Troy Aikman, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Dr. J, and Sugar Ray Leonard have something in common. What is it? Yesterday, I would have said they were all Hall Of Fame athletes. Today, they have been reduced to associating with known spammers, the online version of used car salesmen. How did it come to this? How did Jim Brown, Jerry West, and Richard Petty go from the top of their games to complicit pitchmen for the underbelly of online marketing? Well, check out this blog post by Patrick O’Keefe. It’s a sad commentary on the nasty side of “online marketing.”

The cheesy marketing efforts of the event (a poker tournament) organizers brings up a good question: If all these guys are legends, why all the black hat marketing to get people to come to the Bahamas to play poker with them? If rubbing elbows with these guys isn’t enough, maybe it wasn’t planned by somebody playing with a full deck.

Unfortunately for Larry Lubin, President of the Sports Legends Challenge, he’s bet it all on a marketing strategy that totally pisses off the blogosphere. Guess what, Larry? If you’re going to play at our table, you better have one hell of a hand. And guess what else? You don’t. By the time the top blogs and Twitter get done with you, anybody heading to Paradise Island for this event is will be perceived as a pretentious douchebag and the athletes involved will be selling SureFlow catheters at a medical supply conventions.  Well played.

Carry on, Citizens!