RealClearSports.com: Sports No Longer Respite from Messy World

By Art Spander
For RealClearSports.com

Connect the dots if you can. The man who used to coach University of Kentucky basketball, Billy Gillispie, was arraigned on a charge of drunken driving.

The University of Wisconsin is tossing away $425,000 a year by terminating advertising agreements with MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch in the "ongoing battle against alcohol abuse.''

No, it's not the people making the stuff who are entirely at fault, although they want us to believe you can't have a good time at a game without a brew or something stronger.

It's we folk of little self-control who cause the problem. But someone has to take a stand.

TCU and SMU did just that, but for an interesting reason. Anheuser has produced cans of Bud Light in school colors, as if the more you drink the more you're supposed to be backing the old alma mater.

According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, TCU's associate director of communications, Lisa Albert, said, " . . . we do not want TCU students, parents of TCU students and stakeholders of the university to think we support this program.''

This has been quite a week for sport, an activity once described in the famed 18th-century dictionary of the Englishman Samuel Johnson as "tumultuous merriment.''

How tumultuously merry would anyone consider Rick Pitino? Or the execs in the National Hockey League as they wrestle a maverick from Canada for ownership of the Phoenix Coyotes? Or the ballplayers who learn their drug tests were seized improperly by the government?

Or Mr. Gillispie -- who for loyalty's sake, we hope -- was sipping Kentucky bourbon, proving his heart was in the right place, if not his brain.

A former California governor and later U.S. Supreme Court chief justice named Earl Warren once said, "I always turn to the sports pages first. They record people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures.''

Earl was around in the fantasy world of the 1940s and '50s, when an athlete's peccadilloes were not considered important. Jock journalists concentrated on touchdowns and runs batted in and winked at what could be judged criminal or antisocial behavior. If it didn't happen between the lines, then it didn't happen.

Sometimes -- sometimes -- you wish it were that head-in-the-sand way once more. Plaxico Burress shooting himself in the groin? The whole agonizing business with Michael Vick? These are people's accomplishments?

ESPN can get on your nerves with its self-indulgence, but the network is to be congratulated for the nightly 10 best plays of the day. For a few wonderful seconds of hand-eye coordination and dexterity, we are reminded that sport is fun and games.

Otherwise, we have Pitino acting like a would-be Clarence Darrow, defending himself and questioning the judgment of a Louisville TV station to break into a report on Ted Kennedy's death and show videotapes of the woman who claimed Pitino raped her.

Or the estranged wife of convicted NBA game-fixer ref Tim Donaghy saying he's been "treated unfairly.''

Pitino and Donaghy created their own problems. If you do things that either are stupid or illegal, or both, you pay the price.

Maybe half of what Pitino was preaching was true. "My wife and family don't deserves to suffer because of the lies,'' he said. But it's also true he had a liaison with the woman. That was no lie.

And whether Donaghy is guilty of a parole violation or just victim of a misunderstanding, well, if the man hadn't bet on games he was officiating, then he wouldn't have been sent to prison in the first place.

Sport, tumultuous merriment, has turned into a list of daily accusations and apologies. Patrick Kane, the hockey player, tried to use a cab driver as a puck, and now Kane is sorry.

Oakland Raiders head coach Tom Cable is going to be interviewed by police in Napa, Calif., about his alleged role in a confrontation that left an assistant with a battered jaw.

The world's a mess. Always has been. So we turned to sport for the presumed brief escape from that mess. For decades, we were successful because the unwritten rule was that if someone broke a rule, the possible story remained unwritten.

No longer. Earl Warren to the contrary, the failures listed on the sports pages run from Louisville to Lawrenceburg, the town where Gillispie was halted. The days of the All-American boy who was diligent and selfless are numbered.

It's been a great run for attorneys, if not so good for their clients. Someone's always making news, and except in rare cases, such as at the U. of Wisconsin, too the news is bad.

As a reporter since 1960, Art Spander is a living treasure of sports history. A recipient of the Dick McCann Memorial Award -- given for his long and distinguished career covering professional football -- he has earned himself a spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. He was recently honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the PGA of America for 2009.

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