ESPN poker anaylst / Washington Post columnist Norman Chad notes that Michael Jordan was married for the 2nd time this past weekend, shortly after Kobe & Vanessa Bryant announced their reconciliation and LeBron James confirmed his engagement to girlfriend Savannah Brinson. Speaking from his own personal experience, Chad writes, “it is so depressing, and devastating, to watch our best and our brightest athletes throw away their future time and again by conforming and capitulating to a broken-down American institution?” (“If you back down a defender, then put up a fadeaway, turnaround jumper that keeps bouncing off the side of the backboard, you stop taking that shot, right? So why do these great, savvy athletes keep walking down the doomed aisle to matrimony?”). We’ll have to presume Norman was not invited to the Jordan/Prieto wedding, but who amongst us wouldn’t want to see Charles Oakley’s reaction if Chad had voiced any of these sentiments out loud?
This remains one of the few areas in life in which Couch Slouch has PhD-like credentials. I am the Stan Musial of husbands — conjugally speaking, I am considered a two-time loser, but in baseball, my .333 batting average would put me in the Hall of Fame.
Be like Mike? Are you kidding me? No. Guys, guys, guys — be like Hugh Hefner. And, hey, I guarantee you the most interesting man in the world — that deliciously debonair Dos Equis fella — has never been married.
MJ was married for 17 years to his wife Juanita. Their divorce settlement reportedly cost him $168 million. Frankly, I believe this was karmic payback: MJ got away with a massive push-off against the Jazz’s Bryon Russell before hitting the winning shot in Game 6 of the 1998 NBA Finals; nine years later, his ex-wife got away with her own beneficial “legal” contact.