The Softest Beefs in Sports: Volume 1
As you know by now, Meek Mill died last week.
After engaging Drake in a social media tiff over a retweet (or lack thereof), Meek took a single, solid, lyrical fist (some language ) to the throat and melted into spaghetti.
He just fell over, laid there long enough for ice caps to melt and children to be born, grow old and die, and then sort of tried to get up. Since then, his figurative ashes have been spread over Citizens Bank Park and the set of "Anaconda," ending the beef by TKO.
.jpg?w=256 "Colts Jaguars Football")
And it was pretty disappointing, honestly.
I wanted them to go a few rounds, at least give the people their money's worth. But Meek got knocked down, went to his corner, came back out and more or less fainted into Drake's arms.
It was such a soft way for a beef to end, but then again, how much can you expect from a fight that started over a courtesy retweet?
It just goes to show: All beefs are not equal. Many are Gerber soft and petty from the get-go—particularly in sports, where not toward Rome after a home run will cause grown men to tear their robes and wing fastballs at your ribs.
With that in mind, I've put together the first volume of what will hopefully be a series cataloguing and deconstructing the most goose down of sports beefs.
These are three hand-picked, 1,000-thread-count sports beefs that epitomize just how easily tough sports men can chafe over the dumbest things.
Everything these beefs touch turns to . If you started your laundry before this, you will have roughly 14 more dryer sheets than you put in when it's done—such is the softness of beefs to come.
And now, we hit 'em up:
The Standoff
Who: J.J. Watt and Zach
What: Grown men fighting over camera techniques
Offenses: Sub-tweeting, , that , though
Look, I don't like this any more than you do.
Putting J.J. Watt's name within 200 yards of the word "soft" is a great way to die screaming. He's going to kill me, box jump my casket, and the guy who takes my job will write about it.
"J.J. Watt Trolls Dead Blogger With Epic 61-Inch Casket Jump (WATCH)." That's how I'll go out.
But I don't make the rules here, and Beef Law clearly states that sniping through the media over social media presences is, categorically, softer than jersey fabric sheets.
Thus, we have the Standoff—a weapons-grade loofah fight between Watt and that broke out during Week 8 of the 2014-15 season.
It all started when the Tennessee Titans backup quarterback posted some porn ' to after being tapped to take over for the pile of hand-me-down that was once Jake Locker.
Watt saw the and responded by devouring and mocking with a sack .
"It's just reminder, this is the National Football League, not high school," Watt said when asked about his taunting at the presser. "Welcome to the show."
And that's where this dumb thing ended—or should've.
Unfortunately, caught feelings, held them close like a candle in the wind and—nine months later—opened up to a reporter about how he thought Watt's Texans jacket was high school-ish.
Taking the slap fight to the next level, Watt responded with some wisdom over Twitter.
then hit us with that quick , doe.
"Watch the video and you can see I was being sarcastic and joking," told the Tennessean's Jim Wyatt. "Pretty simple."
Level of Softness: J. Cole panda adoption
The Civil Conflict
Who: and football
What: Whole cloth fabrication of rivalry/reality
Offenses: See above
There are a lot of good, genuine, hostile beefs floating around in the college football . The "Civil Conflict" is not one of them.
Seemingly dreamed up by head coach Bob in the midst of a gin fever, the football rivalry became a reality this June after engraved "Civil Conflict" into a block of wood and then offered it to with all the tact of a man who found a wedding ring in his Lime-A-Rita and tried to marry the next closest person.
This was problematic, of course.
Separated by 1,200 miles, and have only three things in common: a conference and the letters "U" and "C." Their similarities balloon to if you count the Sur La Table knife block repurposed into a trophy for the "rivalry."
The best part is didn't even know about the trophy—or the rivalry!
If your beef is so nebulous and plush that the group you are beefing is unaware said beef exists, your beef is Lean Cuisine. Tuna tartare. Veal that was never allowed to stand.
Best of all, essentially breathed this rivalry into existence just by saying things that entered his head after win over in 2014—its only win of the season (per SB Nation):
"We're excited about this North/South battle. You want to call it the Civil Conflict? Maybe I'll win my money and make a trophy. I'll buy it myself. Put a big giant Husky and a big giant Knight on it. Make a stand. Put it in our hallway. The Civil Conflict. The loser, maybe they've got to put nutmeg on the stand when it's not there and we'll put a sack of oranges.
"
Darn ', Trapper Bob! After that, we'll go out way and find a whole mess o' rivals! Loser has to put fruit dust on their mantle! Could get wild.
It should be noted that still refuses to even recognize this rivalry, and that suits just fine.
Level of Softness: Turning on your smart phone's flash so you can get from your light switch to bed without the monsters getting you.
Who: Tom Brady, Robert Kraft, Roger Goodell and all his men
What: Just a big damn mess
Offenses: Ball-tampering, caring about ball-tampering, guerrilla cell phone commercials, anything and everything
First off, screw into the sun. Screw it into a black hole, out the other side and right into Matt Damon's dumb, eyes.
is the French of sports beefs—first-world fare so tender and gluttonous we should all have to wear veils before indulging in our PSI takes just so the sports gods won't witness our shame. A veiled Mark could weep in peace. Everyone would win.
Just consider Deflate at its most basic level, which is a beef between a millionaire model, a billionaire pushover and a glorified dean of students with a slavish dedication to doing whatever will keep the most members of his boys club happy.
Doesn't get much softer than that, right?
And that's before you tack on the conflict itself, wherein millions of dollars will be tamped down lawyers' throats with chimney sweeps in order to settle whether someone lied about the firmness of balls used in a futile blowout game.
That's it. That is what the NFL and its most powerful owner will go to civil war over—a soft beef over soft balls. And we all have to live with it for eons.
Softness Level: making it rain on Kylie Jenner at the scholastic book fair.
And that's it for the first installment of Softest Beefs in Sports History.
Join me next time as we take a look at the loud Drake music that led two professional golfers to do battle in Twitter's 36 Chambers of .
Dan is on Twitter, awaiting death by Watt.
.jpg?w=480 "Colts Jaguars Football")
