Sports Notes, 7/30/07

OK, so it’s a day late. Still, three postings last week and now a notes column? It’s almost like I’m running a blog or something …

-- To all you White Sox fans out there, hope you enjoyed Steve Stone.

-- It would be easy to pick on Lance Briggs, who just signed a one-year, $7.2 million contract for recanting on his pledge not to play for the Bears this year. Easy, but shortsighted -- the fact of the matter is, Briggs saved some face with the Bears’ concession not to use to franchise tag that so offended him when the deal is up. This is a team that went to the Super Bowl last year and could easily dominate the weak NFC again this season; it looks like maybe Lovie Smith is a bit too smart to let an important piece of the puzzle just walk away.

-- That said, it’s also fun to pick on Lance Briggs, so here goes: Nyahh, nyahh, look who came crawling back!

-- By picking up the Bills’ Darwin Walker to replace Tank Johnson, now the Bears are signing other people’s disgruntled holdouts too!

-- It doesn’t matter how bad they are, it’s always fun to beat the guys in the Cardinals uniforms. Especially when the Brewers can’t.

-- What a shame that the Sox had to dump Tadhito Iguchi. With him on the team, they definitely would have finished the season fewer than 20 games below .500.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Barry, Uh ...

So I went 90 miles north on Saturday to watch the Brewers host the Giants, courtesy of my good friend Jeff Ponczak. Toward the end of the game, while listening to the sellout crowd roundly boo Barry Bounds for the fourth time, Ponz commented that the only real reason he doesn’t want to see Bonds break the all-time home run record is that Bonds is such a prick.

I told him I couldn’t agree more. People complain that Bonds’ record will be tainted because of his well-documented steroid use, and that’s true, but it’s really just convenient ammunition. Consider what relatively little outcry there would have been if Sammy Sosa had passed Henry Aaron’s sacred milestone of 755. Even if Mark McGuire, a world-class asshole in his own right, had broken the record, there would be some dismay but nothing like the vociferous opposition we’re seeing with Bonds.

Me personally, I’ve been secretly hoping that someone would kinda-sorta “accidentally” hit Bonds in the hand with a pitch, breaking his hand and ending his season – and, effectively, his career. You know, kind of like an unintentional intentional walk, except that this would be an unintentional intentional way of telling Bonds that there’s nobody left in the entire league who wants him around, much like the time in high school when I tried to join a pickup basketball game at the gym, and when my turn came to shoot a free throw to decide teams, another eight balls came flying out of the line behind me to knock mine out of the air. But it’s my problem, and I’ll deal with it.

Now, where were we? Oh yes … breaking Barry Bonds’ hand …

As much as it would be fitting for Bonds to be unceremoniously removed from the equation for the way he’s shit all over baseball, it also occurred to me that it would be strangely fitting for him to have broken the record in Milwaukee, for the way Bud Selig has shit all over baseball. Of course, that’s not going to happen, either.

So Bonds will go back to San Francisco, he’ll break the home run in front of a friendly crowd (or at least a tepid crowd, which is still better than he could hope for anywhere else), and what remains of pro sports’ respectability will erode a little bit further. Maybe it’s time I should just stop watching.

Except that the Cubs are finally getting hot …

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Due Process

There’s a rumor out there that there’s still a chance Barry Bonds could get indicted, convicted, thrown in jail and have his career ended. This is a nice little dream, but there’s two problems: It’s really nothing more than a rumor, and there’s no way it could happen before Bonds breaks Henry Aaron’s record of 755 career home runs.

But here’s the thing: Baseball doesn’t have to wait.

Due process and the presumption of innocence is for a courtroom. If a professional sport wants to set its own standards of how much evidence is necessary before punitive action is taken, it’s free to do so. For example:

* The NFL can suspend, or even ban, Michael Vick based on its own investigation of dog-fighting on his property, even if he’s never convicted or indicted of a crime. And by the way, is Vick an insomniac who spends his long lonely nights thinking up new and unique ways to get into trouble? Because that’s about the only thing that would make his life make sense.

* The Bears can cut Tank Johnson for being arrested at 3 a.m. for driving with traces of alcohol in his system, even if he’s below the legal limit. (You see? There really is a Chicago connection to all of this.) To be certain, Tank got a bad break on the specific inicdent that preceded his firing, but the string of events that led to this one being a fireable offense were entirely his own fault.

* The NBA could have fired referee Tim Donaghy, if he hadn’t resigned, for gambling. They also could have fired him for fixing a game, but I want to be crystal-clear here that any athlete or official can be fired merely for gambling on any sport. This one gets its own entry, seen below.

* The NFL can suspend Pac-Man Jones for repeatedly being in the middle of gunfights outside of strip clubs, even if he’s not pulling the trigger. (Or firing his gun, as it were.)

* Major League Baseball can and should ban Scott Olsen, for his body of work.

* Duke can drop its lacrosse team merely for having a party with strippers, which is entirely legal. This one’s a little tricky, because if you started dropping sports teams for hiring strippers you would have to drop every sports team at every Division I college, but you get the point.

And if you don’t, the point is this: Nobody has a birthright to play professional sports. Your employer and mine can put restrictions on us allowing them to fire us for doing things that are bad for business, even if those things aren’t illegal. Pro sports leagues have the same leeway, and because of their visibility, sometimes that means really stringent restrictions.

If the NFL or any other sports league doesn’t want it players associating with gamblers, gangsters, gun runners, drug runners, drug addicts, hookers, strippers, shysters, women of ill repute or crooked real-estate developers, that’s the NFL’s call. And if an athlete doesn’t like it, they always have the option of shoveling shit for 8 bucks an hour like the rest of us.

Payback is a Bitch

Seems like I’m talking a lot about the vices in sports these days, but seeing as how I understand gambling on a deep and personal level, I can shed some light on the Tim Donaghy situation for you.

Let’s say you’re an NBA referee, and like most people, you like to bet on sports. You could fly to Vegas or bet online, but you know some people who are willing to book your bets and will let you settle up after you’ve played for a while.

You bet on several sports and eventually find yourself down $5,000. Problem is, you’ve already overextended yourself to buy a nice house, next to a country club, in a good school district for your daughter, filled with nice things for your wife and adorned with a BMW in the driveway for yourself. You don’t have an extra $5,000 lying around.

Your friends need to make their money one way or another. But there’s a solution. If you fix a game so that they win more than $5,000, they’ll call it even.

This is called the “payback” fix, and any time any athlete or official in any sport bets on any other sport, he or she makes himself or herself vulnerable to it. This is why no athlete or official can be allowed to bet on any sport.

This affects more than the gamblers. Pro sports is a multi-billion-dollar business, and its credibility rests entirely and solely on the notion that all participants are trying to determine the outcome on the best efforts of the players. This is what jabberjocks mean when they refer to “the integrity of the game.” For the survival of the sport, any actions contrary to that integrity must be dealt with swiftly and severely.