Sorry, We're Open
by: jmoriello
jmoriello's posts about:
SOCCER
more SOCCER posts
Page 1 of 1
The Bottom 10: May 4, 2008
May 04, 2008 | 9:20AM | report this
Catching up with the best of the worst from a week in sports that was so busy that Jose Canseco and Pat Riley are off the hook on the premise that they’ll mess up again sooner rather than later. And I’m not even going to get into the dust-up over the dad who accidentally served Mike’s Hard Lemonade to his 7-year-old son at a recent Detroit Tigers game:

(10) Ryan Perrilloux: The LSU sophomore quarterback reminds me of the old gag in which a man complains that he gave his wife a credit card with no limit on it — and she exceeded it anyway. Perrilloux was finally tossed off the team Friday after having been the recipient of more breaks than Evel Knievel’s skeletal system. Perrilloux was suspended last summer when his name surfaced during a counterfeiting investigation and he was also caught trying to enter a casino with a phony ID. He was involved in a nightclub fight in November, causing him to miss the Alabama game, and was suspended again in February for his casual approach toward attending classes and workouts. He was benched for LSU's spring game and finally earned his one-way ticket out of football amidst reports he may have failed a drug test. I imagine the Bengals will now petition the NFL for a do-over of the seventh round of the recent draft because they overlooked a newly available QB prospect.

(9) Hobart College: Last weekend, the board of trustees announced that the Upstate New York men’s lacrosse team would drop down from Division I to Division III, where the Statesmen once won 12 consecutive NCAA championships. By Friday, they’d changed their minds in the face of an angry response by the alums and announced the team would stay in Division I. Way to be decisive, gents. Their next announcement will be that they’ve split the difference and decided to give Division II a shot.

(8) H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger: The “Friday Night Lights” author came across like the north end of a south-bound horse on Bob Costas’ much-discussed HBO special, obfuscating whatever valid points he might have had regarding the cesspoolish nature of some blogging by letting fly with a profane attack against Deadspin.com editor Will Leitch. There is a lot of God-awful blogging out there and Deadspin can sometimes be to journalism what Wilt Chamberlain was to abstinence, but Bissinger looked like the new-media hate-mongers that he was railing against. And let’s not even visit the discussion about the lives that Bissinger affected in a negative way with the book that gave birth to the movie and TV series of the same name. I happen to think that a lot of what Bissinger wrote about Texas high school football was probably dead-on accurate, but others feel he might have taken journalistic license with some aspects of the story along the way. Is his work automatically more credible because it appeared in three forms of “traditional” media rather than on the Internet? I’ll leave it to media ethicists to decide who’s done more damage — me for not seeking Bissinger’s response before writing this or Bissinger for his affront to civil discussion in a national forum.

(7) Pat Putnam: Breaking new Bottom 10 ground, the Sports Illustrated boxing writer earns his place posthumously as it now appears that the stories he told before dying in 2005 about his time as a Marine and Korean War prisoner were less accurate than Wesley Snipes’ tax returns. Details that emerged just hours before the Boxing Writers Association of America was scheduled to present the Pat Putnam Award for courage and perseverance caused the organization to delete references to the writer during the annual awards dinner in Los Angeles. In the aftermath of the damning investigation by a group that sniffs out phony war tales, Marines officials said they cannot find evidence that Putnam ever earned four Purple Hearts or the Navy Cross.

(6) Loose lips in the NBA: If you thought the Cleveland Cavaliers’ dissing of LeBron James was out of line, how about the people who are spilling the NBA’s secrets. Once again, the results of balloting for one of the league’s major awards – this time MVP – seeped out prematurely as the Los Angeles Times reported that Kobe Bryant is the winner. Compared to the way the NBA leaks, the Titantic really was just making a scheduled stop to pick up ice.

(5) Tim Montgomery: Already awaiting sentencing for his role in an elaborate stolen-checks scheme, the former Olympic sprinter was indicted last week on heroin distribution charges. The former Fastest Man of Earth, 33, stands accused of dealing more than 100 grams of the drug in Virginia in the last year. A U.S. District Court magistrate ordered him jailed pending a bond hearing, which probably won’t go well considering his May 16 sentencing on the checks charge could fetch him nearly four years in prison. Marion Jones is starting to look like the model citizen in that former relationship.

(4) New York Daily News: Most multiple-part series that you read in newspapers are in the form of book excerpts. Rather than giving a sneak peak of an upcoming book, the tab pulled a sneak attack on Roger Clemens. Likely hand-fed The Rocket’s dirty laundry — and there certainly was a lot of it — by someone with a rooting interest in Brian McNamee in the upcoming defamation suit, the paper went into full tabloid mode and milked it for most of the week instead of hitting us with it all at once. Just another case of Mainstream Media out of control, I guess.

(3) Jay Bergman: The veteran baseball coach, six wins shy of 1,000 for his 26-year career at Central Florida, was fired amidst allegations of sexual harassment of a team equipment manager. According to The Orlando Sentinel, Bergman, 69, wielded a bat last month to simulate raping the employee. Bergman denies the allegation, but school officials have made him persona non grata and are saying they will not pay him for the remaining two years on his contract.

And that brings us to the final two “honorees” of the week, a pair of men whose time in the spotlight can be summed up as a case of “Lola, meet Lolita; Lolita, this is Lola.”

(2) Ronaldo: The Brazilian soccer star drove his girlfriend to her house Monday night and then picked up three prostitutes in Rio de Janeiro (where “play for pay” is legal, by the way). Upon reaching the hotel, though, the three-time FIFA player of the year discovered that the “ladies” were in fact transvestites. Police had to be called in to sift through a classic “he said, he said” dispute when the player said the prostitutes tried to extort money. For their part, the faux-females claimed Ronaldo threatened to harm them and also alleged the injured AC Milan striker is a druggie. Ronaldo’s statement to police said he was having psychological problems related to his bum knee. Umm, OK.

(1) Roger Clemens: The top three signs you’ve had a bad week? (a) You play for the Phoenix Suns; (b) The loyal opposition throws the anniversary of “Mission Accomplished” in your face 24/7; or (c) Your name is Roger Clemens. The week got worse by the day for Clemens, but it started pretty low — the newspaper story strongly implying that his friendship with country music performer Mindy McCready may have been of a physical nature while she was still a young teen. As any blackjack player would tell you, Raj, nothing good comes from hitting on 15.

 

24 Comments | Add a comment   categories: CFB, College Football, Media, Soccer
 
« Continue reading Sorry, We're Open
Page 1 of 1
ABOUT ME


jmoriello
I am John Moriello, a sportswriter for a little more than a decade before catching the World Wide Web bug in 1995. I've since worked on a variety of online projects. In my spare time, I am president of the New York State Sportswriters
Association
. We are concerned primarily with covering high school sports, including producing weekly rankings in the major team sports and the selection of all-state teams.
MY FAVORITE BLOGS
Bread and Circuses
Half-Baked Ravings
The One-Point Safety
jon_464's Blog
The Fowl Line
Straight Talk From the Left Coast
Time stamping is done in Pacific Time.