Top Five Worst Fist-Pumpers of All Time

By Dave “Large” Larzelere
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All right, Maria Sharapova. Your legs are impossibly long, your grunts impossibly ferocious, and your forehands simply impossible. But I have one thing to say to you, Missy – your fist-pump is an abomination. Last night I was so disgusted with your variously disgraceful fist-pumps, I realized that you’d cracked my Top Five Worst Fist-Pumpers of All Time list. Cracked it, might I add, at number three with a bullet:
No. 5 - Lleyton Hewitt
There’s nothing technically wrong with the Hewitt fist-pump, but he does it so often and so inappropriately that the gesture loses all meaning and just becomes symbolic of everything that’s wrong with him as a human being. It’s like dropping the f-bomb in polite conversation, really. Let one fly at just the right moment and you own the room. But go to the well once too often and you’re just an idiot.
No. 4 – Kenny Rogers
I have to admit I was really digging The Gambler in his postseason run in ‘06. He was cool because he seemed like he’d legitimately lost his mind. That fervor, however, only emphasized what a crappy fist-pumper he is. He’s a proponent of what I like to call the “roll-the-dice†pump. It’s a tough maneuver to begin with, and he oversells it. It’s not a knockout punch, Kenny, it’s a jab.
No. 3 – Maria Sharapova
Oh Maria’s fist pumps, how do I hate thee? And which do I hate the most? The one where you convulse and bring your elbow hard into your gut like you’re about to barf? The one where you bring it up weakly like you’re curling a two-pound dumbbell and then flap it armpit-fart-style? Or the one where you just suddenly raise it in front of your face as if you’re peering at a watch that you have backwards on your wrist? All of these, of course, are accompanied by your pixie-ish little two-step and the bitchy “come on!†of a tweener whose parents won’t buy her an iPhone.
No. 2 – Bill Clinton
Many people who when thinking of bad political fist-pumping immediately would turn to Howard Dean’s edition from the 2004 Iowa Caucus. Me, I liked that fist-pump. Clinton, on the other hand, set the entire art of fist-pumping back decades. It was all about the thumb with Clinton, and I think his problems began when he started to conflate the “thumbs up†gesture with his fist-pump and ended up with this half-breed thing that was very feminine and weasely.
No. 1 – David Duval
Never has there been such a horrific display of fist-pumping as David Duval’s pyrotechnics at the 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline. There was that one during the Sunday match-play session when he circled the putting green doing this comic-book front-of-the-face fist-waggle that said nothing so convincingly as “that dagblasted Scooby Doo… I’ll get him!†Later on he added some of the worst high-fiving on record to an overall performance of ineptitude that nearly a decade later still has him an untouchable number one in my book.↵