Soccer star Conrad comes by his comedy naturally
KANSAS CITY, MO. — Some parents in Southern California take their kids to Disneyland, others to the beach. The La Brea Tar Pits are a good spot for learning, Rodeo Drive for gawking.
Kansas City Wizards star Jimmy Conrad and his father, Kim, visited the sites from “The Big Lebowski.”
“You know that scene where he’s smoking pot while he’s driving, then he sees he’s being followed and crashes his car into a Dumpster and the car kind of pops up in the air?” Kim Conrad asks. “That’s our favorite little spot. It’s awesome.”
With parental guidance like that, it’s easy to understand how his son became one of the most affable athletes in sports.
A chip off the old Lebowski-loving block, Jimmy Conrad has taken the nothing-is-off-limits humor of his childhood to the masses with a Kansas City-based radio show and unusual blog posts. Once he’s done kicking around a soccer ball, Conrad clearly has a future in entertainment.
“Jimmy is good at it,” says teammate Davy Arnaud, a recent guest on Conrad’s radio show. “He’s a little quirky and has his ways, but that’s just part of who he is, part of his personality.”
Conrad got his start in the media world by accident: His agent forwarded a scathingly funny e-mail from Conrad about everything Polish -- the defender played in Poland during the 2000 off-season -- to SI.com. A goals-and-giggles career launched from there, earning him a radio show and a job as a blogger for SI.com, later ESPN.com.
His site, jimmyconrad.com, has his bobblehead giving a public service announcement for sun block and a picture of the Skipper from “Gilligan’s Island” next to blog entry on a MLS star whose identity he protects by calling him Lexi Alas.
Conrad is just as biting on his radio show, including this question for his dad on this week’s show: “I know my mom’s great and everything, but what were you thinking?”
It’s all in good fun, even if not everyone gets the punch line.
“Some people don’t think it’s becoming of professional athlete, that we should concentrate on being a professional athlete and save that stuff either for when we’re done or not do it at all,” Conrad says. “But it gives me some balance in life, to just have some fun and bring people along for the ride.”
The trip started early.
His father, a self-proclaimed pregnant stick man -- most of the 300-or-so pounds on his 6-foot-5 frame are in his belly, Jimmy says -- brought up his seven kids in a no-holds-barred world of quips and digs. Putdowns were part of life. Laugh with us or we’ll laugh at you was the family creed.
“You’ve got develop a sense of humor when you’ve got a girl’s name, man,” says Kim, who runs a drywall business in Burbank.
Jimmy, like his younger siblings, wanted to emulate his father and was quick to catch on to the art of the insult. Only problem was that not everyone enjoyed sarcastic barbs from someone still watching cartoons.
“I had a big mouth as a kid,” Jimmy says. “You have to know what that end game is, what the end of that spectrum is, so for a long time I would rub people the wrong way. As you get older, you kind of figure out what works -- ‘I kind of hurt somebody’s feelings there’ -- and just find a buffer. There was a lot of tough times when I was a kid.”
What Jimmy realized was that his dad’s humor had a purpose. It was a barometer of personality, a gauge of whether a person was worthy of your time.
He sees it in the way Kim runs his business.
When going to a job with new clients, he’ll often walk around with pen and pad, appearing to take copious notes. Only when the clients ask what he was doing do they realize he had been drawing a cat -- his favorite animal -- eating or lying in the sun. Deal done.
“He’s been doing the job for 30 years, so he knows what needs to be done,” Jimmy says. “So at that point, he’s just trying to get a good social interaction. He’s going to do a great job, but he understands that it’s not the end-all be-all.”
So does Jimmy.
He takes soccer very seriously. The Wizards captain is a five-time MLS All-Star who played for the U.S. 2006 World Cup team, a gritty defender who never gives up on a play. Off the pitch, he’s all about having fun, whether it’s picking on Arnaud about the pronunciation of his name -- “it should be Ar-Nad” -- on the radio or giving quirky gifts for family members.
Jimmy once spent hours cutting and pasting magazine pictures of cats to a large box and filled it with gift cards from Del Taco, Burger King and the rest of Kim’s favorite restaurants.
Funny, yet thoughtful.
“I love that he gets me like that,” Kim says. “Maybe he just feels sorry for me.”
