The Rules of Trash Talk - Where is The Line?
It’s my junior year of high school, and our varsity soccer team is playing Camarillo High in an important — insofar as high school soccer games can be important — match with playoff seeding implications.
I’m manning my usual center back spot, anchoring the defense, and the game hasn’t started well for me. Camarillo has this kid named Alfred who is impossibly fast, and just my luck, he’s their center forward and my primary responsibility.
I didn’t know who he was going into the game, but about fifteen minutes in, he’d been cooking me nonstop and had given his team the lead with the only goal so far. It actually took until he scored for something to click: he wasn’t very good.
Even the goal itself was a mishit — one of those shots that fools the goalie more than beats him. Alfred had one elite tool: speed. That was it. No touch. No creativity. No guile. Just Usain Bolt acceleration stapled to a mouth that never shut up.
Never mind that he wasn’t very good at soccer. He had the only goal. I was his marker. Therefore, it was my fault. And I was hearing about it.
To be fair, once I figured him out, he didn’t do much of anything. His runs were predictable. He couldn’t beat me with the ball at his feet. But his mouth? That thing was relentless.
At first it was harmless. Standard-issue trash talk:
“You suck.”
“You play like a bitch.”
I mostly ignored it, laughed a couple of times. I’m not a trash talker because, frankly, I’m not very good at it. Also, I already struggle with focus—I can’t be trying to workshop one-liners while tracking the fastest kid in the county.
Then, just before halftime, we equalized. And that’s when it turned.
When Trash Talk Curdles
I’d neutralized him. He knew it. He started getting frustrated.
Second half, the tactics changed. Less talking, more sneaky nonsense. Shirt tugs. Subtle shoves in the lower back. Anything he thought he could get past the ref — which was everything, because Stevie Wonder was apparently on the whistle.
Problem for Alfred: he was fast, but he was also weak. His dirty tricks didn’t work. So he escalated.
The trash talk got louder, meaner. Idle physical threats. Posturing. High school boy nonsense. I would’ve ignored all of it — all of it — except then he decided to bring my mother into it.
Not just mention her, but imply non-consensual sex with her.
That’s apparently where my line was. As a card carrying mama’s boy, I wasn’t going to let that fly. A more mature me would probably have let that go as well, as Alfred wasn’t really going to commit felonious sexual assault against my mom. But this wasn’t grown up me. This was angsty teenage me, and weed wasn’t legal yet.
I decided right then that when the final whistle blew — win or lose — I’d have something for Alfred.
Consequences, High School Style
Shortly after, with about fifteen minutes left, we took the lead. Then we doubled it. Alfred went quiet. So did I. But I was still waiting.
As the final minutes ticked away and Camarillo pressed desperately, we stole the ball and launched a fast break the other way. The ref and linesmen turned and sprinted after the play.
Alfred was jogging back toward midfield. I came up beside him.
I grabbed his testicles and squeezed as hard as I could.
Quietly, I said: “Got anything else you’d like to say about my mother?”
When I let go, Alfred collapsed, writhing on the ground, yelling to anyone who would listen: “He grabbed my nuts, man! Bitch grabbed my nuts!”
Unfortunately for him — and very fortunately for me — there wasn’t anyone there to hear it besides one of his teammates and a few of mine. His guy protested. My guys had my back. I escaped unpunished, which I fully acknowledge was luck.
Why do I tell you this story?
The Nuts and Bolts of It
A few weeks ago, Carolina Panthers defensive back Trevon Moehrig was suspended for a game. His offense? Punching San Francisco 49ers wide receiver Jauan Jennings directly in the nuts.
Jennings, as it happens, is a trash talker — and by most accounts, a nasty one.
Football is played by enormous, hyper-athletic men violently colliding at impossible speeds. There’s going to be talk. There’s always talk. What you don’t usually see is this kind of response.
Fighting in football is rare, given how violent the sport already is. And when it does happen, it’s usually the result of built-up physical tension — not something someone said. So what did Jennings say? We may never know. Moehrig hasn’t revealed it. But he did say Jennings crossed a line — a sentiment echoed by multiple teammates.
Which brings us to the question: Where is the line?
What Makes a Great Trash Talker?
I’d argue that a significant part of it — maybe the most important part — is the ability to cut to the marrow without crossing it, wherever that line happens to be, arbitrarily drawn and non-violently enforced. If you built a Mount Rushmore of trash talkers, who would be on it? And if you couldn’t narrow it down to just four, who would be in the running?
Michael Jordan, the consensus greatest basketball player of all time? Jordan was a legendary trash talker, which, to be fair, is much easier when you’re the best at something.
For a taste of Jordan’s smack talk, look no further than ESPN’s Last Dance series. Another gem: after dunking on 6’1” John Stockton, Jazz owner Larry Miller yelled that Michael should pick on somebody his own size. So, he responded by dunking on 7’1” center Mel Turpin, and on the way back down the floor fired back, “He big enough for you?”
“Don’t ever trash talk Black Jesus.”
Jordan’s contemporary, Celtics forward Larry Bird was another guy known for more than just his basketball skills. Bird reportedly once told an opponent before a game that he had gotten him something for Christmas.
In the actual game, he hit a three pointer from in front of the opponent’s bench, turned around, and said, “Merry f*cking Christmas.” Come on, that’s elite.
“Chuck, I need to talk to you. Y’all got a white guy trying to guard me, that’s disrespectful. There’s not a white guy on the planet that can guard me”
Former heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali practically invented trash talking, unabashedly declaring himself as the greatest. Sure, there weren’t going to be a lot of people who would dare try to do something about it if they didn’t like what Ali said, so maybe he gets dinged for that too, but the inventor deserves his flowers.
And, just to raise the degree of difficulty, he took to smack talking in rhyme. Ahead of his legendary fight against Joe Frazier, he promised, “It’s gonna be a chilla, a thrilla and a chilla when I fight the Gorilla in Manilla.”
“He’s too ugly to be world champion. The world champ should be pretty like me!”
Los Angeles Kings defenseman Drew Doughty is a two-time Stanley Cup winner, and a notorious chirper who is reviled and respected by opponents in equal measure. They let you fight in hockey with a mere five minutes in the sin bin as the only deterrent, but Doughty won’t do that as evidenced by the zero fighting majors over his illustrious 17 year career. He will, however, tell you what he thinks of your abilities in a sing-songy voice only slightly less abrasive than nails on a chalkboard.
“You have the skinniest legs in the league!”
Quarterback Philip Rivers, who just recently became the first grandfather to throw a touchdown pass in an NFL game (read that again if you have to) is known to be a non-stop gum flapper.
Impressively, Rivers, who is devoutly religious, does it without using any potty language. Like, at all.
“First play you called out right today, five five. It’s the first one you’ve called right.”
There are plenty more. Kevin Garnett. Ray Lewis. Gary Payton. Probably several dozen guys I’m missing. You can make this list as long as you want and the virtual unanimity of it is going to have one thing in common. Rarely if ever has any of these guys been accused of crossing the line, when odds are that everyone has one somewhere.
So Where Is It?
It’s not written down anywhere. There’s no rulebook appendix titled Acceptable Verbal Warfare, Section C. The line isn’t universal, either. It shifts with the moment, the sport, the relationship between the players, and whether the guy doing the talking can actually back it up when things get uncomfortable.
The line is probably somewhere between “you can’t guard me” and “I know things about your family.” Somewhere between earned confidence and borrowed cruelty. Somewhere between competitive fire and saying something just to see if another human being will break.
Here’s the part Twitter doesn’t understand: the line is enforced, not declared. Sometimes it’s enforced with a stare. Sometimes with a bucket. Sometimes with a sack punch, a bench-clearing brawl, or a quiet note in your mental ledger that says I’ll get you later. And sometimes — rarely — it’s enforced the way Alfred learned it, when someone decides words are done and consequences have entered the chat.
Trash talk has always been part of sports. It sharpens edges. It tests nerve. It reveals who’s playing and who’s pretending. But it only works when there’s mutual risk — when the person talking understands that crossing the wrong line might cost them something real.
Once that risk disappears, once the mouth runs faster than the feet and the fingers type faster than the courage ever could, trash talk stops being competition and starts being cowardice.
So where’s the line?
You’ll know you probably crossed it the moment you say something you wouldn’t repeat if the other person could reach you.
Where’s yours?
Torsten / 120 Proof Ball
Proof that the internet was a mistake.
