About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

44 Replies to “Mario Cipollini”

  4. Cipo was exactly who I was thinking of for the next baller post. Damn, we gots one brain this day, Gianni. I love Cipo. GOOD call.

  6. …no doubt about it, cipollini added ‘big presence’ to any bicycle racing event…

    …& as a snide aside…gee whiz, gianni…that must be reassuring to you…

  7. Cipo ain’t no baller king. Winner, sure. Amazing, sure. Baller, no. There isn’t anything about his personal that defines baller. He’s the Sammy Hagar of the sprint. Full on rocker, but not for real. He and Franco P. are bunkmates.

    Who was the Roth of the sprint?

  8. Gnome, Cipo had class by the mile. I’m calling it baller.

    Dude would waltz out on the podium to crack the champagne in a tailored suit (grahamwatson.com/gw/imagedocs). He is more guido than the entire cast of Jersey Shore multiplied by a factor of ten (cyclelicio.us/2006/09/sinclair-imports-at-interbike). He took 42 stage wins in the Giro, took Gent–Wevelgem three times, Milan – San Remo, and was also World Champion (en.wikipedia.org/…Mario_Cipollini#Major_results).

    I think he might have been the David Lee Roth of the Sprint. He certainly wasn’t the Hagar.

  9. Tailored suits weren’t my def of baller. My def was skewed. I had to look that shit up and he fits it, of course. But I’m down with the working class cyclists, and that he was not, or he did not promote himself as such (every cyclist has some work ethic, afterall). Too much panache. Too much pretense. Not enough humility nor dedication to cycling as a whole for my tastes. But he got the W’s nonetheless… He and that train, anyway.

    Interesting to note that he was the one who changed the sprint from it’s opportunistic origins into the systematic lead-out trains of his days at the sharp end. We see that pragmatism in concert with opportunistic bunches anymore, and it with less effect overall than when he dictated how things would unfold.

    Interesting evolution of the bunch.

    Still, he rides the fence between the backyards of Hagar and Roth. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt from there.

  12. Gnome writes, “Tailored suits weren’t my def of baller.”

    Damn mountain bikers. You can take ’em to town, but you can’t make ’em smoove.

  14. @gnome: There’s something about the lead out as “fuck opportunity, I’m just going to OWN this one” that demands respect regardless of your position on suits.

  16. @art: Word, and I congratulated that. He was the one to define a new form of sprint tactic. Regarding baller status, I always assumed “baller” meant a dedicated individual, but I’ve learned that it is also about being lavish in style, thus he is baller to that end and so he has some DLR cred. But I’ve always had a bit of contempt for him because as he swaggers, he also doesn’t finish tours because of excuses or – beneath those excuses – he has an outright inability to clear the mountains. So that doesn’t fit into baller status imo. But because he dominated as he did, well, that detail can have little validity here.

    In the end, should there be a Baller of contention, it should be Mario if anyone.

    @Gordon: It’s Roth, not Hagar!

  17. Hmmm… Tailored suits… Baller… You been to a basketball game? Ballers do wear suits, and some of the best cuts of cloth, to boot.
    The King gets to swagger. Hard to think of Contador as this type.

  27. …the band ***van halen*** was fronted by david lee roth…

    …the band that was allowed to continue as ‘van halen’ was fronted by sammy hager…

    …but gnomer, to give sammy his due, he did invest in a bike shop, did have ‘red rocker’ mtb’s built & he sponsored ‘team tam’, an mtb team of young stoners here in the county…

  28. …to be properly correct, sammy only commissioned the ‘red rocker’ bikes which were really ‘fisher hoo koo e koos’ painted all in red with black decals n’ black gear…

    …the shop in sausalito is now part of the small local chain of bay area ‘mikes bikes’…

    …just historically sayin’…

  30. +2 street cred points to Hagar then. Or, wait, was it just his marketing ppl using up the tax monies while he was in CaboWabo? Does Hagar even know how to drunk cycle? yea, probably. CABO WABO!

  31. Wow, small world Mr. Gnome…I just took a shot of Cabo Wabo tekillya and I’m riding my bike downtown to the symphony. I might just rock some old VH on the way for old times sake and all. Then some bassoon. Nothing like live bassoon.
    “I don’t feel tardy”

  32. …sammy is more of a beach cruiser kinda guy but i think his enthusiasm was genuine from a ‘local’ angle (mtb’s, marin, health, sammy livin’ in mill valley, blah, blah, blah) but then again maybe his tax lawyer suggested a few investments might be useful…

    …whether that was the case, i dunno but once the whole cabo wabo thingy got off the ground, the red rocker was set for life i’m pretty sure…a little cantina south of the border & a few bottles of tequila ???…

    …how about the reality nowadays is that cabo wabo‘s cactus juice is a 60 million dollar a year biz…sammy sold 80% of his share 3 years ago for (choke) $80,000,000…not a bad little deal…80 mil in the ‘bank’ & retains 20% of an ongoing 60 mil a year biz…

    …“i can’t (have my chauffeur) drive 55”…

  37. I’d be less conflicted if he had managed to push himself to Paris just once despite the fact that Baller and work ethic aren’t even on the same planet.