My favorite people are large, strong men who also happen to be intelligent.  I thought of this when I ran across this Freakonomics post about a 6’8", 350 pound professional football player who majored in economics at Cal and who reads educational material in his free time.  That’s my kind of dude.

Here’s the deal: through ninth grade I was always the smallest kid in my class and I wasn’t endowed with natural strength although I did have a little speed.  In ninth grade I had the distinction of being the punching bag or locker-stuffing victim of several convicts-to-be, but I learned how to run well and I often found I could out-think my tormentors, usually by pointing behind them and saying "Holy shit that girl’s boobs are showing" and when they turned to look I’d take the precious seconds it bought me and run like hell. Sometimes my trickery didn’t work and that’s where the smart big man came into play.

You see I made friends with this one freshman football player who was actually studious.  The problem for him was math; he was doing okay but he really wanted to ace the class and we’d often work together during breaks to get him up to speed.  Well, one day he saw me getting chased around the track in gym class (I’m not kidding) and proceeded to whip up on the kid doing the chasing.  Word got around and my torture decreased significantly, but unfortunately not completely.  Still I forever after had a soft spot for studious big men.

I finally hit my growth spurt in tenth grade and after that I only got into a couple of scrapes and those were always fair fights.  I also found that most of my friends who were big suffered a kind of prejudice where everyone assumed they were dense.  Of course they weren’t and it was always fun watching them prove people wrong.

Can you think of a better person to have in your corner than a smart big man.  Put another way, would you want that person in the other corner?