When Are They Going to Learn Dept.

Two more examples this week of TUI — tweeting under the influence. How else to explain:

1) UCLA freshman receiver Randall Carroll not only complaining about Bruins offensive coordinator Norm Chow but referring to him with a racial slur?

2) Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry Johnson not only belittling head coach Todd Haley but using a gay slur?

It’s unclear whether Carroll will be disciplined, though he already has been suspended once this year for a violation of team rules. But Johnson has been suspended for his tweet, and the suspension will cost him about $600,000.

Yes — $600,000.

In the past few months, TUI or TWT — tweeting without thinking — has gotten a number of athletes in trouble. Perhaps Johnson and Carroll just weren’t paying attention.

Johnson, who followed his ill-advised tweet by using the slur again while talking to reporters, has a history of doing dumb things. Carroll has a way to go to match him, but he’s off to a promising start.

Mother of the Year candidate

A cheerleader in Columbus, Ohio, got into a disagreement at school, went home and complained to Mom. So, Mom did what any red-blooded, female progenitor would do — grab a baseball bat and go looking for the coach.

When she found the coach, she began yelling at her and swinging the bat near her. Other parents at the practice broke up things up before she could connect, and the mom, the disgruntled cheerleader and the bat all went home.

Oh, I don’t know if we mentioned it, but this was an elementary school.

Coach of the Year candidate

In Lakeland, Fla., Christopher Michael Campbell, a volunteer assistant football coach at Kathleen High School, didn’t like the way the guys were playing.

So he decided to do something about it. What? You mean bring a bat to practice? No, no, my friend, not a lousy bat — a knife. And he not only brought the knife, he allegedly brandished it several times, while cursing for extra emphasis. He reportedly poked one player, tapping him on his chest while verbally threatening him.

Somehow, this didn’t go over well, and now Mr. Campbell finds himself in a certain amount of legal jeopardy as — oddly enough — having a weapon on campus is not only a violation of school board policy but a felony.

Mr. Campbell might have heard about a certain incident a few years back — ah … Columbine, I think it was called. Or he might recall any number of other incidents the past few years, which have led schools — and cops — to frown on bringing weapons to show-and-tell.

A school administrator said that Mr. Campbell was very well-liked.

Not anymore, I’m guessing …

Friday column: Gladwell might be barking up right tree

In a recent New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell drew a comparison between dogfighting and football, especially pro football.

He drew an analogy between the damage done to dogs in the pit and the damage done to players on the field, between the disposability of dogs and the disposability of players.

I first thought Gladwell had gone around the bend. But after looking at Roger Goodell’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I’m not so sure.

In his article, Gladwell brought up Michael Vick, who spent 19 months in prison for running a dogfighting ring. One of the things that intensified the reaction to Vick’s actions was his lying about them, his refusal — until forced — to accept responsibility for the terrible physical damage he had caused.

The long failure to accept responsibility was one of the reasons Goodell made Vick jump through so many hoops to get reinstated to the game — including a
4 1/2-hour interview with Goodell so the commissioner could determine if Vick’s remorse was sincere.

Which brings us to Wednesday’s hearing on the NFL and head injuries, where Goodell refused to answer a straightforward question from committee Chairman John Conyers.

In the wake of studies connecting football head trauma with dementia and other cognitive problems — including a study sponsored by the NFL — Goodell was asked if he believed there was a a injury-disease connection.

His response was to tout the league’s desire to make the game safer. A longtime politician, Conyers knows stonewalling when he hears it. “I just asked you a simple question,” he said. “What is the answer?”

Goodell responded that a medical expert could give a better answer than he could. Well, as a matter of fact, they did, and cited for the committee “growing and convincing evidence” of a link between the football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that has resulted in depression, rage and suicide.

I understand why Goodell wouldn’t admit what seems to be increasingly obvious. If he admits the truth, he admits liability, and he knows there will be consequences. Much like Vick knew that if he admitted to sponsoring dogfights, there would be consequences.

More and more, the NFL is looking like Big Tobacco when it denied that smoking causes cancer. And a little bit like a certain former Atlanta Falcon who denied having anything to do with brutalized “animal athletes.”

Eventually Vick was compelled to admit the truth about his activities, and the damage his “sport” caused. One day, the NFL and Goodell will be compelled to admit the damage their sport caused and continues to cause.

When that happens, I wonder if former players and their families will want to interview Goodell for 4 1/2 hours to see if he truly is remorseful.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.

When in doubt, blame the tutor

Some 700 pages of documents a court ordered released by Florida State on the academic fraud — freaud that might cost football coach Bobby Bowden 14 of his precious victories — reveals that university President T. K. Wetherell essentially blamed it all on a “rogue tutor” and largely gave the athletes a pass.

“The student-athletes didn’t start off with the idea of this is how I am going to cheat,” Wetherell told the N.C.A.A.’s Committee on Infractions last October. “We don’t really believe they cheated. They got inappropriate help.”

The athletes received answers to test questions and allowed tutors to type and write their papers.

If they didn’t understand that was cheating, they weren’t exactly college material in the first place. Speaking of which, one of the tutors testified that some of the athletes she worked with read at a second-grade level.

You read that right.

Prodigal son? Not exactly

Stephen Jackson, who’s been whining about being stuck on Golden State even since signing a lucrative contract extension with Golden State, recently returned to the team after a two-game suspension, prompting coach Don Nelson to say, “The prodigal son has returned.”

It seems to me the parable of the prodigal son involve a word we haven’t heard from “Big Shot Jack,” as Jackson styles himself. What is it? What is it? Oh yeah — repentance.

(And no, don't hold your breath.)

Friday column: Steel cages, syringes and 'bad boys'

News item: The same day New Mexico suspends head football coach Mike Locksley for hitting an assistant, the NFL says it will consider taking action against Oakland head coach Mike Cable for allegedly breaking an assistant’s jaw.
Comment: Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Yes — steel-cage match: “Two coaches go in — but only one comes out!” For charity, of course.

News item: The discovery of “several suspicious syringes” linked to the Astana cycling team — the one featuring Tour de France winner Alberto Contador and third-place finisher Lance Armstrong — spurs French prosecutors to open an investigation into possible drug cheating.
Comment: The relentless effort of the French to nail Lance Armstrong makes Inspector Javert look like Inspector Clouseau.

News item: The Rev. Al Sharpton urges the NFL to reject any ownership bid involving Rush Limbaugh, saying the radio host is racially divisive.
Comment 1: Duh.
Comment 2: Al Sharpton’s worried about somebody being racially divisive? Al Sharpton?

News item: A recent poll indicates that American families with a household income of $75,000 or less now have zero dollars of discretionary income.
Comment: What’s discretionary income?

News item: Louisville basketball players Jerry Smith and Terrence Jennings — both projected starters — are charged with resisting arrest at an alumni party, and head coach Rick Pitino says the matter “will be handled internally.”
Comment: How does Pitino mete out any discipline — internal or external — after his well-publicized fall from grace?

News item: Matt Jones, dumped by Jacksonville after two arrests and a league suspension — all drug-related — reportedly has at least five teams interested in signing him.
Comment: Those teams seem to forget that for all his speed — he once ran a 4.37 40-yard-dash — Jones is yet to outrun either his drug problems or the cops.

News item: Barack Obama receives the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush.
Comment: Can I get a Pulitzer for not being Stephen Glass?

News item: Oakland defensive tackle Gerard Warren, reveling in the Raiders’ outlaw image despite their 1-4 record, says, “We’re still the most hated — the bad boys coming into town.”
Comment: If they had to, opposing teams would send limos to pick up the “bad boys” at the airport — even pick up their air fare.

News item: Four days after the arrest of Smith and Jennings, Pitino announces that neither will miss a single game.
Comment: See what I mean?

And they look so wholesome, too ...

What’s the deal with the Giles boys?

Wednesday, former San Diego Padre Marcus Giles was arrested for allegedly battering his wife. What's so unusual about that? By itself, nothing — unfortunately. Athletes getting nailed for domestic abuse is all too common.

But what makes this a bit different is the fact that Marcus' brother, Brian, another ex-Padre, has been sued for $10 million by a former girlfriend who alleges he hit and kicked her while she was pregnant with his child, causing a miscarriage. He’s counter-sued.

In case you wondering, yes, Brian is the older brother — the role model, if you will ...

Yeah, this is bad judgment ...

What in Phog Allen is going on at Kansas?

First, a rumble between Jayhawk basketball and football players; now a DUI arrest for junior guard Brady Morningstar, who also broke the curfew that hoop coach Bill Self put on his team after the fight.

Kansas, which historically has had a fairly clean image, got a great deal of bad publicity from the on-campus scrum. Now the DUI arrest.

Morningstar “used extremely poor judgment,” Self said.

You think?

... But this is worse

Say what you will about Morningstar, at least didn’t get tanked the night before a game — a critical game, in fact — like Detroit Tiger Miguel Cabrera did.

Cabrera came home early Saturday morning boozed up and in a combative mood — witness the scratches police found on his wife after she called 911. Cabrera, too, had scratches.

In this incident, Cabrera comes out a bum three ways: striking his wife, getting stinking drunk (blood-alcohol level of .26), and getting stinking drunk the day of a key game.

Nice.

Police didn’t charge Cabrera, but they did take him to the cop shop, where Tigers general manager Dave Dombrowski picked him up about 7:30 a.m. I bet they had an interesting discussion.

Blount: a pressure offense

News that the University of Oregon is reassessing its season-long suspension of LeGarrette Blount — the running back who popped a Boise State player following the Ducks’ opening game — doesn’t bother me.

Even to me, that suspension seemed severe.

But I wish the Oregon brass had come to the decision to reassess without being pressured by Blount’s parents and an attorney.

While Oregon athletic director Mike Bellotti said the call “was a plea by parents for understanding and leniency,” he acknowledged he was aware of the lawyer’s presence on the line, aware enough, in fact, to include a school attorney on the call.

If the school decides ultimately to give Blount a break, I’m sure it will say the (implied) threat of a lawsuit had nothing to do with it.

But that won’t be the truth.

The truth is that bureaucracies respond to pressure, and if you can bring enough to bear — by threatening to cost the bureaucracy either money or bad PR — minds can be changed.

Friday column: More than dumb, this defense is dumb-dumb

So.

Whoopie Goldberg doesn’t believe a 43-year-old man sodomizing a girl of 13 after giving her alcohol and drugs is rape.

Well, it’s rape, she said in explaining why Roman Polanski should not be extradited to the U.S., but not rape-rape, thereby somehow offering Polanski license for a crime he admitted to but for which he never paid.

The only way I can account for this interesting … um, thinking … is the fact that Polanski is a film director — you know, an artiste, and therefore not liable to the standards the rest of us proles are held to. That seemed to be the thrust of Debra Winger’s impassioned defense of Polanski — he’s an artist.

But then, he’s not that great of an artist, right? I mean, granted, he gave us Chinatown and The Pianist. But he also brought us The Fearless Vampire Killers and Pirates. Personally, I’m not sure I’d give the director of Bitter Moon a pass on jaywalking.

But that got my wife — the RISD and CalArts grad — and me to wonder: Using the reasoning of the Polanski defenders, what level of artist do you have to be to get a pass on a terrible crime against another human being?

Staying for comparison’s sake in a single category, painters, here’s what we came up with:

A Renior-level artist could commit crime.

A Jackson Pollock-level artist could commit crime-crime.

A Picasso-level artist could pretty much do anything he damn well pleased.

(A Dalí-level artist, on the other hand, could and should be arrested for spitting on the sidewalk.)

This Whoopie-and-Winger-inspired rating system could apply to athletes, as well. After all, they’re artists of a sort, aren’t they?

Kobe Bryant, I recall, was accused of rape — I don’t know if Ms. Goldberg considered it rape-rape or not — but he most certainly did something to that young Colorado hotel worker. Yet he walked without it costing him a little more than lawyers’ fees, settlement money and, of course, that nice, big rock for Mrs. Bryant.

With four NBA championships on his résumé, Bryant clearly is at or near the top of the basketball world, so whatever he did to the woman clearly should be covered by artistic license.

What about Ben Roethlisberger, the latest big-name athlete accused of rape?

On the one hand, the Steelers quarterback has won two Super Bowls. But on the other, he can’t be said to have reached Bryant’s level of accomplishment. So the precise level of violent sexual predation he should be allowed under the Whoopie-Winger system is unclear.

Now, if because of Roethlisberger’s unclear status, this method of determining who should get away with what seems inexact, it’s only as it should be. After all, the system isn’t science; it’s more, well, art.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.

Game-changer? Not while NFL plays prevent defense

So.

An NFL-commissioned study has discovered what other studies already have — Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia have been found in the league’s former players vastly more often than in the national population.

“This is a game-changer — the whole debate, the ball’s now in the NFL’s court,” Dr. Julian Bailes, chairman of the department of neurosurgery at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, told The New York Times. “They always say, ‘We’re going to do our own studies.’ And now they have.”

Yes, the ball’s in the NFL’s court. That doesn’t mean the league is going to do anything with it soon.

The NFL’s Greg Aiello told The Times that the study did not formally diagnose dementia, that it was subject to shortcomings of telephone surveys and that “there are thousands of retired players who do not have memory problems.”

“Memory disorders affect many people who never played football or other sports,” Aiello said. “We are trying to understand it as it relates to our retired players.”

In other words, the league will continue to obfuscate in order to delay doing anything substantive — such as ponying up funds for dementia victims’ care — for as long as it possibly can.

He’s got a lot of something

So.

Stephen Jackson is unhappy and wants to be traded.

The Golden State Warriors sharpshooter says the team has been going backward ever since its 2007 playoff run. In that, he is right. So why, one might ask, did Jackson sign a contract extension through 2013 a year and a half after that playoff appearance, when the Warriors’ direction already was evident?

"Who's going to turn down that money?” Jackson said. “I'm not stupid. I didn't go to college, but I have a lot of common sense."

This is the same Stephen Jackson who in the past five years, according to a generally favorable Wikipedia bio, “has been charged with felony criminal recklessness and a number of misdemeanors, including assault, disorderly conduct, and two counts of battery.”

Yes, much common sense.

Friday column: Locksley precedent is a hit

If you’re a scalp hunter for The University of New Mexico, your job just got easier.

UNM might not be Harvard, and Albuquerque might not be — oh, I don’t know, Cambridge or Palo Alto — but at our state’s largest university, there is one personnel perk you don’t get at any other school.

One free shot.

Yes, thanks to the precedent set by the administration in the case of head football coach Mike Locksley, all university personnel can take a productive swing at the co-worker of their choice and get no more than a verbal reprimand and a letter placed in their personnel file.

Talk about a great recruitment tool.

“Well, no, I’m afraid our salaries are rather limited at the moment, and the school contribution to the 401(k) plan has been halted … but if you run into an annoying fellow professor, you can cold-cock him!”

“When do I start?”

To be fair, Locksley didn’t knock out assistant coach J.B. Gerald, but grabbing him by the collar, hitting him and splitting his lip — an attack bad enough to necessitate a police report — is close enough to allow a little hyperbole for recruitment purposes.

After all, coaches have been known to mislead athletes to get them to sign on the dotted line. Locksley, for instance, is accused of wanting to fill the football office with young lovelies bodacious enough to make potential recruits sign letters of intent before they remember where they are.

Alas for football administrative assistant Sylvia Lopez, 54, it was decided she didn’t fit the bill, and out the door she went. Lopez in May filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charging sexual harassment, age discrimination and retaliation.

At the time, UNM athletic director Paul Krebs said of Locksley, “He is an outstanding football coach. I believe he is an outstanding individual. I’m really looking forward to what he’s able to build here long-term with our football program.”

What he’s built so far is a program that’s an embarrassment both on the field and in the office. But he remains the coach.

The only possible problem for Locksley — and the one-punch rule — is an investigation launched by the school’s Human Resources Division. But UNM President David Schmidly and Krebs are two of the three people who will make a final decision on the matter. Schmidly has made it clear he’s got Kreb’s back, and Krebs has made it clear he has Locksley’s.

“I do not believe (the punch) is a reflection of his dealings,” Krebs said Monday. “It’s not a reflection of his character. This does not shake my faith in his leadership whatsoever.”

Let’s roll the tape on that last part again: “This does not shake my faith in his leadership whatsoever.”

Who wouldn’t want to work for an administration like that?

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.