My Twelve Most Hated San Antonio Spurs: Nos. 9 and 8

Ninth Most Hated Spur: Michael Finley

"Well I am just SO put out."

This one hurts, because Mike used to be my boy. When you're a fan of a sports team, you develop serious man crushes very easily on any young prospects who show early promise for your club, especially when those guys exceed expectations. In his first year after being drafted 21st by the Suns, Michael Finley was awesome. Finally, the Suns had an athletic wing player, which hadn't really been the case since I'd become a fan of basketball. He could dunk like crazy (he was the first guy whom I saw successfully dunk on Dikembe Mutombo - back when Mutombo was still an otherworldly shotblocking god who stuffed it right back in Shawn Kemp's face every time Kemp tried to dunk on him). Finley even hit a game-winning jumper in a crazy early-season game against the Lakers; the Suns were down 10 with a minute left, but they hit three quick 3s, forced a jump ball at midcourt with about three seconds left, tipped it to Finley, and let him run down the floor and hit a pull-up from elbow with no time left in like the eighth game of his career. I was fucking psyched (even though the Suns plummeted from the elite in the West that year).

The next year, we traded him to Dallas in the Jason Kidd deal, which hurt, but it still seemed worth it. He went on to be a minor star and the third wheel of Dallas's big three in the early Oughts. He signed a huge contract, got cut via the amnesty rule after the last collective bargaining agreement, and had a real chance to do something meaningful with his life. But instead of following his boy Steve and coming home to Phoenix, he did the unthinkable: signing for cheap with the one team that both of his former clubs detested above all. I realize that you gotta do what you gotta do, Mike, but so do I. And I gotta hate you, you son of a bitch.

Finley has developed into one more in a long, long succession of perimeter guys who nail open 3s to torment the Suns, including John Paxson, Mario Elie, Sam Cassell, Kenny Smith, Vernon Maxwell, Brent Barry, Manu Ginobili, Bruce Bowen, and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (until later in this list). Strangely, a number of these guys later played for the Suns, but never at length or effectively. At any rate, I hate all of them, because there's really nothing worse in basketball than watching your team dash around and scrap like mad to get a key stop, only for one of these dicks to hit a three that just strangles your chances.

Eighth Most Hated Spur: Brent Barry

Nowadays, Brent Barry and Michael Finley are pretty much the same player, except that Brent Barry is white and ugly (see above). I also used to kind of like Barry when he played for the Sonics, but that all changed when he joined the Spurs. Now, his every 3 pains me like an eyefull of bees and his awkward gangliness turns my stomach like a mouthful of poop. Add to that his impenitent scruffiness, which is less Brett-Favre manly and more child-molester shady, and the fact that his insufferable brother always seems to be announcing his games and blathering about how funny it is that they have the same parents, and the man becomes equivalent to a massive federal subsidy for hatred.

Oh, he was also the first and only affirmative action dunk contest winner. "Oh, hey, you're white and you kind of did that dunk that Michael Jordan already did in this contest ten years ago. Take a charity trophy for your earthbound race." Watch this clip and tell me: Is it any wonder that the terrorists thought they could defeat us after we crowned a dunk champion this goofy looking? How are we to strike fear in the hearts of our enemies when we once concluded that this man, out of all our many peoples, could perfect something as awesome as the dunk? Blood is on your hands, Brent Barry.

My Twelve Most Hated San Antonio Spurs: Nos. 11 and 10

Elventh Most Hated Spur: Beno Udrih

"Hey there, cowboy."

This motherfucker wants me to pronounce the "h" in his name like a "k." Fuck no. I'll pronounce a "c" like a "ch" or a "j" like a "y," maybe even a "w" like a "v," but the h-to-k thing is just too preposterous. Retransliterate your bizarre language in some even slightly sensible fashion, asshole.

In addition to his curious disregard for the sonic values of letters, Beno suffers from being one of the league's more boring players. He's short and white, he used to have a really dumb bowl haircut, and he has moles on his face. His game consists almost entirely of shooting left-handed 18-foot jumpers, and that would probably be really annoying except that he stopped making them last year, thankfully. If he had continued to be as good as he was in his first two years, I'd probably hate him a lot more.

Since I don't really have much else to say about Beno, I'd like to shame the entire city of San Antonio with this:

Anyone remember that? That was the Spurs logo in the 90s, and I must say that time has not diminished the potent repulsiveness of its design one bit. As I recall, they had this lovely mixture of colors, particularly the manly pairing of pink and teal, all over their home floor at the time. I bet David Robinson would've grabbed at least two more rebounds per game over his career if he hadn't been exposed to such eye-rending graphic design so frequently. In researching this color scheme, I discovered that these colors are rich in disease-awareness symbolism: pink for breast cancer, teal for polycystic ovarian syndrome, and orange for leukemia, three diseases that, strangely enough, I've often wished that the Spurs would contract. May this logo turn out to be a portent of things to come!

Tenth Most Hated Spur: Eva Longoria

Already the most irritating of the housewives desperate, the-former-and-probably-soon-to-be-again Miss Longoria made a strong case for first-ballot induction into the Could You Possibly Hate Me Any More? Hall of Fame by dating and then marrying the NBA's girliest (at least, since Rick Fox retired) and nearly most annoying player. Shockingly, she appeared in the stands for virtually every singly nationally televised Spurs game, and ESPN/ABC made the even more shocking decision to aim at least seven cameras at her at all times.

Mr. and Mrs. Longoria really took things to another level of irritation with their wedding. Like countless other idiots, they got married on 7/7/07, apparently because primitive peoples once attributed divine powers of luckiness to the number 7 or something. I am forced to assume that, should they birth a child on a 2/3 some year, they will ritually sacrifice the poor wretch to the great demon N'Kothra -- Scourge of the Living, Progenitor of Self-infatuated Celebrities -- upon on altar constructed from the bones of kittens, lest the numerological horror of the event should bring ruin on their house. (Bonus prediction: couples married on July 7th, 2007 will actually prove to be more likely to get divorced, owing to the exceeding shallowness that their choice of wedding date reflects).

Of course, we should've known that Eva and Tony would do something like that and make sure that every celeb mag knew about it the instant they announced their engagment by calling in to Ryan Seacrest's show. I can't believe that David Stern didn't fine Tony for making the league look like a bunch of tools like that. You can bet that Roger Goodell would have.

Just in case you aren't sure whether you, too, should hate Eva Longoria, I submit to you this quote: "I've lost a lot of jobs because I was too pretty. And everybody's like, 'Oh, poor you.' But seriously, you don't get the good roles when you're beautiful." That makes so much sense, because big-time actresses like Julia Roberts, Angelina Jolie, and Reese Witherspoon are so ugly, and because this is what you look like without makeup:

Oh, poor you.

My Twelve Most Hated San Antonio Spurs

John Hollinger is fond of saying that, despite the fact that they've been dominating the league for the better part of a decade, no one really hates the Spurs because they're so nice and professional. John Hollinger has clearly never spoken to a fan of the Phoenix Suns. Besides, I'd call them whiny, insufferably arrogant, and unscrupulously devious before I'd go for nice and professional; while none of the Spurs ever seem to get caught firing off guns in barfights or sexually assaulting groupies like their colleagues do, there are many other ways of being a dick.

Last night, as I read Hollinger's scouting report on Tim Duncan, my body was literally wracked with spasms of hatred. That's right: my animus towards that bastard actually manifested itself physically. It occured to me that this phenomenon needed to be recorded, carefully analyzed, and digested in all its particulars for the benefit of future vituperologists, not to mention for the sake of streamlining my Spur-hating process for maximum efficiency. The Spurs, after all, have reached that illustrious threshhold of detestability from which a team or athlete can never be removed. Some teams, such as the Lakers of the early part of this decade, earn the hatred of an hour; once they cease to dominate, one no longer gets all that worked up about them (though I certainly hated the Lakers fully in their day). For me, the Spurs have joined the Dallas Cowboys, the New York Yankees, and the Texas Longhorns (places I won't be moving: Texas) as teams that I will despise forever, even if they finish dead last every season from now until the day I die.

So in preparation for the upcoming NBA season, I'm cataloguing the twelve Spurs whom I hate the most. You will note that this number is sufficient to cover the entire active roster. I think the experience will be illuminating. When Bruce Bowen sticks his leg in between an opponent's to cause a turnover that leads to one of those soul-dessicating Tony Parker teardrop shots, which player is most responsible for the bile rising in my throat? Now I will know.

First off, some dishonorable mentions. I hate these guys, but not in enough detail to warrant a finely wrought thesis on the subject.

• Ian Mahinmi: What an infuriating name. It seems like it almost rhymes, but that turns out to be a tease, and it asks us to end one syllable with an "n" before starting the next one with an "m", which is positively rude. I'd hate this guy a lot more if it weren't a near 100% certainty that he's going to suck completely.
• Sean Elliott: Sean Elliott is said to be a nice guy, and he was very brave to come back from a kidney transplant to play in the league once more...and that's precisely the problem. Thanks to him, people feel obligated to have pity for someone associated with the San Antonio Spurs, causing intense cognitive dissonance and probably a few nervous breakdowns. Also, he was a pretty lame announcer without anything particularly interesting to say.
• Ime Udoka: "Hey, looks like Bruce Bowen's finally getting old, inching closer and closer to the welcoming grave. He'll probably stop being good pretty soon, and then we won't have to watch his sickeningly ugly form of play in service of the world's most evil basketball team." Every NBA fan in America has been having these thoughts for a year or two. Now the Spurs go and sign Udoka, who's pretty much the exact same guy except five years younger. No, it's cool, go ahead and smash my other testicle, too; it's not like I wanted it.
• David Robinson: Truth be told, I have surprisingly little beef with Mr. Robinson. Maybe it's because, per the Hollinger theory, he actually is incredibly nice, and he lacks Sean Elliott's cloying human interest story value to boot. Still, he did us all a massive disservice by getting injured in '96-'97, causing the Spurs to suck for just one season and giving them the draft pick that became Tim Duncan, one of the ten or fifteen greatest players of all time. Why couldn't you have just soldiered on as usual that year, David, making the Spurs into fringe contenders who would never quite get over the hump for a few years more? That was pretty uncool, and definitely not what Jesus would've done.

Alright, finally: the Spur whom I hate twelfth most:

Matt Bonner

Has anyone ever liked the unathletic, tall white guy who shoots threes and gets beaten on defense like a rented mule with a "Please beat me!" sign on its back? No. I asked everyone who's ever bothered to think about the question, and we all agreed that the answer is no. Even if that guy is good, like Dirk Nowitzki, or kind of a little bit good, like Troy Murphy, no one likes him. If that guy also happens to be the palest New Hampshirean in captivity, it's that much worse; how could you not resent a guy that physically unappealing for going into one of the professions most likely to cause images of his grotesque whiteness to be broadcast all over the globe, with nary a sleeve or a pant leg to obscure the awfulness? Matt Bonner playing basketball professionally is like a lawyer going to work for the mafia: yeah, the money's good, and your actions aren't in and of themselves immoral, but what about all the innocent people out there suffering because of them anyway? Sometimes, you've got to let your own interests be superceded by the greater good. For Matt Bonner, that meant giving up his mediocre NBA career for, most likely, a job as the Walmart employee who restocks the really high shelves. Unfortunately, he wasn't man enough to do it. I hope he's learned how to cram some of his hundred-dollar bills into his ears to drown out the screams of all the misbegotten babies who happen to look at the TV screen at the wrong time. It'd be tough for him to live with himself otherwise.

More to come.