I try to keep my distance from the predictable, low-rent theater of the modern culture wars. It’s a sucker’s game played by grifters and bought by fools. But I have a lifelong, visceral allergy to world-class assholes, which brings us to Aubrey Huff...the internet’s loudest self-appointed guardian of traditional Christian values.
Before Huff found his current calling as a digital moralist, he won a couple of rings in San Francisco. And on a fog-choked Saturday afternoon in the winter of 2010, I got a front-row seat to the exact brand of "traditional values" he brings to the table.
The Giants had just secured the World Series. A dozen of us had staked out a massive back booth at the Tipsy Pig to celebrate a friend’s 26th birthday. If you spent any time in the Marina back then, you knew the Pig was a place where there was likely to be a lot of attractive women. And like flies to a fresh carcass, you could always count on Aubrey Huff and Pat Burrell to roll in, blind-drunk on their own hype, scanning the room for any woman with self-esteem low enough to accommodate their egos.
Our birthday girl was easy on the eyes herself. The second she walked through the door, Huff’s eyes locked onto her like a heat-seeking missile. He barked some low-grade line as she passed, but she didn’t even blink. She just slid into the booth with us.
"You know who that was?" someone whispered. "That’s Aubrey Huff."
She looked entirely vacant. "Who?"
"The baseball player. For the Giants."
"Oh."
You could have told her the guy stocked shelves Safeway; the indifference would have been identical. But Huff was a man accustomed to the easy currency of a championship uniform. Like a starving dog staring at a hambone behind glass, he couldn't let it go. He slithered over, squeezed his way into the back of our booth, and spent fifteen minutes breathing the fifth stale beer he'd drank into her face, trying to buy an ounce of her attention.
As those 15 brutally dull minutes passed, he lost his patience and just leaned in to whisper something in her ear. She just shook her head and said, "No."
What happened next was a masterclass in fragile, athletic entitlement. Huff didn't slide out of the booth like a normal human being who had just swung and missed. His brain completely short-circuited. He stood straight up on the bench, took a casual tabletop stroll directly across our plates of food, stepped over my shoulder, and vanished back into the crowd. A grown man, throwing a silent, mid-afternoon tantrum because a 26-year-old wouldn't validate his existence.
We sat there stunned. "What did he just say to you?"
She shrugged. "He leaned in and asked, 'Are you DTF?' I said no, and then he did...whatever that was."
It was a hilarious story at the time—the ultimate tale of a professional athlete’s ego collapsing under the weight of a simple "no." But the humor curdles when you look at the ledger. Huff was married then. He was wearing his wedding ring while running his pathetic little pickup routines. He had a wife and two young kids sitting at home.
Years later, Huff published a book blaming the wreckage of his marriage on anxiety, depression, and the bottle. But anyone who drank in the bars around SoMa or the Marina knew the truth: Huff’s favorite off-field sport was hunting for women drunk enough to overlook his personality.
There is an ironclad, algorithmic certainty to the universe: the louder a man screams about his righteous, traditional family values on the internet, the more likely he is to be running a sleazy side-hustle in the dark—or getting caught begging 23-year-old influencers for "cocktails and bad decisions" on Christmas Day. Huff claims he got sober and found the light, but all he really did was trade one addiction for another, swapping chemical dependence for the cheap high of online grievance.
Now I guess he's angry at hats.
At least one thing is consistent, Aubrey Huff remains exactly what he’s always been: a world-class asshole.
@aubrey_huff Well I ain’t gay but I can tell you like talking about it so much you probably are and are just afraid to admit it. You can come on here acting tough but the truth is you just carry hate in your heart. You can’t just accept that people should be respected.