Guys just can’t resist lying about old scores

It was Otto von Bismarck, the “Iron Chancellor” of Germany during the late 1800s, who said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.”

That was probably because ESPN did not exist during the Duke of Lauenburg’s heyday.

Skip Bayless, a former sports columnist who has become a personality of some repute at ESPN, is the latest to have been tripped up making a sports fib. Former Fab Fiver Jalen Rose called him out, on the air, about a Twitter post in which Bayless invoked the name of Pete Maravich in describing his basketball skills in high school.

Well, perhaps Bayless wore the baggy socks. But he must not have possessed The Pistol’s mad basketball skills, or he probably would have averaged more than 1.4 points per game during his senior season.

When Rose exposed the fabrication, Bayless started hamana-hamana-hamaning like Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners,” when Alice caught him making stuff up. And then Rose, and a lot of people who don’t much care for Skip Bayless, enjoyed a hearty har-dee-har-har.

So what is it about guys that compels us to stretch the truth about how good we were in sports?

I can almost guarantee that if you put three or four or five men together in a bar, or at one of those lodges named for large beasts of prey where one must know the secret handshake to get in, the conversation invariably will turn to the night when one of them scored 37 points against Disco Tech and made it with both Grabowski twins.

And then the guys sitting on the other stools will try to top it with even more outrageous personal myths, falsehoods and subterfuge. Heavy on the subterfuge.

Then when the last guy calls “B.S.,” as Rose did on Bayless, they will stop telling lies and weigh in at great length on whether Batman could kick the Incredible Hulk’s rear end in a fight. Only they wouldn’t say “rear end.”

This is what men do. We concoct these fantastic narratives about the sports we’ve played and the women we’ve known and the superheroes we always wanted to be. It must be in our DNA.

Why else would George O’Leary spin yarns when he was applying for employment at Notre Dame, ultimately costing him what must have been his dream job of coaching the Fighting Irish football team?

After O’Leary was hired, it was discovered that his claims of earning a master’s degree from New York University and earning three letters while playing football at New Hampshire were false.

Who lies about playing football at New Hampshire?

Alabama, Michigan, Nebraska, sure, I get it. That would impress both Grabowski twins. But New Hampshire? You wouldn’t have gotten Bea Arthur with that. Who fibs about rushing for a buck-fifty against William & Mary?

Anyway, O’Leary admitted that “resume padding” was to blame, and so now he’s the coach of Central Florida instead of Notre Dame.

I did some research on the reasons men fabricate stories about how good they were as athletes. But (for once) I’m not going to lie. It wasn’t Harvard-thesis-type research, though it probably would have gotten me a B-minus at Western New Mexico, which is where I graduated from college after like five or six years.

I learned that one of the main reasons men tend to lie about their accomplishments is that it gives them an edge in competing for jobs.

Substitute “women” for jobs, or “admiration of one’s peers” for jobs, and I suppose it makes sense why this guy I knew a long time ago named Dave invented a story about him having played baseball at Arizona State.

This was long before the Internet, but not before the telephone. So I called the Arizona State sports information office and they said they didn’t remember Dave having played for the Sun Devils, and that when they looked it up, his name never appeared in a box score — not even against Northwestern, or somebody like that.

And the funny thing is, after I called Dave on it, we became friends and, later, roommates. He turned out to be a great guy. And I think a lot of guys who lie about scoring touchdowns and getting girls are really pretty good guys, once you get to know them.  

Dave never brought home the Grabowski twins, but I was there when he brought home Miss New Mexico, and she was beautiful and he never told anybody about it, not even when she confessed she was really from Dallas.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.