Jock Itch: The Misadventures of a Retired Jersey Chaser

ONE

Training Camp

Everyone has a type. Dudes tend to be either boob guys or ass men. Some prefer blonds to brunettes. Few prefer redheads, mainly because their private parts resemble baloney and carrots. Intelligence-wise, some dig the hypersmart Tina Fey type, while others settle for those dumb bitches on The Hills—essentially blow-up dolls who rarely speak and seldom have opinions—to adorn their arms and blind them with cleavage. Types aren’t just for the boys: Women have them too. Some like good guys, more like bad ones, and some just crave a big fat wallet—even if it comes with a guy who looks like George Costanza. You know what your type is. It’s the one who gives you the uncontrollable urge that makes you go weak in the knees. It’s the one who makes you a little bit dumber—and a whole lot giddier. Admittedly, we all have our celebrity crushes. And I’m no different. It’s just that my itch is for athletes. I wish the cure were only as simple as buying a case of Lotrimin and being done with it. But it took a lot more than that to cure my jock itch.

There is a certain danger—a confidence and a swagger—that comes with professional athletes. It’s what I call BDA—or Big Dick Attitude. I’m not insinuating that all athletes are hung. Believe me, height and stature have nothing to do with their…athletic equipment. What I do mean to say is that sometimes you meet a guy and he just has that certain something. Athletes are overly confident, and people are naturally drawn to them because of it. They’re the fives who date tens. They have BDA. They carry themselves differently from the rest of us. And they know it. They simply have an air about them that you can’t quite put your finger on—or around.

If you think about it, these guys have literally been worshipped since they were in junior high, when people discovered their talents. In fact it was probably even before that. How many unsuspecting, drooling infants have heard: "Oh, he’s gonna grow up to be a linebacker! Look how big he is!" That worship continues through grade school until finally they become like pied pipers, whose adoring following only grows as they move from junior to varsity to college, and then on to the professional leagues.

If you’re a guy, chances are you tune in to ESPN’s SportsCenter at least three times a day, if not more. You worship a team, or several—maybe a player, maybe a city, maybe some dumbass mascot or school that you didn’t attend. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a guy out there who hasn’t had the I wonder what would it be like… fantasy. Guys who don’t fantasize about playing maybe just fantasize about looking around the players’ locker rooms instead!

Some fans take it as far as obsessing about fantasy ball. Or as my friend Randall Slavin says, Fantasy should strictly be used for storytelling and masturbation. In the same vein, imagine how you’d look at your girlfriend if she were sweating out and losing sleep over with whom she would potentially pair up in the latest Judd Apatow movie. Should the lineup be Cameron Diaz and Ben Affleck? Or should it be Ben and Jennifer Aniston? Or Kate Hudson? Or should we not go with Ben, because he once made a movie like Gigli, which was like watching a root canal in slow motion, with a windup drill. (You know I’ll never get those two hours back.) Amplify this with the countless magazines dedicated to the fiction or fantasy of choice, along with websites, chat rooms, blogs, frantic phone calls, draft-pick parties, and even more frenzied sports-event watching. The behavior is really bizarre, I think.

If you’ve ever had a partner do this in front of you, it’s almost like watching your once-adult mate travel backward in time, regressing and obsessing over this waste-of-time fantasy sport. But things could be worse. They could actually play the sport for a living. And you might even find yourself dating one of these fantasies, or, in my case, one (maybe two) in every professional sport except soccer, tennis, and horse racing.

My infatuation with jocks all started with Ken Doll Donny Gothem. He was on the junior varsity football team. Donny was a public high school trifecta. He was hot, popular, and he wanted me because I had just thankfully grown out of my gawky junior high phase. (You know the look: when your teeth are too big for your mouth and go every which way but straight, your face hasn’t caught up with your nose, and your monobrow is filing for a legal separation.) It was the late eighties, and I was sporting the big, teased, and highly flammable Aquanet hair that sprouted like cauliflower florets on top and curled under like a sausage down below. (My bangs could take gale-force winds without budging.) I completed the look with blue eyeliner—a color not found in nature—and neon fuchsia lip gloss. Who needed safety reflectors riding a bike with a makeup palette like that?

Donny was my it guy, until I wouldn’t put out, so he dumped me in favor of someone who would. You can only endure so much jeans-to-jeans dry humping before causing significant chafing and possible first-degree burns to the crotch. It was high school, so Donny just asked for his football jacket back and mumbled in that intelligible teenage angst garble: This ain’t working. Because it was high school, I acted like I didn’t care, made sure I looked extra cute at school the next day (in case he changed his mind), and never bothered to ask him to expound on the reasons for our breakup even though I cried myself to sleep on my Like a Virgin pillowcases. (Ah, vintage Madonna, the first Lady Gaga.) After the whole brief Donny debacle, I realized I actually really enjoyed the attention of athletes. I felt cool—cooler than I did before. And isn’t that the main objective of a high school education?

So I used my creativity to devise a scheme that would give me more access to them (as well as create a nice high school cash flow). Armed with a fake pregnancy bump and a shopping list from my husband, I went to neighborhood grocery stores dressed like I was about to give birth any moment and bought alcohol for members of the football team. Due to my delicate state, the clerks not only helped me gather the ingredients for the barbecue we were having, they also carried the load out to my parents’ woody station wagon. And when they asked what I was having and when was my due date, I had to resist the urge to answer: Bartles & Jaymes Black Cherry wine coolers, later tonight!

They were innocent times. I came from Mount Prospect, Illinois, Where Friendliness Is a Way of Life our town’s welcome sign boasted (unless that’s been changed to "Home of 2010 American Idol Winner Lee DeWyze!!!). A few years before meeting the Donny doll, I used to voraciously read anything by Danielle Steel. I would get lost in her world of romance and opulence. Since my childhood home was a modest, ranch-style house (similar to all the other houses on the block) I thought anyone who had white carpeting and an upstairs was rich."

I also immersed my literary tastes in the grand dame of books—Judy Blume.

When I read what was considered the dirtiest book of all time, Judy’s Forever, it felt very forbidden. The novel got its reputation because the two lead characters had sex in chapter 17, on lines 54 and 55, oh, and 56, and then in even more chapters. It was the summer before sixth grade. This was the time when I would have given my left leg to get my period and start developing breasts. My friend Tanya and I even went so far as to try to insert a tampon (with a mirror to guide us) in hopes that this might jump-start the real thing, because rumor had it that once you got your period your breasts could double in size! Sign me up.

Anyway, the guy in Judy’s book actually named his penis Ralph. Judy wrote sentences like Ralph was getting hard. This went totally over my head. Then when she wrote, He came… I thought, Now why would that be a sentence? Where did he come from? Where did he go after he came? And not only did he come, but then she came too. Who were these visitors to Ralph’s penis and where were they headed? She came. He came. It all puzzled me so much that I actually wrote a note to Judy’s publisher: Are you there, Judy? It’s me, Rosa. I’m a little confused about people coming in your books.

While my serial jock dating started with Donny, my infatuation with athletes began when I was a midget-football cheerleader. Yes, back then it was actually called that, pre–political correctness. Today, it’s Pop Warner. The Latin translation of Pop Warner is little cocky egos-in-training program. As cheerleaders, we wore our ridiculously hyperthermal, nonbreathing polyester uniforms and pomponed our mighty men and their balls on to victory. We had no interaction with the football players. They were focusing on the game—while we were focusing on them. This would later become a recurring theme in my dating life. They never even extended a thanks, bitches to us, which would at least have been an acknowledgment. We just cheered our little junior asses off for them until we were so hoarse that our moms had to slather our throats with Vicks and warm hand towels at night, and also had to go without practicing: "We’ve got spirit! Yes, we do! We’ve got spirit! How ’bout you?"

The passion continued in college at the University of Kansas, where I was fortunate enough to be in a sorority with a girl that was dating one of the KU football players. They were like McDonalds supersized fraternity boys and as yummy as the inside of a chocolate ooze cake. But my sorority sister was the only one besides me who wanted to be in a relationship with these collegiate Neanderthals. My other girlfriends saw them as something to do on a Saturday night, while I (the serial serious girlfriend) saw them as my next goal. I think that everyone possesses a dark, masochistic side, some more than others. I craved the attention of these men: athletes who were infamous for being anything but monogamous.

I even padded my bra to make my waist seem smaller, but I don’t think they saw past the freshman twenty, twenty-five, or thirty that I had packed on my short five-foot-two-inch frame. I was also considered exotic looking at the University of Kansas, like a love child of Frida Kahlo and Erik Estrada with just a dash of Charo. This was a time where it ruled to look like you were part of the Swedish Bikini Team and not the now, exactly what nationality are you—Latin, Jewish, Guatemalan? squad. It was a seriously challenging time, but I am convinced that J Lo changed the course of what typical Americans started considering beautiful when she played Selena.

After Kansas, I transferred to Columbia College. No, not the brainy Columbia University in New York City, but the one that even the Kardashian sisters and Bruce Jenner could get into in Chicago. Once there, I also got a job at a brand-new restaurant called Hooters. I had had a job since I started pumping hot, fake cheese onto nachos at the public-pool concession stand when I was fourteen, but the job opening at Hooters seemed potentially more lucrative (and posed less of a threat of coming home with jalapeños and melted soft serve on you). Despite the orange shorts and nylons, it seemed downright glamorous. It was an educational working environment, and at nineteen it gave me my first peek at professional basketball. I worked under my college fake ID of Molly O’Brien. Forget the fact that I looked nothing like a wee Irish woman. And forget that she had platinum-blond hair that I simply colored in with a brown eye pencil. Somehow the mixture of my saliva and the waxy eyeliner created a laminate effect. I was the Michelangelo of fake IDs.

Working at Hooters is not exactly on my résumé, but it was a big deal at the time. It even had fringe benefits. We received floor seats to the Chicago Bulls games, and all kinds of attention and swag. We were treated like celebrities and loved every busty minute of it.

This was before everyone and their mother had a boob job, although I was able to give myself what I called a poorman’s boob job. I would twist a pea-sized amount of fabric and place it exactly where my nipple would be on my tank top. The end result was an indomitable Chicago-winter nipple hard-on look. That little trick made the Farrah Fawcett swimsuit poster look like her nipples were napping and increased my tips. My career at Hooters lasted exactly two weeks before I got fired for being a sucky waitress. Now, this is as insulting as a stripper being fired for having no rhythm. But before I was canned, I met my first professional athlete. (It’d be really cool if I could somehow cue the Jaws theme music right now.)

I had never been to a football game. Nor had I ever watched one. There was a guy who used to come in all the time, with a group of football players, named Matthew Stonebricker. I knew they were football players because there was a definite shift in the energy of the place from the moment they came in, and they always traveled in a group of six. There was also a lot of Hooters managerial back-bending to accommodate them (with more than triple the normal wait-staff attention) and a general frenzy—as if they were Zagat Guide reviewers. The prettiest girl who worked there at the time was named Lisa. She had waist-length blond hair and a fifty-two-inch inseam of toned, tanned perfection that would have stood out anywhere, but especially in Chicago. She told me her boyfriend was a very famous (very married) out-of-state football player who lavished her with mink coats and spur-of-the-moment trips. I didn’t know his name at the time, but many years later when I saw that in the press he was considered Mr. Family Role Model, I just thought, Ewwwwww.

Matthew had a slyness about him. He was a subtle flirt, like he wasn’t that invested in whether I had feelings for him or not. He was also confident, and I immediately liked him because he was nothing like the frat boys or Chicago suburb boys I had met. He had a rebel without a cause attitude, complete with a motorcycle he liked to drive recklessly (which my parents forbade me to ride, so of course that was one of the first things I did). It was all very out of a movie—very Grease 2. I’d clutch the back of his motorcycle jacket, as excited as I was fearful. He seemed to live his life completely in the moment—as if he were permanently flipping the bird to all of society—and I found that intoxicating. He’d take me on the back of his bike and speed through the streets of the city, showing me all these Chicago haunts I never even knew existed. Those hip places and neighborhoods you had to be in the know to know about. We’d get stoned (while I nervously remembered the pot is a gateway drug movies I’d seen in Prospect High School health classes and prayed this wasn’t the beginning of my demise). We’d gorge ourselves on crab legs at one of those bib-and-picnic-table places, making a giant mess and just laughing our asses off. Living at my parents’ house in the suburbs, when I wasn’t living on a college campus in DeKalb, Illinois, had kept me properly sheltered and I felt like this was my first taste of adult dating.

Career-wise, Matthew was a classic case of one of those guys who do tremendously well in college but shit the bed once they get to the pro game. Dating Stonebricker (born with such the quintessential badass football name) impressed the hell out of my guy friends, who all seemed to be champing at the bit and breathlessly waiting for any detail I could muster up about our dates. It almost seemed as if their heterosexuality could have been called into question. Athlete worship can do this to a guy. I’ve seen it firsthand. Dating Matthew was just an exciting diversion for me from sorority life, and as soon as he got traded to another team out of state, our romance (a generous description of the reality of it) ended. But like all things that are bad for you, I found myself craving more. It all felt dangerous and addictive and so much more exciting than the norm I was used to. I’d return to my college campus parties and crinkle my nose at the frat boy look-alikes (all standing about five foot nine with their braided leather J. Crew belts and pastel button-down shirts) trying to pass out trays of grain alcohol Jell-O shots—their only path to potential scoring—and find myself wanting more. Wanting another challenge. Much like the Lay’s potato chips slogan, "Betcha can’t eat just one!" And so I was hooked.

I MOVED FROM THE Midwest to Los Angeles at twenty-one, hoping not to become just another statistic with my attempt to break into the entertainment industry. I packed my bags and left Chicago with determination, a headshot, and my proclivity for athletes. The thrill of the chase only pole-vaulted my competitive spirit to find another guy as exciting as Matthew. But finding athletes while hating sports proved difficult. I lived in Los Angeles, where everyone and their dog was trying to be an actor—including all the men. Therefore they were all small, delicate, and prettier than me. The fact was, I was surrounded by guys who used fifty-dollar hair gel to try and look edgy, but only succeeded in looking more metrosexual (if that was possible). It was a massive turnoff. How hard could it be to find a date that didn’t keep his headshot stapled to a résumé in the backseat of his car? Where were the manly men? Where were the guys who weren’t getting facials while they were waiting to be discovered? Where were the dudes who ate meat and potatoes—or just ate for that matter? I knew where they were, and finding them became an addiction. They were playing at a field near you.

Like people do with all vices, I started rationalizing that dating athletes might actually be good for me—healthy, a distraction from all the stress of the business—if I could only figure out how to meet them.

Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and where there are Playmates there are athletes, so I had to devise a plan to get myself invited to the next Playboy party. I had a couple of friends (they worked on the television show Baywatch as Pam Anderson’s double while Pam was getting her Tommy Lee groove on in her double-wide) who were actually invited to go. I asked them to describe to me exactly how the entrances to the parties were set up so I could MacGyver my way in. Apparently, you drove up to the guard at the gates, they checked off your name, and you proceeded down a very long driveway to the mansion.

One of the friends, Cici (who would have been more aptly named 1,500 cc’s of silicone), had dated the famous director Michael Bay for a few years, and had bought him his beloved pet, a ginormous English mastiff. She often took care of both the dog and Mr. Bay’s car, a huge black Chevy Tahoe SUV, while he was out making huge, successful blockbuster films such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, to name a few. The night of the big Playboy Halloween party, I crouched in the trunk of the huge SUV, every inch of me covered with a hairy old dog blanket we found back there. Big dogs smell, and this one weighed over two hundred pounds. So underneath the blanket it was unbearable. It smelled like it had been sprayed with Eau de Rancid Dog. But I successfully gained entrance to the party and hopped out of the trunk like an illegal alien on the U.S. side of the Mexican border. Sure, I smelled pungent, was covered in dog hair, and felt like I’d swallowed an angora sweater, but I was in.

The Playboy Mansion is surrounded by abundant, sprawling lawns. From the gates up to the mansion, it’s literally a hike. Back then, you could drive up to the gate. Now, perhaps because self-smuggling missions like the one I just described were captured on security cameras, they have shuttle buses that take you from UCLA parking garages up to the entrance. This is after an elaborate check-in procedure that rivals international airport security and comes complete with a Polaroid photograph taken on the spot and a handstamp. On the grounds there’s the zoo (with the monkey cages), the resortlike pool (with fake rocks and a moat), and of course the famous Grotto. I usually avoided the Grotto because it was very humid from the hot tub steam, and I didn’t want to swap the effects of my carefully flatironed hair for an Ogilvie home-perm-looking mess. Plus, I didn’t know how the extra fake hair I’d clipped in would react to the steam (unfortunately the package didn’t come with directions from the previous owner). There was that, and then you could only spend so much time watching drunken public groping sessions. There was a rumor that Verne Troyer, a.k.a. Mini-Me, was once serviced by a Playmate in there. I can’t back that up as factual. It just came from a really good source. The grounds were mostly tented for the outdoor parties, with round tables set up everywhere, and catering that was as extensive and exquisite as you’d find on a cruise ship—ice sculptures included. The dance floor they had set up was always rocking, with the best DJ that Hef’s money could buy. You can actually purchase DVDs similar to the Girls Gone Wild ones that feature this exact dance-floor scene and the people who frequented it. Thank God I had the sense to dodge the video cameras, because aside from a pic I have with Hef where I am wearing what could best be described as a tiny bikini made of fake leaves (it was a Midsummer Night’s Dream party that night), there’s no lingering evidence. Inside the party there were at least twenty hot girls to every guy. And by hot I mean if-you-polled-college-age-male-spring-breakers hot. The parties were packed with girls who were barely out of their teens, hovered around a hundred pounds, were stuffed with implants (both in their chests and their lips), and dared to test their sense of balance by teetering on clear Lucite stripper heels. They had expensive, waist-length hair extensions, seductive false black eyelashes, and long shiny acrylic nails.

Sprinkled around the party were