NY Times Article: Bart Scott

The Last Word in Trash Talking

By GREG BISHOP
Published: December 19, 2009

MORRISTOWN, N.J. ? Bart Scott talks trash freely and incessantly, all day, on any topic, on matters from petty to profound. He has singled out Bill Cowher?s chin, LenDale White?s gut, T. J. Houshmandzadeh?s ponytail and Reggie Bush?s manhood.

A Jets linebacker, Scott views trash talking as an art, or science. He has developed and refined his method. He has studied loquacious athletes from years past. And he has practiced, from the first day he tugged on a uniform all the way to Sunday, when he will unleash another torrent of mostly unprintable barbs on the Atlanta Falcons.

His mouth runs 365 days a year. In fact, the first time he met Woody Johnson, the Jets? owner, Scott smacked him on the backside and clamored for a free case of baby powder.

?Bart is an original,? said Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune.

In his basement last month, Scott?s earliest inspiration ? professional wrestling ? flashed across the television. He imitated the voice inflection of Hulk Hogan, the dramatic delivery of Ric Flair, the intensity of Rowdy Roddy Piper.

Scott grabbed a visitor and performed the figure-four leg lock, an arm bar and the crossface chicken wing. The chatter never stopped.

When Flair said: ?To be the man, you?ve got to beat the man. Whoo!? Scott repeated every word, calling that sentence the ?most realistic line in the history of life.? His wife, Darnesha, walked past and shook her head.

?Forget trash talking in football,? Scott said. ?This is trash talking at its finest. This is what I aspire to.?

The evolution of a trash talker began in southeast Detroit, where at age 6, Scott became obsessed with professional wrestling. His sisters, older by 7 and 10 years, left Scott with ample solo television time. Wrestling, said his mother, Dorita Adams, was his baby sitter on occasion.

Scott loved the character development more than the actual matches. He ate his vitamins and said his prayers because Hogan said so. He screamed at the television, waking his family each Saturday morning, and he cursed when commercials interrupted. He still calls wrestling a soap opera for men, still believes in its authenticity.

Outside, Scott was surrounded by more brash talkers: the older boys who played touch football on the street, and his oldest sister, Cutrice, whose oratorical motor most closely matched his.

All Scott needed was a uniform to set his mouth in motion. He played for a junior team outside his neighborhood, and they wore the Miami Hurricanes? colors, an odd mixture of orange and green. Scott told everyone that his jersey shone the brightest.

The boys settled disputes over whose uniform was best by lining up 5 yards away, then charging like bucking rams. Their helmets turned all sorts of colors from the collisions, and they called the markings ?meat.?

?That?s when my hatred for my opponents started,? Scott said. ?Basically when I got my first opponent.?

Scott described himself as an ?average to medium trash talker? back then. He was already developing his method, starting with preparation. Loading up your gun, Scott called it.

He took jokes from the neighborhood into school and returned with insults he had borrowed from his classmates. He searched for any edge. He spied mothers with curlers in their hair. He gossiped for information. He bullied bullies. He became creative, telling classmates with high-water pants to pull their shoes up.

When others stopped, Scott turned up the heat. He knew then that they were out of insults, but he had saved his best material. He used all of it, and parents and older siblings sometimes came looking for the small boy with the big mouth.

When all else failed, Scott had what he labeled his break-glass-in-case-of-emergency routine ? ?yo momma? jokes. Regardless, the back-and-forth would end there, in laughter or in fisticuffs.

?I keep ammo on everybody, even if they never joked on me,? he said. ?Because I will never be caught off-guard. No one will outtalk me. Ever.?

Those who listen to Scott regularly do not disagree. When he played for Baltimore, the Ravens watched as he found an old rap video of their teammate Deion Sanders, in which Sanders wore snakeskin boots and danced around with a muscled man wearing a Speedo. Scott said Sanders was ?the most harassed football player in the history of comebacks? and ?that might be why he retired again.?

Scott regularly told Houshmandzadeh that he planned to beat him with his ponytail. He drew Cowher?s ire for calling him the Tick, a superhero with a super-size chin. And Scott went so hard after Ryan Fitzpatrick last season when he quarterbacked the Bengals that Scott said Houshmandzadeh and Chad Ochocinco pleaded with him to stop.

?He?s good with words, you know,? Houshmandzadeh said of Scott. ?Before the game, during the game.?

Mike Pettine, the Jets? defensive coordinator, might agree.

?I don?t know if it?s possible to talk as much as Bart does,? he said. ?I just saw him in the lunchroom, and he was eating and talking.?

Scott uses a three-step trash-talk template. He starts with research. He scours ESPN, Google and scouting reports, which include pictures. He wants to understand the opponents he will talk to, understand what angers them, what makes them tick. He looks for police incidents, problems with wives or girlfriends, expanding stomachs, funny faces.

To aid in his delivery, Scott watches wrestling videos, or famous trash talkers like Muhammad Ali. They taught him Step 2: mixing fact with fiction. Scott wants his barbs to be believable, but he often uses exaggerations, or lies disguised as truth, for maximum effect.

This leads to Step 3: know your audience. The more people responding, the more the insults will sting, Scott reasoned. He especially likes when his targets? teammates laugh.

This style works for more than Scott?s amusement. Angered opponents have become distracted, thrown fits, or tried to hurt Scott.

Last season in the playoffs, Scott said, White spent so much time arguing with him that his Titans teammates yelled at White to get back into the huddle. (White has said he hates Scott more than any other N.F.L. player.)

?I get satisfaction from that,? Scott said. ?I can talk and play effectively. I?m used to it, I do it all the time. When people get out of character, they?re going to be distracted.?

But Scott occasionally crosses lines. Last weekend at Tampa Bay, he ripped off an opposing player?s helmet. And Pettine said he must remind Scott to drink his daily glass of ?shut up? during meetings.

With Scott, that is all part of the package. Even his mother says she notices the difference when her son steps onto the field.

?It?s magic,? she said. ?It?s on. His whole personality changes.?

What Scott loved most about professional wrestlers was the way they became the characters they portrayed, the total immersion, until it was impossible to tell the difference between them.

Scott remains a character, the Mad Backer, the loquacious linebacker, the titan of trash talk. When the Jets lost six of seven games this season, he drew criticism for that style. But he will not apologize for it.

?How do you expect me to be different?? Scott said. ?I wasn?t trying to entertain you. I was entertaining myself. I was being myself. This is me.?

Scott continued talking.

?I don?t get nervous,? he said. ?If you put me in front of Barack Obama, I?m not going to be nervous. I?m going to say: ?What up, Barack? What?s crackin??? ?

And continued talking.

?You can go back and ask anybody I ever played with, same spiel. I?ve always been funny. I?m opinionated. I speak my mind. I like to talk, O.K.?