I don't know how I missed mentioning this Tuesday, but April 29 was the 20th anniversary of one of my favorite moments in sports history: Chicago Cubs manager Lee Elia's postgame tirade against the Wrigley Field fans in 1983.
ESPN.com this week posted a retrospective of Elia's Dresden-like f-bombings and listed it at the very top of sports' all-time meltdowns, each one funnier than the next. I don't know how these reporters don't crack up laughing even the time Royals manager Hal McRae threw the office phone and drew blood from one of them. I know I almost fell off the couch when I watched it.
Last summer, I did an update on funny sports audio, and a link to Elia's tirade is one of them. Trust me on this, and listen to it. You might want to review the transcript and real along while Elia screams 43 curse words in three minutes.
Excerpt:
"They oughta go out and get a fuckin' job and find out what it's like to go out and earn a fuckin' living. Eighty-five percent of the fuckin' world is working. The other 15 percent come out here."
"I'll tell you one fuckin' thing, I hope we get fuckin' hotter than shit, just to stuff it up them 3,000 fuckin' people that show up every fuckin' day, because if they're the real Chicago fuckin' fans, they can kiss my fuckin' ass right downtown and print it!"
The page typically gets pretty good traffic from search engines, but nothing like my top 10 MILFs, which is in the top six or seven for a MILFs search on Google and Yahoo! But Monday, my friends, Lee Elia trumped Catherine Zeta-Jones, Faith Hill, Broke Burke and the rest of the hotties to attract roughly 500 visits from people who searched for more on Lee Elia's "I Have a Dream (That One Day Cubs Fans Fuck Themselves)" speech. Congratulations, Lee!
In other news, I got something like 700 visits from an University of Illinois message board celebrating my controversial "Kansas Introduces Traitorous New Coach" post. Of course, the point I was trying to make was that Bill Self is a "traitor" only if you're dumb enough to label Roy Williams a "traitor," because they did basically the same thing, which is leave a good post for a better one. You can't attack one man's character and welcome another with open arms. And, of course, I fault neither, because as Cleo McDowell said in Coming to America, "This is America, jack." (KU fans pointed out that Williams promised to stay forever. Get over it.)
Some things just need to be said, I guess.
Posted by Billy at April 30, 2003 6:58 AM