Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Back during my basketball playing days some of the insults that went on during the games were priceless. Of course, that was a different era (way back in the 1980s) & people didn’t think that being “disrespected” was tatamount to beheading one’s first-born, so respectfully throwing down some taunts on an opposing player was more acceptable, but only if the game was close. Once you were being bested, you shut-up because for all intents & purposes, you’d lost and the better man, as the saying goes, got the spoils. Nowadays, the guy getting his a$$ kicked during a contest will claim that he’s been “disrespected” and therefore has cart blanche to go out to his car & retrieve a gun in order to blow away the person that he couldn’t best on the field of athletic battle.

That aside, some of my more memorable lines:
“Your coach must not like you very much, he’s making you guard me.”
[after making a basket] “As easy as taking candy from a baby”

Those were all in good fun & the other guys usually ended up laughing.

The insult that shook me to the core was the lamest one I’d ever heard yet was the only time I was scared while on the court. It was when the opposing team sent out a behometh to guard me (I’d been scoring at a rapid pace to that point, so they sent in their resident ‘goon’ to put the clamps on me) and all 6′6″ and around 260 pounds of him walked across the court, right into my face - about 4 inches from my nose - and said “nah, doc……nah. No.” Guy was so freaking huge that I was scared @#$%less and couldn’t even muster up a response. All I could think was “Ricky, if you say the wrong thing this guy can literally break your neck, so keep your smart mouth closed”. Lesson learned: it doesn’t take a snappy line to get the job done, sometimes it takes looking like an NFL lineman.

* Recently, I came up with one that I think is a rather good insult; quick, to the point and yet still biting. I brought it out rather recently when Person A was arguing with Person B in a comments section and Person B was imploring Person A to go to ANOTHER SITE where someone was telling folks that they wished Person A would show up so that they could tell them the big “FU”. [Another sign that times have indeed changed; at one time when two men had reached the point where diplomacy would not work, they'd agree to "step outside" and handle things in the proverbial alley. Sometimes, it consisted of setting up a time & place for fisticuffs, where one person would await the others arrival, much like Richie Cunningham, Potsie & Ralph-Malph waiting for the gangsters to rumble in the gym - memorable quote: "that's not a good thing to leave out, Fonz". Today, apparently typing on a web page & wishing that someone would show up on site so that one can sit on their a$$ and type stuff that they'd never - EVER - say to anyone's face constitutes acceptable banter.] Personally, wishing that someone would show up on a web page so that they could be “told off” is as laughable to me as a woman telling someone that she wished so-and-so (who lived in another state) would call her so she could “give her a piece of her mind”. The answer to Person A imploring Person B to go to another web site, which I think is one of my better insults, was: “______ ________ isn’t worth the six seconds it would take to kick his a$$.”

That one still makes me laugh….