MATT TAIBBI

Bad idea jeans

MATT TAIBBI — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:10:18 GMT

Sports blotter: "You’re looking at some years, son" edition

THE NOT-SO-GREAT HEIST: Charleston Southern University football teammates Tyrone Lattimore, Zachery Hillery, Ronald Jay Baldner, and Samual Baptiste teamed up to rob a couple — and scored $7.50 a piece for their efforts.

Bad idea, Ch. 1
Man, there must have been something in the air last week. A rash of arrests across the sports world, with most of them involving college football players. And not little piddly-widdly, penny-ante, wuss-bunny arrests, either, but serious, man-size, you’re-looking-at-some-years-son felony arrests.

The worst (and stupidest) of these might have taken place in South Carolina, where four men associated with the Charleston Southern University football team were arrested and charged with armed robbery and kidnapping. It is really difficult to describe, with accurate pathos, exactly how tragic and tragically idiotic this crime was.

Here goes: Tyrone Lattimore (the CSU starting running back), Zachery Hillery, Ronald Jay Baldner, and Samual Baptiste are all staring down the barrel of two major felonies, but get this — all they got was 30 bucks!

Apparently two of these men, armed and in masks, approached a young couple in the parking lot. The men told the male victim to get behind the wheel of the car and drive. They drove to an apartment complex, took the $30 or so both victims had, then ran away.

This ingenious crime somehow involved four men, though, which means they got to split the $30 four ways, with each man having almost enough to eat a Steak and Shake dinner. Sounds worth 10 years in prison to me.

A sad commentary on the declining level of criminal sophistication among collegiate athletes. Hell, just a few years ago in the Palmetto State, football players at the University of South Carolina were smart enough to steal whole laptops without a gun. Sixty points apiece for the goofballs.

Bad idea, Ch. 2
A former Ohio state-wrestling champion and current Miami of Ohio football player gets drunk. He’s walking around his dorm feeling frisky. He opens some chick’s door, walks into her room, lies on top of her, puts a pillow over her face. She screams. He is surprised that she is not rolling with the situation, gets up, and flees. She runs after him. He gets popped and then it’s discovered that he walked into someone else’s room the same night.

The arrest of Zachary Marshall would be Cecil “The Diesel” Collins all over again, except the Diesel was sober when he walked into women’s bedrooms. The Diesel’s thing was also watching couples sleep together, not women all by themselves. Either way, this is not a good way to further your athletic career.

Magnum farce

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:48:47 GMT

Sports blotter: "CSI: Binghamton" edition

Binghamton University hoopster Malik Alvin broke new sports-crime ground recently, stealing a 36-pack of extra-large condoms and assaulting a senior citizen in the process.

CSI: Binghamton
New can’t-miss TV show concept: find some aging washed-out actor (Danny Bonaduce? Tim Matheson?) and turn him into a sneering, Armani-clad, cool-guy chief of the Binghamton, New York, municipal crime-scene investigators’ office. And then have him exclusively investigate crimes committed by members of the Binghamton University Bearcats basketball team. It’d get great ratings and then you could spin all 300 episodes off to the A&E channel for endless syndication.

The Bearcats, as you may recall, were once the home of New York Post back-page mega-villain Miladin Kovacevic, a Serbian hoopster who got in some trouble in May for beating the shit out of one Bryan Steinhauer in a bar. Steinhauer suffered a fractured skull, a broken jaw, and two broken eye sockets, and had to be put in a medically induced coma — nice work for a basketball player who apparently couldn’t hit the side of an airplane hangar with an actual basketball.

Kovacevic initially left the country and escaped prosecution in his homeland. The Serbian consul in New York was arrested for helping Kovacevic out of the country (he was accused of forging papers for the basketball player) but has since been freed; Kovacevic, meanwhile, has been arrested in Serbia but has yet to be extradited to the US. Senators Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer will likely continue to stump loudly for said extradition, or at least until such time as the prosecution of hulking Serbian goons who put American college kids into comas becomes unpopular in the polls.

All of that, however, is academic, as Binghamton now has a second national scandal on its hands. This past week, Bearcats coach Kevin Broadus (no relation to Calvin, rap fans) was distressed to learn that 20-year-old junior guard Malik Alvin had been busted for shoplifting a 36-pack of Trojan Magnum condoms. Not only that, but as he made his getaway, Alvin knocked over a 66-year-old woman — causing a concussion. He’s been charged with shoplifting and assault.

The Binghamton program had to watch quietly as sports publications across the country laughed out loud at the incident, with Sports Illustrated even going so far as to put it in its “Dumb Arrest of the Day” section — alongside a joke which suggested that Alvin had cooked up the scheme to advertise the fact that he has a Magnum-size dong. “Good PR,” the magazine quipped.

He choked big time

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:36:12 GMT

Sports blotter: "Ugly incident" edition

He choked big time. Choked a woman, that is. University of Florida cornerback Jacques Rickerson was involved in one of the ugliest sports-crime stories of the year this past week, accused of beating, choking, and suffocating his girlfriend at her apartment complex.

Rickerson allegedly struck his girlfriend and choked her; then, when she screamed, he threw her down on a bed and put a pillow over her face. He also blocked the door when she tried to escape, and grabbed her phone when she tried to call police. Cops eventually arrived at the scene and hit Rickerson with charges of felony domestic battery by strangulation.

These stories of chick-battering by football players just get worse and worse, and, dare we say it, it might be time to start asking if both the NCAA and leagues like the NFL are complicit in the problem.

Granted, Gators coach (and good Bill Belichick buddy) Urban Meyer did the right thing this past week by removing Rickerson from the squad. The normally squeaky clean Meyer immediately bounced Rickerson, saying, "That is not what our team is about."

The question is, how long it will take for some other college to pick up a guy who had been a good player for an SEC powerhouse. The one constant in college domestic-violence cases is the second chance — if the guy can play well enough. If and when he reaches the NFL, the same guy could then get a third and fourth and fifth chance.

Watch any NFL game this week and see if you can count the number of players on both teams who've skated on a domestic-violence incident at least once. Larry Johnson of the Chiefs is actually going to be back in uniform this week after his fourth domestic-violence incident. A one-game suspension for your fourth domestic-violence case? After you got caught going all Pacman on your ex, spitting in her face in a bar?

The curious thing is that Dolphins linebacker Joey Porter recently chose to make an issue of the league's inconsistent discipline policy by wondering aloud why first-time drug offender Matt Jones is still playing after catching a coke charge. But Porter's comments were actually off-base. If anything, the NFL and the NCAA go after drug abusers harder than they do batterers. Multiple offenders on the domestic-violence score — guys like Michael Pittman — can stay in the league for years. And too many teams draft guys with domestic-violence histories and then give them second chances once they misbehave in the NFL; the Bills' Marshawn Lynch, last seen getting stifled by the Patriots defense this past Sunday in Foxboro, is a great example.

Quiet before the storm

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 22:03:42 GMT

Sports blotter: "Good call, coach" edition
There have been a lot of mysteries surrounding the Patriots in the Bill Belichick years, not surprising given the intense effort the team puts into maintaining airtight clubhouse and organizational secrecy in general.

QUIET BEFORE THE STORM: Belichick dropped cornerback Jeff Burris without explanation last year. Turns out it was a good choice.

So maybe that's why
There have been a lot of mysteries surrounding the Patriots in the Bill Belichick years, not surprising given the intense effort the team (read: Belichick himself) puts into maintaining airtight clubhouse and organizational secrecy in general. A Pats player might see his patella sheared off during a game, fly across the field, and hit a cheerleader in the mouth, and on the injury report two days later all you find out is that he's doubtful for the next game, because of "leg." Unlike other teams, where wide receivers do their complaining openly, in front of reporters, about not getting enough touches, on the Patriots all the idiotic in-house stuff happens in a way that passes mostly undetected.

Thus, we never really knew what Hakim Akbar did to piss off Belichick, never found out what Kyle Brady did (if he did anything at all), never learned the full story on guys like Steve Martin, Jonathan Sullivan, Fernando Bryant, Leonard Myers, and others who went the revolving-door route on the roster. Only occasionally, like when Pepper Johnson decides to write a book, or when some news report trickles out long after the fact, do we get some hint as to why this or that player didn't cut it in Pats-land.

Example: Jeff Burris. Anyone remember Jeff Burris? He was once a starting cornerback for the Colts, back in the days when "starting cornerback for the Colts" was a synonym for words like "consistently ineffective" and "posterized" and "total pussy." This was a while ago, back in the pre-Marlin Jackson, pre-Kelvin Hayden days. Burris left the Colts in 2001, played for the Bengals for a while, and then — this was after the Pats' most recent Super Bowl win — Belichick managed to get Burris to sign a one-year deal for less than a million bucks. It was considered something of a coup around here. We thought we had another bargain-basement pickup on our hands.

Then a funny thing happened: Burris didn't show up for training camp, and was quietly released. Nobody knew what happened.

Well, last week we got a little peek into the private life of Burris. He was busted for a very odd DUI in Carmel, Indiana — caught driving not only drunk but backward. . . not to mention west in an eastbound lane. This is a bad-driving trifecta perhaps never observed before, even among pro athletes: driving drunk, backward, and in the wrong direction. At the same time.

BBs and b-balls

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:13:57 GMT

Sports blotter: "Inducing panic" edition
A few years ago, it looked like college athletes shooting strangers with BB guns was going to be the boutique sports offense of the 21st century.

Air power
A few years ago, it looked like college athletes shooting strangers with BB guns was going to be the boutique sports offense of the 21st century. We had a rash of interesting cases. Remember Adam Gourley? No? He’s the Oklahoma State offensive lineman who sat in his dorm-room window popping passers-by with a BB rifle. Or how about that case involving the Rider University baseball team, when a player named James Kennedy pulled a BB rifle on a pizza-delivery chick? Or how about Winston Justice — yes, that same Winston Justice now playing tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles — who, four years back, pulled a pellet gun on a student in a parking structure on the USC campus?

There were more. Marsalous Johnson, a defensive back for the Tennessee Volunteers, was involved in one of the more bizarre cases of 2006 when he waved a pellet gun out the window of a speeding car at an off-duty Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officer (Johnson was eventually found not guilty). Then there was onetime Super Bowl hero Dwight Smith, formerly of the Tampa Bay Bucs, who pulled a BB gun on a slow-to-decide motorist in a McDonald’s drive-through.

Need more memories? How about Ohio State University basketball recruit David Lighty, who escalated the phenomenon by pegging a 55-year-old jogger in the neck a few years back? Or Billy Tibbets, legendary hockey goon, who violated his parole with a BB shooting and ended up doing two years? Of course, locally we remember the story of St. Anselm College football players shooting the hell out of a bunch of skate-geeks with BB guns, understandable behavior that for some reason is designated as a crime.

Now we have another case, and what’s noteworthy about it is the new choice of weapon and target. Ohio University sophomore basketball player Maurice Pearson has been arrested and charged with the fantastic-sounding crime of “aggravated menacing and assault” after shooting a pair of Delta Gamma sorority girls with an “Airsoft” rifle. For those of you not familiar with the device, an Airsoft rifle is a kind of play-gun used by grownups who think paintball doesn’t hurt quite enough, but aren’t willing to go far enough to do us the favor of using real guns to remove each other from the gene pool. Airsoft guns fire little non-metallic pellets that can break the skin and leave welts on exposed beer bellies and bald heads. They are not the kind of thing you typically want to fire at a sorority girl if you’re trying to get laid. Firing one at two sorority girls is even less productive.

Cursed Aztecs

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:02:03 GMT

Sports blotter: "Late-night shopping" edition
San Diego State Aztecs basketball coach Steve Fisher lectures his players during the season about how to behave off the court, getting pretty specific about what he doesn’t want to see.

CURSED AZTECS: San Diego State basketball player Lorrenzo Wade was arrested on felony burglary charges this past month, the latest in a recent line of run-ins wih the law for the school’s athletes.

Late-night shopping
San Diego State Aztecs basketball coach Steve Fisher lectures his players during the season about how to behave off the court, getting pretty specific about what he doesn’t want to see. “We talk about it all the time,” he says. “ ‘Don’t you be the one that people are going to read about in the newspaper.’ ”

Well, here we are reading about one of his players, Lorrenzo Wade, who got arrested this past month on felony burglary charges after he and a friend visited a young woman in the middle of the night and, apparently, carried off her television. Wade’s attorney claims that Wade was only at this woman’s apartment because he believed her car was blocking a parking space he wanted. So that’s why he was there, in her apartment, at 3:30 in the morning.

The woman first heard knocking at her door, then noticed people in her place, and then finally saw Wade’s friend carrying out a TV worth about $600. Wade’s attorney is making a lot out of the fact that it wasn’t Wade carrying the TV. Good luck with that. Fisher has already indefinitely suspended Wade from the team.

SDSU has had some issues lately. Senior guard Richie Williams had a bench warrant issued for him when he failed to show up for a drunken-driving education program he was ordered to attend following a DUI (the warrant was cleared this past week, when Williams finally came to court and was ordered to resume the program). A few years back, the team also had problems with forward Kyle Spain — who, like Wade, was one of the team’s top scorers. Spain ended up getting bounced from the team, reportedly for positive drug tests.

Getting back to Wade, the alleged TV boost feels like a 30-point crime to me, maybe more like 35. We’ll see what the indictment ultimately looks like.

Really tough love
You’ve got to give Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis credit for one thing. The gastrically stapled former Pats offensive coordinator preaches tough love to his kids, and he apparently means it. Or someone at Notre Dame does, anyway — for there was a punishment handed down to a misbehaving college athlete the likes of which I have never seen before this week.

Hello, Larry

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 05:52:47 GMT

Sports blotter: "End of an era" edition
Absolutely nothing is funny about the Lawrence Phillips case, so let’s not even go there — there isn’t a single laugh to be found in this past week’s news that the onetime Next Jim Brown was sentenced to 10 years in Cali.

End of an era
Absolutely nothing is funny about the Lawrence Phillips case, so let’s not even go there — there isn’t a single laugh to be found in this past week’s news that the onetime Next Jim Brown was sentenced to 10 years in Cali. One of the great wasted talents of our time, the former Ram/49er/Dolphin/Cornhusker/Montreal Alouette will now be shooting baskets in Lompoc until his early 40s, marking perhaps the last sad chapter in what is likely the most consistently sad story in sports crime of the past two decades.

Phillips was drafted out of Nebraska by the Rams in 1996 and was expected to be a great running back. He had awesome power and speed. Virtually the last time the name “Lawrence Phillips” wasn’t a joke, we watched him running through Steve Spurrier’s Gator defense like it was wet tissue paper in the ’96 Fiesta Bowl. Linebackers fell down just looking at Phillips. Unfortunately, a steady string of women also fell down when Phillips smashed their heads on stairs or mailboxes.

Phillips already had a laundry list of transgressions before he left college, but the Rams drafted him sixth overall anyway because, well, NFL teams will put up with the odd crack-a-chick’s-head-on-the-mailbox trick if they can get 18 TDs a year from one guy. Unfortunately, Phillips ended up not being able to deal with having a real job and cracked under pressure, getting himself cut from the Rams and then ringing up a truly awesome arrest record, one that would dwarf even that of a J.R. Rider (in severity, anyway). He was repeatedly arrested for acts of violence against women, once striking a woman who refused to dance with him, another time allegedly choking a girlfriend to unconsciousness.

The sad end came when, out of organized sports, he was involved in a pickup football game at a park in Los Angeles in August 2005 and got mad at a bunch of teenagers he was playing with. He hopped in a car and hit three of them — vehicularly, as it were. This led to seven counts of assault with a deadly weapon and the current 10-year sentence, which could become worse, actually — the courts are still sorting out a prior charge for domestic assault, one in which he hit a woman he was dating at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Phillips is trying to get his guilty plea overturned so that the car-ramming charge will be just his first strike in three-strike-law California, not his second. If he fails, they could add more years to his sentence. In any case, Phillips managed a tearful apology in court to one of his teenage victims, who apparently had to give up his own sports career after getting hit by Phillips’s car. “I’m sorry your leg is messed up,” will therefore be among the last words Phillips uttered to the world as a free man.

More bad news for the Mets

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:09:45 GMT

Sports blotter: "Very bad times" edition
Look, it just isn’t seemly for us non–New Yorkers to laugh too much about the continued suckdom of the New York Mets, specifically their bullpen.

Mets bullpen woes continue
Look, it just isn’t seemly for us non–New Yorkers to laugh too much about the continued suckdom of the New York Mets, specifically their bullpen. In fact, most of us decent folk should have watched the spectacle of the Mets trying to win a pennant with Luis “Kerosene Can” Ayala closing games down the stretch with horrified relief, with a There But for the Grace of God sort of attitude — it could have happened to anyone. Of course, a good team would have had at least two decent relievers on the roster at the start of the season, providing insurance against injury to its closer. In the case of the Mets, whose closer (Billy Wagner) is a very little left-handed guy who throws 98 by recklessly hurling his body at the plate 30 times a night, they probably should have wanted better insurance behind their top guy than, say, Scott Schoeneweis.

But the Mets didn’t nail down that insurance policy, and that’s why general manager Omar Minaya gets paid the big money. No one else wins 89 games a year and comes up two feet short of the goal line quite like Minaya. Once revered for his ability to deal away multiple future all-stars for aging quick-fixes — the Grady Sizemore/Brandon Phillips/Cliff Lee for Bartolo Colon deal was the signature Minaya (then with Montreal) move until recently — he has since rebounded and become best known for his ability to mismanage the massive budgets of big-market contenders. And he’s especially skilled in loading expensive and superfluous back-end years onto otherwise reasonable veteran free-agent deals. This year’s Mets, for instance, headed into this season with more than $26 million committed to three 89-year-old injury-prone washouts (Pedro Martinez, Moises Alou, and Orlando Hernandez), while letting their left-handed starter-with-upside, Oliver Perez, enter free-agency. That’s not just good business, it’s the Minaya way.

Anyway, one of the great Minaya deals of the past few years was something that at the time seemed like a small transaction: the 2006 trading of innings-eating young starter Brian Bannister to the Royals for unproven relief prospect Ambiorix Burgos. Burgos was sort of a souped-up version of Craig Hansen — he hit 99 on the gun but couldn’t find the plate with a map. Bannister slipped a little this year, but in the two years since the deal he’s pitched nearly 350 innings and won 21 games for the worst offense in the American League. Burgos has since pitched 23 innings, missed the 2008 season due to elbow surgery, and, now, allegedly killed two people. Suffice to say Kansas City is probably happy with the deal.

Husker don't

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:57:42 GMT

Sports blotter: "Next Lawrence Phillips" edition
Details right now are still sketchy, but Thunder Collins, a former University of Nebraska running back who was once considered a sure-fire NFL star, has been charged with murder.

Thunderous news
Details right now are still sketchy, but Thunder Collins, a former University of Nebraska running back who was once considered a sure-fire NFL star, has been charged with murder.

Since his playing career ended in 2002, Collins has not-so-quietly been building a rep as the next Lawrence Phillips — a perpetually arrested once-great running back. He’s been busted for weed, numerous domestic assaults, and burglary. He was a suspect in a shooting in 2006. And now he has been charged with homicide — technically, murder-one, attempted murder-two, and felony weapons possession — in connection with a drug deal gone bad that left one man (Timothy Thomas) dead and another (Marshall Turner) mortally wounded by gunshots. Along with Collins, two other men (Karnell Burton and Ahmad Johnson, the latter of whom is still being sought by police) have been charged in connection with the incident.

More on this later, but first-degree murder is a straight-up 100 pointer, putting Collins on top of the list.

He wears court shorts
Sometimes franchises deserve their bad luck. It didn’t always seem that way with the Cincinnati Bengals. Sure, the team had an awful owner who let star players walk and waited far too long to start investing in his team. And yes, they made some bonehead decisions in taking a short-cut approach to close the talent gap with Baltimore and Pittsburgh by picking undervalued “character flags” in the draft several years in a row.

But it seemed like Cincy had turned a corner since this past year, when, following the arrests of rules-averse players like Chris Henry, Odell Thurman, A.J. Nicholson, Frostee Rucker, and others, the team became a national joke. The situation got so bad that quarterback Carson Palmer actually had to step in to the PR leadership void left by the team’s idiotic, sleepwalking owners, saying after the January 2007 weed arrest of corner Jonathan Joseph, “If this keeps up, we won’t have any fans left.”

Team administration officials finally caught on to their mistakes — or seemed to catch on, anyway — this past April, when they reluctantly released stud wideout Henry, who had been caught punching some guy in the face and shattering his windshield with a beer bottle. “We acknowledge those fans who had concerns about Chris,” team president Mike Brown said.

Hello, old friend

MATT TAIBBI — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 06:18:25 GMT

Sports blotter: "Past Pats" edition
There was a recent arrest of a onetime member of the Patriots defensive backfield — old friend Lawyer Milloy.

Lawyer can’t pass bar
Quick memo to Pats fans who might have been worried about their team’s paper-thin secondary after seeing this past week’s headline, O’NEAL, SON, ARRESTED IN DRUG SWEEP AT HOME: that wasn’t Deltha O’Neal, but Ryan O’Neal. Just because the wrinkly old actor pulled a Ty Law — “The drugs found were not his. He would never use them,” his attorney told reporters — doesn’t mean it was actually a football player getting busted. So, relax.

That said, there was a recent arrest of a onetime member of the Patriots defensive backfield — old friend Lawyer Milloy, who went from celebrating on a Super Bowl team to sucking in Buffalo to, now, patrolling the artificial-turf-covered purgatory that is the Atlanta Falcons secondary. Milloy was busted for a DUI in the Atlanta suburbs around 4:30 am on September 15.

This probably won’t be the last straw, but it might be — is there a phrase for this? — one of the last straws. “I’m extremely disappointed and I can’t stress enough — it’s unacceptable,” Falcons coach Mike Smith said before wavering on whether there would be concrete punishment.

Milloy has been playing for 13 years, hasn’t been able to cover a tight end since at least 2006, and is in the last year of his contract. Something tells me he’ll be riding the Otis Nixon/Andre Rison Oft-Troubled Retired Athlete Express before long. Give him the minimum points for the DUI. (That’d be 25.)

Minor league mischief
Hey, I didn’t know there was an “ABA” basketball league any more. Like most Americans, I thought the ABA of Dr. J, Artis Gilmore, and the tri-colored ball went out with Gerald Ford, Karen Ann Quinlan, and the Gang of Four. But apparently a new ABA, called “ABA 2000,” was formed in 1999. It also uses a red, white, and blue ball, and has more than 50 teams. Former NBA player John Salley was one of the founding commissioners; Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff was the owner of one of the more successful franchises, the Vermont Frost Heaves.

Originally the league was semi-serious, as it cost $50,000 to start a franchise and most of the scheduled games actually occurred. Then disputes between the CEO and the COO, as well as several absurd controversies (teams flying to China to play the league’s Beijing squad were forced to spend a road game in a hotel that doubled as a brothel), basically knocked out the league’s credibility. By this year, multiple franchises were folding almost every week — any swinging sack with 10 grand could buy a team.

Zero hour

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:20:40 GMT

Sports blotter: "Credit where credit's due" edition
Everyone knows there is a double-standard in the NFL when it comes to arrests.

Weeded out
Everyone knows there is a double-standard in the NFL when it comes to arrests: if a good player gets arrested for serious crimes, the front office inevitably talks about wanting to take its time with its internal investigation, that it would like to “let the justice system run its course,” and that it tries whenever possible to support players in their time of need, as one would support a member of one’s family.

But when a crappy player gets arrested for a serious, or even for an un-serious crime, that is when the front offices get tough. That’s when it starts braying about “zero tolerance” policies and making sure the players are good citizens, as well as good on-field performers, about sending the proper message to the kids, yada yada yada.

Thus it is somewhat surprising to see the Indianapolis Colts — a franchise we’d all like to hate around here, if we weren’t so busy mourning Tom Brady’s knee — hold a firm line this past week. Ed Johnson, a starting defensive tackle at a position where the Colts are perilously thin, got busted this past Wednesday for speeding and weed possession, and was axed by the team fewer than 24 hours later.

Johnson was a character flag in college and apparently was given a shot by the Colts only on the condition that he sign up for a zero-tolerance type of arrangement. He blew it and they pulled the trigger, despite the fact that the Colts in Week 1 were unable to stop a Chicago Bears offense whose best player is probably a middling rookie running back named Matt Forte. (That would be like the Patriots releasing Ellis Hobbs for jaywalking.) Hard to say if the reasoning is sound — one would think that 300-pound men should be able to smoke weed if they need to, to keep calm — but it sure is a remarkable decision, one that not a lot of teams would make. So we’re giving credit where credit is due.

Interestingly enough, one of Johnson’s backups, tackle Darrell Reid, was busted on weed charges in 2007. The team kept him on board, but then Reid didn’t have any strikes against him at the time.

Give Johnson three points for potentially blowing his career over a joint. We’ll see how long he stays unemployed — the guess here is that it won’t be long.

Well, that's weird
Strange, strange story coming out of Long Island, where onetime New York Giants wide receiver Mark Ingram continues to be one of the most dependable performers in all of retired-athlete crime.

Astro naught

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:47:08 GMT

Sports blotter: "More trouble for the Clemens family" edition
Always a darned shame when we hear that the Clemens family has fallen on hard times.

Astro naught
Always a darned shame when we hear that the Clemens family has fallen on hard times. Not like we harbor any bitter feelings toward ol’ Rajah for eating himself halfway out of the league and laying around on the Winter Haven grass like a beached whale in Spring Training of 1992, on the heels of signing that last $20 million contract with the Sox. Or for bolting to Toronto with a bag full of magic syringes in ’97. Or for finagling a trade to the Yankees two years after that. Or for the rest of his sorry biography. Nah, we’re fine with you, Roger. You. Fat. Pig.

There have been many wonderful things for the Boston fan to celebrate over the past seven years: the cosmic losers-to-rulers makeover of the Red Sox, the ascension to dynasty status of the Patriots, the KG trade and its championship aftereffects, the precipitous $200 million collapse of this year’s Yankees, the spellbinding passing of the reptilian-villainy baton from George to Hank Steinbrenner . . .

But almost nothing has been sweeter than seeing the “legacy” of Roger Clemens go up in dense clouds of acrid death-smoke amid revelations of everything from steroid use to adultery with country-music stars to apparent perjury. Watching Roger weepily beg for redemption before an impassive, stone-faced, clearly disbelieving Mike Wallace was one of the most gorgeous things seen on TV in this part of the world since Walt Coleman’s “tuck rule” replay call in the great Snow Bowl of 2002. Roger, underneath it all, was simply a greedy, bloated hog, and if there is any justice he will spend his last days drooling into his lap while private male-nurses wipe pools of liquefied squash off his many chins.

That said, nobody in these parts has ever felt any particular animosity toward Roger’s eldest son, Koby Clemens. Back before Roger was an American pariah on par with Osama bin Laden, his desire to stay with the Houston Astros in the hopes of someday playing with his son (then a minor-leaguer in the Houston organization) was considered a “touching” human-interest drama, one of many agent-crafted inventions designed to make him look human.

Heightened anxiety

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:56:46 GMT

Sports blotter: "Attack of the seven-foot tall driver" edition
Look, it’s not easy being seven feet tall.

TALL TALE: Seven-foot high-school hoops star Anthony DiLoreto was the alleged getaway driver in a hare-brained bank robbery.

Short on brains
Look, it’s not easy being seven feet tall. If you are seven feet tall, there’s only one socially acceptable thing you can do with your life: play basketball. Creative thinkers might scheme their way into careers in pro wrestling, action movies about Vikings, or porn, but basically it’s basketball or nothing.

One career the seven footer should absolutely not consider, however, is bank robbery. The thing about bank robbery is that it’s usually done under the cover of darkness, or via a tunnel, or in daylight while masked (the mask being worn to protect one’s identity).

And here’s the thing about identity: ordinary-size people can protect theirs just by wearing masks, since there are a great many ordinary-size people (hence the term “ordinary”). But if you’re seven feet tall, a mask doesn’t help you that much. Because the police already have a lot of information when the witness begins his statement by saying, “Well, he was seven feet tall. . .”

That brings us to the story of Anthony DiLoreto, a seven-foot-tall high-school basketball star from Minnetonka, Minnesota, who was due to play for Cal Poly next year. On August 16, he and a 16-year-old accomplice allegedly attempted to rob the Bremer Bank in Danbury, Wisconsin. Police say DiLoreto was driving the getaway car, but got confused when he didn’t see his buddy come out. So he went into the bank and spoke with an employee about opening a student account. He took off after this, stopping for gas — for which he didn’t pay — before returning to the scene of the crime. When he heard sirens nearby, police say, DiLoreto got cold feet and headed home for good.

His partner, meanwhile, had allegedly done the deed, getting away with about $1000. Not seeing his ride, he fled the robbery on foot, and was eventually apprehended by police, apparently trying to walk the 100 or so miles back to the Twin Cities. The kid admitted to the crime, and told authorities he had been with DiLoreto. Police found our hero at home a few hours later.

DiLoreto was charged with being a party to an armed robbery and being in possession of a short-barreled shotgun. Cal Poly seemed willing to let him enroll as planned, but for now the youngster has put off his college career to focus on his legal troubles.

Revenge of the toad

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:40:45 GMT

Sports blotter: "Irabu!" edition
Some sports-crime stories aren’t funny in any way — they’re just plain violent and tragic. But every now and then you get a story that’s just pure fun.

Flat-out awesome!
Some sports-crime stories aren’t funny in any way — they’re just plain violent and tragic. Others are too emblematic and telling, revealing awful things about our crass, media-obsessed society. And still others — DUIs of aging linebackers, for instance — just aren’t that interesting. When there’s nothing but stories like these to write about, it makes for a depressing week for the author of this column.

But every now and then you get a story that’s just pure fun. Like the one that came gift-wrapped in the New York Post this past week, under the headline DRUNK HIDEKI IRABU ARRESTED FOR ASSAULTING BARTENDER. It’s always great when Yankees get in trouble, but it’s particularly delicious when it’s a famously high-priced former Yankee import, washed up and drinking away the sting of a failed career back in his home country — while an ocean away, Daisuke Matsuzaka, in his nibbling way, is mowing down the American League, going 15-2 this season for the Boston Red Sox.

You basically know the Irabu story already, but here are the details, which are terrific. It seems the “Japanese Nolan Ryan” (yeah, right) spent a long night drinking in a bar in Osaka and then, when he went to pay, had his credit card rejected. Enraged, Irabu (who was once called a “fat pussy toad” by George Steinbrenner, back in the days when the Boss was still great and terrible and ambulatory) threw the bartender against the wall, pulled his hair, and smashed at least nine bottles of liquor. (It is assumed the credit card didn’t cover those, either.) Cops later showed up and learned that Irabu had drunk 20 mugs of beer in the bar.

Irabu was a Yankee during that franchise’s most recent golden age, and actually owns two World Series rings (from 1998 and ’99) despite not doing much to earn them. And . . . well, who cares what happened from there? The only reason I’m even continuing this tale is to segue into the current plight of the Yankees, at last count around 10 games out of first place. Which is really embarrassing for a team with a $200 million payroll. Did I mention they’re 10 games out of first place?

Anyway, give the fat toad 10 points for bartender abuse. Have another doughnut, loser!

Tiger trap

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:37:28 GMT

Sports blotter: "Walking in Memphis" edition
There are a lot of famously troubled college sports programs out there, the majority of them football teams.

Teach me, Tiger
There are a lot of famously troubled college sports programs out there, the majority of them football teams. Most of America knows that the Florida State Seminoles team, in its heyday, was once called the CrimiNoles; there isn’t a shop owner on the panhandle who wouldn’t move his finger toward the alarm button if he saw an FSU player drifting through his aisles. There were the problems with the University of Miami football team, and Maurice Clarett helped shine a light on a similar record of iniquity in the Ohio State Buckeye football program.

There are, however, some college basketball teams that have legacies of their own that are no less striking. Perhaps chief among those is the University of Memphis hoops squad, a group that has always had a reputation for, shall we say, generous academic standards, as well as a touchingly high degree of tolerance for talented ballplayers with checkered pasts. Over the years, the Memphis Tigers have seen quite a bit of trouble with the law, with some of their players continuing their unfortunate records even after leaving school and making it to the NBA.

What makes Memphis striking is that many of their arrested players are also their most prominent performers, even if their offenses are sometimes minor — as in the case of recently drafted Joey Dorsey, who was hauled in for traffic violations in 2006, or onetime Conference USA player of the year Antonio Burks, who was arrested on a failure-to-appear charge that same year. Now, the school has seen trouble hit their current squad. In fact, the team even appears to have a favorite arrest spot in downtown Memphis — the Plush Club on Beale Street. In 2007, Sean Taggert and Jeff Robinson were arrested for “inciting to riot” after a fight at the bar, and earlier this year junior forward Robert Dozier was arrested for hitting his ex-girlfriend there.

There have been numerous others, of course, but the relevant name this week is a Tiger from the past — Vincent Askew, a star for Memphis who went on to play in the NBA. On August 14, the 43-year-old Askew was arrested on felony charges as he was apparently caught soliciting sex from a 16-year-old girl in Florida. Askew, who was interviewing for a coaching job at a high school in the Miami suburb of Pinecrest, had told the girl he was recruiting players for the team. Apparently he did this bit of recruiting in a hotel room, naked.

Bang for T-Buck

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:38:36 GMT

Sports Blotter
Brett Favre walks into a bar.

Brett Favre walks into a bar. Bartender reaches down, grabs a shotgun, shoots Favre right between the eyes, sending skull fragments flying in all directions and leaving nothing but a gurgling stump. He then goes into the back room, grabs an industrial-strength 10-ply garbage bag, fills it with the headless remains, drags those out back to his pickup, and drives them to the nearest landfill, where he dumps the bag at the base of a mountain of garbage 200 feet high.

The next day, ESPN goes back to covering baseball.

That’s it, that’s the joke. Brought to you courtesy of someone who is sick to death of hearing about Brett Favre. So an extra-juicy fuck you to Eric Mangini and Brian Schottenheimer this week for bringing that backwoods media cancer into our AFC East. You both suck. Not that you didn’t before, but now you really suck.

And now, on to sports crime. While we’re on the subject of football, let’s all give a special shout-out to old friend Tebucky Jones, former New England Patriots safety and would-be hero of Super Bowl XXXVI (if Willie McGinest hadn’t been called for holding Marshall Faulk on the goal line in the third quarter, Tebucky’s fumble recovery/TD would have been the clinching play). Pats fans everywhere remember “T-Buck” (not to be confused with the other Belichick-era “T-Buck,” Terrell Buckley) as a key figure in the Patriots evolutionary story: the missing link between the Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick regimes. Jones was perhaps the crowning achievement in the dubious career of one-time Pats personnel chief and notorious draft-pick waster Bobby Grier — he spent a first round pick on Jones, a college running back converted to safety at Syracuse, with the idea of turning him into a “massive press corner.” As Jacksonville’s recent experience with rail-bumping quarterback-turned-wideout Matt Jones shows, there just isn’t a great tradition of taking guys in the first round of the NFL draft to play out of position.

But don’t tell that to Grier, the scouting genius who brought such great players as Chris Canty, Damon Denson, Tony Simmons, Ed Ellis, and Sedrick Shaw to the Pats’ roster. In fact, by the time Belichick turned the team around and beat the Rams in the Super Bowl, Tebucky — by then sensibly converted back into a safety — was the last Grier player still making contributions to the team.

Olympian anti-heroes

MATT TAIBBI — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:57:11 GMT

Sports blotter: Olympic edition
Greetings, Olympic sports fans!

Greetings, Olympic sports fans! You are out there, aren’t you? NBC Universal sure hopes you are. Because if you aren’t, and you decide to spend the next three weeks watching anything except the hammer-throw quarterfinals, heat six of the women’s 4-x-400 relay, and profiles of the Hungarian dressage team, there are going to be some TV executives committing suicide. Well, assisted suicide, maybe. If you’re a Nielsen viewer, there might even be a camera in your house — and if it catches you switching to Greatest American Dog during the trampoline semifinal, an animatronic chain will yank a pin from a grenade crammed in the mouth of whichever NBC marketing executive promised a 17 share to the suits upstairs at 30 Rock.

Beijing 2008: Special issue: China, Tibet, and the Olympics

So, lives are in your hands. No one is telling you what to do, but think twice before you turn on Don’t Forget the Lyrics!, or any other non-Olympic programming for that matter, next week. Besides, it’s not like the Olympics are completely boring. True, the actual sporting competitions have lately taken a back seat, drama-wise, to the question of whether terrorists will strike during the Games, or whether the budget can be managed by the IOC without two dollars out of every three ending up in mysterious accounts in Antigua, or whether Chinese guards will bayonet free-Tibet protesters along the torch route, or, indeed, whether NBC will be felled by yet another disappointing ratings showing. But that’s not to say the athletes aren’t providing some sordid entertainment themselves.In fact, just like regular athletes, Olympians frequently rack up ugly arrests. Who can forget these anti-heroes of sports-crime?

The lover’s lane rapist
This was a recent one, actually. Alvin Henry was a one-time Olympic sprinter, a New Yorker who ran for Trinidad and Tobago. He went to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney on the T&T 4-x-100 team, but never actually ran in the Games. He returned to America, however, and did some running there. This past month, Henry was arrested 16 days after a rape in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, when the victim identified him while riding around the park with police. Henry had allegedly raped the woman at gunpoint and was a suspect in numerous other sexual assaults dating back to 2003. The unknown serial rapist had been called the “Lover’s Lane Rapist” because he frequently targeted women he had seen having sex with their boyfriends in the park — he told one of the victims he had taped her in the act. “I knew something wasn’t right with him,” Henry’s cousin told New York papers.

Return of the U

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:35:09 GMT

Sports blotter: "Plant City, indeed" edition
Remember the days when the University of Miami dominated college football?

’Canes blowing again
Remember the days when the University of Miami dominated college football? For a four- or five-year stretch there, there was “The U,” and there was everyone else. They racked up ungodly numbers and had other teams beaten and humiliated before the season even began.

And that was just in the sports-crime department. In the days when Miami was almost always a lock to be the preseason number-one team, when 59-0 ass-whippings of top-20 opponents were nothing to write home about (are you listening, Syracuse?), and coaches like Butch Davis and Larry Coker each year flooded the NFL with skill-position stars on both sides of the ball, the U was also racking up arrests with the best of them.

The school was constantly in trouble for one reason or another: if it wasn’t a Pell Grant scam that cost the program more than 30 scholarships over three years, it was promising linebackers James Burgess and Jammi German getting rung up on battery charges, or star cornerback Antrel Rolle getting busted in a bar fight, or all-world recruit Willie Williams setting the unofficial sports arrest record before even arriving on campus.

Then came a pair of school-wide humiliations: the notorious “7th Floor Crew” incident (in which a group of U players recorded a controversial, more-than-unusually-lewd rap song) and the celebrated on-field brawl with Florida International. During these past few years, Miami has fallen in the college rankings, while its arrest rate appears to have fallen off too. That is, until now.

This past week, former Miami quarterback Kenny Kelly — the architect of the Canes’ 9-4 campaign in 1999, in which they beat Georgia Tech in the Gator Bowl — was busted on felony drug charges. Kelly was nailed for possession of marijuana of more than 20 grams, and purchase and solicitation to deliver marijuana.

Kelly actually represents the marriage of two different sports-crime institutions, as he dropped out of football following Miami’s 1999 season to pursue a professional baseball career in the minor-league system of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, at one time the arrest leaders of the baseball world. Kelly made it to the bigs briefly in two separate runs — once in 2000, and once in 2005, playing sparingly for the Rays, Reds, and Nats. His best year was in 2005, when he went 3-for-9 for the Reds. Those three hits helped lift his career batting average to .286, which is likely where it will stay, now that he appears to have washed out of pro sports. At the time of his arrest this past week, Kelly was a quarterbacks coach for Plant City High in Florida.

Street cred

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:21:34 GMT

Sports blotter: "This year's Xbox" edition

A new kinda cred
It seems like every year, it’s something new — some new boutique crime sweeps through the ranks of collegiate athletics, luring young jocks into indictment after indictment. A few years back, it was shooting people (usually geeky campus civilians with good grades) with BB guns, a crime that for some reason attracted a large number of 300-pound football linemen. Then it was getting drunk and ripping the mirrors off of parked cars — we had a year full of those cases at one point.

Arrest-prone jocks then shifted gears and ventured more into the area of enterprise crime, leaving car mirrors be for a time and moving into the world of stealing Xbox consoles. There was a rash of such arrests in 2006 and 2007, including the embarrassing pinch of Bowling Green hoopster Lionel Sullivan and a bizarre story involving defensive-back twin brothers Jack and William Ikegwuonu.

After Xbox theft, it was boosting laptops, a campus hobby that touched nearly every state in the union over the course of about 16 months, netting such luminaries as our own struggling baseball phenom Clay Buchholz and doghouse-bound New Jersey Nets point guard Marcus Williams. Even the Ol’ Ball Coach got dragged into the laptop craze: Steve Spurrier’s South Carolina Gamecocks were bedraggled by an elaborate and seriously ugly laptop-theft case. But quick as it came, the laptop fad fizzled.

Now we have the new new thing, and that is misuse of stolen credit and debit cards. There have been quite a number of them in 2008, including a somewhat unusual case involving Florida cornerback Jamar Hornsby, who was caught using a credit card belonging to a woman who had died in a motorcycle accident. In that case, Hornsby’s attorney, Huntley Johnson, claimed his client had a “legitimate reason” for charging more than $3000 to the dead girl’s card. (We’re still waiting to hear that reason, by the way.) Then there was the case of West Virginia’s Charles Pugh and Quinton Andrews, who police believed went on a shopping spree with credit cards stolen from a car parked near the WVU campus. Only Pugh was charged; he was kicked off the team soon after.

The trend now seems to have found its way to the Blue Chips, as Marshall (Texas) High School wideout Dameon Mark-Keith Smith was picked up this past week in connection with at least one debit-card theft. Police in Marshall — a city of 24,000 about 20 miles from the Louisiana border — had previously cautioned residents about an uptick in thefts of credit and debit cards from parked cars, warning them not to leave valuables in their vehicles. Smith’s arrest was “in some way connected to that press release,” said Marshall Police sergeant Leland Benoit.

Bad times for kickers

MATT TAIBBI — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:05:50 GMT

Sports blotter: "Not so high on the hog" edition
Here’s a depressing-ass story that tells you everything you need to know about the life of a retired mediocre athlete.

Snap judgment
Here’s a depressing-ass story that tells you everything you need to know about the life of a retired mediocre athlete. Anyone out there remember Tony Zendejas? So-so kicker for the Rams, Oilers, Falcons, and Niners in the ’80s and ’90s, once went 17-for-17 in a season. Now 48 years old, he owns a sports bar in Los Angeles County. And he was arrested for rape this past week.

It seems some woman came into Zendejas’s bar back in January, drank a cocktail he handed her, then woke up groggy and sore in a motel some time later. She talked, cops investigated, and this past week Zendejas was charged with one count each of rape by use of drugs, rape of an unconscious person, sodomy by anesthesia or controlled substance, and sodomy of an unconscious victim.

It’s been an ugly few years for NFL kickers, especially ex–Rams kickers. In June 2007, former Rams punter Rick Tuten was busted for dealing hot flat-screen TVs in Ocala, Florida. It turns out Tuten was buying stolen goods, particularly electronics and recreational vehicles, and reselling them.

Zendejas faces up to 15 years if a jury ends up serving him the whole meal. And he’ll deserve it, too. Give him 90 points minimum — plus an extra five for being a kicker.

Chop chop chop
Jacksonville Jaguar Matt Jones represents one of those ideas that never felt quite right. Sure, there have been plenty of athletic college quarterbacks drafted by canny NFL teams who subsequently converted them into quality wideouts. Hines Ward and Antwaan Randle El come to mind, as does Drew Bennett. Even Seneca Wallace is okay. All those guys had one thing in common, though — they were lowish draft picks. Nobody picked them in the first round and gave them huge money to play a position they had never played before at any level above high school. Nobody was crazy enough to do that.

But they did it for Matt Jones, an oversize good ol’ boy who broke the SEC record for career QB rushing yards while at Arkansas. Jones stood 6-6 and had 4.4 speed — not to mention the silliest white-man hair on an NFL draftee since Brian Bosworth. NFL GMs drooled over him as the future white-trash version of Randy Moss, but Moss could catch a football and actually run routes. Jones was just sort of big and could run fast in a straight line. And, as it turns out, blow coke in the offseason.