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By Randy Horick
There is nothing like a week at the beach to change your perspective. On family vacations, it's not so much that you lapse into some Corona-ad reverie that seduces you into leaving the cares of the 50-week-a-year world behind. It's that, when you spend six days being bitten by irate crabs, stung by jellyfish, either broiled alive or slathered in pungent white cream, and occasionally tormented by the indelible image of a middle-aged man in a thong swimsuit, all amid a swarm of raucous preteen hellions, you don't really have the time or ability to tune into that other, "normal" world.
Just Say No: Rafael Palmeiro testifying before Congress. Photo: Getty Images
Except for a Yankees game and just enough golf and the umpteenth televised Texas Hold 'Em tournament this year, the only sports I watched last week were the X Games from Los Angeles. (The games also happened to be the one viewing opportunity regarded as must-see TV by the preteen boys among our vacation party.)
Consistent with the theory that we tend to be most interested in sports we've actually played, I usually channel-surf right through the X Games to something a little more sedate and comprehensible—like, say, Jerry Springer. So it was a bit of an eye-opener to watch dudely dude after dudely dude sail on a motorcycle into thin air and, often as not, come crashing to earth in a way that bodies were not designed to land. For the longest time, I could have sworn we were watching reruns of Jackass. As one X-Gamer told an ESPN interviewer, you have to be pretty much nuts to be an X-Gamer.
But when I got back to the ostensibly sane world, the crazy bikers and boarders started looking better and better to me. Their earnest, if goofy, devotion to their sports seemed positively heartwarming compared to all the mainstream lunacy, avarice and weaselry that I began catching up on when I got back. There were so many sports figures last week who deserve at least the moral equivalent of a hiney-kicking that it's hard to know where to start.
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Let's pick first on Rafael Palmeiro. The sweet-swinging slugger for the Baltimore Orioles was among the baseball stars who went to Capitol Hill earlier this year and declared that they had not used performance-enhancing drugs (his endorsements of Viagra notwithstanding). So Raffy had a little splainin' to do when it was revealed last week that he tested positive for, um, steroids.
About the best alibi Palmeiro could manage was the Sergeant Schultz defense: "I know nuh-think, I see nuh-think." George W. Bush, a team owner when Palmeiro was with the Texas Rangers, seemed to buy it. Of course, George thinks that intelligent design should be part of the high school biology curriculum.
But let's give Raffy some credit for trying. In the face of overwhelming implausibility, it was the most daring excuse I've heard since a drunk driver explained his innocence to the judge after the cops found his car atop Legislative Plaza, where he sat with an empty whiskey bottle. He accidentally drove up the plaza's steps while sober, he said, and became so unnerved that he began drinking.
Fortunately, Raffy doesn't have to bear this cross alone. He can share it with the even more deserving twits in Congress who stuck the legislative branch's nose into the whole steroid business. (I've got 5 U.S. dollars right here saying that if Bill Frist were to attempt a remote diagnosis by watching Congress on C-Span, he'd detect no signs of brain activity this time.)
Reinforcing Will Rogers' old axiom that the Republic is generally much safer when Congress is in recess, our Solon Geniuses decided that baseball's steroid problem needed the kind of careful attention only they could provide. Now they're making the cast of Johnny Knoxville's show look like gray eminences.
You know who's looking the most genuine in this whole loblolly with each passing day? The certifiable lunatic Rico Suavé, also known as José Canseco, who claims to have personally injected steroids into Mark McGwire's posterior.
While we're here, we've gotta give it up for our Hockey Genius Friends north of the border. I admire a lot of things about our strange-speaking neighbors. Their proprietary, whiny attitude about their national sport—especially as it pertains to Nashville—is not among them.
First, they loudly opined that the Predators were destined to fail as a franchise after last year's lockout. Then, last week, they professed astonishment, even outrage, that a superstar free agent like Paul Kariya would sign with the Preds. Imagine the head-scratching that would ensue if Peyton Manning opted to join the Arizona Cardinals, and you'll get the picture.
Kariya, one of the top 10 players in the league, gives the Predators real credibility as a contender to win their division and make some noise in the playoffs. Nashville's newfound boldness in the marketplace almost makes it look as if owner Craig Leipold and GM David Poile got their backs up and decided to stick it to the condescending Yankees (which, to us, includes Canadians). The team's fan club should hold a formal awards ceremony in which they name Poile and Leipold as honorary Southerners.
Not to be outdone by any of the other jackasses, the NCAA last week declared that its tournaments from now on will be off-limits to member schools that have mascots or uniforms bearing Native American names. That's bad news for the Florida State Seminoles (who actually had obtained the blessing of the Seminole nation in Florida to use the name), the Illinois Fighting Illini, the Utah Utes, the North Dakota Fighting Sioux and others.
Who'd've thunk that an organization that's plagued by corruption, and whose mission to promote student-athletics has been almost entirely consumed by the overriding imperatives of running an entertainment business, would have time to tilt toward such political correctness. (Watch and see if the NCAA next outlaws animal mascot names under pressure from PETA.)
Then again, in the name of fighting crime, Ronal Serpas' boys were in my quiet residential neighborhood the other day, ticketing cars for being parked on the wrong side of a barely trafficked street. Guess it beats stinging gays. If the gig doesn't pan out, they could always apply for jobs with the NCAA.