Every James Bond villain’s sports owner counterpart

Everybody’s favorite truck stop billionaire warrants an equally forgettable Bond villain, and your boy Brad Whitaker from “The Living Daylights” is as nondescript as Timothy Dalton’s run as Bond. Joe Don Baker’s portrayal of the villain was so meh that he returned to the franchise later as Bond ally and CIA agent Jack Wade in “Goldeneye.”

I’ll happily rewatch 007 movies, but even for research purposes, not the Dalton ones. With that said, Whitaker’s Wiki page describes a black market arms dealer who’s obsessed with the military and war reenactments with figurines, but has no real experience in active combat. Sounds like a perfect buffoon for the Cleveland Browns owner.

And their propensity to say outlandish shit — Whitaker sees history’s genocidal maniacs as “surgeons who removed society’s dead flesh,” and Haslem said “of course” the alleged sociopath on his roster is there because he’s a star quarterback — is simply a chef’s kiss.

I’ve seen “For Your Eyes Only” as much as any other Roger Moore Bond movie, and I still don’t know what Aristotle Kristatos was after. All I know is he was Greek (I think), and sent squads of hockey players and Olympic athletes to try to kill Bond. It’s been so long that I forgot why he was such a villain.

The same goes for Jerry Reinsdorf, who’s been overseeing mundane White Sox and Bulls seasons for a prolonged period of time that the general populace outside of Chicago has to be reminded of Reinsdorf’s thriftiness any time they wonder why a couple of teams in a huge market require luck to compete.

I’ve also been eating a lot of Greek food since moving to Chicago — gyro fest, oof — and associate the city with the heaps of thinly sliced lamb that I’ve inhaled over the past year.

It’s insane to me that people reach a point of desperation in their lives that working for a supervillain seems like a viable option. Karl Stromberg, the evil genius in “The Spy Who Loved Me,” needed a small army of soldiers to execute his plan to turn the planet into an Atlantis-type haven, and there’s no shortage of lackeys willing to entertain sports owner’s shittiest aspirations.

After watching John Henry’s apology video to Liverpool fans for the Super League shenanigans, his benefits package must be really good, because that was about as inspirational as Stromberg dumping his assistant into a shark tank. Henry also owns the Red Sox, and those fans will never forgive him for giving Mookie Betts the trapdoor treatment, and trading him to the Dodgers.

Both have the charisma of an anal wart, and yet got all of these goons to keep signing on?

The Brooklyn Nets owner is too new to merit one of the classic villains, and I’m not going to give him the Dr. No title because he’s Chinese. No, no, no. The reason Joe Tsai and Lyutsifer Safin are perfect for each other is their use of technology. Safin infects Bond with some nanobytes that will kill his family members if he comes in contact with them — and I’m not going to share the ending to “No Time to Die” because of, y’know, spoilers and it’s the most recent Bond movie.

For Tsai, who’s co-founder and executive vice chairman of Alibaba, China’s version of Amazon only somehow worse. (You bet your ass Jeff Bezos would be on this list if he owned a team.) The company is essentially state-run, and the government has allegedly been using tech from businesses owned and/or affiliated with Alibaba to identify and roundup Uyghur Muslims, who’ve been put in detention centers in Western China. An ESPN article described the facial recognition software as an “Uyghur alarm,” and holy shit if that’s not some new-age, next-level Bond villain-type stuff, I have no idea what is.

The only connection I can come up with here is Dr. No employs fake blind hit men to murder an MI6 agent, and the Cubs are currently being sued for the Wrigley Field renovations failing to meet proper code for handicapped patrons. I’m guessing his touch also might be as cold and metallic as Dr. No’s metal hands, but I can’t say for certain, and damn sure don’t want to find out for myself.

Perhaps I should’ve gone with an easier comparison, but there are like 25 of these villains, and none of their grand schemes revolved around an ill-advised, hard-to-get independent sports channel. Though I bet Cubs fans loathe the Marquee Network as much as Dr. No hates loose ends.

The Ricketts family in general sucks, as Nebraskans can attest to during Pete Ricketts’s reign as governor, so there’s that.

I know I’ve harped on lazy comps, but it absolutely makes sense that one of the most cartoonish Bond villains shares a last name with the NFL owner who waxes the end of his mustache like he’s Hercule Poirot.

There is no way a movie with the title “Octopussy” ever gets greenlit in the age of social media. It’s actually a tribute to a previous era when movie producers were so insulated that no one told them having a French guy play an exiled Afghani prince was good casting. Louis Jourdan delivered a number of laughable one-liners while chasing Roger Moore around the jungle, and that schtick is as funny as Shahid’s facial hair choices.

Shahid’s son, Tony, oversees AEW, and if the Bond franchise ever needs a sequel idea to “Octopussy” (“Hectatpussy”?), perhaps he can lend some of his considerable storytelling abilities to concoct a plot better than whatever the fuck was happening in that literal clown show of a movie.

I’ve watched “Casino Royale” a bunch of times, and I’m still uncertain what Mads Mikkelsen’s character Le Chiffre does. He’s a poker player who gambles on the stock market and manages Spectre’s money? I’m similarly lost as to what Steve Cohen did before owning the Mets. Hedge fund manager is a generic term along the lines of entrepreneur, and I guess good for the people who’ve made billions off of fancy financial footwork.

So I can’t really speak specifically to the career likenesses of Cohen and Le Chiffre. However, do I think there’s a chance that Steve tried to figure out what happened to the Mets in the playoffs via a seatless chair and a thick-knotted rope? Yes, yes, a million times yes.

There aren’t a lot of Black owners in sports, and the ones that exist usually aren’t majority owners, so I’m not going to offer up something lazy like Michael Jordan for the only Black villain on this list. That said, this isn’t so much a direct comparison as much as a template that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft could follow.

In “Live and Let Die,” Yaphet Kotto plays the multi-persona villain Mr. Big/Dr. Kananga. He’s a heroin dealer/voodoo doctor that assumes a different identity and wears a false face when stateside.

Kraft, he of a dropped happy ending accusation, could’ve avoided that mess altogether had he popped on a false nose before stepping into the massage parlor. And I’m going to stop here because that movie didn’t age well, and, if you’ve been paying attention, neither has Kraft.

There’s a safe bet that you have no idea who the hell Franz Sanchez is. The antagonist was played by the white FBI agent from “Die Hard” (Robert Davi) in the rarely rewatched (at least by me) “License to Kill.” The Timothy Dalton Bond movies are far and away the worst (aside from George Lazenby’s one-off, of course), and there’s no better comp for a B-rate owner than a forgettable Bond villain.

The only thing I remember about “License to Kill” is the car chase featuring a tanker full of cocaine. Franz and his scientists figured out how to smuggle the substance in gasoline, and the degrees of separation from Irsay’s arrest for DWI and a bevy of pill bottles, are close enough to Sanchez’s plot to associate the two second-tier figures with one another.

Well that, and Irsay comes across as the kind of owner who would have a pet iguana.

I was out on “Die Another Day” within the first 15 minutes. As soon as I saw spies on surfboards, I knew something went very wrong in the writer’s room. It took Commanders’ fans all of 15 minutes to know this season was over but the embarrassment was just getting started.

Not only does Pierce Brosnan get into a sword fight with the movie’s main villain Gustav Graves, for no reason in the middle of the movie, but the latter undergoes a face change/skin pigmentation alteration, going from North Korean to British. Coincidentally enough, millions of dollars in reconstructive surgery and a new identity are the only ways Snyder is going to be able to keep his team.

Every new plot twist in the Snyder saga garners eye rolls the way a massive sun laser, an ice castle, and a MacGyvered kiteboard do. (Yes, “Die Another Day” had to separate surfing scenes.) Additionally, the Washington owner doesn’t deserve the label of genius (even if evil is before it) because there’s nothing particularly bright about him. He’s every bit the abomination Graves was.

Mark Cuban made his billions by being innovative. He was ahead of the curve on the tech boom, and it enabled him to buy the Dallas Mavericks. Dominic Greene, of “Quantum of Solace,” was out in front of a trend, too, weaponizing drought to extort the Bolivian government.

The deal Greene forced upon General Medrano for the water rights was every bit as lopsided as the trade the Mavs pulled off for Luka Doncic, and there are quite a few Atlanta fans who wouldn’t be mad if the people responsible for that were left in the middle of the desert with only motor oil to drink.

Francisco Scaramanga, aka “The Man with the Golden Gun,” is a straight-up assassin, so there’s not a lot of direct owner-to-villain overlap. Christopher Lee and Robert Sarver — who is definitely not an assassin — also don’t look a ton alike. Lee is low-key tall, and even if Sarver was, he’d look short next to the Phoenix Suns’ and Mercury rosters. There will be several reaches throughout this slideshow, and Sarver is no exception.

Rarely is a Bond villain just an allegedly racist and sexist asshole. There’s usually a little more depth than just skin-deep (or genetic) differences. So, I’m going to make this as basic as possible, and go with the assumption that both men are/were very tan. We know Scaramanga had a nice sheen as he was bronzing in a scene (essentially to show off his trademark third nipple), and seeing that Sarver lives in the Valley of the Sun, and strikes me as the kind of guy who lays out by the pool to escape avoid the realities of his actions, I’m going to say that’s exactly what he does, too. I didn’t dare Google “Robert Sarver shirtless” to see if he also has a third nipple, but I’m not ruling it out.

Let’s face it, if James Dolan can barely oversee the Knicks and Rangers, he’s not worthy of one of the Blofeld distinctions. Spectre is a multi-faceted enterprise with a ton of moving parts, and Jimmy D is too busy with the Straight Shots to make sure the haul from the opium trade in China was on the up and up. No, Dolan strikes me more as someone who will never rise higher than No. 2.

That said, Emilio Largo, the overzealous mastermind with an eyepatch in “Thunderball,” is a famous foil, and that can be applied to Dolan, as well. I mean, are we sure he’s not a sleeper agent planted atop the Knicks to sow discord among New Yorkers?

If world domination is the long con, it would make sense to target the major population centers and drain their sense of optimism. People are going to be so distraught by the time Spectre invades NY that subjugation will feel like a vacation compared to rooting for the Knicks.

Stan Kroenke is obsessed with sports teams the way Auric Goldfinger was enthralled by gold. The Los Angeles Rams owner also owns Arsenal, the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, the Colorado Rapids (MLS), the Colorado Mammoth (lacrosse), and a couple of Esports teams. If you were to plop down an ingot of a sports franchise during the middle of a golf outing, I guarantee he accepts the wager and cheats to win it.

Hell, he had to pay a settlement to cover allegedly improper shit concerning his relocation of the Rams to L.A. The man who married into the Walmart fortune will have to pay $571 million of the $790 million owed to the city over the move, and his fellow NFL owners will have to foot the other $219 million. While forcing your peers to pay for your mistake isn’t quite irradiating the entire gold supply of the United States, it shows a willingness to fuck over your business partners.

And if you remember the way Goldfinger had the mob bosses gassed/smashed after he revealed the details of Operation Grand Slam, that’s one thing Kroenke and this famed Bond villain has in common. (Remember this is satire).

If you thought Arsenal fans hated Stan Kroenke, wait until you get a lot of what Manchester United fans think of the Glazer family. The owners of the Tampa Bay Bucs expanded their sports franchise holdings, and have done such an abysmal job that Man U faithful chant “Die, die, Glazer” at them whenever they have the stones to show their faces in the UK.

When I think about the angriest, most hate-filled Bond villain, I think of Sean Bean’s Alec Trevelyan, and while I’m talking about angry fans, anger is enough of a throughline. Bean’s character isn’t English, but has pretended to be, just like the Glazers are moonlighting as soccer club owners. The way they’ve run the team makes you think it’s been hit by the Goldeneye satellite.

Burying a team in debt might as well be zapping it with an EMP because it’s not the way to compete for EPL and Champions League titles, which Man U hasn’t really done much of since Sir Alex Ferguson left. Their supporters would happily rejoice if the death sequences that befell Trevelyan and his henchmen also happened to the Glazer bros. That may sound harsh, but I assure you, it is very real.

“A View to a Kill” is one of the most unhinged James Bond movies. Christopher Walken plays Max Zorin, an ex-KGB tech mogul bent on destroying the competition by flooding Silicon Valley. The San Francisco/tech comps are obviously there for Warriors’ owner Joe Lacob. With the housing market in that area the way it is, I doubt he would be on board with the ploy though, because my guess is he probably has a lot of real estate holdings in the flood zone that may be worth more than a blow to the competition.

Now if we could only get Dubs ownership into some ’80s frames, a blimp, and power suits and have Walken say the infamous Lacob “light years ahead” quote in his signature cadence, the rest of the NBA would be trembling like those workers in the mine shaft that Zorin gunned down while cackling.

My only qualm with “Skyfall” is Javier Bardem really dials it up. When Daniel Craig finally offs Raul Silva, it takes Bardem 15 minutes and 1,700 different facial expressions to die. Steve Ballmer dies a thousand deaths per Clippers’ game, and the man doesn’t have a notch below 11.

The thing about Bardem’s performance and Ballmer’s performance art is that both have immediately become iconic. The “Skyfall” scene that’s burned into my brain was when Bardem removed his fake teeth to show what the cyanide did to him, and I’m similarly scarred anytime the Clippers’ owner gets onstage at a team rally and screams/acts like a fucking lunatic.

As far as motivations go, Silva is talking shit to M and trying to kill the hierarchy, and the same could be argued for Ballmer trying to unseat the Lakers as L.A.’s team. And though both people pulled off major moves toward their end goal — Silva actually kills M, and Ballmer convinced Kawhi Leonard and Paul George to wear nameless-henchmen uniforms — in the end, it didn’t matter.

This one is a little personal for me. Bob Nutting, the owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, is a media mogul much like Elliott Carver in “Tomorrow Never Dies.” Carver’s diabolical plan is to start a war between China and Great Britain so he can have a monopoly on news coverage. Nutting’s grand scheme is to buy smaller papers and gut them for profit. Kind of the opposite, yet dastardly nonetheless.

Since purchasing the company that owns my previous place of employment, The Aspen Times, Nutting’s underlings botched the handling of a story so badly that pretty much everyone was fired or quit. The Atlantic even ran an exposé about it called, “End Times in Aspen: How to Kill a Newspaper.” You don’t get the nickname Bottom-line Bob unless you’re exceptionally cheap, and Pirates fans aren’t the only ones who can attest to that.

Jonathan Pryce’s deranged character delivers several surreal speeches in Pierce Brosnan’s second appearance as Bond, and judging by the correspondence Nutting sent to my former coworkers, both have an ability to simultaneously befuddle and enrage their audience.

There have been many femme fatales in the Bond universe, but rarely do we get a woman head honcho (hancha?). There are more women owners in sports than women super villains in Bond movies, so there weren’t a lot of options. However, Elektra King from “The World is Not Enough” and L.A. Lakers’ owner Jeanie Buss work eerily well as comps.

Both are heiresses, and both won’t stop until their fathers’ empires are reduced to rubble. Oil runs in Elektra’s veins thicker than blood, and my guess is Jeanie has the same feelings about purple and gold in her circulatory system.

Even look at the way each surrounds themselves with incompetence. King fell for her own kidnapper, Renard, who’s got a bullet lodged in his head that makes him feel nothing, and she picked him, and his squad of bumbling terrorists, to execute her vision. Buss’ inner circle consists of Rob Pelinka and the Rambises, plus probably a little sprinkling of advice from Phil Jackson when he’s coherent — and probably sometimes when he’s not.

I’m pretty sure “Moonraker” inspired 95 percent of the “Austin Powers” movies. A film that influential deserves a family that’s also had a massive impact on sports ownership — and how much we love to make fun of them. Al Davis would’ve taken one of the Blofeld crowns had he still been alive, but his son Mark is almost a parody of his dad. With a few tweaks to the color schemes, the tracksuits could easily blend in with the late ’70s attire and the uniforms of the Moonraker crew.

I’m pretty sure “Moonraker” inspired 95 percent of the “Austin Powers” movies. A film that influential deserves a family that’s also had a massive impact on sports ownership — and how much we love to make fun of them. Al Davis would’ve taken one of the Blofeld crowns had he still been alive, but his son Mark is almost a parody of his dad. With a few tweaks to the color schemes, the tracksuits could easily blend in with the late ’70s attire and the uniforms of the Moonraker crew.

The Davis family motto — “Just win, baby” — is as myopic as Drax’s vision for the future. The only caveat is Drax and Al share the same haircut, while not even in a make-believe universe with over-the-top villains is there a Mark Davis haircut. The first Bond movie came out in 1962, and in 60 years of borderline comic book-type foils, not one even neared the same stratosphere as Mark’s suck cut.

There have been multiple iterations of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, with the faceless version in “From Russia With Love” to Christoph Waltz’s portrayal in the Daniel Craig films. Lucky for us, because there are two owners worthy of Blofeld. Jerry Jones is the first, and the Blofeld he gets is Charles Gray’s rendition in “Diamonds Are Forever.” Blofeld’s plan involved kidnapping a Texas business tycoon and assuming his identity (or at least vocal cords) to use the company’s infrastructure and resources to hold the planet hostage with a giant space laser.

Jones’ tactics to bring a Super Bowl back to the Dallas Cowboys may not be as far-fetched as a space laser, but they often blow up just as spectacularly. His team is 4-2, and if it was another franchise, we wouldn’t be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He’s as powerful of an owner as there is in not only the NFL but all of professional sports despite all this, and I haven’t a clue as to why he’s the leader of the owner rogues gallery. How many times can he fail to kill Bond before he’s stripped of his leadership role? One thing I will say though, is he’s just as hard to kill as ol’ Blofeld.

Hal has a lot of work to do to live up to his father’s reputation, and perhaps he’ll get there. Regardless, you can’t have a list like this without the man who ran the Evil Empire. Are we sure George didn’t have a false bridge that dropped you into a piranha-filled pond? Yankee Stadium definitely counts as a lair even if it’s not enclosed in a volcano like Blofeld’s base of operations in “You Only Live Twice.”

Getting called into either’s office is a terrifying endeavor as you have no idea if it’ll be your last day as New York’s manager or on Earth. In my opinion, Blofeld’s two most bat-shit appearances are “Diamonds Are Forever” and “You Only Live Twice,” and those portrayals are right up there with George and Jerry Jones on their wildest days.

Their teams also had success, and you don’t get to be the head of Spectre if you lack ambition, vision, and at least a small degree of competence.

Sorry, I had to. This was too easy to pass up.

Every group of owners needs their muscle, and, like Roger Goodell, Jaws is dispensed whenever the threat gets too big. Rog will bite a gondola cable, a shark — anything to get the job done. I seent it!