Major League Baseball

In praise of Anna Benson's wild ride

Published Jul. 11, 2013 1:00 a.m. ET

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Jason Whitlock

Anna Benson had a damn good run. Seriously.

Oh, I know everyone is laughing now. She’s locked up and potentially facing 20 years for home invasion. Apparently, at the tender age of 37, the stripper-turned-baseball-housewife snapped.

According to her husband and police, Anna dressed up in bulletproof military gear, sneaked into her estranged husband’s house through the garage, beat her armored-double-D breasts with a baton, pulled a revolver and demanded Kris Benson give her a $30,000 advance on their pending divorce settlement.

Tough ending. Robb Stark’s red wedding and Kenard’s cap-peeling of Omar Little were less shocking.

Who planned this heist? The same clowns who collaborated with O.J. Simpson to retrieve his memorabilia?

Whatever. We can waste time second-guessing Anna’s ending or we can celebrate her amazing journey. I choose the latter.

This is an all-time bimbo run. Calling it a rags-to-riches story doesn’t do justice to her 15-year come-up.

“When I came to Kris,” she was once quoted, “I had nothing — two pairs of panties and one bra. Suddenly, I found I was married to a millionaire.”

Only in America!

Only here could a single mother from the sticks climb a pole, insert two silicone bags, land an All-American, blue-chip pitching prospect and become a household name.

"I'm a good girl, a nice girl. I would never hurt (Kris). I am still in love with him," Anna Benson told the New York Post from jail. ". . . We have been married for 15 years, and he can't keep it in his pants. He can't stop f-----g my friends, in my house. But that doesn't mean I don't love him."

Go ahead and laugh. Point your finger, tsk-tsk the ending and discuss the inevitability of it. I’m a gambler. I choose to marvel at the journey.

Anna Benson walked up to the craps table with just the g-string on her backside, batted her eyes, bummed a $5 chip and held the dice for an hour. She started off playing the field, parlayed several hard sixes and eights and the next thing you know she was on the pass line with full odds and a rack full of black chips.

She’s the real-life Pretty Woman. Anna was from the wrong side of the tracks. She left home at 16, married a dentist at 17, had a child and was divorced by age 18. Kris Benson, on the other hand, played baseball at Clemson, was on the US Olympic team at 22 and is the child of two educators, a teacher and a college dean.

Anna married up in every way possible. She's a role model for some women.

"I'd love to meet her, I'd love to hear how she got him. Teach me how to land a baseball player with millions of dollars," my friend and Playboy Live model Angel Allison told me Thursday morning. "I want to know what happened. How did she screw this up? Did she stop giving him the cookie? It can't be just because he was sleeping with her friends."

Kris and Anna met at her strip club when Kris was still in the minors. They were married six months after his major league debut. She wasted little time spitting out kids and even less parlaying Kris’ high profile into attention for herself.

She bragged publicly about banging Kris at Three Rivers Stadium. She started modeling for FHM and Penthouse. She became a regular on Howard Stern’s radio show. She infamously promised to sleep with all of Kris’s teammates if she ever caught him cheating.

Somehow, she became baseball’s “hottest” wife. Sporting News put her on the cover of its magazine. She became a reality-TV star. Bill O’Reilly booked her on “The Factor.” She became an outspoken gun advocate.

If Anna Benson was a man, she’d be best friends with prominent politicians. I’m serious.

Jay-Z can rap and boast about dealing crack cocaine to single mamas and all the other destructive nonsense that goes along with a male hustler’s life and still have dinner at the White House. But Anna Benson can’t be proud and celebrated for hustling in the sex industry?

This is sexism.

There’s more honor in selling sex than selling dope. Strippers and hoes rarely shoot each other.

Yes, Anna Benson has crapped out. But she came to the table with nothing, had the time of her life and left with a best-selling story to tell. That’s a consequence any gambler can accept.

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