All-Ego team: What came first, ego or egg?

What came first, the ego or the egg? Does success make you confident, or does confidence make you a success?

In the sports world, you would be hard-pressed to find a major star without a double scoop of chutzpah. Even decent guys such as Pete Carroll, Joe Torre and Al Michaels have an inner strength, a sort of sports gravitas.

But the following list isn't about steely self-confidence.

It is about bloated ego, about heads too big for the helmet, and mouths too big for the microphone. Being merely obnoxious doesn't get you on this list. You have to be seven flavors of insufferable.

Here is the All-Ego Sports First Team:

• Al Davis, owner. If ego were chocolate, he would be Hershey, Pa. Once his awful behind-the-scenes antics produced nasty but effective Raiders teams. Now his awful behind-the-scenes antics produce laughably bad teams.

• Barry Bonds, baseball player. He is the most prolific home-run hitter of all time and still can't get a gig. Why? Maybe it is because he is clubhouse poison. Maybe because he may be headed for jail. Was Willie Mays really his godfather? What happened there?

• Charlie Weis, football coach. Casts about the gridiron like McClernand at Vicksburg. Certainly not the first coach at Notre Dame with a God complex, just the lamest. Call him the Round Mound of Hallowed Ground.

• The Duke student section. Listen up, you little punks. Pride in your team is one thing. But you have helped turn college hoops into a rancorous R-rated spectacle, from which mothers shield their young-uns. I guess sportsmanship wasn't an essay question on the SAT.

• Bob Costas, broadcaster. I have friends who really admire Costas. So I'm getting new friends. Not everyone can have the easy charm of a John Madden or a Cris Collinsworth. But Costas oozes arrogance.

• Kobe Bryant, Los Angeles Lakers guard. Men are from Venus, Kobe is from Mars. His behavior during the Olympics went a long way toward improving his image.

• Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees baseball player. The way he finagled a new contract in 2007 was churlish and an insult to an organization that treated him well. Now he has left his wife to hang out with strippers and movie stars. A-Rod? More like A-Bomb.

• Mark Cuban, team owner. Even among the frat house of fools who run the nation's sports teams, Cuban is a standout — for his harassment of NBA officials to the recent insider-trading allegations. Mark, take your Ritalin. Your steady hand is probably what the Chicago Cubs need.

• Tom Lasorda, baseball executive. Casual fans may see Grandpa Dodger as a keeper of the game's grand traditions, dripping Dodger blue. Insiders tell of a vulgar blowhard whose No. 1 fan is himself.

• Jim Rome, sports-talk host. Turns almost any topic into World War V. The problem with the knowledgeable Rome is that his hyper-intense, humorless style has been adopted by so many other less-talented broadcasters. It has helped turn talk radio into a septic tank of bad crud.

The second team: Bill Belichick, New England Patriots coach; Bob Knight, retired basketball coach; Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders (relics; if only they'd returned my calls when I was 23); Shaquille O'Neal, NBA player; Lance Armstrong, cyclist; Serena and Venus Williams, tennis players and fashionistas; Isiah Thomas, ex-NBA player and coach; Bill Parcells, NFL executive; Scott Boras, agent; any NFL receiver who wears gloves when it is 80 degrees.