Way Outside The Lines: A Legacy Recovered

On the surface, the similarities between San Francisco Giants hurler Randy Johnson and LA Lakers center Pau Gasol stretch little beyond their comparable physicality. They are both very tall and unsightly men. However, most know nothing about the painstaking struggle the two men have endured their entire lives. It is this struggle that unites them— the struggle to recover a defiled past.

These two giants of the athletic world have been weighed down throughout their lifetimes by a distant yet undeniable family relation to two giants of history—Johnson, with his connection to U.S Calvary Officer General George Custer, whose foolish and impulsive actions resulted in his own death and the death of all 600 of his men at the Battle of Little Bighorn, and Gasol with his ties to the Russian mystic Rasputin— the man who helped destroy the Romanov dynasty in tsarist Russia, ushering in nearly a century of disorder and oppression under communist dictatorship.




Though the legal names “Johnson” and “Gasol” no longer bear the obvious marks of shame, the physical likeness shown by the two men tells a story far different from the athletic triumphs experienced on the diamond or the hardwood.

The ancestral ties between Johnson & Custer and Gasol & Rasputin were difficult to trace. However Deucedbrains was able to do just that, receiving permission to compare the DNA of one of Johnson’s curly mullet hairs with one of Custer’s curly mullet hairs, which we obtained from one of the General’s famous mullet/mustache combo combs displayed in the National Museum of American History in D.C.

Gasol’s connection to Rasputin was proven under stranger circumstances. All that remains of the former Russian priest is his 14-inch penis, which is kept in a glass jar in Moscow (pictured below). Yet Deucedbrains gained exclusive access to the severed penis, acquiring a single pubic hair from the jar to compare with a strand of Pau Gasol’s beard. Gasol’s pubic hairs were unavailable for analysis (He was clean shaven at the time, reportedly a playoff superstition of Gasol’s). DNA work confirmed the ancestral ties between Johnson & Custer as well as the ties between Rasputin & Gasol.

Rasputin's Big Unit

Last Thursday night The Big Unit took a tremendous step in setting straight his tarnished past by winning his 300th game. When asked by Deucedbrains at the post game presser how he felt about vindicating his family name, Johnson claimed he had no idea what we were talking about, and that he was not related to Custer because his last name was Johnson and not Custer.

Similarly, Gasol denied his apparent relation to Rasputin, stating that he was of Spanish descent, not Russian. Nevertheless, scientific facts do not lie. Secretly Gasol must hope to follow Johnson’s footsteps in recovering his family legacy. By bringing home an NBA title to LA, Gasol could finally clear his good name and erase the fanatical bearded grimace which has loomed over his family for nearly a century.