Sunday, March 09, 2008
Sports, "Hunt's Grunts"

My Miranda Rights

I have a friend who’s not real...

CREDIT: Preston Dickson Jones
Hunt’s pals Miranda (left) and Melanie Z.
I have a friend who’s not real. Her name is Miranda and she’s an armless half-mannequin from the waist up. Currently she’s sporting a sassy pink Falcons cap on top of a bright purple wig. Underneath her old-school black satin Falcons jacket is a personalized Panama City Beach air-brushed tank top that her friend Melanie Z. helped her pick out several spring breaks ago. We also met Jenna Jameson that trip.

Next month Miranda and I will celebrate, or at least recognize, 15 years together. She came to me already named; a long-ago Montgomery bud asked if I could take her, seeing as his fiancée was none too keen on the idea of a hunk of shapely plastic hanging around their new home. Especially with those nipples. For whatever reasons, that couple is long divorced, but Miranda and I have been constants ever since. Not that I want that written on my tombstone—which, for the record, won’t exist, as I’d like to be cremated—but I’m not embarrassed about it either.

You want embarrassing? Try Billy Knight’s draft record. Wonder how he felt last week as the man he hired but can’t fire (Mike Woodson), called Chris Paul “phenomenal’’ after watching the point guard Knight & Co. passed over score 23 points and hand out 18 assists in yet another Hornets blowout win over the Hawks. Knight might want to consider sticking his head in the sand, but considering he’s rarely ever heard from or seen, maybe he already has.

So lately I’ve been called out because Miranda does indeed ride along with me in the back seat of my lima green station wagon. Not that Miranda isn’t loved by many: We co-hosted a cable TV show years ago at People TV on 14th Street, she’s helped interview Braves fans at Turner Field, taken shotgun test laps at Road Atlanta, aids in candy tossing in the Inman Park parade and has made at least one Falcons home game for six years running (3-3 is her record after this year’s prime-time Bobby Quitrino bye-bye rotten-egg special against the Saints). Still, the reality is that recently an accountant friend revealed to me the reason she didn’t want to eat with me at Two Urban Licks was because she was embarrassed to endure the valet service with Miranda. Never mind the winged trophy on the hood.

For the record once again, Miranda isn’t real. But what’s not real isn’t all bad. The fictitious Carl Spackler won the Masters and is loved by many. Randle McMurphy helped the inmates beat the orderlies in hoops. All surfer Jeff Spicoli needed were some tasty waves and a cool buzz. Even Navin R. Johnson challenged his brain capacity by guessing the age, weight and sex of country fair goers. And of course, The Dude abides at the alley and beyond.

Sometimes you don’t know what’s real and what’s not, such as the info from the Flats regarding Paul Hewitt’s future. Two weeks ago, I grunted here about how my North Avenue sources said the Tech coach was gone at season’s end. Although they had been correct about Chan Gailey’s fate, I doubted their accuracy with regards to Hewitt. But as this truly uninspiring and disappointing season at the thriller-less Alexander-Memorial Coliseum comes to a close, my sources maintain Hewitt’s Tech days are over.

Will this become a reality? I’d know better if I was as close to the situation as I was a decade ago when I covered Auburn athletics. Then, when I wrote of a source “close to the situation,’’ I was getting the info from the affable but pronoun-challenged Terry Bowden. I was literally getting it straight from the head football coach’s mouth. I think because he liked my then-girlfriend (who for the record still gets “creeped out’’ by Miranda), Bowden liked me and provided me useful information. Sometimes too much, like the time I made a work-related call to his home one summer’s day and before I could get out a hello he was telling me that he had his testicles on ice after having a vasectomy that morning. I told Terry that was too much real info.

Miranda isn’t real, but neither are Leprechauns and those emerald green frock-coat wearing, crock of gold-hoarding, shoe shining, drunk little fairies get their due this time of year. Yes, it’s disturbing that last year a 39-year-old Detroit man was sentenced to 18 months for habitual criminal activity including “smashing storefront windows containing mannequins’’ and being found “in an alley behind a women’s clothing store with three mannequins dressed in lingerie.’’ But hey, Miranda isn’t even anatomically correct, as was Bianca in this year’s Oscar-nominated and widely acclaimed “Lars and the Real Girl.’’ I mean, whatever: Some people collect unicorn figurines!

I know Miranda’s not real. I know maybe now might be the time to take her out of the back seat. Maybe. But I also know that in what has really been a bad stretch of team sports performances in this city, sometimes it’s good just to not talk about it. And I can always count on that from Miranda. 

Happy times … and no, we don’t ride in the HOV lane together. SP