Playing Through

Photo by John Anderson

Over the years, we've all witnessed our share of dicks in the world of sports. Tennis has always had dicks galore. Jimmy Connors, for instance. It's hard to find a bigger dick than Jimbo. Unless it's Roger Clemens. Or Kobe Bryant. Or Barry Bonds. Or Sergio Garcia.

The website Dickipedia lists O.J. Simpson as a dick, but I'm not so sure. People like O.J. or Pete Rose or Michael Vick are just too pathetic to ever make it into the dick hall of fame. Same goes for mealymouthed putzes like Mark McGwire or A-Rod. In sports as in life, the great dicks are unabashedly, unrepentantly dicky (e.g., Dick Cheney).

It was while watching the Thursday evening road-racing criterions at Driveway Austin that I got thinking about dickishness. Most days of the week, the 1.7-mile track along the Colorado River is home to Porsches and Vipers. But Thursday afternoons, hundreds of serious bicyclists take over. Andrew Willis, of Holland Racing, has been running the show for a year now, staging crits 33 consecutive weeks in the year. Some of these are pretty low-key, like the junior race, and some are strictly designated for elite racers. It's the category 4-5 races that attract the biggest dicks.

Now, if you're a cat-5 road racer, you're basically one step up from a beginner – a beginner with a really expensive bike. Enter one of these races, and you're entering a world of raging insecurity. "Yeah, road racers do have the stigma of being the biggest assholes in cycling," Willis acknowledged. "I've seen it all, but the one I've seen the most are the equipment snobs. They're looking for some kind of validation, I guess."

Hoping to see an accident, I parked myself on the track's corkscrew turn. I was in luck. With about five laps to go in the 30-minute, cat-5 crit, the pack accordioned coming into the tight uphill turn. Just like that, three of them bit it big-time. One guy was lying there, saying, "my collarbone, my collarbone, my collarbone!" Another seemed OK, except his shorts were torn, his butt hanging out. It was the third rider, No. 273, who put on perhaps the most spectacular display of dickitude I've ever seen.

"Fuck you, motherfucker!" he was screaming at the guy with the busted collarbone. He was also throwing a bike at the guy.

The guy with the bare ass, trying to calm things down, pointed out that it's just a weekly cat-5 race, that there's always next week.

"Shut the fuck up, asshole!" 273 said. With paramedics already on the way, he threatened to punch the injured rider. Then, as befitting a total dick, he rode away.

It was awesome. Forget Kobe or the Rocket. In my mind, rider 273 is now the platonic ideal of athletic dickishness. Willis said that 273 would be given a time-out for a few weeks, and I suppose that's the right call. But I really hope 273 returns, as dicky as ever.