Growing up in Kansas City, my father always liked taking our family to the movies during the summer. He loved to watch a good action movie. I can remember him arguing with his friends for weeks about different scenes in the original Terminator movie. In all of these movies, there was a good guy to root for and a villain to go against.
Over the years, there have been several villains in movies. Superman had Lex Luthor, Batman had the Joker, and Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader. Anyone who knows me can tell you who is my all-time villain. That would be Wesley Snipes’ character Nino Brown in the best movie ever, New Jack City.
I thought about this topic while listening to an ESPN sports radio show discussing something similar this past weekend. Just like in every action movie, there is a villain that the audience is supposed to go against or strangely root for.
In baseball, you could consider Barry Bonds a villain. He broke the home run record and is known as one of the best baseball players ever, with an asterisk, since he took performance enhancement drugs “without knowing”. Side note, if my head size went from a 7 to an 8 after age 24, I would check with a doctor about that. He was always a complete jerk to the media.
Basketball has their fair share of villains. Dennis Rodman is the first one that comes to mind. He was an original Bad Boy for the Detroit Pistons championship teams. Dennis and his teammates believed it was their duty to beat the crap out of Michael and Scottie any chance they could.
Football has a couple villains as well. One of the most recent inductees to the villain fraternity would be Gregg Williams, GODFATHER of the BOUNTY. He turned a mediocre New Orleans Saints team into a championship defense just by giving the team an incentive (BOUNTY) to do what they were already going to do.
Villains in the sports world can be players, coaches or even owners. Let me know who are some people you think are the villains of their sport and what they did to give themselves the VILLAIN title.
