Supermodeling Ain't Easy When Your Son's High School Basketball Opponents Use Your Nude Photos to Taunt Him

This is Christy Turlington, one of the last of the great supermodels. The product of a time in history when the true supermodels reigned supreme. When the magazine industry was still thriving and there'd be faces staring out at you from the rack of the supermarket checkout besides Queen Elizabeth or whatever celebrity recently died. 

I'll always associate her with one of the true highwater marks of the Supermodel Age, George Michael's all time classic "Freedom '90" video, which hasn't aged a day:

And in looking up her information for the purposes of this video, I found out she's married to Edward Burns, who played Pvt. Reiben in Saving Private Ryan. So good on them both. Given the fact they're now in their mid-50s, been married for over 20 years and have two kids, it would seem life has been good to them both. 

But according to this profile in Harper's Bazaar, Christy has found out the hard way that balancing motherhood and being ridiculously good looking in designer clothes, lingerie and naked is not all it's cracked up to be:

Turlington Burns recounts attending one of her son’s high school basketball games where the opposing team passed around a nude photo of her from an old shoot as a heckling tactic. “I was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner,” she tells me. “But at the same time, I was like, ‘This is so rude!’ ” The incident turned into a “bigger thing” once the school got involved. “All I wanted to do was disappear,” she says, growing more animated. But she quickly returns to an even keel: “I don’t feel embarrassed about anything,” she explains. “Regretting things is a waste of time.”

There are so many layers to this. Three different perspectives, at the very least. 

First of all, as the baseball managers are so fond of telling us, the other guys show up to play, too. Sometimes they get the better of you, and all you can do is tip your cap and go get 'em tomorrow. And Burns lad's team's opponents came prepared. Bringing nudes of a kid's mom to wave at him every time he brings the ball up or stands at the free throw line is diabolical. Ingenious, really. Using the Oedipal Complex against a player has to be the greatest defensive innovation in the game since the Box and 1.  It's 4D chess. Check and checkmate. 

Next comes her son. Speaking personally, I'm the youngest of five, so by the time I came along my sainted mom was built for function, not form. Yet late in her life we came across old photos our dad took of her looking rather glamorous in an admittedly modest nightgown. And it still gives me psychological issues I struggle with to this day. Now imagine you're in high school and trying to focus on the Pick and Roll while the turds on the bench are fapping to your world class smokeshow mom right in your face. Getting Ryan away from the front lines in France and back to Iowa was child's play by comparison. If that kid was able to put any points on the board, he deserves First Team All Conference. 

Finally, it's hard to put yourself in Christy Turlington Burn's high fashion stilettos here. But you have to admire the way she worked her way through the anger to acceptance. She's right she has nothing to be embarrassed about. She's been arousing post-pubescent males since the late 1980s. Now she's supposed to … what exactly? Feel shame, because she worked her ass off (literally) to become an international icon? Feel embarrassed, because she had - has - an amazing body everyone wanted to see? Feel regret, because a gym filled with basketball moms, half of whom probably look like Mama June, resent her for posing nude back in the day? Nope. Absolutely no. She's got nothing to apologize to anyone for. Let them look. Enjoy the show, creeps.

As for the school, sure they've got to look into the matter. To pretend to be appalled and outraged that teenage boys would be passing around a 35 year old nude modeling shot, like it's the 1990s all over again and they don't all have unlimited access to the most depraved shit imaginable available on a rectangle in their pockets. I'm sure they issued some mealy mouthed statement about protecting out youth and passed some rule change banning the use of fashion shoot photos on school grounds. But kids have been taunting each other in competitions since they were fighting with woolly mammoth bones. And talking trash about each other's moms since moms were invented. This opposing team merely perfected the art. So everybody wins, I guess?