Ask A Genius 1558: Baseball, Rambo Scars, and the Strange Performance of Masculinity
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/01
What drives Rick Rosner’s reflections on baseball, masculinity, and the strange art of self-creation?
In this candid and eccentric exchange, Rick Rosner chats with Scott Douglas Jacobsen about fair-weather fandom, the statistical chaos of baseball, and the misunderstood genius of Dodgers manager Dave Roberts. The conversation drifts—quite literally—from bullpen blunders to body scars, as Rosner recounts crafting his Conan-inspired look and accidentally one-upping Rambo in realism. Between anecdotes of fake blood and real keloids, he muses on aging, hearing loss, and the quiet hum of tinnitus that punctuates his later years with reluctant introspection.
Complaints
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your complaint today?
Rick Rosner: I don’t know. What did I complain about? This morning, when we finished the show where everyone screams at each other, the Dodgers had made it to game seven. They had to win tonight to do that. People on Twitter love to criticize the Dodgers’ manager for his pitching decisions. The Dodgers were supposed to win it all—some said they would win more games this year than any team in Major League history. They didn’t, but they still finished first in their division. They didn’t even win 100 games, though. An exceptional season is 100 wins; they won 93. Their manager, Dave Roberts, gets criticized for pulling pitchers too early or leaving them in too long. The Dodgers were supposed to be loaded with pitching talent, but then injuries and underperformance set in. For years, the Dodgers have had trouble with their bullpen imploding after taking the starter out. I assume other teams deal with this, too. I’ve lived in L.A. since 1989, so that’s the perspective I hear most often.
I don’t follow baseball or any sport very closely, but given how random baseball is, I imagine many managers face the same criticism. Baseball is probably the most random of the major sports. If you look up Dave Roberts’ managerial statistics, the Dodgers have won more regular-season games since 2010 than any other team. They’ve also made the most World Series appearances in that span. Dave Roberts, who’s managed the Dodgers for about ten seasons, owns one of the best winning percentages in MLB history and the best among managers with at least 1,000 games. I’d guess his pitching decisions are no worse than anyone else’s. Someone who actually knows might prove me wrong, but if you’re going to be a fair-weather fan like I am, the Dodgers are probably the best team to root for.
Rambo Lookalike Scars
Jacobsen: Why was Rambo such an extraordinary influence on your pursuit of a girlfriend when you were younger, to the point of deep self-scarring?
Rosner: I gave myself the scars first. Rambo wasn’t really the influence—it was more Conan the Barbarian. Around 1980, when I was twenty, I was putting together a Halloween costume. My fraternity had some fake fur, so I made myself a loincloth out of it and used my weightlifting belt to hold it in place like a big diaper. I tucked fur into my knee-high socks for fur leggings, wore cowboy boots underneath, and went out as a Conan type. I had a sword from a trip to Europe when I was fifteen. We stopped in Spain, where I bought an ornamental sword. So I had a sword and fur—that’s enough to be Conan, Ponan. Good thing you caught me off guard there.
So I did that, and I did it every year because I was nearly naked, and I’d been lifting weights a lot. I figured some girl had to like the way I looked—and that was probably true. But you can’t get a girl to go out with you, even if she likes how you look, unless you’re exceptionally handsome—which I wasn’t. Unless you’re a super-beautiful man, maybe girls will make it easy for you. But if you’ve just got a good body—some muscle and abs—you still have to be able to talk to girls. I was bad at that. I assume it still works the same way now—every guy who wants to meet girls has to be able to talk to them and approach them, whether it’s in person or online. I guess with Tinder, you just have to look good in a photo. Even then, you’ll have to exchange messages.
You could probably use AI to help with that now, but back then, you had to actually talk to girls, approach them, hit on them, and deal with being rejected. I wasn’t good at it yet. I never became great at it, but I eventually got good enough to walk up to people and ask them to dance—and that’s how I met my wife. Every year, I made the costume a little better until I came up with a recipe for fake blood: about one part of the kind they sell in costume shops to five parts chocolate sauce. You get a really dark, nice colour. It’s suitable for drawing wounds, and it drips nicely.
It also solidifies—not completely, but just enough. It has a good balance between being drippy and setting. When you sweat, the fake blood comes out more readily than the chocolate sauce, so if you’re dancing with your fake cuts, you’ll drip fresher-looking blood than the rest of the blood on you. While this is technically impressive and realistic-looking, it doesn’t help you make out with a girl. But I was very into it—to the point where I thought, “Chicks seem to dig muscles.”
By the time I was twenty-two, I’d been stripping—still bad at picking up people in strip joints—but very convinced that muscles were helpful. I thought, if muscles are helpful because they’re manly, scars are even more manly. So I designed some impressive scars—mainly across my chest, a couple on my arms, and a few small ones across my abs. They turned into keloids because when I bench-pressed, I’d pop them open. The wounds kept reopening, eventually turning into thick scars. This was around 1983, maybe 1982. But I had the scars before Rambo came out. My scar design was so aesthetically appealing, so well planned, that Rambo’s scars—which were professionally designed to look rugged and masculine—were in the same places. Whether that was a coincidence or two brilliant scar-making minds thinking alike, I don’t know. But my scars came before Rambo’s.
I was still living at home—nothing says “barbarian” like still living at home—and my mom saw this giant slash down my chest. I’d done it so that it looked like I’d been in a sword fight, where my pec had been sliced. My pec was thick enough that the cut looked like it had jumped off the muscle and landed again lower on my rib cage. There was this big scabby mark, and my mom asked what happened. I couldn’t tell her I’d done it myself, so I quickly made up a story that I’d been working out at the Boulder Athletic Club, my home gym, and that a frayed cable snapped and cut me. It was the best bad story I could come up with on short notice. I should have just kept my shirt on around my mom, or thought of something better, because she called the gym owner and gave him a ton of grief for having unsafe equipment. I had to apologize to him. I don’t remember if I ever told her the truth, but anyway, my scars.
I was in a Rambo look-alike contest at one of the bars I worked at—the Dark Horse on Baseline in Boulder—at the height of Rambo fever. I’m thinking 1984 or 1985. It may have caught on even more when the sequel came out. The first one, First Blood, introduced the character, but no one thought Rambo would become this massive phenomenon. The second movie, Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), is when people went crazy for it. There was a Rambo look-alike contest at the bar—it was me and three other guys. When they saw me with my shirt off, slightly baby-oiled to look a little shiny, two of the guys dropped out, and I won the contest. So there you go—I used to look like Rambo.
Tinnitus Progression
Jacobsen: What else?
Rosner: I’ve had tinnitus for probably ten years, and it’s a bit disquieting. Does it mean my brain is deteriorating? I usually get it when I wake up from a nap. My brain’s been awake all day, then I nap in a quiet room with no stimuli—my eyes are shut, but my ears are still on duty. They start making sounds, and when I wake up, that’s when the tinnitus is at its worst. It fades once I’m distracted by other sounds, and my brain doesn’t have to manufacture fake ones. Carol nudged me into getting a hearing aid. I got just one; one ear’s slightly worse than the other, though neither is that bad. Carole’s concerned because her mom had hearing loss, and hearing aids used to be more of a hassle. Mine charges overnight, but a few years ago you had to mess with tiny batteries—a nightmare for older people.
You never knew if the battery was in right or if it had any juice left. That’s frustrating for them and for anyone who wants them to be able to hear. My mother-in-law went long enough without good hearing that, when she finally got hearing aids, her brain had forgotten how to process certain sounds. You lose the ability to distinguish parts of words. My wife saw this happen to her mom. I’m sixty-five; her mom lived to ninety. So my wife freaks out that I’ll lose sound if I don’t amplify them. I figure that’s twenty years away, but I let her talk me into getting a hearing aid for one ear. Sometimes I use it. What’s interesting is that as soon as I put it in after waking from a nap—when my tinnitus is loudest—it immediately shuts off the tinnitus in that ear. That seems to support the idea that if your ears don’t get the stimulation they expect, they get irritated and make their own sound.
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