10 Things You Should Know about Sportsball Player Rob Gronkowski

I don't usually do sportsball players, but apparently everybody knows about this one, so I have to do a 10-things article to get up to speed.

1. Rob Gronkowski was born in 1989 in New York.

2.  After college (University of Arizona), he started a career in sportsball for some team.

3. His position was "tight end," which I'm sure has a sexual connotation.

4. His nickname is The Gronk, which sounds like a bad guy in a 1970s Sid and Marty Krofft kids' show: "In today's episode, the evil Gronk tries to steal the ice crown and bring chaos to the Land of Shadows."

5. He's photographed nude a lot, but I have found no actual penises.  It's always a tease, with his genitals covered by a football or a picture of himself.

6. He's photographed with bikini-clad ladies a lot.  Apparently he likes women.

7.  He seems quite full of himself.  I've never seen him on film, but in nearly every photograph, he has an annoying smirk: "Don't you wish you were as good as me?  But you're not, are you?"

8. There are 537 articles in various newspapers and magazines exclaiming, with utter surprise, that Gronkowski would be fine with a gay teammate.  Since when is this newsworthy? Would he also be ok with a black teammate?  How about a Jewish one?

9. There's that annoying smirk again.  I don't care if he is ok with a gay teammate, I don't like him.

10. He's not playing sportsball anymore.  He retired at age 30.

"All-American": Beach Hunks Who Play Football

This Netflix icon is obviously meant to draw the attention of gay men to the tv series, with a shirtless hunk gazing at another shirtless hunk with homoromantic ardour.  But I've been burned by Netflix bait-and-switch before, and besides, I don't know what an "all-American" is (some sort of hamburger?).  So it's on to wikipedia.

All-American is based on the life of Spencer Paysinger, who I never heard of.  Spencer James (Daniel Ezra, the black guy in the top photo) is "star wide receiver at Crenshaw High School who transfers to Beverly Hills High to play football, but is switched to playing Quarterback."

So he isn't playing football anymore, he is demoted to another game called Quarterback?  But I always thought that Quarterback was a player type.  And not a humiliating demotion, an honor:  "He's the star quarterback, swoon."

The wikipedia page is all mixed up, but I think I got the basic plot: South Crenshaw is the Hood, and Beverly Hills is the ritzy neighborhood where Will goes to live with his Uncle Phil and Cousin Carlton on Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

This South Crenshaw, a portmanteau of South L.A. and Crenshaw, is a hotbed of gang violence. Spencer leaves behind:
1. His mother (Karimah Westbrook)

2. His father (Chad L. Coleman,  left), the football coach at Crenshaw High.

3. His younger brother Dillon (Jalyn Hall), who wants to play football but is stuck with degrading basketball instead (now it's basketball that's degrading?)

4. His bff Coop (Bre-Z), a lesbian who gets kicked out of the house when she comes out to her homophobic Mom.

5. Some girlfriends of both Spencer and Coop

6. Some teammates (Spence Moore II, Mitchell Edwards, left)

7. Some  gang members (Jay Reeves, Demetrius Shipp Jr., Kareem J. Grimes).  Coop is interested in keeping out of the gang or something.

In Beverly Hills, Spencer gets:

1. His coach, Billy (Taye Diggs), who he moves in with.  All is not what it seems: Coach Billy graduated from Crenshaw South High School, where he dated Spencer's Mom.

2. Coach Billy's son Jordan (Michael Evans  Behling), who is conflicted because his mother is white, so he doesn't feel that he fits into black culture.  He hates Spencer, both because of the football competition and because his girlfriend Layla is into the dangerous bad boy from the Hood.

3. Coach Billy's daughter Olivia (Samantha Logan), who is dating football player Asher (Cody Christian, left), but dumps him because she's into Spencer, too.

Is this guy, like made of pheremones, or something?

4. Billy's father (Brent Jennings), a former football coach, the only person in the family who is not trying to get into Spencer's pants. 

5. 1980s hunk Casper Van Dien as Asher's father (Asher is the ex-boyfriend of Coach Billy's daughter Olivia, remember).  Like all parents on this show, Casper is a former football player and coach.

6. Some other teammates, such as party boy JJ (Hunter Clowdus).

7. Some miscellaneous girls who fawn over Spencer.  Apparently the show bible states that "all the girls are interested in Spencer," and the writers took it literally.  Come on, he's not even hot.

All this teen dating intrigue and father-son baggage was too complicated for me, so I just fast-forwarded through a few episodes, looking for the homoromantic scene, or any buddy-bonding of any sort.

Gay Subtexts:  I couldn't find any.  Most male characters seem to be disagreeable jerks.

Sports:  There's at least one football game in every episode.

Beefcake:  There's a beach scene, hot tub scene, or strip poker scene in every episode, dozens of mega-hunks wandering around looking at girls.  You want to yell "Open your eyes! There's a hot guy standing right next to you!"

Heterosexism:  Yep.  In spite of the lesbian bff back home.

Tracking Down the "Do It For God's Glory" Hunks

These three superlative examples of hunkitude are apparently basketball players.  My only clues to their home base are: a dark blue and white color motif, "Do It For God's Glory" on the gym wall, part of a team logo, and the name "Coach Hancock."

1. I keyed "For God's Glory" and "Coach Hancock" into Google, and came up with a twitter post, where someone named Marquis Williams congratulates Coach Hancock and Jaelin D. Campbell by saying "To God be the Glory.  #GodsPlan."

Hancock #1, a "Husband, Father, Coach, and Teacher," is the coach for the Cougars at College Station High School in Texas.  He also runs a Church Planting blog, with posts like "How to be a growing coach."  One assumes that he does a lot of witnessing to his team.

The team does have a black and purple motif.







But can a public high school really have a fundamentalist Christian slogan on the wall of its gym?

Besides, the gym doesn't look like that.

2. The next Coach Hancock is at Springfield Catholic High School.  He recently retired after 37 seasons of coaching and a spot in Missouri Coaching Hall of Fame.  When he left, he said "The fingerprint of God is all over this move."

 But their team is the Fighting Irish, with a green motif.

He was previously coach of the Branson, Missouri High School Pirates, but they have a blue motif.





















3. No religious talk on the twitter feed of Coach Hancock of the Wyoming, Ohio Cowboys.  Plus their mascot is a cowboy or a horseshoe, with a blue motif.

4. More "Glory to God" rhetoric comes from Coach Hancock of Manvel High School in Manvel, Texas, a suburb of Houston.  He belongs to the New Hope church, and retweets a post of a boy who "just surrendered to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ."  But he also advises "Keep ballin, big dawg."  Go figure.

Here are the junior varsity powerlifters.   Dark purple and orange motif.  Mascot is a maverick horse.  This could be the one.

5.  The only other high school Coach Hancock I could find works at Columbia High School,  Huntsville, Alabama.  No religious talk on his tweets, but leave it to Alabama to allow a fundamentalist Christian slogan on the gym wall. Except their mascot is a red hawk.

My conclusion: Manvel, Texas, a town of 3,000, with the motto "City on the Rise."

Where proselytization by teachers and coaches in public school is perfectly acceptable. 

But on the plus side, they have a water polo team.

Deciphering the Mysterious Headline: Gruden, Yoked, Deuce.

I was looking for Omaha beefcake,  searching under "Creighton University" and "powerlifting," when I came across this mysterious
headline:

"John Gruden's Yoked Son Deuce Just Won a Powerlifting Gold Medal."

Lots of mysteries here.

1. Is Deuce actually the guy's name?  It's a gambling term referring to 2 on dice, rather an odd thing to name someone.  Or is it a phrase, "son deuce"?

2. What does yoked mean?  A "yoke" is something you put over the head and shoulders of an ox to get it to plow a field, but that can't be what it means here.  Maybe it refers to a disability,like this bodybuilder with Down's Syndrome.

3. Who the heck is John Grudin?  Since he popped up in a Creighton search, he must be a Creighton University professor, or maybe a local Omaha celebrity, like a newscaster.

Heartwarming:  The disabled son of a university professor has won a powerlifting gold medal.

First things first: I google Deuce Gruden, to see if it's a real person.

Yep, he's 24 years old, the assistant strength and conditioning coach of the Washington Redskins (a football team), who left them in January 2018 to join his father in Oakland.  Father John says he's "like a tiny little lady but a beast."

Here he poses with...well, I don't know what.

In 2017 he won a gold medal at the IPF Powerlifting Championships in Belarus by lifting 752.5 kg.

3. There's no indication that he has Down's Syndrome, so what the heck does "yoked" mean?

According to the Urban Dictionary, "muscular," from the resemblance the trapezoid has to a yoke.

It's used even with guys who don't have muscular traps, although with them a more accurate term is "swole."

3. Who is John Grudin, Part 1.

I found an article stating that "Washington Redskins Coach Jay Grudin closes on a 2.5 million dollar house near RG3 at Creighton Farms.  Sounds close, since Deuce worked for the Redskins, but it's John, not Jay.

I'm not even going to worry about what RG3 is, or why we're expected to be interested in the houses football coaches buy.

Or what it means to say that son Joey Gruden has won a walk-on with the Fliers.

By the way, Joey's nickname is the Slim Reaper, and he has 2,066 followers on Twitter.  Here he is in the hot tub with a girl.

4. Who is John Grudin, Part 2.

Joey's facebook friends include Christopher, Jay, JJ, Jack, Mike, and Deuce Grudin!  But no John.

But if I spell it Jon Gruden, I get Jay's brother and Joey's uncle (and the father of yoked Deuce), a football coach for the Oakland Raiders.  He's 50 years old, and probably one of these guys.

So, to recap:

We are expected to instantly recognize the names of not only every single player on every professional football team (50 per team) but the names of all their coaches (15 per team).  And the same for baseball and basketball.

That's over 5,000 names, a gargantuan feat of memory.  5,000 words are plenty for everyday communication in a foreign language.

And what does any of this have to do with Creighton University?

The Gay Hint of "Where's Huddles"

At the 1970 Superbowl, played on January 11th at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans, the Kansas City Chiefs beat the Minnesota Vikings 23-7.  The Chiefs got 16 first downs and 151 net yards efficiency. Len Dawson was the individual leader in passing, with 142 yards and 1 touchdown, and a 12/17 c/att.

I have no idea what any of that means, and I couldn't care less. Football is incredibly boring.  I'll go to a superbowl party for the snacks, but I never have any idea what's going on.  Occasionally the other guys in the room scream at the top of the lungs.  I look up from my book and say "So...did our team, like, make a point or something?"

I did try to find a picture of the Kansas City Chiefs with their shirts off.  This one came up, but it also says "Ohio State Football Players Can't Stop Being Shirtless."

I didn't know the Kansas City Chiefs were at Ohio State, but it makes as much sense as anything else in football.

Here's another one of the Kansas City Chief shirtless, at a barbecue that Channing Tatum threw for the Magic Mike Live dancers.

So a football team named after Kansas City that is actually in Ohio moonlights as a dance troupe?

This is why I don't follow football!

But in th summer of 1970, when I was nine years old, I did watch some episodes of a tv series about football!

I know, weird -- nobody watched summer replacement series.  They were awful comedy-variety crap.  Besides, there was something unsettling about watching evening tv when it was still daylight out.

But Where's Huddles was animated, and the two football players, Ed Huddles (Cliff Norton) and Bubba McCoy (Mel Blanc), did a sort of Fred Flintstone-Barney Rubble buddy-bonding routine.  Huddles' wife was even voiced by Jean Vander Pyle (Wilma on The Flintstones).

There was also a Muttley-style snickering dog wearing a football helmet, a daughter named Pom-pom, and a black guy (rare in 1970).

And a football-hating next-door neighbor, Pertwee, voiced with a strong gay accent by Paul Lynde, who I knew from Bewitched.  He voiced everything I thought about football and jocks in general, and he didn't have a wife -- somehow he had avoided the "wife-house-job" future the adults were always mapping out for me!

I didn't know that Paul Lynde was gay himself, and playing the character as gay.  I wouldn't even know that gay people existed for another six years.

But I remember a warm summer evening, when it was still light out, and you could hear the kids playing outside through the screen door, and the fireflies were just starting to sparkle, sitting in front of the tv in our small square house on 41st Street, and seeing a gay man.

Pep Rallies

When I was in junior high, every Friday they forced us to go to the gym for a so-called "pep rally."

Cheerleaders (all girls) forced us to yell "Boy, am I enthused!", jump up and down, and scream as loud as we could.

The mascot danced and did gymnastic stunts.

Then we had to sing our fight song.  I still remember most of the words.

Our T-E-A-M is the best.
We will fight with all our M-I-G-H-T.
W-A-S-H-I-N-G-T-O-N, that's our school, all right.

There were pep rallies in high school and college, too.  They weren't required, but I went anyway, even though I had no intention of going to the game later.

I didn't understand the point of pep rallies.  If you liked sports, singing wouldn't make you like them more, and if you didn't like sports, singing wouldn't help.

Apparently they were recommended by educational authorities of the 1960s and 1970s.  Singing and stomping produces "cohesion," a sense of belonging to a group, and students with high cohesion work harder on their schoolwork, get better grades, and are less likely to drop out.

But I went to them for another reason altogether.

I hated the noise, the crowd, the shouting, and the bouncing pom-pom girls.  But it was all worth it when the team came on stage.

First the captain talked about how prepared they were and how much they planned to trounce their opponents.

Then they demonstrated their size and strength by doing push-ups, performing gymnastic stunts, or playing exhibition games of sports other than their own.

Football players would play basketball, basketball players would wrestle, baseball players would play volleyball.






There were lots of bulges and biceps on display, and sometimes players appeared shirtless.

Not very often, but often enough to build suspense and anticipation: would we see the jocks half-naked today?

When it happened, it was a golden moment, a lot better than actually going to a game.

How to Survive a Football Game

No matter how you guard against it, if you live in the United States, sooner or later you will be forced to watch a football game.

It's a national obsession, especially among heterosexual men.  It's all they think of from August through February, and they believe that it's all you think of, too.  So you will be interrogated on favorite teams, favorite players, favorite plays, asked how the game went last night, and invited to watch.

Of course, there are reasons you may want to hang out with guys who watch football.  They tend to be more muscular than your run-of-the-mill straight guy, and they like hugging and grabbing each other at every point.

The snacks are good, too.

If you go to or watch all of the available football games played from August to February, you will devote 12 hours a day, every day, to The Game.  No one can do all of that, so straight guys usually confine themselves to one game per day, and read the newspaper or watch ESPN to find out the other scores, so they can discuss them incessantly with their friends.

1. Professional football is played by members of the NFL (National Football League), which is divided into two conference of 16 teams each.  Each team will play 24 games during the season, plus a playoff to decide who is best in each conference.

That's a lot of games, but don't despair. You just need to memorize who won in the last few games played by teams from cities in your state (or, to be on the safe side, adjoining states).  Unfortunately, the two conferences aren't divided by geography, so you'll just have to scan to find them.

For instance, when I lived in Dayton, masquerading as heterosexual only required me to know about the Cincinnati Bengals, the Cleveland Browns, and maybe, to be on the safe side, the Indianapolis Colts.  Now I live on the Plains, so all I have to know about are the Minnesota Vikings, and to be on the safe side, the Green Bay Packers and the Chicago Bears.

Memorize the names of the some of main players -- called quarterbacks -- so you can ask "How did ___ do last night?"  For the Minnesota Vikings, that's Teddy Bridgewater and Christian Pounder.

The Superbowl, in January or February, is the big event of the year, with the best teams of the two conferences squaring off.  You should know who won for the last five years: Seattle Seahawks, Baltimore Ravens, New York Giants, Green Bay Packers, New Orleans Saints.

2. You should also know something about college football.  Colleges are divided into four Divisions by the National College Athletic Association (NCAA).  You only have to know about Division 1, the 128 biggest colleges, which is divided into 11 Conferences.  Unfortunately, they're not divided by geography, either, so figure out the ones that are closest to you (in Minnesota, the Golden Gophers).

You also might want to know about the Big Ten, which actually has 15 members: Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan State, Minnesota, and so on.

Be careful around Christmastime: that's when the various conferences decide which team is better at "bowl" tournaments, and there are dozens of them, most with silly commercial names: The Hyundai Sun Bowl, the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, the Chick-fil-a Peach Bowl, etc.

Straight guys will be following all of them, but the only you really need to know about is the Rose Bowl (January 1st), in which the Big Ten and the Pacific-12 conferences pair off.

3. If you're ready for the advanced stuff, try showing off your knowledge of high school football!  They are divided up into divisions and ranks, too.

Rock Island High School, my alma mater, is nationally ranked at 7120 and state ranked at 217.  It's in the Western Big Six.

Do you have a headache yet?

Think of it this way: all of the statistics, rankings, divisions, and conferences boil down to a group of extremely muscular men piling up on each other, grabbing each other's butts, adjusting their crotches, and then getting naked in the locker room.

Almost makes it all worthwhile.

See also: Hating Sports.

Peter Koch, Forgotten Muscleman of the 1980s

The other night I was watching A Different World on Netflix, a "very special episode" where Dwayne rehabilitates two juvenile gang-bangers (played by preteen rap duo Kriss Kross).  The police officer who brings them in for mentoring was striking -- tall, blond, buffed.  He had only one line, but maybe he was in other things....

I found Peter Koch, a forgotten muscleman of the 1980s.

Born in 1962, he played professional football for five seasons while doing modeling and some acting.  His first tv role was "Harry the Bodyguard" on a 1986 episode of Dallas.








He showed some chest as Swede Johanson in the war movie Hearbreak Ridge (1986)

Why do musclemen never get to be romantic leads?  If they're not rescuing POWs from behind enemy lines, they're grunting and flexing to threaten the lead -- here Peter's character roughs up Patrick Dempsey in Loverboy (1988).

It's as if Hollywood thinks of muscles and by definition violent rather than sexy.

He was very busy in the 1990s, playing football players, cops, bodyguards, soldiers, and miscellaneous hunks.  No starring roles, but he played himself in the thriller Sweet Evil (1996), and he had a substantial part as the Fire Captain in Conspiracy Theory (1997), starring Mel Gibson.
















Not a lot of roles in the 2000s, but he kept busy as a fitness trainer.

According to his facebook page, he lives in Santa Monica, he's single, and this photo is prominently posted.

My gaydar was triggered until I read more: it's not the boyfriend, it's Toby Maguire.

And Pete's Facebook likes: Brett Easton Ellis, George W. Bush, and Mike Pence.

Ok, not gay, not gay friendly, but still a hunk.

O.J Simpson and Kato Kaelin: a Gay Connection?

O.J. Simpson was a celebrity of the 1970s and 1980s, a football player turned actor.

I didn't know him from his football days, of course, but I saw him in movies like The Cassandra Crossing (1978), Goldie and the Boxer (1979), Back to the Beach (1987), and The Naked Gun (1988), as well as the famous Hertz Car Rental commercial where he flies across an airport lobby.













He was rumored to be gay, but none of my friends in West Hollywood claimed to have hooked up with him; he wasn't that big a star.

On June 13th, 1994, his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were found murdered outside Nicole's house.

At the time, model and aspiring restauranteur  Ron Goldman was identified as an unrelated passerby, but later he was identified as Nicole's friend, who had come to return a pair of glasses that her mother left at his restaurant.

O.J. was charged with the murders, and for the next year, the "trial of the century" was nearly all we talked about.  We heard the defense and the prosecution, knew all of the players in the courtroom, speculated that O.J. had a romantic relationship going on with his houseguest, aspiring actor Kato Kaelin (played by Billy Magnusson in a tv movie).

Kato became a celebrity in his own right, with interviews and photo spreads.  Later he claimed that he and O.J. were never close friends. No word on whether he is gay or not, but he was briefly married to a woman, and has a child.

It was a hugely polarizing trial: most African-Americans thought that O.J. was innocent, and being railroaded.  Most whites thought he was guilty.

He was acquitted on October 3, 1995, for lack of evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt."  A civil trial, where the burden of proof is lower, found him liable for the murders.

13 years later, he was convicted of several counts of robbery and kidnapping for breaking into the hotel room of a sports memorabilia and drug dealer, an incident parodied on Breaking Bad.

I don't know if O.J. is gay in real life, but apparently his father, Jimmy Lee Simpson, who died in 1986, was.  The family kept his gayness a secret.

There is a nude photo of O.J. on Tales of West Hollywood.

Meanwhile, want to see Billy Magnussen in his underwear?