or whoever to wear it and will be fined $5,000,000,000 if they don’t. But there are holdouts if you look. Steph Curry kept his uni when they clinched, for he is a man of wealth and taste.
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I remain committed to the take that all title swag sucks. It’s ugly. It gets dated within a single year of wearing it. And furthermore, titles are self-evident. You shouldn’t need an article of clothing that stipulates that the Cubs won the World Series last year. People know. The team logo should be able to do all that work for you. Any swag past that is desperate and needy, like you gotta remind people of what your team did. The second I spot a goddamn SIXBURGH shirt in the wild, I know I’m dealing with an imbecile.
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Kyle:
What if Lebron joined the Warriors? He could take less money and basically be guaranteed to get rings. Could it happen? Is he able to not have control of everything? It’d make a beastly lineup having Curry & Thompson at guard and having Draymond & Lebron on the wings and Durant up the middle.
Scott Van Pelt was on the radio last week saying NBA people told him LeBron is GONE from Cleveland after next season, in part because Dan Gilbert is such a fucking dingbat. And if he does leave, why NOT join Golden State? He already proved in Miami that he doesn’t feel the need to do everything on the court single-handedly. And as brilliant as LeBron is, I don’t think he can’t improve any other current team enough to make them better than Golden State is right now. That’s how hopeless the Warriors have rendered the rest of basketball.
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The only way I can see LeBron challenging Golden State is if he already has a clandestine plan in place to ditch Cleveland and form a superteam in a warm-weather city with other pending free agent studs (like Russell Westbrook). Like that’s ever happened before! I CHORTLE HEARTILY AT THE NOTION.
Brandon:
How do you pronounce Reese’s (the candy)? I’ve always said it as written, like someone’s name with an apostrophe s at the end. I think I’m in the minority though, as an insane amount of people say “Ree-sees” which has always blown my mind. Even crazier is I’ve heard people say “Reese’s pieces” as “Ree-sees pee-sees”. The name of the candy already rhymes if you say it the right way! These people are all idiots right?
Obviously the right way to pronounce it is “ree-sehs.” Take it from someone who has worked on the Reese’s advertising account and has personally eaten over 46 billion Reese’s cups in his lifetime. The heartless sugar barons at Reese’s corporate want you to pronounce it normally. Do you know why some people say it weirdly? Because they mispronounced it as kids and stuck with it as a goof. That happens sometimes. My kid calls breakfast bars “breakfast barfs” and thinks it’s the funniest shit in history (I can’t argue). I bet Drew Barrymore called them Reesees peecees back in her ET days. She could have won over any Tonight Show crowd with that routine.
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John:
Driving to a relative’s funeral in Eastern Kentucky (RIP Aunt Bessie), I was reminded of just how many houses in that area have a cemetery. Not like on a separate piece of property, but part of the acreage of the family homestead. This got me thinking: would you want to be buried on your property?
Nope. I know you think you’re staking an eternal claim to that POPPITY by having yourself interred there, but the new owners would just dig up your bones and chuck them in a dumpster to make room for their new outdoor pizza oven. Or the house stays in your family and you’re stuck haunting the same goddamn relatives you had to deal with back in your living days. I see no advantage either way.
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I’m with the late George Carlin in that I don’t think there should be ANY cemeteries. Civilian cemeteries only exist so that old mob factions can get together and so that Bruce Wayne can be caught looking sad. You dead people have already had your time down here. You don’t get to KEEP a whole plot of land for your own while you’re marinating in the eternal void. Someone could have use that land to grow extra pot. Donate your body to science, you selfish dead bastards. And we have Facebook for grieving now. No need to visit Auntie Poona’s grave when you can just click onto her abandoned Facebook page and check out old pictures of her drunk at the beach. Much more efficient way to grieve.
George:
What do you think is the best HBO intro/music ever? I say it’s The Wire. Always got me pumped for the show. Totally dramatic. Totally set the stage for a big episode.
I hated The Wire music. Every version of it. I skipped right past it every time. Sounded like some shitty blues song a middle-aged guy would think is crazy deep. And it goes on FOREVER. I bet James Dolan forces his shit band to play it in rehearsal. I think The Wire was a great show, but The Sopranos theme buries it.
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By the way, if you want to remember The Sopranos theme fondly, never listen to the full version of it. It sounds like some awful E Street Band spinoff record. The whole song should have been 40 seconds long.
Email of the week!
Sue:
I was an exceptionally shy and socially awkward kid, but one year when I was in my early teens, a friend persuaded me to attend summer camp with her. It was affiliated with our church’s denomination, which meant that everyone who attended was nonjudgmental, kind, and filled with the Holy Spirit. Ha ha, just kidding! It was the usual adolescent nightmare of bullying and jockeying for popularity, transferred to a bucolic rural setting. My friend managed to find a boyfriend on the first day there and pretty much deserted me for the rest of the week.
We slept in bunkhouses, and the bathrooms were located in a separate facility, a few yards away. There were a couple of actual working toilets, not just outhouses, but something about the close quarters and the bad camp food caused my sphincter to close up. After a few days, I thought I might make it through the entire week without taking a dump. Then, around day five, I finally produced an enormous, toilet-clogging poop. No amount of flushing was going to send that baby down the pipes. Luckily, the toilet wasn’t overflowing, it was just staunchly refusing to get rid of my waste. I hightailed it out of there and returned to my bunk, where I quickly picked up a book, acting as if I had been sitting there for hours.
A few minutes later, one of my bunkmates came in and asked me if I’d recently used the facilities. I wasn’t an idiot, so of course, I said no. Obviously, my giant poop had been discovered. Word of the mysterious mega-poop spread throughout the camp. One of the older counselors was pregnant, and despite her denials, she got blamed (I guess people figured she was pooping for two). It even became the subject of jokes during the following night’s camp talent show. No one ever knew it was me, so maybe there is a God after all.
SOURCE - DEADSPIN posted by Campus94Me