You want to go to the Pro Bowl or you want to go home?

Oscar-winning actor gets in ear of Ochocinco
By Michael Silver, Yahoo! Sports

It was one of those typically incestuous Tinseltown celebrity convergences, an impromptu conversation between an athlete who changed his name to enhance his fame and an actor who need only drop his first name to receive the red-carpet treatment.

Yet when Cincinnati Bengals wideout Chad Ochocinco met Denzel Washington at a Los Angeles Lakers game this past spring, it wasn’t the mutual fawning session you might expect. Rather than compliment the receiver formerly known as Johnson for his athletic excellence, Washington called him out, portraying Ochocinco’s lost 2008 season as a self-inflicted nightmare.

“He got on me about the way I handled myself last offseason,” Ochocinco recalled in a phone conversation last week. “He wasn’t being gentle. He said, ‘You know what? You need to straighten up and stop fussin’ about something you have no control over. Make it fun again because it sure looks better when you do it that way.’ That’s all I needed to hear, especially from somebody like him.”

Is it possible that the NFL’s presumptive 2009 comeback player of the year could owe an assist to a man who owns two Oscars? We’re getting ahead of ourselves, but two things are clear as what’s left of the offseason melts away: 1) Ochocinco, 31, believes he’s headed for a monster season; and 2) Washington successfully imparted a stop-being-a-knucklehead sentiment that so many people shared last year as the formerly ebullient Pro Bowler devolved into the NFL’s de-facto grumpy old man.

Rest of story here.

I'm not sure if I could sit through a lecture from Denzel Washington. I think about halfway in I'd want to go grab some Raisenettes or popcorn (if it was T.O. he would already have the popcorn with him). I'm not saying Denzel isn't a good actor. He's great but he pretty much gives the same act in all of them.

So to get through a guy like Ochocinco I think you'd have to give the 'Training Day' performance. Scare the pants off of him. Make him smoke PCP and almost get raped by Mexican gang members. If that didn't work I'd just remind him that if he doesn't buckle down he may be stuck in Cleveland forever. That's enough to scare anyone straight.