Fraudulent Icons

Not sure if serious.

 

Roger Clemens.

 

Dead serious. What's wrong with Lance Armstrong?

 

He's a bold faced liar that was too chickenshit to own it. He threw everybody in the world under the bus on his spiraling fall from grace.

 

Ok, now I know you're kidding.

 

Elaborate please.

 

He was not the best husband in the world.

 

He didn't just throw people under the bus he tried to destroy their lives. This is from a piece in The Atlantic:

Let's talk Betsy Andreu, the wife of one your former teammates, Frankie. Both Andreus testified under oath that they were in a hospital room in 1996 when you admitted to a doctor to using EPO, HGH and steroids. You responded by calling them "vindictive, bitter, vengeful and jealous." And that's the stuff we can say on TV.

Would you now label them as "honest?"

And what would you say directly to Betsy, who dealt with a voicemail from one of your henchmen that included, she's testified, this:

"I hope somebody breaks a baseball bat over your head. I also hope that one day you have adversity in your life and you have some type of tragedy that will ... definitely make an impact on you.."

What do you say to Emma O'Reilly, who was a young Dublin native when she was first hired by the U.S. Postal team to give massages to the riders after races?

In the early 2000s, she told stories of rampant doping and how she was used to transport the drugs across international borders. In the USADA report, she testified that you tried to "make my life hell."

Her story was true, Lance, wasn't it? And you knew it was true. Yet despite knowing it was true, you, a famous multimillionaire superstar, used high-priced lawyers to sue this simple woman for more money than she was worth in England, where slander laws favor the famous. She had no chance to fight it.

She testified that you tried to ruin her by spreading word that she was a prostitute with a heavy drinking problem.

"The traumatizing part," she once told the New York Times, "was dealing with telling the truth."

 

He's going to trial in November for defrauding the U.S. Government of $100 million. So that's a start.

 

Nor father.

 

Not sure being a crappy father or husband damages Einstein's legacy so much. He's not really famous for that.

 

I think it's funny that between Coach K and Lance Armstrong, Armstrong is the one you had a problem with.

 

I agree, and this is also true for K. He's iconic for being an incredible coach, which he is, not for being the wholesome father figure or whatever

 

i'd argue that the "wholesome leader of men" bit is very much a part of coach K's image.

 

Bill Burr perfectly sums up how I feel about Lance Armstrong.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O9YL04v-J5U

 

[video=youtube;O9YL04v-J5U]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9YL04v-J5U&app=desktop[/video]

 

Part of it, sure, but the main reason he's an icon is because he is the best coach in college basketball. Without that, no one cares.

 

All of that can be true and he can still be fraudulent

 

Of course. I get what he did though. I'm a bottom line kind of guy, at the end of the day he's done more for cancer research than any of us can fathom. That outweighs who is he and anything he has done to make that happen.

 

To be an icon, I think that it is necessary to have achieved something others hasn't. His racing achievements are shit. Miraculous recovery shit. And he's a great guy - raised a bunch of money for cancer - oh, but is an absolute piece of shit to others.

It's about cultivating an image antithetical to the underlying person.

It is the paradox that you often run into with fraudulent or false icons, IMO.