The Sports Curmudgeon

You have to have seen by now a TV segment devoted to some of the great games and performances that happened in Super Bowls held in Miami. The segment that must still be waiting to air is the one that lists the trouble players have gotten into in Miami leading up to the Super Bowl.

Miami is where the Bengals’ RB, Stanley Wilson, went on a cocaine binge and had to miss the Bengals’ game against the 49ers.

Miami is where Falcons’ DB, Eugene Robinson, went out to try to find oral sex the night before the Super Bowl. Unfortunately, he happened to select an undercover police officer as the woman he would ask for such services.

I got to thinking about the ability of players to get into “law enforcement situations” in Miami Super Bowls when a reader sent me an e-mail about Tank Johnson getting a judge to release him from house arrest and allowing him to leave Illinois to go to Miami for the game. The reader thought Johnson was getting preferential treatment because he was an athlete and the judge should not have done this. I agree that it is preferential treatment, but it’s not nearly as egregious as some other examples we’ve seen. However, the reader ended his e-mail with a clever line – one I wish I had been quick enough to come up with on my own:

“… Johnson has the support of the NRA in his upcoming trial on gun charges because the NRA always supports the constitutional right to arm Bears.”

With all the attention and focus on the Cowboys’ coaching search, there is an obvious solution to filling their vacancy – but it is one fraught with danger for the league. Jerry Jones could name himself as the coach of the Cowboys. Hey, George Halas and Paul Brown were rather successful “owner/coaches”; Al Davis coached the Raiders for a while and he’s the moral equivalent of an “owner”. Jones is already the Cowboys’ owner, CEO, President and GM; he spends half the game on the sidelines anyway; he played college football; he can certainly do well in the job interview event. It’s a way to increase the team’s profitability since he won’t need to pay a head coach something in the neighborhood of $4-5M per year. And can he really do that much worse than Dave Campo did?

Here’s the danger for the league… If he does this and the team breaks even next year, it will set up a grand machismo situation for other owners. Follow this line of thought. Hey, if JJ can do it – and Al Davis did it before – why can’t I do it too? It’ll mean more face time for me on TV and if the team wins I won’t have to share the spotlight with some flunky that I was smart enough to hire in the first place; all that jamoke did was do what I paid him millions of dollars to do. And with that thinking – I can’t bring myself to call it reasoning – you could see Danny Boy Snyder prowling the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. Talk about putting one of the longstanding franchises into a tailspin…

There was a lot of positive buzz about the NFL and the NFLPA agreeing to increase their surveillance of players using performance-enhancing substances. Yes, it is a step in the right direction and I think that any area of agreement between the parties here should be put into action. However, I did note a comment from the NFLPA – I think it was Gene Upshaw who was quoted but I’m not positive and I lost the reference – to the effect that they were opposed to blood tests for human growth hormone. When I read that sentence in the report, my immediate thought was:

Why am I not surprised?

A lot has been made of Reggie Bush’s taunting in the NFC Championship Game. He was fined $5K for the act even though he was not penalized for it during the game. And that set off a predictable torrent of comment about what his rights are and what the league’s rights are and etc. I don’t think there’s much debate that he was taunting someone on the Bears defense since he was pointing at someone for the final 10 -15 yards of his run. I also think that he already received a measure of punishment on the field because after his pointing, his gratuitous flip into the end zone and his celebratory dance, he and his team didn’t score again. In fact, they won’t even get to try until sometime next September. That was a far more effective “punishment” than a $5K fine.

Enough football. The Red Sox and JD Drew have finally come to an agreement over an injury clause in the contract they shook hands on about 6 weeks ago. Evidently, the Red Sox can void the rest of the deal if Drew misses a certain number of games due to specific injuries in 2009. Wow, no wonder that took so long to finalize! But now that all is well in Boston, the rest of us can start a box pool on when Drew will miss his first game in 2007 and with what injury. I’ll take May 1 with a tweaked hammy…

Barry Bonds endorsed Pete Rose and Mark McGwire as candidates who should be in the Hall of Fame. The self-interest in that endorsement is so patently obvious that it mocks itself. What might be the equivalent of this outside the sporting world?

Dr. Josef Mengele endorses Jimmy Carter as a Nobel Peace Laureate?

Genghis Khan endorses George W. Bush as a Nobel Peace Laureate?

Donald Trump endorses Whomever as Hair Stylist of the Year?

Finally, here’s Jay Leno’s comment on a recent discovery of a skull that had both Neanderthal and human traits:

“Scientists believe this could be the oldest Oakland Raiders fan.”

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…