Perhaps Looks Don’t Matter So Much After All

 This story has nothing to do with cycling and relates only peripherally to midlife.

Recently, I chanced upon “Press Box Chronicles,” a series of YouTube videos by Jeff Pearlman, a self-described “cranky middle-aged sportswriter who’s seen it all.”

A few of his videos cover famous athletes and teams, but they are far from hagiographies. On the other hand, he also talks about sports personalities you may not have hesrd about. Like a true writer, he’s not as interested the team or athlete as the story. And he can tell a story!

Some are funny, like “The Sexiest Man Alive.” He recounts how, during his days as a Sports Illustrated writer, he and some of his colleagues inadvertently helped the folks at People magazine, which shared the same building, pick the wrong person for the “Sexiest Athlete“ for the magazine’s annual “Sexiest Man Alive” issue.

The gist of the story is that the People writers went to their SI counterparts for help in choosing the sexiest athlete. Someone told them “the Kansas City Chiefs’ starting quarterback.” They meant Rich Gannon but, when the People photographer phrased the request that way, someone in the Chiefs’ office sent Elvis Grbac, who was starting that week.

Now, Elvis is a fairly average-looking guy. Gannon, on the other hand, fits most people’s definition of “handsome” quite well.

That story is particularly funny to me because I have a very distant connection to Gannon. He attended the University of Delaware at the same time as one of my brothers. Before she met him, the young woman who would become his wife, and my sister-in-law, knew Rich.  So did some of her female friends.  As good-looking and athletic as he was, none of them (including my sister-in-law) could stand him.

My SIL told me that story one Thanksgiving when Gannon played on a televised game. She even told me some of the unflattering names they had for him.

I wonder what they would have thought of Grbac—and what he would’ve thought about that story.  Would it reassure him that looks aren’t everything and that, perhaps, he really was the Sexiest Athlete Alive in 1998.