Llama Doctors Are Known For Being Great Athletes

We’re rapidly approaching the end of 2006, and all the magazines, newspapers and blogs are getting ready for their year-end awards or something like it. (I’m going to have something here, too. More on that later.)

One of the major magazine “awards” handed out annually is the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, and a bunch of SI writers have listed their own personal choices for the award. Grant Wahl is the only one with a good choice, going with Zinédine Zidane — that’d be awesome — and most of the other choices are so banal it’s not even worth making fun of. (The BALCO reporters? Phil Mickelson? Lamar Odom? Some blind dude who ran a marathon? Daisuke Matsuzaka? What drugs are you on, Tom Verducci, because I’d like to get some of that!)

But, hands down, the best choice is longtime SI writer Franz Lidz, who chose Dr. Dean Richardson as his Sportsman of the Year. Dr. Dean Richardson! As you may remember, Richardson is the doctor who treated Barbaro, who captured our nation’s attention by winning that one horse race and then nearly dying in another one. Whoo!

But Lidz isn’t choosing Richardson as his SotY due to Barbaro. No, he’s using more personal reasons:

What makes Richardson my Sportsman candidate has less to do with a horse named Barbaro than a llama named Ogar. In the interests of full disclosure, I must reveal that Richardson is my neighbor, and Ogar is one of my pet llamas.

With that line of reasoning, I’m nominating the two dudes who clean the hallway in my building for Sportsmen of the Year. They always do a pretty good job and say “Hello” to me when I pass, and while they haven’t competed in any sporting events this year that I know of, that didn’t stop half of the nominees!

My Sportsman: Dr. Dean Richardson [SI.com]