Top 5 Musicians with Muscles

Every once in a while, someone known for athletic pursuit will attempt a foray into the arts. This sort of fish out of water story makes news when it's really incongruous: Pro QB Randall Cunningham took ballet, WWE Wrestler Chris Jericho has a “band,” and Dancing with the Stars is doing a great job at softening (or ruining, depending on how much you like cars and Budweiser) Hall of Fame Football players' reputations.

Usually this blog attempts ridiculous amounts of masculinity (see my mini-ode to Elisha Cuthbert). Well, this week, let’s mix it up a bit. At the risk of changing the usually uber-masculine tone here (or come to think of it, confirming it) and stepping on Sean Horlor's Up Your Alley terrain of showing lots of near-naked men (http://www.xtra.ca/blog/vancouver/), this week I’m taking a look at those artists who "go" athlete?

Below…my top five athletic Musicians. I realize that all musicians require some amount of physical ability and endurance, particularly drummers, singers, and people who blow air into things (if a Tuba player ever had the balls to play shirtless, I bet we'd see a severe drop in Pilates DVDs in favour of tuba lessons); however, this week's list has three eligibility criteria:

First: It will be only male musicians. This saves me a boatload of trouble when I choose five female "musicians" (i.e. Fergie) and open up a can of worms on what exactly constitutes a healthy/athletic body. Not going there, sister. (For the record, Tina Turner would be on the list).

Second: It will only be people I’ve heard of. If there is some bodybuilding opera singer living in Romania, post a link to his freakish, talented figure…we’ll all be more cultured for it.

Third: It will be pretty shallow, based mostly on some male physical ideal formed in my impressionable childhood brain while watching Superstars of Wrestling on Saturday mornings. The reality is, a number of the people on this list are surface athletic: 80s Stallone on the outside, 90s Billy Joel on the inside…and so…

Boyd Tinsley – Electric violinist for the most abused rock band in history, The Dave Matthews Band. Not only is this guy ripped (who knew the violin weighed so much?), but he also started his own tennis tournament. Clearly he has a string fetish.

50 Cent – Who knows how much resistance training he receives from carrying around bullets lodged in his body, but the fact is, 50 Cent is freakishly large for someone who MCs with such malaise. 50 might be on roids, but are you gonna accuse him?

Glenn Danzig – Though he was sort of skinny during his days in the Misfits, well, punk and muscles don’t really go—sort of like punk and bike shorts (though what do bike shorts go with? I’m not sure they even go with bikes). Once Danzig went more metal, dude made even the most testosterone-y teenage boy feel inadequate.

LL Cool J –Though his music is near unlistenable these days (notwithstanding his part on Hit ‘Em High for the Space Jam soundtrack), this guy has his own workout book! I bought it. It was a bit embarrassing. I hide it when you come over to my house. But I tried it. It worked a bit. Though it didn’t say much about drinking draft beer as a muscle recovery drink, so I’m willing to take part of the blame for that one.

Nikki Sixx – I recently finished Nikki Sixx’s journals The Heroin Diaries. Well worth the read. What astounded me about the Motley Crue bassist was that he was strung out on heroin, cocaine, Jack Daniels, pills, etc. and every once in a while, he’d go to the gym! Unlike LL's diet book, Nikki's seems to work pretty well. Oh, and let's not forget, Nikki Sixx died twice. Once in 1986 and once in 1987 when on both occasions, his heart stopped. Do you know how hard it is to live after your heart has stopped? And we think Michael Phelps has a strong cardiovascular system....

On the Bubble: Usher (but there was no way I was putting his shirtless body on my blog), Sepultura's Derrick Green (You’ve heard of him right?!), Henry Rollins (He did pushups in the video for Disconnect), Gwar (But I think they just wore body armour), Times Square Naked Cowboy (the term artist is used loosely), Grace Jones.

Did I miss anyone? Let me know...

Plaxico Burress: this could be you!

I am sitting here in my underwear, Friday afternoon, drinking sugar free juice, and watching O.J. Simpson talk to the judge moments after he has just been told he’s spending 15 years in prison. His voice is cracking. He is on the verge of tears. I don’t feel bad for him.

O.J. Simpson is going to jail for 15 years (minimum 9) for armed robbery. CNN just used the term Cosmic Justice. This has absolutely nothing to do with sports. Does anyone even remember that O.J. Simpson played football?

NFL Career Totals:
• Rushing - 2,404 Carries for 11,236 Yards and 61 Touchdowns
• Receiving - 203 Receptions for 2,142 Yards and 14 Touchdowns
* Some nice Fantasy numbers there…

NFL Highlights:
• NFL Most Valuable Player (1973)
• First player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season (1973)
• Unanimous All-Pro
• Won Four NFL Rushing Titles (1972,73,75,76)
• Named All-Pro Five Straight Years (1972-76)
• Named to Six Pro Bowls
• Pro Bowl Player of the Game (1973)
• Inducted into the Buffalo Bills Hall of Fame (1991)

Does anyone remember that he was pretty funny as Nordberg in three Naked Gun movies?



O.J. ruined the Naked Gun movies for everyone. And for that, may they throw away the key...

Fuck Up Athlete #1: Sean Avery

Sean Avery gets paid millions of dollars to be a fake asshole, and then is chastised when he is an actual one; it’s sort of the Dennis Rodman Effect (dying the hair, cool—kicking a photographer in the nuts, not cool). Avery’s a professional wrestler; he’s Daniel Day Lewis going squirrely and asking everyone to refer to him as his character on a movie set; he’s Christian Bale losing 100 pounds for a movie no one saw; he’s Don Rickles.

If you’re on this sporty blog (and my counter says about 650 non-me hits have been), you probably know what Sean Avery said in Calgary when referring to the fact that his old girlfriend was now with another NHL player (the progerian Dion Phaneuf). Even though he only said it two days ago, PuckBunnygate already seems like old news.



Okay, so sloppy seconds is a bit of a mean thing to say about an ex-girlfriend, especially when he’s referring to my number two crush from 2002-2006 inclusive: Elisha Cuthbert. I imagine the angelic voices of young Billys from Gravenhursts all over Canada asking Ma and Pa over dinner last night....

BILLY: Ma, what’s a sloppy second?
MA: It’s nothing...
BILLY: But the sportsman on TV said sloppy seconds.
MA: When you’re older....
BILLY: Can I have sloppy seconds?
PA: Stop it, boy!
BILLY: Can I get sloppy seconds for Christmas...
*If that's not proof I can write plays, what is?

What all this amounts to is that Sean Avery told a locker room joke in a locker room, only we all got to hear it. Should he be kicked out of the NHL? I don’t know—a million sports websites are talking about that—go look at them. The point is, lots of guys (fuckups and non-fuckups) have made stupid jokes out of jealousy, bravado, carlessness, accident, bullying, self-defence, or just plain absence of thought.
I'm not defending him. I still don’t like him. But no one’s perfect(except Elisha Cuthbert 2002-2006).

Fuck Up Athletes...

...piss us off. And by us, I mean those of who delayed our virginity (if for only a moment) and sacrificed our marks (meaning we had to go to Universities near the bottom of the MacLean’s ranking), growing up in the pursuit of some sport. Life as a Tim Hortons commercial isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, when at 6AM on a Sunday morning, you’re putting on an ice cold jockstrap in Astorville, while your friends are just getting in from a party at someone’s house where there was a bonfire—I mean, come on, a bonfire!

A pro athlete who throws it away isn’t the same as say, an actor who dies early. I don’t care what you say, a fourth line centre in the AHL has sacrificed more to get where he is than River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, or anyone else a teenage girl cries for when he dies. Having tried to learn even the simplest of guitar, you could convince me that Kurt Cobain worked hard to get where he did before he threw it away, but then again, he could do heroin and drink at work: name a pro sport where I can do that, and I’m hitting the gym/pipe. Maybe it’s not a fair comparison, since for athletes, it’s usually not such a matter of life and death, but rather, prison or suspension or looking like a lame ass.

For a number of boys, the youthful pursuit of sport with an eye to “the pros” was with hockey, but for some it was baseball (though Terry Puhl and Larry Walker were the only Canadian baseball players I had ever heard of), or if your parents were eccentric, you had outliers like tennis, golf, or track. (*I won’t even start with the girls, who endure the mysterious phenomenon of stripper training known as competitive dance—come on, Jazz Dancing? Really?).

So when a professional athlete spits in the face of all us losers, we get angry. I don’t mean to say jealous. After the age of about 16, you pretty much realize there are a lot other things to do, a lot of other paths to follow, other than pro-athlete. And while only few people actually live in a Deloreon, I don’t know anyone who grew up playing a sport at any level, who truly says “I wish I could go back and do something about the fact that I’m not a pro athlete,” as though they could do something about being 5’8, 140 pounds.

In light of this week’s multitude of fuck up athletes, I’ll start periodically profiling athletes who...well...are fucks ups. Who have taken a gift (a gift they WORKED for no less) and usually through sheer stupidity, treated it like Sean Avery’s sloppy seconds.

So with that, I’ll start with the biggest fuck up out there right now: Sean Avery.

Bocce Art

In trying to forge an identity for the new blog, I have only a vague idea of combining sport and art. As I approach 30, the thought of improving at any sport seems far off; new sports are for kids and hobbyists (people who think doing things you suck at can still be fun).

A year ago, I discovered urban bocce: 8 big balls, one smaller ball, a measuring tape, public cocktail consumption, and your municipal park tax dollars at work. From cow paddies to concrete abutments, since April of 2007, I have probably played 100 games of urban bocce in varying levels of sobriety.

This picture sums up where I think the blog might be headed. I would hang this over my fireplace if I had one. Behold the visual magnificience of my new #1 sport.

Being in a Mall on Sunday

On the afternoon of September 26, 1986, I am at the top of our driveway in Kingston, shooting tennis balls into a hockey net. The net is one of those flimsy types—with a base and a back, but no sides or “top-shelf.” More a lacrosse net than a hockey net. Framed mesh, if comparisons to lacrosse nets mean nothing. I am seven, and have three Steve Yzerman posters on my bedroom wall. Nothing unique by mid-80s standards.

I don’t know what I am thinking on this afternoon. I mean this literally. I don’t remember. Nor will I try to probe the depths of that seven year old with romantic adult make-em-ups: dreams of playing in the NHL (who didn’t have that?); grade three crushes on a black girl who was actually from India (Sorry, Jaspreet); a fight with a teacher about how many States there are (Fuck you, Ms. Holden, there are fifty!).

I don’t know what I am thinking on this afternoon when after a wonderfully average shot (or a stiff wind), the net falls over and instead of bending down to pick it up, I stomp on it the way Marty McFly does on one end of his skateboard to pop the whole thing up into a waiting hand. Simple lever mechanics…I think.

Ah, the flimsy net…the flimsy net. Well, what can’t stand up to my rad wrist shot is strong enough to pop past my hand and McFly into my mouth, knocking out my front tooth—an “adult” tooth! I don’t suppose the net hits me particularly hard, but for whatever reason the little guy comes out. When there is no tooth where a tooth should be, it’s always going to be disconcerting*; anyone who has had wisdom teeth removed can relate to the idea of getting used to a new mouth architecture. Let’s catalogue the scene here:

• A tooth is floating in a small pool of blood and saliva just under my tongue
• I yell for my Mom (probably)
• When my mouth opens, some blood and spit spills out onto the driveway (probably); there is a splat (unlikely)
• I run inside, lean over the kitchen sink, and cry.

"We" call an emergency dentist whose office is curiously at the Cataraqui Mall, and he tells us to put the tooth in milk. A bloody tooth in a bag of milk: Strawberry Cow, anyone?

Bundled in a hoodie, I am buckled into the front seat of our ‘85 Grand Am. I wonder if in the middle of my first trauma, I marvel at being let into the mall on Sundays—the opening of malls on Sunday being a social hurdle we had yet to overcome. Guess what Dr. Sunday does with the tooth? Just guess. Did you guess that they ram it back into my gums? You shoot, and you score. I shit you not. And like any broken bone, they put a cast on it. Splinting it to the uninjured teeth which surround. Even at seven, the joke, “Can I sign your cast,” is at best, only slightly amusing. It hurts to laugh anyway, so stop making jokes, Jaspreet.

The very tooth will stay in my mouth, changing colours, until 1997 when the dental artists at the University of Manitoba are good enough to give me an implant. Some things we just can’t let go of.

Thus began the years of putting a hand over my mouth when I laughed, mouth guards at recess, being nervous in pictures, and even now, cringing when teeth clink during makeouts.

Not to mention the saddest grade three school picture ever taken...on Tuesday.

* Since this time, I have had four periods in my life where I’ve had to live without a tooth in my mouth, most recently, early 2008 when implant surgery meant a three day self-imposed exile.