By Gail Dense
Special to YNOT
NEW YORK – In a squalid sex scandal that is sure to rock the National Basketball Association right down to its heavily branded sneakers, Kurt Rambis, the interim head coach of the New York Knicks, has been caught liking porn on Twitter.
While the Knicks claim their coach’s Twitter account was “hacked,” this worn-out excuse is clearly just an attempt to distract fans from the maddening and unbelievable fact Coach Rambis regularly consumes the digital denigration of all women everywhere known as online pornography.
In addition to liking some random Asian woman who enjoys masturbating while pointing her posterior at a mirror, Rambis also reportedly follows “Great Ass Daily,” an account I assure you has nothing to do with donkeys of high quality.
Setting aside the ridiculous excuse about being hacked, it’s time to face facts: This man watches pornography, which makes him entirely ill-suited to lead the sort of morally upstanding, staid and sexually reserved men who populate the NBA.
While the NFL is rife with woman beaters, tax dodgers and underwear thieves, the NBA has always been known as the nice guy’s league — you know, aside from the occasional attempted assault of a club manager or fatal shooting of a limo driver. There’s simply no place in such a league for men who like pornography or revel in the exploitation of women.
What would people say if, for example, it were revealed a bunch of NBA stars were regular customers at mob-owned strip clubs, or equally regular “Johns” to the prostitutes who work in such places? I’ll tell you what they’d say: “No Hall of Fame for you, you sick, exploitative perverts! Except Patrick Ewing, obviously, because — I mean, get real — he’s Patrick fucking Ewing.”
With this Twitter stain on his already checkered resume, the best soon-to-be-ex-coach Rambis can hope for is a future as a color commentary man for ESPN, which is known for being very accepting of tech-challenged sex addicts so long as they’re sufficiently godly.
The bottom line is, while the American public long ago accepted the NFL is packed to its extremely wealthy gills with criminals and cads, the NBA has always aspired to a higher level of manhood, a greater degree of social responsibility and far more female-friendliness. The NBA, in a sense, has always been the sophisticated older gentleman to the NFL’s base, violent, juvenile-delinquent dude.
Rambis, however — a man who legendary announcer Chick Hearn nicknamed “Superman” because his glasses make him look like the Man of Steel’s alter ego, Clark Kent — has a long history of behavior that suggests an unacceptable level of dude-ness.
Whenever his supporters talk about Rambis’ playing days, they gush about his willingness to “do the dirty work.” His former teammates and Lakers fans would have us all believe this is a reference to his aggressive defensive play and relentless will to rebound the basketball, but in the wake of his Twitter shenanigans, we now know the dirty work in question probably involved “working girls” and lines of cocaine the size of bratwurst links.
According to the official story, Rambis was fired from his position as head coach of the Minnesota Timberwolves because the team’s record during his tenure was 32-132, but I have hunch the termination really took place because of his porn and/or sex addiction.
It’s not just the recent Twitter debacle that makes me suspect this. For more evidence, just look at the comment issued by David Kahn, who was then the Timberwolves president of basketball operations: “It is always hard to make these decisions. It is especially hard when it involves somebody of Kurt’s reputation.”
Surely, the “reputation” to which Kahn referred was Rambis’s well-established penchant for doing “dirty work,” which probably means some of the Timberwolves front office executives were upset about the firing because they lost their best “connection,” whether Rambis was finding them hookers or was their most reliable source for ripped versions of recently released porn DVDs.
I’m not sure how long it will take the Knicks to fire Rambis, in part because team president Phil Jackson is known for his zest for “Zen,” a do-nothing philosophy that probably was dreamed up by some patriarchal Chinese misogynist as a means to control the women in his life. As such, it probably will take Jackson a few weeks even to acknowledge Rambis’s misdeeds, and then several more weeks to trade him for something of equivalent value — like a second-round draft pick in 2028 or cheese-covered pretzels.
In the meantime, I hope all female fans of the NBA will rise up and boycott the league and all its products, seizing the opportunity to send a clear and concise message to men everywhere: No, you sure as hell are not putting that thing up my ass!
Dr. Gail Dense is an academic, feminist, anti-porn activist, author, filmmaker and expert on which kinds of sex are (and aren’t) healthy, normal and socially acceptable. Her writings include “Welcome to the Porn-Jungle: Watch It Bring You to Your Knn-Knn-Knn-Knees” and “The Porn Trap: Chew Off Your Own Penis and Escape Before it’s Too Late!”
