🏆 The Inaugural Dumb-Dumb Hall of Fame
It's finally here and is probably pretty stupid. Enjoy!
Since the inception of Tubz Unfiltered, I have commonly used the term, “dumb-dumb.” I will not define what a dumb-dumb is because it should be self-explanatory. But I will point out that there is a certain way to pronounce dumb-dumb to elicit the best effect for dramatic/comedic purposes. There should not be a pause between the first “dumb” and the second “dumb.” Instead, you should annunciate the entire phrase quickly.
All right, enough with the Hooked on Phonics lesson. Let’s get down to the brass tacks.
I tried my best to not make the inaugural class as basic and generic as some list that you would read on BuzzFeed about the dumbest people of all time to grace planet Earth. Then again, if someone was a dumb-dumb, don’t you think they should be in the Dumb-Dumb Hall of Fame? So, I tried to strike a balance between the first names that come to mind and the ones that are a bit out of the ordinary.
Without further ado … I am pleased to announce the inaugural class of the Tubz Unfiltered Dumb-Dumb Hall of Fame. Any and all complaints can be directed to takealap@gmail.com.
LATRELL SPREWELL
Sprewell walked, so these young NBA gang bangers could run.
The Milwaukee Washington High School product played for three NBA teams from 1992 to 2005 and was a four-time All-Star and a first-team All-NBA selection in 1994. He averaged 18.3 points, 4 assists, 4.1 rebounds, and 1.4 steals per game for his career. Buddy boy could hoop. Buddy boy was also a one-of-a-kind dumb-dumb. There are several reasons why.
First, he got into a tussle with his Golden State Warriors teammate, Jerome Kersey, during a 1995 practice. It appeared that the situation de-escalated until Sprewell returned to practice with a two-by-four. He also threatened to return to practice with a gun.
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Sprewell’s most infamous altercation involved choking and hitting then-Warriors head coach P.J. Carlesimo in 1997. Carlesimo was simply doing his job by telling Sprewell to make better passes during practice — “make ‘em crisp, 🐶!” — but Sprewell wasn’t having it, so much so that he choked Carlesimo for seven to ten seconds when he approached Sprewell. Sprewell also threatened to kill Carlesimo. Not only that (!!), Sprewell came back roughly 20 minutes after the two were separated and punched his head coach in the cheek.
The NBA initially suspended for 82 games, but an arbitrator reduced it to 68 games. It was the lengthiest suspension in NBA history at the time. Sprewell lost his shoe deal with Converse and $6.4 million of pay as a result of the suspension.
"I wasn't choking P.J. that hard," Sprewell told 60 Minutes. "I mean, he could breathe."
After he came back from his suspension, the Warriors traded him to the New York Knicks because no shit — no way you can come back from choking your head coach. In 2002, while he was with the Knicks, he showed up to training camp with a broken shooting hand, which he did not inform the team of once it happened. The team fined him $250k, an NBA record fine, for failure to do so. He eventually told the team that he broke it after slipping on his yacht. However, the New York Post reported that he broke it during a fight on his yacht. Sprewell tried to put the Post in a chokehold by suing them for their reporting, but it was unsuccessful.
Fast forward to the start of the 2004 season, when Sprewell was a member of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Sprewell was fresh off a season in which he averaged nearly 17 points and three rebounds per game in all 82 games. According to HoopsHype, he made $13.5 million during the 2003-04 season and was slated to make $14.625 million for the 2004-05 season.
The Timberwolves offered him a three-year, $21-million deal in October 2004. Sprewell said hell no to the deal. More specifically, he declined it because “I have a family to feed.” He became a free agent at the end of the season and had some suitors willing to sign him, but he declined all offers. The 2004-05 season was his last in the NBA.
His $1.5 million yacht was repossessed in August 2007 after he failed to make payments; at the time, he reportedly still owed $1.3 million. In 2008, one of his homes was foreclosed on. And finally, the state of Wisconsin came after him — not like Sprewell went after Carlesimo — for $3.5 million in unpaid income taxes.
I must point out that his Dada Supreme Spree Spinners were so damn fire.
However, at the end of the day: Latrell Sprewell. Dumb-Dumb.
ANDREW VOLSTEAD
You likely do not know who this hombre is; I don’t blame you. Let’s get to know him. For starters, he should be referred to as the OG No-Fun police.
The Volstead Act was the legislation that outlawed the selling and manufacturing of alcohol in the United States, otherwise known as Prohibition. Volstead served as the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time and introduced the legislation because he had a big dump in his pants.
All people wanted to do was drink some moonshine legally and have a jolly good time, but Volstead — and others, in particular the anti-Saloon League — decided to plant their flag on some moral high ground to impede people from getting a little litty and being a wee bit irresponsible.
Nevertheless, that did not stop Bucktooth Bob and other toothless wonders from sending hate mail to Volstead. Plus, beyond the hate mail, organized crime was rampant during Prohibition. No bueno.
You will go to hell soon, you damned loafer,” one man wrote in a 1921 postcard, addressing him as “Volstead Prohibition Lunatic."
“Who, in God’s name, would waste a perfectly good bullet, a knife thrust or even a cup of ‘hemlock’ on such an infinitely despicable specimen of the genus vermin as Andrew J. Volstead?” asked another.
Andrew Volstead. Dumb-Dumb.
BUD LIGHT’S 2023 MARKETING TEAM
Bud Light might have wished that the Volstead Act was still around. I want to be very clear at the start — the partnership that Bud Light arranged with a trans influencer had absolutely positively zero effect on me. In other words, I am not inducting them because I was outraged by their decision and engaged in a hard boycott of the beer. (I barely drank it before the “incident.”)
With that out of the way, it was an all-around bad marketing blunder. Hall-of-fame bad, one might say.
The corporate board meetings in connection with the partnership, presumably filled with people that own business degrees from elite academic institutions, left common sense in the dust as the beer company unintentionally alienated the pure-blooded Americans that previously drank their beer as a primary source of hydration.
Here’s a glimpse of what has transpired for the brand since the original marketing campaign.
Kid Rock posted a video on social media of him shooting Bud Light cans. Bad visual.
I went to a Cubs’ game at Wrigley Field over Memorial Day weekend, and Bud Light was the laughingstock of the beers among the people sitting in my section. Again, bad visual.
In May 2023, sales in one week dropped 25.7%, resulting in a drop of almost $16 billion in market value.
Last month, it was reported that the beer’s “distributors no longer expect sales to recover from the Dylan Mulvaney marketing campaign.”
It is no longer the country’s best-selling beer.
Q2 revenue fell 10.5% relative to 2022 Q2.
Bud Light will likely be fine in the long run, but that does not take away from the fact that it was a moronic, what-could-they-be-thinking marketing campaign, which is still somehow rearing its ugly head. If Bud Light somehow does not recover, you can trace it back to the campaign.
Bud Light’s 2023 marketing team. Dumb-Dumb(s).
LARRY SCOTT AND GEORGE KLIAVKOFF
The Pac-12 Conference died last Friday, August 4, when it was announced that Washington and Oregon were joining the Big Ten and that Utah, Arizona, and Arizona State were joining the Big 12. Colorado announced its intentions to rejoin the Big 12 the week prior, and USC and UCLA — two of the conference’s most well-known brands — threw up the deuces last summer and headed to the ATM, otherwise known as the Big Ten. As of this writing, the conference is left with four members — Cal, Stanford, Washington State, and Oregon State. They are likely cooked, just like Houston, Rice, SMU, and TCU were likely cooked at the time when the Southwestern Conference disbanded in the 1990s.
So, how did we get to this point? It’s a bit of a loaded question given the premise and ethos of this piece, but I’ll answer it anyway. We got to this point because of malpractice by former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott and current commissioner George Kliavkoff.
Consider this: the Pac-12 signed a 12-year, $3 billion TV deal in 2011, which was the richest deal in college athletics history at the time. And then the wheels, slowly but surely, came off and practically disintegrated.
For starters, the conference tried and failed at launching its own network. It failed mostly because it did not have a media partner to lock arms with.
The bizarre seven-channel model struggled to gain distribution and never came close to delivering its projected revenue figures. It became an albatross from which league members could never escape.
We later found out the network owed Comcast tens of millions in overpayments.
To compare the network relative to other conference networks: The SEC Network launched in August 2014 and had 75 million subscribers on Day 1. The Big Ten Network grew to 60 million subscribers by 2014. The Pac-12 Network had 26 million subscribers by 2014.
In addition, Scott made so many bone-headed moves during his tenure, it is genuinely astounding how he lasted so long at his job. He made Michael Scott look like Steve Jobs.
Scott himself became the human face of the Pac-12’s woes, mocked and criticized for a long list of fiascos — standing by his general counsel, Woodie Dixon — after he inexplicably overruled an in-game officiating review; staying in a $7,500 Vegas hotel suite during the conference basketball tournament; taking a $2.2 million bonus shortly before laying off or furloughing half the conference staff in 2020.
In July 2018, following a disastrous bowl season for the Pac-12, Scott addressed reporters and brushed aside the results on the field. “The scorecard we think matters … is academic and athletic success across all sports,” he said. The comment exemplifies the ethos, shared by Scott and the presidents, that Olympic sports were as important as football.
I’m shocked we didn’t hear a story about Scott doing blow with hookers as they discussed how schools can improve their recruiting efforts and take the Pac-12 to the moon.
Enter Kliavkoff, who relieved Scott and came over from MGM Resorts as the president of entertainment and sports. Why the conference presidents did not hire someone with a TV background is baffling, because media rights are a massive revenue source for athletic departments.
Kliavkoff started off his tenure looking like a simp clown after he entered into a handshake, non-binding, wink-wink “Alliance” with the Big Ten and ACC, only for the Big Ten to stab the Pac-12 in the back and poach USC and UCLA. Is it Kliavkoff’s fault that USC and UCLA bolted? It’s up for debate; one might argue the blame lies on the shoulders of Scott.
Regardless, Kliavkoff could have righted the previous wrongs by securing a wheelbarrow of money via a new TV deal and being aggressive in expansion. He failed at both.
For the last however many months (it had felt like an eternity), the conference kept on saying, “a TV deal is coming. A TV deal is coming.” But when it finally came, it wasn’t like the slipper magically fitting Cinderella’s foot; it was like when Fiona morphed from a human into a green-ass, chunky-monkey ogre.
The final offer from Apple: a five-year deal with a $25 million base rate per school, according to The Athletic, with the possibility for more if the conference garnered a certain amount of subscribers. According to one media outlet, 2.5 million subscribers equaled $30 million per institution, just behind the Big 12’s per-school payout of $31.7 million, and nearly 4 million subscribers equaled $50 million per institution, which would have been behind but still in the vicinity of the SEC and Big Ten.
The problem is, besides Pac-12 alums, who in their right mind would pay for an Apple TV+ subscription AND a Pac-12 subscription?
At the end of the day, the delusion, even in hindsight, by Kliavkoff is what stands out. Below is what he said in October 2022.
The Pac-12 will not catch the Big Ten because the Pac-12 had its throat slit (sorry for the visual) by the Big Ten and is bleeding out. Sadly, the ambulances can’t come to rescue them.
Larry Scott. Dumb-Dumb.
George Kliavkoff. Dumb-Dumb.
CHARLES WICKSTEED
As was the case with Volstead, you likely do not know who this jabroni is. Allow me to tell you: he invented this death trap.
Pretty neat in theory, but they got literally hotter than Skip Bayless’ takes in the summer, a period of time when you’re supposed to be able to enjoy slides the most, especially in the Midwest. Stairway to Heaven? More like Slide to Hell!
Charles Wicksteed. Dumb-Dumb.
GERMAN CITIZENS THAT VOTED FOR HITLER
This one does not need an explanation.
German citizens that voted for Hitler. Dumb-Dumb(s).
If you chuckled and/or enjoyed it, make sure to forward it to others and/or share it on social. Much love. -Tubz