The 2010 Larry Johnson Awards: a tribute to idiocy

Another year has passed, and Kansas City is still standing. In fact, as 2010 stumbles to a close, normalcy abounds in this land of smoked meat and inconveniently placed borders. The Chiefs are still positioned to break the hearts of countless men in Elvis Grbac jerseys. The streets have more dead bodies than a Golden Girls reunion. And while 47 people are running for mayor, few are worth putting on pants to go vote for.

But just because Kansas City ends the year as it began it — flat, broke and without a team for the Sprint Center — doesn’t mean plenty of ambitious citizens haven’t tried their best to make things even worse. So without further ado, we present the 2010 Larry Johnson Awards, a celebration of degeneracy named for one of our city’s most depraved alumni.

Johnson, once a celebrated Chiefs draft choice, spent six seasons here setting records for bad decision making and general moral mayhem. He left Kansas City the way all the great ones leave — by calling people “fags” on Twitter. It’s about time someone feted him, even if we just learned what “feted” means.

The men and women we honor today didn’t quite attain Johnson’s standards — who has the time? — but they all distinguished themselves with their own unique brands of incompetence. May their legacies be sealed today, and may they continue to live by the Credo of Larry: “It’s Been a Few Hours — I Should Probably Do Something Really Dumb Now.”

Executive of the Year
Karen Pletz

Running a university is a lot of work. There are budgets to balance, funds to raise, dreams to nurture so they can later be crushed by reality. If you’re going to do all that work, you’ve gotta be well-rested. And you’ve gotta look good.

These are truisms that Karen Pletz knew well. For 14 years, Pletz served as the president of the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, working tirelessly to build a legacy that would make a jealous Bernie Madoff soil his jumpsuit. If you believe a lawsuit filed by the school, she succeeded, using $2.3 million in university funds to make it rain rather heavily on her and her family.

According to the lawsuit, Pletz reimbursed herself for trips to Jackson Hole and New York; falsified meeting minutes to increase her pay; and used university money to throw herself and her friends lavish parties — all strategies culled from Kenneth Lay’s best-selling memoir, Holy Shit Are My Board Members Clueless.

But it was a trip to San Antonio that carved Pletz’s bust into the Mount Rushmore of Thieving Bastards. (It’s a very big mountain.) For that trip, the university says, Pletz pulled $4,000 from the university’s coffers, claiming that she needed the money to entertain well-heeled alumni. Instead, she used it to have cosmetic surgery on her face, the school alleges.

Pletz denies the school’s allegations and has filed a wrongful-termination suit. But the university is expected to enter into evidence her face, which looks like a gremlin that just got back from the beauty shop.

To honor her achievement, The Pitch invited Pletz to pick up her award at our headquarters, right after we hid all of our cutlery. But word is, she hasn’t left the house since the school took away her credit card.

Employee of the Year
Jason Whitlock

Some employees depart with dignity, leaving a well-constructed bridge standing in their wake. Some burn the bridge on the way out. And some rent a crane, put on an ill-fitting bathing suit, sit up in the crane eating barbecue, wrap themselves in dynamite and, just when everyone is getting used to them being gone, cannonball onto the bridge.

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Today, we salute one such employee: Jason Whitlock.

After 16 years as a sports columnist for The Kansas City Star, Whitlock left the paper in August for Fox Sports. A lesser employee may have left with humility, thanking the Star‘s editors for rescuing his copy from the clutches of incomprehension — a task that surely required heavy equipment and lots of liquor. But Whitlock, a lifelong champion of his right to dispense bullshit without consequence, would not be subverted by the arbitrary conventions of human decency.

Instead of leaving quietly — and silently praising whatever pot-smoking deity anointed him the Voice of the Internet — he did what champion-breed narcissists everywhere would have done. He took to the radio, where he compared himself with legendary columnist Mike Royko, dismissed the work of longtime colleagues, and recalled how he once offered — for no compensation! — his plan to save newspapers. That plan? More Jason Whitlock. It was as humble as it was logical.

Then, as former co-workers tended to their wounds, Whitlock wobbled into the sunset, taking up residence part time in Los Angeles. And so to honor him, we shall mail him a lifetime supply of Gates barbecue, his favorite, in hopes that he eats so much he can’t come back to Kansas City. Like Winnie the Pooh, only less poetic.

Jurist of the Year
Joseph Locascio

Our next winner has the distinct honor of knowing the man behind the statue. In fact, judging by his work, he and Larry Johnson are total BFFs.

The story begins when our hero, Johnson, was accused of shoving and spitting booze on two women — the third and fourth times he’d been charged with violence against that obviously inferior gender. When it came time for a judge to oversee the mandatory slapping of Johnson’s wrists, the honor was handed to Municipal Court Judge Joseph Locascio. And he did what any Larry Johnson Award winner would do: He fumbled it.

Locascio sentenced Johnson to community service. Most offenders spend their service hours picking up trash. But Locascio was
familiar with Mo.Rev.Stat. §§ 913.010-.030, the obscure state code that requires judges to treat athletes like wounded schnauzers. So he ordered Johnson to spend 40 hours working with kids at the Kansas City Police Athletic League, which, sadly, had gone years without an instructor trained in advanced woman-battery.

Locascio assumed that Johnson would spend the time playing sports with kids, schooling them in the fine art of wasting potential. But Johnson refused, insisting instead on teaching the kids actual art, a display of delusion not seen since Gauguin tried to teach van Gogh the three-step drop.

Word eventually got back to Locascio that Johnson had blown off the judge’s order. It was the precise moment when a less patriotic jurist would have lost his cool and assigned Johnson to the Road Kill Unit, or even locked him up. But Locascio adheres to that time-honored motto, “The Athlete Shall Skate, Just in Case He’s Ever on My Fantasy Team.” So he ordered Johnson to finish the work at any nonprofit in Washington, D.C. — where, it turned out, Johnson had just signed a contract to play football for the Redskins.

Redemption, freedom, a total lack of accountability — these are the things that our women-beating athletes demand. Not everyone is willing to accommodate them, but Judge Locascio did, and for that we salute him with an autographed Larry Johnson jersey. What’s that, Judge? You already have one? You’re wearing it under your robe right now? OK, forget it.

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Salesman of the Year
Kris Kobach

If you recognize Kris Kobach, it’s not because you’ve seen him on Fox News. It’s because, in some previous life, he sold you a Chevy Aveo.

That’s right: Kobach is such a skilled salesman that, after 20 years as the top salesman at Courtesy Chevrolet in Fremont, California, he talked the Gods of Reincarnation — a notoriously stringent bunch — into letting him come back as a salesman. This time, though, he wanted to shill the only thing more impossible to sell than a Chevy: complete bullshit. And he wanted to sell it to the voters of Kansas, a group known for its moderation.

The sale started in June, when Kobach announced that he would run for Kansas secretary of state. He had made his name as an enemy of illegal immigrants, working to deport anyone who knew the difference between a flauta and a taquito. But Kansans knew that their borders were never at risk, since even illegal immigrants get creeped out by all that prairie. So, like any good salesman, Kobach had to tailor his message to his audience.

Enter “voter fraud.” To persuade voters, Kobach insisted that the state’s elections were being stolen by unregistered voters, dead voters and, worst of all, undocumented Mexican voters — because there’s nothing illegal aliens like more than hanging out in a room full of really official-seeming paperwork.

Of course, no evidence of such fraud existed. But that didn’t stop Kobach from routing his opponent. He’s a salesman, after all, and to a salesman, facts are like condoms: They just get in the way. And feel funny.

Humanitarians of the Year
The University of Kansas’ Phi Gamma Delta

Some fraternities labor to be taken seriously, even sacrificing precious liver-pickling time to contribute to society. But the men of the KU’s Phi Gamma Delta this year proved their commitment to the organization’s 162-year-old motto: “πιετε πνει το ποτ” — Greek for “drink, drink, drink, drink, drink.”

This year, as usual, the brothers extended their beer-clutching hands to a new crop of freshmen. According to a university investigation, the brothers quickly secured fake IDs for the frat’s pledges and forced them to drink. When the pledges failed to get sufficiently trashed, the older members poured beer in their faces and threw beer cans at them, selflessly sacrificing perfectly good booze in the process.

The brothers cemented their legacy in September, when they made the pledges dig a makeshift pool for the annual Island Party, the university found. If the pledges tried to study instead of work on the pool — an innocent freshman mistake, really — the brothers were there to guide them, forcing them to blow off study sessions.

On the night of the party, the students celebrated island culture — islanders get hammered off keg beer, too, you know — and a freshman named Matt Fritzie walked through the crowd with his date. As Fritzie later told the school, an older member called him over and “ordered him to swan dive into the pool.”

He obeyed, but he came up convulsing. He was quickly flown to the University of Kansas Medical Center, paralyzed from the chest down. He was later transferred to a rehab center in Colorado that specializes in spinal-cord injuries.

All of which was a total bummer! But while lesser fraternities would have been deterred by the sight of a convulsing freshman, the brothers pressed on, continuing to party for hours after the injury. Because that’s what Fritzie would have done, if he weren’t so paralyzed.

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Although the university has already bestowed the fraternity with one of its highest honors — two years of probation for hazing — The Pitch also wishes to pay tribute to these brave young men. That beer wasn’t going to drink itself.

Businessman of the Year
Owen Hawkins

If you’ve read all the business books, soaked up their wisdom and acted on their counsel with faith and diligence, then you know what all great businesspeople know: Books are for chumps! Just steal shit! No one will notice, and even if they do, you can just pay them to unnotice.

It takes years for others to master these principles, but local businessman Owen Hawkins managed to learn them quickly, despite possessing the business acumen of a BK Broiler. When oil prices peaked in 2007, Hawkins decided to take advantage. But instead of limiting himself to a venture tailored to his skills — like, say, yelling at the sky to rain down some money — Hawkins started an “oil company.” He called it Petro America and immediately valued its worth at millions of dollars. The company was worth less, an amount that financial analysts termed “wow, you guys don’t have shit.”

That’s when Hawkins got creative, selling stock to unsavvy investors and claiming that the company would soon go public and make its shareholders millions. With the backing of the local Ministers Alliance — a band of shady clergymen bullish on Hawkins’ bullshit — he sold millions of dollars in worthless shares, federal investigators say.

If you’ve read those classic business-scam books — we’re fond of the Goldman Sachs employee handbook — you know that this is where Hawkins should have slowed down. He should have invested the money back into the company, experts say, to prolong the scam and buy time to locate the nearest branch of this mysterious Off-Shore Bank.

But Hawkins’ aspirations — he vowed to win the Nobel Prize — required more grandiose action. So he promptly bought himself cars, fur coats and other subtle acknowledgments of his newfound wealth. Then, just to make sure his business sense didn’t go unnoticed, he handed out money at random to customers at his bank.

Investigators, so enamored with his obvious gifts, eventually invited Hawkins to discuss his cunning ways — strategies that recall Rockefeller, or maybe Gargamel, assuming Gargamel was super high. Prosecutors have since recognized Hawkins’ gallantry with a grand-jury indictment, complete with accommodations fit for a CEO: a federal jail cell.

Mother of the Year
Lisa Henry Bowen

Embarrassing their children is a pastime for mothers everywhere, and the competition for who can do it best is fierce. Yet many mothers don’t go far enough, limiting their efforts to restaurant spit baths and singing too loud in church.

Not Lisa Henry Bowen. The proud mother of a boy named Curtis, Bowen flexed her mortification muscles last month, when she claimed that a teacher had mistreated her son. While most mothers simply would have shown up at school swinging their husband’s 4-iron — Mom, that’s the wrong teacher! — Bowen seized the chance to enshrine herself in the Hall of Her Kid’s Shame.

She launched a website called CurtisGot Slapped.com, then dashed off a 40-page letter — addressed to the White House, Congress and other government officials. In it, she demanded more goodies than the final season of Oprah: a free college education; two trips to Disney World; nine years of private tennis lessons; season tickets to the opera, the theater and the ballet; counseling by “the best black child psychologist in the country”; an orchestra’s worth of musical instruments; a trip to Africa; and a personal audience with President Barack Obama.

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Oh, and cash: Claiming the teacher slapped one-fourth of Curtis’ “million dollar face,” Bowen included with the letter a handmade invoice for $250,000, which should just about cover Curtis’ therapy.

Statesman of the Year
Matt Bartle

In the Great Recession, politicians tend to blather on about fringe issues like “job creation,” “economic development” and “not starving our asses off.” But a select few know the truth: That it’s not the rumbling of poor people’s stomachs that guides our policy decisions, but rather the rumbling of God’s stomach when he gets hungry for some tasty judgment.

Matt Bartle is one such statesman. A Republican state senator from Lee’s Summit, Bartle spent years trying to legislate the strip-club industry out of business, convinced that his disdain for nudity would land him box seats in the afterlife. Time after time he was turned away by morally bankrupt lawmakers, who somehow couldn’t see the upside of erasing tax revenue, killing jobs, and flooding the streets with strawberry-scented vixens named after luxury cars.

But Bartle was persistent. Earlier this year, with elections approaching and every strand of pragmatism finally yanked from his country’s political system, he pushed through his bill. It was signed by Gov. Jay Nixon — what, you thought he was some kind of perv? — and in August it became law. Missouri’s strip clubs no longer feature booze, nudity or physical contact, just like Bartle’s 20s.

And so we honor Bartle with his first Larry Johnson Award. May he be clutching his trophy — or anything heavy, really — when he arrives at heaven’s gates. He’ll need it to fend off the glittery mob.