Professional athletes are, by virtue of their trade, good at sports. Most of them can rightfully be called “super-humans” in terms of raw physical ability; they can run faster, jump higher, and hit harder than most of us could ever imagine. If you’re an armchair quarterback and often find yourself thinking “I could do that if I really wanted to” as you watch the professionals play football on Sundays, you need only reference SpikeTV’s “Pros vs. Joes” (current season’s episodes air at 11pm Eastern Time), in which amateur athletes are matched up against the likes of Hall of Famers Jerry Rice and Bo Jackson in various competitions that simulate pro football. It’s kind of like American Gladiators, if you stripped AG of its professional wrestling theatrics (goofy nicknames, even goofier outfits) and replaced the gladiators with real athletes and not just muscle-bound steroid freaks. On the whole, the “Challengers” on American Gladiators—the amateurs, that is—tend to fare much better than the “Joes” on “Pros vs. Joes.” That is to say: the Joes usually get the shit kicked out of them.

As it turns out, most of us regular Joes—no matter how dutifully we work out—can’t hang with the Pros for more than a step or two, if that.

Unfortunately, a professional athlete’s ability often bears no correlation to his mental ability. Many pro athletes are as dumb as they are good—or even dumber if you’ve followed the headlines in the past year. There are various schools of thought when it comes to this—too much money, too much attention—but to me, it all comes down to this: one’s ability to avoid would-be tacklers while running with an oval-shaped sphere invariably says nothing of one’s ability to avoid drunkenly speeding in a Ferrari or slapping hookers. Granted, being smarter can make you a better football player, but being a better football player cannot make you smarter.

I can live with that. Pro athletes didn’t sign-up to be role-models or NASA engineers; they just signed-up to play and make millions of dollars (and slap hookers, depending on who you ask). But what I can’t stand is when professional athletes lose all sense of perspective, when forget that they’re “playing a child’s game for a king’s ransom” in the words of former NFL star WarrenSapp, and start acting like whiny turds. Which brings me to the following clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc11PUnFgkQ.

As you just saw, this clip shows Milwaukee Bucks center Andrew Bogut high-fiving himself after making a free throw. “Is this simply an act of lunacy?” you ask. “Is this just more evidence to support the hypothesis that being born in war-torn Croatia and raised in whacky Australia will inevitably lead to an irreconcilable inner battle of Nature vs. Nurture?” No. It’s just that usually when a Bucks player makes a free throw, all of his surrounding teammates high-five him. It’s customary. But in this case, Mr. Bogut has to perform an act of congratulatory masturbation because the rest of his teammates are too busy wallowing in the depths of a another miserable loss in a long, miserable season.

This clip is funny, but it is NOT laughable. Bogut’s teammates should be ashamed of themselves. It’s okay to lose; in fact, 50% of all pro athletes are losers after any given match. But it’s not okay to lose like a Soviet athlete that must return to his Communist country bound for a life of hardship and disgrace, when in reality you’ll be returning to your Mercedes Benz coupe that has tires worth more than most of us regular Joes make in several months.

I think those turd-like Bucks players should be featured on a new show on Spike TV (that I just came up with): “From Pros to Joes.” Yeah! Try blogging for a comedy Website for a living, Mr. NBA All-Star. We’ll see how much you appreciate your little game then!