July 11, 2014

Publicly mocked obese, sleeping Yankee fan sues over the public mockery...

... and is publicly mocked for the lawsuit.

When is it better to laugh at yourself when you are laughed at and when is it better to stand your that's-not-funny ground and seek millions of dollars for your pain?

The filing of the lawsuit got me to watch the much-watched video clip, which I hadn't bothered with before. I'm surprised how gentle the ESPN announcers are. There's no conceivable basis for a lawsuit here.

By the way, the man, Andrew Rector, is a used car salesman. You'd think he'd have better skills at taking what seems to be bad and flipping it into the good. He's recognizable. He's famous now. Be the fat, sleeping baseball guy. It's branding. Now, you're the petulant, humorless, litigious guy.
Rector shut his business for a while after the embarrassing incident, telling staff at Auto World NYC to take the next few days off. He also gave away his season tickets to Yankee home games.
Pathetic.

ADDED: Wait. I had a Nixon theme going this morning....

18 comments:

alan markus said...

Guess he would have to sell a lot of cars to make $10 Million - wouldn't be much time left for baseball games and/or naps.

If he gets a settlement, he would be wise to invest in some medical tests to diagnose for sleep apnea - looking at his weight and him falling asleep while 45,000 people next to him are standing and screaming bears some further investigation.




Anonymous said...

Phoning-it-in Betamax says:

Has anyone noticed that Nixon sorta looks like Sarah Jessica Parker? Maybe Nixon as part of "Sex and the City". Big libido. Thing for shoes. Would take some work, probably with disappointing results. Another time. But probably not.

tim maguire said...

Not only was the ribbing pretty tame and good natured, but he needs to read the back of his ticket.

Michael said...

Our nation needs a lot more people willing to mock others: the throngs of fatsos waddling through the airline terminals and up and down the sidewalks, the hefty feminists with their awful tattoos and sophomoric ideas, the stupid speech codes in the universities and those who support them. The list is endless. There were a lot fewer fatties when the chant "Fattie fattie two by four" was heard across the nation's playgrounds. A few hurt feelings and legions fewer cases of diabetes.

Anonymous said...

Phoning-it-in Betamax says:

Petulant Humorless Litigious Guy says:

I'm petulant, humorless and litigious. I am also fat.

The easy is too easy and the hard is too hard. Another gets crossed off the list.

Anonymous said...

Phoning-it-in Betamax says:

Take the script from a random "Golden Girls" episode: replace the four women's names with Nixon, Kissinger, Liddy, Haldeman. Otherwise: don't change a word. Could be funny. Maybe later.

The Crack Emcee said...

"They then compare his weight to that of Kruk, a hefty former major leaguer.
Asked by Shulman if Rector might be a relative, Kruk replies, 'Physically, he could be, yeah.'"

Fatty will win.

Maybe not 10 Mill, but he'll win,….

The Crack Emcee said...

Michael,

"Our nation needs a lot more people willing to mock others"

I couldn't agree more:

Let's start with white folks for the next 400 years and start there,….

Ann Althouse said...

Crack, you are starting to sound like one of those Onion advice columnists.

mikee said...

Dear Phoning-It-In-Betamax,

It is SJP who, as the years pass, is looking more and more like Nixon, unfortunately, not the other way round.

And Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan or Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama would make a much better Golden Girls than the Nixon inner circle.

As to sleeping in public: I used to wait an hour for my carpool home to swim team practice as a teen, usually reading or napping in front of a strip mall a block from my high school. My mother would get phone calls once in a while from her friends asking if she knew I was passed out drunk by the Krogers. You sleep in public, you take the consequences.

john said...

Crack -

When those cotton pickers get mockin',they won't pick very much cotton, in them old cotton fields back home

That wasn't a way of meeting production quotas.

Michael said...

Crack:

Actually, you are providing enough mockable moments for a lifetime.

And a picture of a hanged man does not underscore every stupid point you try to make. It just doesn't. It make you look crazy.

The fat guy will lose. On top of being a slug he has no self awareness and no sense of humor.

By the way, what does it feel like to lose a sense of humor? Is that space automatically filled with anger? Or fear?


The Crack Emcee said...

Michael,

"A picture of a hanged man does not underscore every stupid point you try to make. It just doesn't."

Yes, it does - because, like Fatty, that hanged man is a person.

Recognizing our shared humanity seems to be a problem for white people - that's why "this land of milk and honey" is, in reality, such a cruel place with a horrible history towards any "outsider."

One that loves Thomas Jefferson, but ignored Sally Hemmings, the woman he raped - and thinks blacks should, too, when her story tells us more about Jefferson, and America, than anything he ever wrote.

Naw, I'ma leave those black bodies hanging right where our America's ancestral white people wanted them - where they could be seen by EVERYBODY.

Fucking sweeping it under the rug any longer - that's how white neighborhoods became white.

And, despite what you say, they tell us everything we need to know, and more, when taking the measure of this so-called "Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,…"

Anonymous said...

You never know what someone's internal psychological situation is or what brought them to that point. This is why it's best to be kind.

Good-natured hazing from one POV can be traumatic from another. Not everyone in the United States is yet ready to leverage their new status as a viral joke.

jaed said...

Our nation needs a lot more people willing to mock others: the throngs of fatsos waddling through the airline terminals and up and down the sidewalks, the hefty feminists with their awful tattoos and sophomoric ideas, the stupid speech codes in the universities and those who support them.

One of these three things is not like the others. You may want to contemplate the difference before you continue filling out your list.

Michael said...

Crack

The hanged man is long dead. Fatty is still alive.

You think you discovered slavery ? Go lecture someone else, someone as clueless about the history of your race in America as you were until your cult scam ran out of steam. In your fifties. You should be ashamed of yourself. Go freedom ride in the real world big man instead of on the Althouse blog. Go insult some white people to their faces. If you had any balls you would. But you dont. You freedom ride on the Althouse blog lecturing people and blaming them for something you only recently gave a shit about.

There is nothing to sweep under the rug, you poor man, it is all in the open and it only took you most of your life to figure it out. Don't attribute stupidity and evil to others when you are the one who only recently had the scales fall from your eyes.

Freedom ride outside. Face to face with the white people you hate and blame for your bad decisions.

Michael said...

jaed

I don't think I will. But you could probably use a walk around the block.

William said...

I don't think he has a case, but the fact remains that anyone who is two or three clicks off pretty and who becomes a public person is in for some heavy ridicule. Look at the crap Richard Jewell, Monica Lewinsky, and Linda Tripp had to endure. The reverse works to your favor if you're good looking. Tsarnaev will never get the death penalty. The death penalty is not designed for good-looking people.......Anyway, TV crews should keep that in mind when they single someone out in the crowd. If the joke was directed at someone with normal weight, then the joke would be that he's sleeping. But he felt that the joke was aimed at his fatness--probably because he's been hearing fat jokes all his life.