IDIOT OF THE MONTH: Luis Rubiales, John Angelos, and the elusive White Sox park shooter

We’d like to be more descriptive in identifying the idiot behind Chicago’s latest public embarrassment, but we have no idea who did it. Nobody does, except maybe city police, and they’re either useless or stalling on purpose. Even now, a full week removed from the high-profile shooting that left multiple baseball fans hospitalized, official details remain disturbingly scant. So we, as observers, can only make this deduction: Because guns can neither transport nor fire themselves, there must ultimately be a person at fault. And that person is, at best, criminally stupid.

Circumstances surrounding the apparently unintentional gunfire were only made more confusing earlier this week, when a small crop of too-wacky-to-be-true details began to emerge, including a claim that the suspect was a woman who snuck a firearm into Guaranteed Rate Field by “hiding it in the folds of her belly fat” before shooting herself and two others in the stands a short time later. Another outlet, Sports Mockery (which covers Chicago teams and, despite its name, is not satirical) claimed the woman repeatedly set off the stadium’s metal detectors but was waved through anyway by security guards, who “did not want to overstep their boundaries” by making physical contact with an armed Rubenesque lunatic.

These reports quickly went viral — of course they did — because they are hilarious. As is typical amid any retweet frenzy, skepticism was an early casualty, with many simply accepting the accounts at face value and moving on in search of the next social-media dopamine hit. But the story here just doesn’t smell right. Between the total lack of on-record sources and circular attribution among those actually publishing this information, it’s hard to see the “Belly Fat Gun” scenario as anything other than a flight of unhelpful but well-executed trolling. Video reviewed by ABC7 shows a woman — one of the three injured by gunfire and an apparent police suspect in the case — breezing through the ballpark’s security checkpoints with no incident. Pertinently to the more lurid rumors mentioned above, ABC7 described the woman in the video as “very heavy.” (While it is a relevant detail, ABC7's story amusingly fails to mention why it’s relevant, leading to this descriptor reading less like additional context and more like the sudden and inexplicable roast of a shooting victim. Which was probably not their intention?)

Anyway, that grand haze of uncertainty brings us back to the beginning — three people were shot, and beyond that, we have only the faintest clue of what actually happened at Guaranteed Rate Field last week. We don’t know anything about the shooter, we don’t know anything about the weapon, and we don’t know anything about any makeshift satchels of flesh and fatty tissue that may or may not have been involved. What was already an amazingly sad and stupid saga has only been made sillier by the utter silence of Chicago police investigators and the proliferation of absurd narratives by fast-and-loose members of the press.

It’s easy to joke about this. It’s hard not to, once terms like “Belly Fat Gun” start getting thrown around and the injuries sustained proved non-life-threatening. For that we are lucky, but why must we tempt fate? Why not just handle your weapons properly?

There is a culprit out there, and whether by malice or negligence, three people were shot and it is their fault. And their recklessness was idiotic.

The lengths climate change deniers go to now include blaming space lasers for catastrophic wildfires. The blaze in Hawaii during mid-August was one of the deadliest natural disasters in United States history, yet former NBA player, and current BIG3 open gym participant Royce White wants to “Investigate Maui.” So much so that he wrote it on the side of his head during a BIG3 game.

While splicing BIG3 games with Black Mirror episodes certainly sounds like a good way to make the faltering league palatable, ideally, viewers are aware that White’s stunt was just that. White had “Trump won” plastered on his dome piece during a previous game, so he’s firmly planted himself among other conspiracy theorists who believe in things like the Pentavirate. (Not too sure who replaced the queen, now that she’s passed away — or has she?)

So long as trustworthy arbiters are in place to help the public delineate between fact and Royce White’s brand of conspiracies, society will be OK. Seeing as how he adopted the space lasers theory from some fellow kook on X (the social platform, but probably also the drug) the world will probably fold in on itself within the next two years.

Maybe the most galling thing about sports owners these days, and especially those who are just failsons who happened to have the team land on them with a crunching thud, is just how joyless they all seem. Take John Angelos. When he isn’t in litigation with his brother, this should be the easiest job in the world. You don’t have to do anything. Hire the right people, or better yet hire someone to hire the right people. And then you can go to a baseball game in really great seats whenever you want while the revenue-sharing or TV money checks (for now) roll in. It should be delightful.

Most of these guys spend all their time with a scowl trying to convince the world how hard it is. They spend all their time stewing over what they don’t have when they already have everything. Maybe it’s to fill the hole within them that knows they never really did anything, and certainly nothing to earn what they have. Maybe it’s because their parents didn’t like them, who knows?

Angelos should be, or could be at least, one of the most popular people in Maryland right now. He’s got the American League’s best team — the Orioles — on the field, after years of being utterly irrelevant, playing in what is still the gold standard of the new age of ballparks. They’re young, they’re exciting, they hit the shit out of the ball. All Angelos has to do is not talk, and be shown smiling in his box or whatever.

And yet none of them can help it. Even amongst the best stretch of Os baseball in what, at least a decade, with the promise of so much more, Angelos is threatening fans with higher ticket prices or needed tax breaks and state handouts or a full-out move, simply so he can have more of what he already has. All these guys, especially the failsons, have a disposition of having needed to take a dump since they were 11.

Take a cue from the Ricketts. Act like a fan while the team is good and then right at the height of it no one will notice when you start stripping the team and holding up the locals for more money and give you the benefit of the doubt because you didn’t bitch up a storm that one time. Or follow Tony Khan and do all the rails in the zip code and start a wrestling company to entertain yourself. It isn’t that hard.

So Northwestern’s hazing scandal has turned out to be one ugly visible rust from a deep program rot. That’s right, give the nerds some whistles and uniforms and they too can become bullies.

Longtime head coach, and legendary member of the Northwestern 1995 Rose Bowl team, Pat Fitzgerald, was fired after a hazing scandal was brought to light. The school tried to let him off with a slap on the wrist when an internal investigation revealed hazing in the program.

Contents from that report were not made public, so undergraduate students at The Daily Northwestern put in print that the hazing was actually sexual misconduct taking place between teammates. Once that story went viral Fitzgerald was canned, but his staff remained. Defensive coordinator David Braun was entering his first season in that position and was promoted to interim head coach.

While he may not have been in the program long enough to worship at the altar of Fitzgerald, Mike Bajakian has been at Northwestern since 2020. Early in summer practice, Bajakian and several other staff members wore shirts that read “Cats against the world,” with Fitzgerald’s playing number between the words.

That means important people in the Northwestern football program have no remorse for what happened. They do not care that young people in their care were done harm by people who are supposed to be their “brothers.” Coaches in that program believe reporting that resulted in the ouster of Fitzgerald is a far greater wrong than former players being sexually abused.

Getting rid of the most visible eyesore of the rot does not fix the problem. When rotten to the core, everything must be disposed of and the structure built anew.

Luis Rubiales is a symptom of pervasive idiocy.

As Spain glided to its first World Cup, American conservative firebrands blamed wokeism for the USWNT’s early exit. Yet, here are the reigning Women’s World Cup champions pushing back against sexism in one of its most knuckle-dragging forms. Well, I guess we can eliminate wokeism as a cause.

Spanish Football Federation President Luis Rubiales is obviously an idiot. Simply by getting fired because he couldn’t control himself after the women’s national team he oversaw reached its pinnacle is a sign of brain worms. However, his form of idiocy is a symptom of a much larger problem. Sexism flows throughout the Royal Spanish Football Federation. Forward Jenni Hermoso labeled Rubiales’ action as an “impulse-driven, sexist out of place act without any consent.”

For decades their leaders ruined the experience for their nation’s best female football stars. Soon-to-be ousted manager Jorge Vilda would be the second manager ousted for reasons unrelated to football results. His predecessor, Ignacio Quereda was referred to as the “cancer of women’s football” by a former Spanish football pioneer and was ousted after 27 years by a revolt. With that history in mind, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Spanish women were subjected to some old-fashioned sexism almost immediately after their biggest achievement.

The atmosphere within the upper ranks of Spanish soccer was so toxic that Vilda chose to back Rubiales. It’s emblematic of the fight the Spanish Women’s National Team has waged against its superiors for better pay and fairer treatment.

“Maybe this is a European thing,” we thought when we first saw Rubiales puckering up. But instead of doing the cheek-to-cheek peck, Rubiales was leaning in full throttle. Simply put, it was too much.

And why would he think he needed to reel it in? Rubiales’ own mother went on an ill-advised hunger strike in support of her son after he was asked to resign. She’d rather hospitalize herself rather than teach her son how to act outside.

Rubiales ruining the momentous occasion by putting his slimy mouth all over women isn’t an uncommon occurrence. But doing it on national television adds an additional level of ridiculousness.

Remember Adrian Brody planting one on Halle Berry at the 2003 Oscars? This was worse by several degrees because he kept doing it over and over and over again.

Culturally, Spain might need a little awakening. And if I’ve misread the situation and they already have, it’s time for their football federation to join the rest of the world. Magic Johnson might be the most affectionate NBA player who ever lived. We’re talking about a guy who smiled 24/7 and kissed Isiah Thomas on the mouth before games. Yet, when he went around hugging reporters after his resignation from the Lakers, even he knew better than to go around slobbering on everyone.

Athletic success being turned into political or societal gains is a tale as old as time. The USWNT used the influence they gained from their successes to force change. Spain’s federation is trying to save face now by dumping Rubiales, but they set the tone for what’s been described as Spanish football’s machismo culture. The Spanish Football Federation was just next in line.