Jimbo’s Mailbag: Alternate Body Parts

Melissa Majchrzak via utahjazz.com

Welcome to the next edition of Jimbo’s Mailbag, our regular dose of levity here at Salt City Hoops. In each mailbag, Jimbo answers your burning questions with his unique outlook on Jazz basketball. Jimbo, by virtue of being recently featured in the Deseret News, is now the world’s most famous Utah-based basketball mailbag artist. Interested in submitting a question to Jimbo’s mailbag? Email it to Jimbo at mailbag@saltcityhoops.com or tweet @JimboRudding to appear.

Q: At a BYU game in the 1990’s I overheard an old lady talk about Robbie Reid replacing John Stockton one day. Ever overheard anything better?

@SpamIsDelish

The only thing I remember about Robbie Reid is his beautiful bowl cut. Man, that was a luscious head of hair! There were many a lady in mom-jeans and Jellies waiting in line for a shot at kissing Robbie on Squaw Peak… or the lips. Heck, back in those days I would’ve killed a small sheep dog to have hair like that, which coincidentally is exactly what it looked like was sitting on his head with that haircut. Unfortunately, I was predestined to inherit hair with a thickness and body similar to that of a muskrat pelt. C’est la vie!

I see only two explanations for this woman’s Robbie Reed/John Stockton confusion–either she was clown-shoe crazy or she was just a rabid BYU/Jazz fan with tunnel vision. I’m gonna have to go with the clown-shoes.

I guess it’s not entirely her fault though. Sometimes, as the band Blink 188 so eloquently put it, we’re our own worst enemy. At times our fandom sort of controls us. We just love so quickly and so hard that we forget we live in a big country with other states and that those states ALSO have good basketball players with sheep dog haircuts. Or maybe she thought that Stockton played at BYU?

The point is, we all have crazy ideas and expectations from time to time. For instance, I assumed for years that I was the only one who had had the idea to connect computers together and create some sort of information super-database. Little did I know there was already a thing called the “internet” and it had been around for over a decade!?

Here are some other ridiculous and often downright ludicrous things I’ve overheard people say through the years:

• Girls don’t like puppeteers… they LOVE them!
• Don’t worry. Derrick Favors’ses back is “just tweaked.”
• Deron Williams is awesome in person and very pleasant to be around.
• If you turn in a Tootsie Pop wrapper with a star on it to a cashier at the supermarket, they are obligated to give you $50.
• Jim Les is pretty good at basketball.
• The THOR movies are my favorite!
• Greg Ostertag will be a BEAST once he gets into shape.
• It’s so great that Derek Fisher loves playing in Utah and is such a good, wholesome family man.
• You can get discount Disneyland tickets at a Ross Dress For Less in San Bernardino.
• I’m so glad they don’t give those mints away at the door after a win anymore.

Q: I think we need a name for the injury curse we are facing. I would say the “Fisher Curse,” but he wronged us, not us him. Ideas?

@BardenPembleton

GREAT question! I agree with your assessment of Fisher. It’s too bad too, because “Fisher Curse” has such a nice ring to it.

If you go back and read the last seven Jimbo’s Mailbags, you’ll find that injuries and how much I/we hate them is thoroughly covered. But that doesn’t mean I will refuse to talk about them again. I’ll talk about my abhorrence for injuries until the day I die (hopefully not after succumbing to my injuries).

I mean, we can’t control if and when injuries happen, but what we CAN control is… I don’t know…our attitudes? At least that’s what my dad always told me growing up. He’d always say stuff like, “Have a good attitude!” Or, “Your attitude can affect everything.” Or, “You can come out of your room when you’ve decided to change your attitude and apologize to grandma!”

One thing I’d like to get to the bottom of is what players are doing during the games? Sometimes injured players watch the game from behind the bench, but sometimes they aren’t there at all and that makes me sad and a little bit anxious. I know they get “treatment,” but what does that even mean? A massage? Aromatherapy? And why does that have to happen during the game? Aren’t they missing a good opportunity to see what the team is going through? Do the massages hurt? How many women masseuses are employed at any given time? Can they squeeze me in on a weekday? Should I be worried if there’s a tingly mound-type area on the small of my back? What about over-sized moles? Ugh, so many questions and so few answers.

Here’s a list of things we could call the Utah Jazz injury curse:

• Boozer Heard a Pop Curse
• Favors’ February Curse
• .500 Curse
• Corbin Played the Vets Curse
• Core Four Curse
• Injuries, They’re Dumb Curse
• The Curse that Shall Not be Named
• Greg

Q: Should we sign players with 6 fingers and/or toes just so they have spares if they injure one?

@RxMike12

This might be a good idea. I think we’d need each player to have an extra set of knees, one more back, and a back-up large/small intestines for those gastric distress nights. In fact, make it two sets of intestines because I like to do late-night taco runs.

How in the world did Stockton and Karl Malone play so many games without injuries??? Were they secretly in pain most of the time and just played through it? Remember when Malone had that deep laceration on his palm for two months? How many games did he miss for that? Also, remember when Stockton had knee surgery and he came back a little bit into the third quarter?

I still remember when Greff Broomhurgle of the Milwaukee Bucks got a fingernail to the throat and the trainers just packed his open wound with sawdust and glue, wrapped it up in a wet towel, gave it the once-around with some scotch tape and was instructed to “get back in there and give em the business.” (R.I.P. Greff.) Those were the days. Also, those days are ancient history.

In today’s NBA game, toes and thumbs keep players out for weeks. If someone gets a bloody nose then that player is sent to the locker room to change his uniform and the entire court has to be disinfected. I understand that times have changed and we have more knowledge about diseases and whatnot, but so what? If you get a disease, just tough that out too! Make the disease know who’s boss. (By they way, Mona was the real boss.)

I don’t know, maybe I’m letting my anger towards injuries do the talking here? Maybe I’m just old and I still believe in taking two Advil and getting back out there and dealing with the pain when the game is over. Sure, you could injure it even more, but guess what? You could also NOT injure it even more, right? Also, I stayed home from work today and took a TON of NyQuil about an hour ago, so the ghosts hovering around my computer screen telling me what to type could be completely off-base on all of this.

You should probably also take into account that this is coming from a guy who successfully managed to avoid manual labor for most of his life and has only been inside a hospital once and that was only because he thought it was a mall.

Q: With alternate jerseys being the cool thing nowadays, I’m curious what a Jazz alternate jersey designed by you would look like.

@TravisBruerton

They ARE the cool thing nowadays, aren’t they? It’s like teams are tired of their old look, but not enough to completely change their original look. I went through a phase like that in high school when I decided to grow out my rat-tail mullet. I decided I needed an edgier look because most of the basketball team caught me crying in my car while listening to Firehouse’s “Love of a Lifetime.” In my defense though, Julie Weirholdt told me right to my face that she didn’t like me because my breath always smelled like chili dogs.

I like the fact that the Jazz at least recognized that there was a need and finally addressed it…and by “need” I mean that every other team was getting alternate uniforms so why couldn’t we? I don’t know if I would’ve chosen the exact ones they came up with, but I also wore a pair of women’s running pants for a whole year and didn’t even realize it, so what do I know about what looks good?

If I designed the Jazz’ses’s uniforms I would My designs would include at least one symbol of the great state of Utah, such as a seagull or Kennecott Copper Mine or a seagull flying above Kennecott with some copper in it’s beak. I’d also allow one sponsor’s logo to be placed somewhere near the mid-section, like maybe Zion’s Bank or Classic Skating or Footloose. Another thing I would include on the uniforms are tiny lights that would illuminate during the game. Like, whenever the crowd cheered they would turn white and whenever the referees made a bad call and they’d turn red. Also, they’d turn a greenish color if a restroom was out of order. The last thing I would do is make them smell like a poorly managed Red Lobster. So, as you can see, my uniforms would be sort of like the Hunger Games except without all the fire.

Q: So Jazz have kids playing terrible basketball at halftime and the Stars have the audience playing knockout and we still can’t get Jimbo Rudding to do halftimes???

@urzishra

RIGHT!?!?!?

The thing that bugs me the most about being overlooked to perform during halftime is that I’ve put hundreds of hours into my halftime ideas and the Jazz don’t even care. They just keep hiring the lady who catches bowls on her head or the guys who jump on a trampoline in ski gear. What about me? Are my trained toddlers not “good enough” for the NBA? Is my Boot Scootin’ Boogie whilst wearing 16 different jackets not “cool enough” for halftime?

I get asked about my halftime acts every once in a while and I’m fine giving updates on how they’re coming along, but just understand that every one of my halftime acts are copyrighted and I am not afraid to take legal action if I feel like my creative assets have been compromised. Basically, any reproduction of my halftime acts without the express written consent of The Rudding Halftime Association is strictly prohibited.

So here I sit, ready and willing, just waiting for the call. All my mechanical props have the proper amount of gasoline; my samurai swords are perfectly sharpened; my helmet gear has been professionally repaired and deemed suitable for human protection again; my costumes are all tailored to fit both me and my two chimp assistants; and my double-dutch skills are exactly where they need to be. So, like I said, I’m ready whenever they are.

Thanks for the questions, you guys! Remember to tell the mall Santas about Jimbo’s Mailbag. When you do, whisper in his ear that you’re still upset about the Reebok Pumps you were supposed to get back in 1992. Make it weird.