Why I hate Rick Fox: Reason No. 1,324

This is a true story. It doesn’t have anything to do with fantasy baseball, but we need to keep the content rolling here at PG.com, so here goes…

by Paul Gammons

I’ve never liked Rick Fox. During his years with the Boston Celtics, he always seemed like a guy who, at the end of the day, cared more about looking good than playing that way. He put up some decent numbers from time to time, but never really helped the team win.

Our pseudo-relationship took a turn for the worse when he left the Celtics — and his captaincy — to join the archival Lakers. It was disgusting act, one which proved to me that all those years he was little more than the sports world’s latest Benedict Arnold, biding his time before donning his turncoat. Granted, this all mattered a little too much to me because at the time I still played a little basketball and was more emotionally connected to the team than the average fan. Still, in my mind, Rick Fox and his ilk were the No. 1 reason why the Celtics had yet to return to greatness.

Meanwhile, not only does Fox go on to earn a championship playing with the Lakers in 2000, but he also plays significant minutes in the Finals and performs better in crunch time than at any other time in his career. He was one of us, and now he was one of them, and while karma should have dictated great suffering, instead he was thriving. The reality of it all made my blood boil.

To make matters worse, he had married a famous actress and former Playboy centerfold (Vanessa Williams) and actually started getting parts in major productions. Overnight it seemed that he went from a few cameo appearances to suddenly the industry couldn’t get enough of Rick Fox. For a while, he was everywhere: movies, television shows, commercials. He was living the Hollywood dream. It reached the point where even the slightest mention of his existence would drive me crazy.

Flash-forward to 2002. My wife wants me to go with her to a party at another couple’s house. Not exactly at the top of my to-do list, but when you get married it’s implicit that these duties come with the territory. Fair enough.

Now my wife is good friends with the woman, and naturally they’re both hoping that the two of us husbands will hit it off. This would in turn set the stage for all sorts of future couples activities that women love and make men want to strangle themselves with piano wire. Yet this escalates the pressure. Not only do I have to show up and pretend like I care, but I also have to act like I want to be friends with this dude.

So we get there, and the party is underway. We do the meet-and-greet thing, and while the ladies are talking, I’m standing arond waiting to get in on the conversation with the husband. However, he’s basically sitting at the kitchen table with two of his friends having their own little conversation about something totally off the wall: D&D, japanimation, who knows. It was clear though that nobody at that table was interested in normal human male conversation.

I go sit down in the living room, and lo and behold, as if things weren’t going well enough, the Lakers are on the tube, and who’s lighting it up, just for me? It’s the one and only Rick Fox.

This is where the frustration and awkwardness of the moment overcame me. I was trapped at a party that wasn’t going well, and Fox was rearing his all-too-pretty head to torture me. Perhaps a little louder than I realized, I say with great disdain to no one in particular, “Oh jeez, it’s Rick Fox!”

The boy-men buzzing over at the kitchen table suddenly fall dead silent, and the husband looks over at me and asks me something to the effect of, “You don’t like Rick Fox?”

I turn to him curiously. Uncertain why he’s interested in me for the first time today, I respond with the Readers Digest version of my Rick Fox tale of woe, saying basically that Fox didn’t deserve to leave the Celtics and be rewarded with so much success.

The husband responded with no words, but a bit of a pained look on his face, and his kitchen cohorts seemed incredibly awkward, like they wished they were invisible. The whole thing struck me as incredibly odd, but other conversations ensued and the topic was instantly dropped.

A short time later, since we’d never been to this couple’s place before, the wife decides she’s going to give us a tour of their condo, which is in one of the wealthier suburbs south of Boston. We have a look around and finally we conclude the tour by following the wife down into the finished basement, and it’s man-room to end all man-rooms. It’s got everything you could possibly want: gigantic TV, plush, comfy chairs, man games, the works, not to mention an enviable collection of Boston sports memorabilia. Needless to say, I was impressed. I was starting to see the husband in a new light. Maybe this guy was someone I could relate to after all.

Then, I laid eyes on the two centerpieces of the man-room, and a Glenn Davis-sized lump immediately formed in my gut. Hanging on the wall was a framed, signed Rick Fox Celtics jersey, along with a framed, signed Rick Fox game photo. It was as if once again Fox himself had thrust his rusty dagger into my chest.

The wife saw my eyes fearfully lingering on the Fox items. It was then that she took the opportunity to tell me that her husband, who was employed by a large corporate sponsor of the Celtics, occasionally worked on the court as a Celtics towel assistant, and that her husband, who was a huge Rick Fox fan, had developed a friendship with him, and that Fox himself had given her husband the items that were gracing the the most prominent positions in what was otherwise the most elegant man-room I’d ever seen.

As you can imagine, there was really nowhere to go from there. I don’t think I ever spoke another word to the husband, perhaps aside from “Goodbye,” and I don’t think we ever did anything with that couple again. My first and last conversation with the husband had been an expression of my hatred for his sports idol and personal friend. Fate was not on my side that day. Why not? I don’t know, but between you and me, I blame Rick Fox.

Why am I sharing this story? Well, after all that I’ve been through with Rick Fox, you’d think we could go our separate ways, live our own lives, put it all behind us. And it seemed like we had.

Until this.

Rick, it’s on now baby. Oh yes, it’s on.

Paul Gammons, a columnist for PaulGammons.com, may really, really dislike Rick Fox, but John Mayer’s mankini is a close second.