The 4 Most Spectacular Mental Breakdowns in Sports History
I am a Denver Broncos fan. For those of you who aren't spirited followers of the National Football League, Denver's record this season couldn't be much worse if they replaced the entire team with actual horses. I don't mean horses that were trained to play football either, I mean the kind that were trained to jump over gates or pull farm equipment. The only solace that comes from liking a team with an abysmal record is that it makes it hard for even your worst rivals to muster the strength to hate you. But the pity I receive from other football fans is not just because the Broncos are bad, the sympathetic nods and potato skin offerings are in preparation for a disaster that hasn't even happened yet. Everyone is patiently waiting for a humiliation far worse than loss after loss for Denver, they are waiting for one particular player to finally suffer a colossal meltdown.
Oliver McCall -- Boxing
Skip to 6:00. It looked like McCall had been punched into an existential crisis and had started to question the significance of a life spent turning other peoples' guts into paste. Between the fourth and fifth rounds, the ref knelt down in McCall's corner and asked him like a concerned parent if he really wanted to continue fighting. It wasn't clear if he meant this particular match or boxing in general because the tears streaming down McCall's face suggested a regret far more encompassing than just the events of the night. While McCall said he wanted to continue, the fight ended just 50 seconds into the fifth round because he still refused to honor the human instincts of protecting his own brain, and no one was eager to watch a clinically depressed man try to commit suicide on someone else's fists. It was easily one of the top 1,790,502 emotional breakdowns Las Vegas has ever produced.
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Martina Hingis -- Tennis
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Angel Matos -- Taekwondo
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John Bourke -- Australian Football
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