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Scott's trash-talking hero? Hulk Hogan


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http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/nfl/columns/story?columnist=oconnor_ian&id=6043648

FLORHAM PARK, N.J. -- Dorita Adams was the first to assure her son, Bart Scott, that he would be good enough someday to walk the talk. Adams knew nothing about the Green Bay Packers or Vince Lombardi or the frozen corner of hell that was the Ice Bowl, but she bought her child his first football uniform when he was 2 and gave him an appropriate name.

"Bart Star," Adams called him.

She found out years later about Lombardi's quarterback, Bart Starr, while watching some old NFL clips. Adams never needed any snapshots from Titletown for inspiration.

Bart Scott watched hours and hours of pro wrestling as a kid, idolizing Hulk Hogan.

Before she ever bought that uniform, before her only son even left the hospital after his birth, she looked down into his incubator and whispered more than once, "You're going to be special someday."

Adams had to protect him first. She was a quality inspector at a Detroit automobile plant, sometimes working as many as 12 hours a day. Adams did everything she could to keep Bart busy and out of trouble, enrolling him in the Boy Scouts, entering him in a bowling league, and making sure he made it safely to church.

Her two older daughters looked after him, and so did the extended circle of relatives who lived on their block. "I had a sister upstairs," Adams said, "a sister next door, my mother two doors down, and across the street another sister. Bart was raised by women."

Raised by women to conquer men.

When the walls of urban blight closed in on him, Scott won the one fight he needed to win in high school, a fight against a Detroit gang member trying to recruit him to the dark side. "Nobody jumped in," Adams was later told by one of her daughters. "It was one-on-one, and Bart took care of business."

The big Division I schools didn't want Scott out of Southeastern High; even Morgan State told him he was too small to play linebacker. He took a scholarship offer at Southern Illinois, watched 27 linebackers not named Bart Scott get picked in the 2002 NFL draft, and settled for a tryout with the Baltimore Ravens.

Scott made the team. "How ironic," Adams said. "Down the street from Morgan State."

Nine seasons later, Scott isn't the best player on a New York Jets team heading to Pittsburgh for a shot at Super Bowl XLV. Scott isn't the Jets' best defensive player, or even their best linebacker.

But if there was any doubt that he is the Jets' heartbeat and voice -- especially their voice -- it was erased that Sunday night moment when he interrupted his celebration on the Gillette Stadium field by turning his arms into airplane wings and taking himself in for a landing at the feet of ESPN's Sal Paolantonio, who stuck out his microphone and opened a treasure of video gold.

Long before Scott's mom knew who Vince Lombardi was, or Bart Starr, she nicknamed her son Bart Star.

The New England Patriots, the Jets' very own wicked witch, was dead and buried, and Scott's rant about those who allegedly disrespected the Jets was framed by an iconic football visual -- clouds of chilled breath billowing from the player's mouth. If nothing else, Bart Starr likely appreciated that part of Bart Star's show.

When Scott finally came up for air, Paolantonio said, "Congratulations, see you in Pittsburgh."

"Can't wait," Scott barked, providing a fresh mantra this week for Rex Ryan and the rest.

"I thought I looked pretty crazy," Scott said Thursday of the clip that raced around the Internet at Ted (Golden Voice) Williams speed. "Hopefully what people can pull from that is that it's real. That's how I am."

It's real, yes, but artificial at the same time. In his youth, Scott unwittingly started developing his style as the NFL's foremost trash talker by watching hour after hour of professional wrestling.

Not just professional wrestling, but Hulk Hogan. When Adams was working around the home, doing the laundry, she saw Hogan as the perfect babysitter.

Bart sat in front of the TV, hooting and hollering and mimicking Hogan's blustery sayings and signature moves. "To this day," Adams said, "you can't tell Bart that wrestling isn't real. I'd say to him, 'Are you sure this is real?' And he'd say, 'Momma, the guy's got blood coming out of his mouth. It has to be real.'"

So Scott made a career out of hitting opponents with his words as much as he hit them with his pads. When asked at a news conference Thursday if he'd studied the founding father of trash talk, Muhammad Ali, Scott put Ali on the canvas and raised Hogan's triumphant hand.

Some reporters laughed. "What's funny, man?" he asked. Scott explained why he was serious about the Hulkster.

"It wasn't the fact that Hulk Hogan was a wrestler," he said. "What I took from it was that he was a trendsetter, no different from Ali or Babe Ruth.

"You can only globalize a sport or industry or whatever you're trying to do one time, and no matter what you may think about what wrestling is and what it stands for -- sports, entertainment, fake, whatever -- it was a craft, and he's the best at it. He worked at being the best and he entertained you no matter what."

Scott has done the same. He isn't another Lawrence Taylor or Ray Lewis, but he might be the NFL's most entertaining conversationalist, outside of his own coach, of course.

Scott said he would "die for" Rex Ryan, and he was quoted in Newsday threatening Wes Welker after the receiver mocked Ryan's connection to foot-fetish videos allegedly featuring the coach's wife. "I don't see [Ryan] just as a coach," Scott said. "I see him as a friend or business partner."

A friend or business partner who allowed an interview of wrestler "Macho Man" Randy Savage to be played on team speakers while the Jets practiced, surely a nod to the villainous "Mad Backer," Bart Scott, one of the most detested opponents in the NFL.

A feature film on his life is in the works, based on a story by New York Times sportswriter Greg Bishop. After two consecutive failures in the AFC title game, Scott wants his movie to have a new closing scene.

"It's time for the New York Jets to get their happy ending," he said.

First Scott needs to make it past the Steelers, a team that lived to torment his Ravens. On cue, the linebacker will do most of the talking to Big Ben Roethlisberger. He'll try to crawl inside the quarterback's helmet.

But Scott won't get any angrier than he was in the immediate wake of the New England game, when the ESPN video showed the Mad Backer madder than he's been since his freshman year at Southern Illinois.

"He was really mad back then," his mother said. "That's when he was saying the colleges who didn't recruit him should've measured his heart instead of his size."

In fact, they should've measured his mouth. The linebacker said he talks and talks to elevate his own play, a piece of good pregame news for the Jets.

They can't afford him to be Bart Scott in Pittsburgh, not when the occasion calls for Bart Star.

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2 points....

first, Hulk Hogan would be one of my 3 dinner guests.....ive been a hulkamaniac since i was like 7 years old! Im glad i have that in common with Bart Scott!

second, i may have read the coolest thing ever in this article! Are you trying to tell me that the Jets practiced with old "Macho Man Savage" interviews blasting!!?? If you dont get psyched up listening to him talk you have no pulse. It looked like he was gonna pop a vein in his neck with every word he said! ................"OHHHH YEAH!!"

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the look on his face at 0:27 makes me seriously wanna run thru a wall

When it comes crashing down and it hurts inside,

You gotta take a stand it dont help to hide.

If you hurt my friends and you your my pride,

I gotta be a man, I can't let it slide.

I am a real American,

Fight for the rights of every man.

I am a real American,

Fight for what's right, Fight for you LIFE!

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http://sports.espn.go.com/new-york/nfl/news/story?id=6045599

Hulk Hogan pulls for Jets, Bart Scott

Bart Scott made quite an impression on millions of startled viewers with his postgame rant to ESPN's Sal Paolantonio after Scott's New York Jets defeated the New England Patriots in their divisional playoff game.

Scott's childhood hero, Hulk Hogan, was among them.

"I knew when Bart looked down the barrel of the camera he believed in himself and in what he was saying," Hogan

told ESPNNewYork.com by phone. "And that makes him a real dangerous man."

Hulk Hogan on those talkative Jets: Let's hear more!Arguably the most popular pro wrestler of all time, Hogan was the audacious figure who inspired the Jets linebacker to become one of the NFL's leading trash talkers. Scott's interview with Paolantonio, punctuated by the Jets' new mantra, "Can't Wait," became an Internet sensation and caught the attention of the wrestling legend whose style and moves Scott studied through his childhood in Detroit.

"It was like one of my mid-'80s promos, and all that was missing were a few 'What are you gonna dos?' and some lightning bolts in there," said the 57-year-old Hogan, who now appears with TNA Wrestling on Spike TV. "It was right on the money. I think it's cool that [scott] is stepping up and showboating it a bit, because it's about personality and entertaining people, too.

"I could tell Bart had been watching wrestling, and it's pretty cool because a lot of these guys are afraid to step outside the box. ... Sometimes when you say stuff you believe it and it happens."

Hogan said he knew Scott had to be a wrestling fan when he watched the video "just by his mannerisms. He had the cadence down, his eyes were real wide, and he wasn't looking at the interviewer but right down the barrel of that camera."

Scott lived by Hogan's articles of faith -- doing your training, saying your prayers and taking your vitamins. Does the Jets linebacker have a potential second career in the ring?

"Oh yeah," Hogan said. "When his career's over and he wants to make some real money, tell him to give me a call and we'll break him in the right way."

Scott is hardly the first professional athlete struck by the magnitude of Hogan's presence. When he first met Wayne Gretzky, Hogan said, "Gretzky asked me to autograph his hockey stick."

Hogan described himself as a casual pro football fan, but Scott has given him a not-so-casual rooting interest in the AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh.

"I'm going with the Jets," Hogan said. "I love the Steelers, but if my boys with the Jets keep talking smack over there, they're going to go all the way."

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