A Moment Of Perspective

With all that has gone on recently in sports, I'd like to pause to reflect upon something truly nice:

Tony Gwynn is a Hall-Of-Famer.

Those words bear repeating.

Tony Gwynn is a Hall-Of-Famer.

As the old saying goes, he may not be in a class by himself, but it doesn't take long to call roll.

To wit:

Cobb.

Williams.

Oliva.

Carew.

Rose.

Boggs.

Gwynn.

That's about it.

This guy could do the most difficult thing in sports better than 99% of anyone who has ever been paid to do it, and he did it with a genuine smile on his face.

Gwynn proved that one doesn't have to be some chemically-enhanced hulk to hit a baseball; in fact, for most of his career, he looked like some beer league softball guy, or some throwback from the Seventies, before players fell in love with the weight room and forgot about the batting cage.

He looked like us.

His waist expanded in accordance with his age, just like us mortals. He got older, he got a little...rounder.

Just like us.

But a bulging waistline did not detract from the discipline that made him an all-time great. He saw the ball. He kept his weight back and his hands high. He took what the pitcher gave him and he hit the ball where someone was not standing.

He did that 3,141 times, for a lifetime batting average of .338.

Were a man to hit .338 for a season, he would stand to make millions.

Gwynn just like wearing out pitchers because he could.

Consider: Against Greg Maddux, arguably the greatest pitcher of his era (and a guy who is still pretty darned effective), Gwynn hit .429 for his career.

That bears repeating: Gwynn hit .429 against a pitcher with four consecutive Cy Young awards and 340 (and counting) career victories.

See, he didn't just wear out roster fodder like Zachary Taylor. He wore all of 'em out.

He was perhaps the one man who could argue with Ted Williams about hitting that Ted Williams would listen to and not dismiss outright...and that list is even shorter than the one I posted above. He also respected Ted Williams so much that, as a veteran of double-digit seasons, he took Williams' advice and changed his stroke on inside pitches...and posted his career high in home runs (17).

He coaches baseball for his alma mater, San Diego State, not because he needs the money, but because he gets to pass on the encyclopedic knowledge of hitting that he has gained from a lifetime of spanking the ball the other way.

Tony Gwynn is a Hall-Of-Famer.

Of course he is.

The Coriolis Effect

For those of us who are less than scientifically-inclined, the Coriolis effect has nothing to do with which direction something circles the drain.

It has everything to do with observation.

Quoting Wikipedia, the Coriolis effect (named for Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis) is the apparent deflection of objects from a straight path if the objects are viewed from a rotating frame of reference.

The key word in this definition is the word "apparent."

In other words, an object may appear to be moving in a curved path, when it is actually moving in a straight path. It is the observer's point of view that makes it appear to be moving in a curve, because that observer is not standing still, but on a rotating frame of reference.

Imagine standing on the edge of a rotating merry-go-round and watching a car drive past. The car would appear to curve either away or toward you, depending on the spin, but it is actually following a straight path.

Why all the science?

It helps to sort out the Michael Vick situation.

If one is standing on the edge of the rotating coverage of the Vick fiasco, any number of CSI/Law & Order forensic possibilities for his acquittal offer themselves. There's nothing in the evidence that directly connects him to the events described in the federal indictment. The evidence is flawed somehow. The evidentiary chain has been somehow compromised. The prosecutor wants to run for president.

If we were standing still, we'd see the truth: Michael Vick is going to jail.

Straight to jail.

As if it weren't bad enough that his case is federal (read: 95% conviction rate, pelts on the wall include Al Capone and John Gotti), now comes news that one of his co-defendants has entered a plea agreement.

That's right, Tony Taylor, one of the Canine Quartet, has flipped and is now doing his finest Luther Vandross impression for the prosecution in return for what will certainly be a drastically-reduced sentence...possibilities at this point might even include the fact that Taylor never sees a minute of penitentiary time in return for his aid.

Now, as before, the Coriolis effect threatens to skew our perspective. Let's stand still and logically figure out what this means.

In large, bold print, it means that Mike Vick does a perp walk sometime within the next 12 months. It means that his football career is at least in jeopardy, if not over; remember, Jamal Lewis did some prison time recently and was still able to find gainful employment in the NFL, but Lewis only did months...Vick is in line for years. It means that whatever he hasn't spent on his defense will be taken back by the Atlanta Falcons for breach of contract.

It means that he'd better get his resume updated.

Taylor flipping for the feds is HUUUUGE. The prosecutor can easily prove a relationship with the defendants that goes back for years, which will counteract any attempt by the defense to portray Taylor as a former felon willing to say anything to get leniency. Taylor will know names, dates, and amounts. Taylor will know exactly who did what, and when, and for how much, and where. And when Taylor's testimony connects the dots provided by the other unnamed witnesses, all that will be left will be the determination of Vick's federal sentence.

But, as Ice Cube once famously said, it ain't over.

Once Vick gets his federal conviction, the State of Virginia will move in and hammer him with much more serious charges. "Under Virginia law, the intentional killing of an animal is a Class 6 felony, which carries a sentence of one to five years, per count. For killing eight dogs, that's a potential sentence of anywhere from eight to 40 years." (thanks, http://profootballtalk.com)

The only question after that is whether Vick's sentences are concurrent (at the same time) or consecutive (one to be served at the completion of another).

Remember, because of the Internet and 24-hour news reporting, it is only our rotating perspective that makes Vick's case seem to curve.

Stand still, and you will see him heading straight for a jail cell.

A Black Thang

Paraphrasing Bernie Mac, I'm only going to say what you were thinking.

In fact, because of some long-overdue rethinking the whole skin color thingy, I'm going to say some things that some of you can't say without getting called a racist.

If my skin is my sin, then that same pigment is also my privilege.

Michael Vick is guilty as hell, and anyone who supports him is a damn fool.

I don't want to hear anything about due process or "innocent until proven guilty," because I'm not in a courtroom. I'm not an officer of the court. I'm not an attorney. I'm not a juror.

I'm just a man who can read. In fact, I could and did read all 83 paragraphs in the 18-page federal indictment against Michael Vick.

I'm sorry...wait a minute, no, as a matter of fact, I'm not: given what we already know to be irrefutably true of Michael Vick, why is it that I could read that indictment and be truly, utterly horrified...but not surprised?

Not in the least?

Maybe it was the water bottle incident. You remember, the one where he was carrying a water bottle with a secret compartment. See, the whole point of SECRET compartments is that they are not meant to be found, because they are HIDING something.

If your skin is the same color as mine, I don't want to hear a damn thing about "all them rich dudes got secret stuff, why they pickin' on my mans?" It doesn't matter if Donald Trump smokes more chronic than Snoop Dogg at Freaknik, what he's NOT going to do is carry it with him in a secret comparment in his water bottle.

See, this is what those of us who were raised better would call "ghetto thinking"...if we're being polite. If we aren't being polite, we'd rightly call it "stupid as hell," which, ironically, characterizes most "ghetto thinking."

Yes, Michael Vick was rich. Richer than any of us will ever hope to be. And still, he chose to "keep it real" and do some ghetto-a** stuff with his millions. Like carry a water bottle with a secret compartment.

Like sneak into different health clinics under the nom-de-plume "Ron Mexico," to get treatment for herpes (!!), the gift that keeps on giving, because he was hotter than a stereo at the swap meet and burning every woman he'd slept with.

Like flip off the hometown fans with both hands in a fit of pique reserved for most two-year-olds...and, amazingly enough, some of y'all are stupid enough to continue to support him.

The man makes millions of YOUR dollars, flips YOU off, and you are in front of the federal courthouse supporting him?

This is ghetto as hell.

Again, he is guilty. And you know it. Just like we all know O.J. did it.

To this day, I'm sick of hearing the following rationalization: "Well, he made the system work for him."

Did he?

What, exactly, has his acquittal gotten for him? Besides the scorn of the people shouting most vociferously for his freedom?

Tell me, my dusky-hued companion, what self-respecting black man would have O.J. to a barbecue?

We all know that the right thing was not done then.

The good news for the rest of us is that the Feds also know that the right thing wasn't done then. They are not going to make the same mistakes that the L.A. prosecution team made. They are going to nail Michael Vick's sorry hide to a barn door. And they should.

See, what "streets has spoken" doesn't realize is that the Feds SHOULD nail Michael Vick's sorry hide to a barn door. "Streets has spoken" thinks that the Feds are only going after Vick because he is black and rich.

Funny, Michael Jordan is at least as black as Michael Vick, and easily richer, but the Feds weren't hauling him into court on an indictment for dog-fighting.

Even funnier, Oprah Winfrey is at least as black as both Jordan and Vick, and easily richer than both of them combined, and she hasn't been repeatedly named in any 18-page federal indictments recently.

Call me crazy, call me a Tom, call me a sell-out white wannabe house nigger, call me whatever you want, but I'm guessing that the Feds are going after Michael Vick because they have reasonable cause to believe that he broke the law.

You might remember the law. It's that thing that protects things like little kids, old people, and dogs.

I mean, damn. A dog can't speak for itself. A dog can't say, "You know what? I really don't want to have sex with that other dog right now."

That's why Vick and his boys had rape stands...to help the unwilling female submit.

Seems to me that something like this might have happened before.

Oh. Wait. That's right.

It was during slavery, when black women were forced against their will to submit to whatever was asked of them.

Sometimes it was to have sex with a slave from another plantation. Sometimes it was with the master himself, or whomever he decided to give her to.

And you fools are supporting him because he hit the same genetic lottery that you hit.

And I will call you fools, because I've read opinions from black folk that actually believe that all of it, every piece of evidence, right down to the 54 dogs taken from his property and the 17 dog carcasses found on that same property, all of it was fabricated. Made up. That Good Ol' Herpes-Having Mike Vick with the Special Water Bottle and the Magical Flip-Off Hands was being framed by the Feds because they couldn't stand to see a black man rich and happy.

If it takes electrocuting, shooting, hanging, drowning, and slamming a dog's body into the ground to make a black man happy, count me among those signing up for whatever Michael Jackson had done to him.

If that's what it means to be black, to support an evil man only because his skin color is the same as yours and not to judge him by the content of his character (like Dr. King once said...you remember Dr. King; he's that fat-headed black man on the wall right next to Malcolm X and the Black Jesus), then I'd rather be anything else.

I'll have no truck with anyone who supports Michael Vick, even if he gets acquitted.

Like my father, a black man before me, once said, "Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining."

This Just In...

...NBA games are fixed.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, concrete evidence of the fixing of NBA games has finally come to light in the form of 13-year veteran referee Tim Donaghy.

Donaghy's indictment by the feds for fixing games and point-shaving now means that all three major sports in the U.S. are facing major federal criminal indictments, but this is not to digress. It is entirely possible that this story will get lost in the jet wash that is the Michael Vick disaster in Atlanta and the Bonds nightmare in San Francisco.

In fact, this could be the biggest sports story of the last 100 years.

Think about it: Bonds' ruthless (pun intended) assault on Hank Aaron's home run record will not truly sully baseball or Aaron as much as it will confirm Bonds' own villainy. The 1919 Chicago White Sox scandal was much more damaging to the credibility of baseball than steroids will ever be, because if steroids have any saving grace at all, it is that they allow a player to compete at a level beyond his natural state. In other words, it may seem relative, but it is easier to forgive a man for trying to hit home runs than it is to forgive a man for deliberately giving up home runs. (This, by the way, is why Pete Rose will never see the inside of the Hall of Fame without an admission ticket...his gambling directly affected the credibility of the game in a far more serious manner than Bonds' growing hat size will ever achieve.)

In the NFL, golden boy Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers, then the flagship franchise of the league, was suspended by Pete Rozelle for one year because of his own gambling entanglements.

And let us not forget that in the early days of college basketball, CCNY stood as tall a program as Kentucky or Kansas, only to be brought low by a nasty point-shaving scandal.

Now comes Tim Donaghy, a veteran referee, who admits to gambling on NBA games...including games he called.

That last bit bears repeating, because it goes to the heart of credibility: Tim Donaghy bet money on games he could directly affect.

So, for example, let's say he's down a couple grand to the local leg-breaker. He moves his debt to a game he's working, throws some cash in on top, checks the spread, and takes matters into his own hands. If he has the underdog covering the spread, and the favorite gets a little momentum, a quick whistle for traveling or three seconds stops the bleeding and gets the dog back into the game. The favorite has a player getting hot? Get him a couple of quick fouls and get him out of the game. The dog has a guy that can score? Protect him like he was Michael Jordan; anything within six inches of his person puts him on the free throw line. Someone doesn't like a call? Warn 'em, then tee 'em up.

And, because he's a veteran who understands the ebb and flow of a basketball game, he doesn't have to do it all the time; no more than once or twice a quarter, depending on the situation. By game's end, the favorite still won; more importantly, the underdog covered (thanks to his intervention), and he has cleared his debt to the bookie.

Sound implausible?

Not to me, either.

All of us have watched games where the tide inexplicably turns, almost as if it were being, well, manipulated. How many times have I seen a back-breaking three-pointer waived off because there was an offensive foul called under the basket? How many times have I seen the guy that the offense really ran through pick up two quick fouls and land on the bench? If you're a Lakers fan, how many times have you seen Luke Walton catch a couple of touch fouls and take the Lakers offensive continuity with him to the bench? If you're a Pistons fan, how many times do you have to watch Chauncey Billups get whistled in questionable situations before you suspect that the fix is in?

I can go on and on, but the point is clear: how can we trust a game that is rigged?

Say what you will about Bonds, but I promise you that no one is grooving him pitches, especially now. More to the point, nothing about steroids suggests that they will make a guy (or a team) tank that should have won.

Say what you will about Vick, but his problems are his own and his team's. As vile as dogfighting is, it speaks more to personal character than to on-field competition.

But when referees charged with our trust abuse that trust for their own personal ends, all credibility is lost.

And nowhere does NBA credibility come into question more than in the playoffs.

Tim Donaghy was on the court for that controversial Game 3 between San Antonio and Phoenix in this year's playoffs. Without reviewing every call in every situation in that game, I realize that my evidence is circumstantial at best...but then, had Phoenix won that game, it would have turned the tide of the entire series.

But it's tough to win when Amare Stoudemire, the only post player in the Western Conference who can score on Tim Duncan at will, suddenly ends up on the bench in foul trouble...

And the worst part is yet to come. Donaghy, already having received death threats, has begun his series of arias for federal investigators to ponder, and you can make book that names will be named. Let's not forget that NBA officials are hardly paragons of virtue in the first place, having been busted for changing league-paid first-class plane tickets into coach seats and pocketing the rather significant difference...how many of these saints do you suppose might like to lay a couple of grips on a spread that's paying 2:1?

The unraveling of the sweater has officially begun for the NBA, and I'm scared to think of where it might end...

Piling On

Trust Michael Vick to take all the shine off Posh and Becks' W cover...

In arenas across the country, music is used as a way to fire up the home folks and poke fun at the visitors. In Michael Vick's case, it is nearly scripture that "Who Let The Dogs Out" will be played ad nauseam, ad infinitum.

This cannot be.

Thus, I have taken it upon myself to suggest songs that any stadium deejay can play when he finally gets sick of The Baha Men. They are, from number 10 to number 1:

10. Craven Choke Puppy, Bob Marley
9. Puppy Love, Paul Anka
8. Too Many Puppies, Primus
7. Big Dog Daddy, Toby Keith
6. Dirty Old Egg-Suckin' Dog, Johnny Cash
5. Dog Eat Dog, AC/DC
4. Hair Of The Dog, Nazareth
3. Black Dog, Led Zeppelin
2. Hound Dog, Elvis Presley
1. Atomic Dog, George Clinton

I look forward to your suggestions as well.

Boy, nothing like having a little insurance like Matt Schaub on your bench right about now, eh?

Oh, that's riiiight...back in April, right around the time Ookie and the Three Idiots were killing dogs in ways straight out of Eli Roth's Torture Porn For Dummies, the Falcons traded Schaub to Houston for...what, exactly? I don't recall, and I can't hear the answer over the belly-laughing coming from Houston...

Say this much for Joey Harrington: after leaving Detroit, he might have found in Atlanta the only place where his meager skills are not merely tolerated, but desired...

And that will be Joey Ballgame lining up under center with the first team on July 26, when the Falcons training camp opens, because the other guy will be wearing a suit in a federal courthouse on that same day...

It sez so right here that Falcons owner Arthur Blank was busy figuring out if he could get some of that bonus money he spent on Vick when he was shoved aside by a fed named RICO...

This just in from the Adding Insult To Injury Department: Al Sharpton (!!) has publicly denounced another black man.

That's right, he and Russell Simmons have written a letter condemning Vick's actions and demanding action from sponsors of the NFL.

That should tell anyone with a pulse how bad it really is for Michael Vick, because I'm pretty sure that I was watching Jeopardy! when I learned that Al Sharpton throwing another brotha under the bus was one of the signs of the Apocalypse...

(I'll take Rectal/Cranial Inversion for $200, Alex.)

(Name the year that Michael Vick was drafted number one overall into the National Football League.)

(2001.)

(Correct. Go!)

(Rectal/Cranial for $400, please.)

(Name the year that Michael Vick founded and funded Bad Newz Kennels.)

(2001.)

(Correct again. Make a selection.)

(I've gotta go with Rectal/Cranial Inversion for $600.)

(How unlikely is it that Michael Vick was never at the property in Surry County, Virginia?)

(About as unlikely as you not showing off your superior pronunciation of French, Alex.)

(Tre magnifique! Select again.)

(Rectal/Cranial for $800.)

(Where is Michael Vick's cousin, Davon Boddie, the idiot who lived in the house?)

(Playing solitaire with The Eraser and warming up his singing voice.)

(Right! And you look like you're about to run the category...?)

(I'll take Rectal/Cranial Inversion for $1000.)

(You've hit the Daily Double. How much would you like to wager?)

($137 million, Alex, the whole pile.)

(Alright, here's your question: how stupid would you have to be to forfeit millions of dollars in NFL paychecks and endorsement money for the sake of torturing and killing helpless animals?)

(Pretty f**king stupid, Alex.)

(That's correct, and you have control of the board.)

And I'm just getting warmed up...

Hatin' On Mike

To anyone who says that the federal indictment of Michael Vick and three other idiots is being driven primarily (or even solely) by race:

SHUT THE HELL UP.

At some point, this has GOT to stop being about 400+ years of injustice (thanks, Chuck D.) and about one individual making choices that came back to bite him in the rear end (pun intended).

However, I will say that race will figure largely in his trial...at least, it will if Vick's lawyer has an ounce of sense in his head. Right now, as I speak, Vick's mouthpiece is reading the O.J. Defense Playbook written by the late Johnny Cochran (and there is no truth to the rumor that Satan now has Cochran on retainer...but I digress).

If Vick's lawyer didn't just fall off the law school truck yesterday, he is going to do his level best to confuse, obfuscate, and otherwise cloud the issue with racial overtones.

If there's a problem here, it's only in how this will play out in the public arena. I have a word which may be appropriate here: ugly. This will get publicly ugly. Black men who have been unfairly harassed by police will be joined in four part harmony by white men who are guilty about all that they have (never mind that 99.99% of these weepy-eyed liberal white dudes have never owned as much as a "Slave" album, let alone the genuine article), statistics both legitimate and spurious are going to be thrown about again, including that old chestnut about more black men being in prison than in college. We'll probably see our old friend Harry Edwards bemoaning the social aspects of young black men and sport. We'll definitely see Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in various capacities because the two are drawn to television cameras in much the same way that flies are drawn to feces.

Rap music will be played as background music. Pants will sag. Bling will, dare I say, bling.

And, thank goodness, none of it will matter.

At the risk of repeating myself from earlier writings, these are the feds. The feds convict 97% of the time. The feds took down The Black Hand, Tony Soprano be damned.

The feds are not going to let a jury get blinded by Vick's dark skin, or all that that skin may or may not represent in this society. They are not going to get sidetracked into defending themselves against charges of racism like the L.A.P.D. did during the O.J. Fiasco, er, Trial. (And if Johnnie Cochran is indeed on retainer for Satan, it's only because he owes Big Red a big favor for giving the world Mark "Der Fuhrer" Fuhrman, a/k/a Exhibit A in the Racist Cop Show...but I'm digressing again.) If nothing else, the O.J. Fiasco, er, Trial is practically a primer on how not to prosecute a high profile black suspect. The mistakes and missteps that the L.A.P.D. and their benighted prosecution made will not be repeated by the feds.

No, the feds are going to put the focus of the trial squarely on the victims that cannot speak for themselves: the 50+ dogs that were taken from Vick's property. They will put evidence on trial that the jurors can handle for themselves, like the rape stand, used to breed unwilling females. They will be made to understand how dogfighting really works, and what's in it for the dogs themselves.

Ultimately, the dogs only get to die, and soon if they are lucky. Otherwise, it's a life of testing, weighing, and fighting to live another day, until one day a claw slips or a grip fails to hold and it gets beaten, where it will then die at the fangs and claws of another dog...or where it may be shot, drowned, hung, electrocuted, or slammed into the ground the way that other losers at Bad Newz Kennels were.

The same black folks who were happy when Mayor Diddy Kwame Kilpatrick got re-elected in Detroit (talk about getting what you deserve...) will be the same ones raising sand about Michael Vick getting indicted, and they couldn't be more wrong.

This is not about the color of a man's skin, but the content of a man's character (thanks, Dr. King).

Michael Vick is not getting prosecuted for dark skin as much as for dark deeds.

The Complaint, Part 2

I intended to address some of the more salient points of the federal complaint filed against Bad Newz Kennels, when the feds one-upped me and indicted four individuals with regard to dog-fighting, including Michael Vick.

I have read the 18-page indictment fully. It is not a difficult read

Neither is it pretty.

The federal indictment against Vick and his cohorts at Bad Newz Kennels details in dull, bureaucratic prose the horrors of dog-fighting.

Worse, the case against Vick and his cohorts is so absurdly easy to make that only incompetence on the magnitude of Gerald Poindexter's put the issue into question in the first place.

The first piece of the puzzle is the money. None of this happens without the money man, in this case Vick. Vick provided vast sums of money for the purchase of training equipment, property, and animals in support of this venture.

And what venture are we talking about? The fighting of dogs to the death, eventually, either at the fangs and claws of the other animal or at the hands of the losing owner. An animal that failed in testing was killed, and an animal that lost a fight was also killed.

The second piece of the puzzle is the eyewitness testimony. There are four cooperating witnesses for the federal government, each of whom has provided concrete evidence to the authorities that leaves no question about Vick's personal involvement in every aspect of the dog-fighting operation.

Including the execution of dogs that failed to meet his standards for fighting.

That's right, Michael Vick did not merely put up the money to support this enterprise, which in itself would have been foul enough, nor did he merely gamble on his dogs to win, which is worse, but the blood of animals that failed to meet his testing criterion literally stains his multi-million dollar hands.

The federal indictment alleges that Vick participated in the killing of 8 dogs in April of this year, by "hanging, drowning, and and slamming at least one dog's body to the ground."

It is my sincerest hope that Michael Vick is at least suspended by NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for at least one year. It is my further sincerest hope that Vick is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, is rightfully found guilty, and is sentenced to the maximum sentence allowable under federal law.

Anyone who can hear of these things without being horrified has long since lost touch with genuine humanity, because no real man can stomach the thought of deliberately torturing animals, let alone doing it for something as base as gambling.

There is nothing to excuse here. There is nothing to explain away here. There is nothing to make excuse after excuse for here. People have been apologizing for Vick ever since his freshman year at troubled Virginia Tech. Were one to listen to the talking heads at the Worldwide Fearless Leader in Bristol, one might be amazed to find that Vick is even in trouble. Here is a problem that even a man with blazing speed can't run away from.

Thankfully, the truth has come out. Now we know exactly what kind of man Michael Vick is: the kind of man who would keep a secret compartment in a water bottle; the kind of man who would pass on an STD without informing his partner until he was forced to in a court of law; the kind of man who would derive pleasure from the death of an animal.

May he rot in a jail cell, and that right soon.

Coincidence and Baseball

I'm not a terribly old man (43), but I have been privileged to witness the fall of some significant sports hallmarks: the NFL all-time rushing mark, the NBA all-time scoring mark, the NHL all-time scoring mark, and anything belonging to Tiger Woods and scores relative to par in a major championship (not to mention the unofficial but never-to-be-duplicated Tiger Slam).

Why is it, then, that only baseball seems to suffer from such a vile cloud of infamy where its hallowed marks are concerned?

Think about it: the all-time hits mark belongs to Peter Edward Rose, a guy that most of us wouldn't want to be in the same room with...and he took it from Ty Cobb, a guy that would gleefully spike his own grandmother at second base.

Then there's the all-time home run record.

While Babe Ruth was hardly a paragon of virtue, he never broke the unwritten rules of baseball. He played hard and he lived hard and we loved him for it.

Henry Aaron, on the other hand, is everything a mother could want in a son, and a manager could want in a baseball player. While enduring segregation of the vilest sort, and living under the black shadow of death threats, like the John Henry myth from which he picked up his name, he simply picked up his hammer and went to work.

No record was won more honorably.

Which brings us to the lamentable Barry Lamar Bonds.

Up to his 35th birthday, there was no finer player in baseball, perhaps in baseball history. The numbers he put up were much like Aaron's in their metronome consistency. He'd already won three MVP awards and was suffering from Michael Jordan syndrome: sure, you're really the best player, but we really oughtta give it to some other guy.

That was then.

Now, a mammoth imposter wearing Bonds' jersey sits five home runs away from baseball's most hallowed record. Implausibly, his hat size has grown even as he has shaved his head, his jersey size has grown a mere 10 sizes since his first MVP award, and he has managed some 257 home runs since the age of 36, including a single-season record of 73.

Anyone remember Dale Murphy at 36? 2 home runs in 18 games, and none in 26 games the following season.

Mickey Mantle at 37? Retired.

To all this, add Barry Bonds' less-than-sparkling personality (somewhat south of Dave Kingman on a bad day), and we the perfect baseball storm.

Barry Bonds is at least an unrepentant narcissist, concerned only with those things that may happen to affect him on Barry-world, and dismissive of anything he deems beneath his attention...which is the rest of us.

However, given the anecdotal evidence that anyone can amass by doing a little Intergoogling, including what steroid usage will do to a person over time, it appears that Barry Bonds is also at least a criminal (as steroids are still against the law)...and he's about to break the all-time home run record belonging to a man whose class and reputation is beyond impeachment.

I guess my question is this: given that the all-time record holders in the other sports also seem to be exemplary characters in their private lives as well as their public lives, why is it that baseball seems to suffer from idiots at the top of their all-time charts?

No one has accused Dan Marino of anything more heinous than not winning a Super Bowl over his Hall-Of-Fame career, and certainly nothing since. Walter Payton lived and died with his reputation as a man, a father, and a hell of a football player intact. Emmitt Smith remains one of the few Cowboys of the Jimmie Johnson era whose face has not shown up on a police blotter. Wayne Gretzky has cast the kind of glare over his sport that only Tiger Woods has managed to duplicate, and neither of them has been guilty of anything but wanting to win all the time. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar remains the real pillar of the NBA, combining longevity with effectiveness in a way that escaped Wilt Chamberlain (due largely to Chamberlain's rather Ruthian excesses.)

Maybe I've answered my own question. Maybe these things are cyclical. After all, the previous all-time NFL rushing leader, Jim Brown, is a notorious woman beater, despite all of his community efforts. We've already mentioned Babe Ruth. Wilt Chamberlain was at least the narcissist that Barry Bonds currently is, even if Bonds hasn't quite slept with 10,000 women yet. Ty Cobb probably wasn't a serial murderer only because baseball payed better. Steve Carlton was a Fruit Loop escaped from the cereal box.

At any rate, here's hoping that Ichiro and A-Rod play for another twenty years...

The Complaint, Part 1

A federal complaint was recently filed in the government's ongoing investigation into Michael Vick's alleged malfeasance. (For the curious, you can download the PDF here: http://media.hamptonroads.com/media/content/pilotonline
/2007/07/affidavit070207.pdf (remember to edit out the unnecessary spaces or you'll get bupkiss)

I have posted a link to the document, not only in the interest of full disclosure, but so that anyone who might disagree with me can see where I will make the following observations. To wit:

1. I am reminded once again that we are now dealing with the Feds, a/k/a The Varsity. These are the guys that got Al Capone, Sammy The Bull, and The Teflon Don his own self, John Gotti. Their conduct with respect to this investigation stands in sharp relief against the conduct of the alleged prosecutor of Surry County, Virginia, one Gerald Poindexter. For all of Poindexter's doublespeak, bumbling, foot-dragging, and downright obstruction of justice, this case was too big to let rot on the vine, as it is becoming increasingly clear he hoped would happen. Did this backwoods blowhard actually believe that we would just forget about 50-something dogs in various conditions being taken from the house of a star NFL quarterback?

2. For those who are concerned that Michael Vick might beat the rap, I offer the following responses.

First, if he escapes this mess without so much as incurring a single charge, to say nothing of eventual acquittals in the event of charges being filed, Vick automatically qualifies for sainthood because he will have pulled off three miracles for the price of one: he will have proven that he didn't support the operation financially, that he had absolutely no idea that such an operation was occurring on his property, and that he was never there in the first place. (Somewhere, St. Peter is getting a little nervous about Vick as a future bunkmate because he knows that the other side has all the good lawyers...)

It sez so right here that even the late, great Johnny Cochran couldn't help Vick pull off a hat trick of that magnitude...but, just for the sake of the argument, let's assume he does. Do you really believe that anyone with more than a milligram of sense will trust Ron Mexico again? What sponsor would commit brand suicide by putting Vick's face on their product after this? What right-thinking person (which, by definition, excludes any person answering to the name "Falcons fan") could look at him and say that all has been forgotten?

Second, I would remind you that these are the Feds we are dealing with, not Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane and Flash. This document is but the first of many that will be filed in federal court, all stating things that will rightly horrify us in the clear and dull prose of the federal bureaucrat. These guys know how to dot the i's and cross the t's, how to properly document a chain of evidence, how to flip a witness, basically, how to make a case. The band is warming up as we speak, and eventually Michael Vick will have to face the music, all stalling attempts by his lawyers to the contrary.

Speaking of lawyers, ProFootballTalk.com (must-reading for the football fan) noted that Vick's attorney was present when the feds took the second lot of dog carcasses from the property on Moonlight Road. While I agree with the guys at ProFootballTalk (their take is simple: why would a guy who has nothing to hide have his attorney present at the proceedings?), I might be able to add one more unpleasant thought for the Vick defenders to mull over: the attorney was there because the feds told him that they believed that they had evidence linking Vick to the dogfighting, and Vick's attorney would have to be noticed up and given an opportunity to examine the evidence against his client before it could be presented in trial. I don't know whether it is procedurally common for the attorney of a "person of interest" to be present during a federal evidentiary investigation (after all, Vick isn't a defendant...yet...), but it says to me that the Feds are acting like a guy in Texas hold 'em poker holding pocket aces when the last two come up on the flop. In other words, the presence of Vick's attorney might actually speed the case to a conclusion rather than drag it out, because Vick's attorney might become convinced of the inevitability of conviction if that evidence sees the light of day. Most likely, he was there hoping that some Gomer would foul up the chain of evidence in his presence...but these are the Feds, not Wojo and Fish from Barney Miller.

The Feds will get their man. It's only a matter of time now.

Raising A Toast

Here's how you know if you like a guy: if Jim Lampley says he's leaving CBS, no one would shed a tear. If Bryant Gumbel says he's leaving HBO, no one would notice. If Bob Costas says he's leaving, period, we might take the day off work to celebrate.

But Dan Patrick is leaving ESPN.

Dammit.

Back before the Worldwide Fearless Leader created an empire upon which the sun never sets, ESPN was entirely the domain of cable sports junkies like me who set our watches by SportCenter. These guys weren't sexy. They looked like us. (Seriously, Chris Berman and Charley Steiner still look like us, bless 'em...) They dressed like us: badly. Better than that, they talked like we wanted to talk. They said the cool little stuff that brought us one step closer to the games we loved to watch.

They clued us in on real sports jargon, not the crap we used to hear and repeat on barstools. For example, unless you played competitive baseball at a high level, you didn't know that the baseball player's preferred term for great hitting was "raking." You didn't know that the football player's preferred term for a concussion was not "getting his bell rung," but "getting his eggs scrambled." You didn't know that basketball players, referring to a great leaper, said that he had "bunnies."

Thanks to ESPN, we know all that and more.

Then there came a cultural revolution. The Powers that Be'ed put Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann together for the 6:00 p.m. SportsCenter broadcast.

You remember: the one and only Big Show.

Just as there can only be one true Dream Team of Olympic basketball competition, comprised of only Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Larry Bird (among others), there can only be one Big Show, and that was Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann.

Everything before the Big Show was like silent films before talkies, or black and white television before color, or rabbit ears before cable, or anything before the Internet.

Everything since has been paler imitation on top of wholehearted thievery, from the increasingly incomprehensible Stuart Scott to any number of smarmy idiots looking to pad their resume by wearing an ESPN blazer before standing in line to shine Al Michaels' shoes at a network.

Chris Berman, noted on Pro Football Talk.com as one of the faces on ESPN's Mount Rushmore, probably saw this coming a long time ago and gratefully exiled himself to baseball broadcasts and NFL pre-game shows. Patrick, on the other hand, has continued to shine even as lesser talent occupied Olbermann's old chair. But when the two of them were together and live, well, it was must-see television.

These guys were the Rowan & Martin of sports broadcasting (ask yer dad or Google 'em, junior), and every bit as culturally relevant. Their catchphrases got into the public consciousness faster than a sexually-transmitted disease, and they still come to mind easily: "en fuego," "it's deep, and I don't think it's playable," the understated and ultra-cool "gone" in response to some mammoth home run, and my personal favorites, "so-and-so is listed as day-to-day, but then, aren't we all?" and "for those of you scoring at home, congratulations."

But all good things must come to an end. The Beatles broke up. Gunsmoke went off the air. Michael Jackson's weirdness finally overtook his talent. And Keith Olbermann thought that he was John Lennon to Patrick's Paul McCartney, when, in fact, he was only George Harrison at best. He left for the hinterlands of cable-access programming, only recently resurfacing on Dan Patrick's national radio program, kinda like those friendly get-togethers that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page have on stage occasionally to kick out some of the old jams and remember how they used to own the world...

...except that it was Olbermann reliving past glories.

Dan Patrick stands atop his profession in a manner unlike any of his aforementioned peers Lampley, Gumbel (hell, either of 'em), or Costas could ever hope to.

The difference is that we genuinely LIKE Dan Patrick, and so do the athletes that he has had the privilege to cover. Who else would even think of bearding Michael Jordan during an NBA Finals the way that Patrick did, or busting Tiger Woods' icy chops during a Masters?

Dan Patrick could do it, because he was genuine in a way that those other guys aren't. Patrick has a palpable passion for sports that bleeds through the television screen to the sports fan. Consider how he has used his position to go after idiots like Bud Selig, or any number of miscreants on his radio show. He is fearless in what he believes about the purity of competition, and this is what the average guy respects.

Dan Patrick gets it.

And now he's hanging up his spurs.

Let's face it: ESPN now is not what it was back in the '80s and early '90s. Back then, ESPN was the outsider gleefully sticking it to The Man. Now, ESPN is The Man.

Maybe Dan Patrick has had a flashback to his maverick Big Show days, and hopes to recreate that with a nationally-syndicated talk radio show, where he can gleefully tilt away at all the windmills that the Worldwide Fearless Leader won't let him attack. Maybe there's more money somewhere else...although it's hard to believe that ESPN wouldn't match whatever offer was out there to keep Patrick in Bristol.

There are reasons for his departure, and, whatever they are, they don't matter because one of the guys who made ESPN cool in the first stinkin' place is leaving.

While I am obviously sad in a very selfish way, I wish him nothing but the best in his future endeavors, and here's sincerely hoping that he gets his nationally-syndicated radio program. (What the hell am I thinking? OF COURSE he gets his radio program...I'm hoping that that is what he wants to do, and that he wants to do it SOON!)

Dan Patrick.

Gone.