BUZZ BOOK: Talking trash

In “Trash Talk — The Only Book About Destroying Your Rivals That Isn’t Total Garbage” (Public Affairs), Rafi Kohan charts the history of sports’ braggarts and blabbermouths to find out why they hurl insults and what it achieves.

From “holler guys” and “bench jockeying” in baseball to “sledging” in cricket, trash talk permeates most sports. In fact, given it dates back to David’s successful goading of Goliath in the Bible, it is “perhaps the original sport,” writes Kohan.

Trash talking, or “competitive incivility” as some sociologists term it, can be funny or playful, aggressive or vicious but it’s aim is always the same: to undermine opponents.

You have to be a certain character to carry it off.

WNBA great and trashtalker Diana Taurasi once described herself as a “kindhearted a--hole” while Butch Harmon, former coach of Tiger Woods, believed that in order to achieve greatness, “You got to have a lot of p---k in you.”

But for many, argues Kohan, adopting a more vicious persona was vital to gain publicity.

Like former boxer Christy Salter, whose ring alter ego, Christy Martin, was, she tells Kohan, “pretty much an asshole.”

Other interviewees, like retired wrestler Missy Simpson, rehearsed insults so much she neglected her sport. “I was probably better at talking sh-t than I was at wrestling,” she tells Kohan.

In the NBA, meanwhile, legendary point guard Gary Payton was the king of antagonism. “His mouth was like the eighth wonder of the world,” writes Kohan.

Gaining an advantage isn’t the sole reason sports stars trash talk.

Basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, for example, called it “marketing sparring” designed to “keep people buying tickets.”

It was a tactic mastered by Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali ) and, more recently, by UFC‘s Conor McGregor, a fighter known as much for his boastful big mouth as he is brawling.

Trash talk “is hardly anything new or aberrant, or the sign of civilizational decline,” Kohan writes. “If anything, it might be the mark of intelligent life.”

The bottom line, Kohan concludes, is that trash-talking “is probably the fastest route to making someone care.”