Putting Down a Mad Dog

“Mad Dog”? “Foaming Rant”? Yeah, and I’m a “Young Professional” with a “Promising Career”. Patrick O’Grady, your latest tripe has got to be the most weak-kneed excuse for an editorial since Mike Imrem christened Ricky Williams the next Jacques Anquetil. In all honesty, what was the point of this Friday’s rant? That it snows in Colorado? Did that surprise you? Had you really lived there all those years without ever seeing the license plates?

One of the biggest dope investigations in the history of cycling is collapsing on its hamfisted chefs like an undercooked souffle. The self-righteous stuffed shirts that should be running this sport are too wrapped up in a Eurocentric dick-measuring contest to enforce any sort of order on the situation. And the most pressing issue on mind of the most storied editor of the most well-known cycling magazine in America is the weather? The weather? Jesus-freakin-Christo. What were you? Stricken with writer’s block and forced to fall back on “Dave Berry’s Cliche Essentials, Vol. 6”?

Oh, oh, wait – now I see your rant was featured in Velonews, instead of filling space inside the back cover of “Mountain Living Quarterly”. There, in paragraph seven, you mention bike racing. It’s a sentence-long nod to the 2007 Tour presentation and the seeming randomness with which doping punishments are meted out, all packaged in a crisp, glib cultural reference. Wow, man; you’re like the kid in the leather jacket lighting up a cig on the back of the pro cycling bus and too damn cool to care.

Well, lest you’ve forgotten the byline of the oversized glossy that cuts your checks, caring about this BS is your friggin’ job. Me, I get paid to sit in an 8’x6′ cubicle and get uglier. You get paid to write viciously about cycling. And you used to do it well. You didn’t line up an audience of millions peddling limp-wristed disaffection; you got it by being funny, incisive and brutal. That’s why they called you “Mad Dog”. Lately, you’ve been little more than a drooling poodle.

I’m sure you’ve long been aware of this, Pat, but rabies is a degenerative disease. At first, infected animals are distempered and aggressive; “Mad”, so to speak. But soon they’re pathetic, withered sacks of flesh, who can’t stop staggering in circles long enough to keep from sh*tting themselves.

If you really are growing bored and complacent with your work, that’s essentially where you’re headed. Wouldn’t you rather quit near the top of your game like Jaja, instead of spending to the tail end of your career yo-yoing miserably off the back like some journalistic Ivan Quaranta?

I know which I’d prefer, O’Grady, and that’s why I think it’s time to hand off the biting duties to someone who still has teeth. Someone like me. References available on request.