Friday column: Not sure I’d cash these assertions

Former NBA player Javaris Crittenton, best known for playing quick-draw (with real weapons) with then-teammate Gilbert Arenas in a gambling dispute, has a new claim to fame — murder suspect.

Police say Crittenton, who was robbed of some bling in April, thought he saw the perp walking down an Atlanta street. So, allegedly, he did what any of us would do — whip out a gun and fire from his SUV in the perp’s general direction.

Unfortunately, the specific direction turned out to be the leg of Jullian Jones, a 22-year mother of four standing outside her house. She died in surgery.

On the lam for a few days, Crittenton has now turned himself in, professing innocence. I’m sure you can take his avowal to the bank.

Of course, if you took his denial of the 2009 locker-room showdown with Arenas to the bank, you found his veracity lacked sufficient funds.

Both of Crittenton’s gun incidents (one proven, one alleged) seem beyond stupid. Yet Crittenton is not a stupid man, evidenced by his a 3.5 high school GPA. The explanation for his latest screw-up, if true, may lie not in his head, but in his heart.

Asked about his former teammate after Crittenton was put on probation and suspended for a year for the locker-room gun incident, Arenas said he had heard Crittenton had become “more hard.” More hard as in “more gansta.”

“You know, like some people turn over a new leaf when something bad like that changes their life,” Arenas said. “I heard Javaris went the other way — he became more ’hood, more hardened in that way. I don’t know if that’s the case, but that’s what I heard.”

If Crittenton is convicted and imprisoned, he’ll get all the gansta he can handle.

* * *

A fondness not for gangsta life but for John Barleycorn seems behind another incident, less damaging but still repugnant, in which a number of LSU football players were involved in a bar fight that sent four people to the hospital.

One of the victims has a facial fracture, a concussion, fractured teeth and facial and body bruises. The fractured teeth might have come courtesy of LSU starting quarterback Jordan Jefferson, whom a witness recalls seeing kicking the man in the head.

After being hit with felony charges of second-degree battery, Jefferson (along with linebacker Josh Johns) was suspended indefinitely, a miscarriage of justice that his attorney seeks to repair by asking LSU head coach Les Miles to reverse his decision.

“It is more than unjust to destroy this young man’s career if it’s all about a bunch of nothing, which is what I think,” defense attorney Lewis Unglesby said Monday.

Actually a true translation of Unglesby’s last phrase from lawyer into English would read, “which is what I am paid to think, or at least am paid to say I think.”

Not that I for a minute would question the attorney’s sincerity or his opinion of the young man in question.

I’m quite sure you can take them both to the bank.

Friday column: I’m taking Darwin and the points

It appears that the Super Bowl could be hazardous to your health.

Citing a study showing that heart attacks and other cardiac emergencies doubled in Munich when the German national team played World Cup matches, doctors are warning Americans — especially those with known heart issues — to not get too excited during Sunday’s Big Game.

“I know a little bit about the Super Bowl,” study author Dr. Gerhard Steinbeck of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich told The Associated Press. “It’s reasonable to think that something quite similar might happen.”

In the study, The AP said, Steinbeck and his colleagues “blamed emotional stress for the heart problems, but they note that lack of sleep, overeating, wolfing down junk food, boozing and smoking might have played a role too.”

So, boozing, smoking, night-owling and junk-food eating by people who already know they have heart problems — combined with getting overstimulated by watching complete strangers carry, kick and throw a leather oval to and fro — could cause some of them to move to the Big Stadium in the Sky.

I believe there’s a term for this eventuality.

Natural selection.

* * *

While we’re on the subject of brilliant behavior, I offer the actions of one Deon Anderson of the Dallas Cowboys.

According to police, Anderson got into a early-morning dispute with another man this week outside a restaurant/saloon at, oh, just about closing time.

When the man begin laughing, Anderson allegedly pulled a gun.

While I’m sure that at the time the move seemed a reasonable response to mirth, the Cowboys fullback may feel differently now that he’s been arrested on a charge of deadly conduct. The police, you see, found the gun in nearby shrubs — loaded and with a round chambered.

Besides his legal problems, Anderson is likely to face certain employment difficulties. The NFL, I believe, frowns on this sort of breach of decorum.

Before pulling the weapon — in fact, before driving to a bar with one — Anderson would have done well to consider a couple of recent incidents involving athletes and guns.

Plaxico Burress, late of the New York Giants, is in prison for his little 2008 nightclub mishap.

And Gilbert Arenas and Javaris Crittenton, soon to be late of the Washington Wizards, have been suspended for the rest of this NBA season — sans pay — for bringing manhood extensions into their locker room.

As neither of these episodes ended well for the athletes involved, one would have thought Mr. Anderson would have paid attention.

I guess not.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.

Who is Gilbert Arenas?

Recommended reading: Saturday's Sally Jenkins sympathetic-yet-tough piece in the Washington Post on the Wizards' troubled star.

Of his attempt to play the locker room gangster, Jenkins writes:

"What a weak-willed, fraudulent gesture, to pretend to be someone lesser instead of someone better. And that's the deeper offense that Arenas has committed; it's what underlies our anger at him, and our sorrow for him, and our bafflement. The most winsome, talented young man in town is indefinitely suspended from the NBA, and facing a grand jury, because he stepped down instead of up. He didn't have a strong enough sense of self to shrug off a quarrel, and had to go one-up on the dumbest guy in locker room."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/08/AR2010010802166.html

A pointed response

Latest rumble on Gilbert Arenas’ little gun joke was that it took an even more serious turn than was thought. There are reports that when Arenas laid out four guns in the Wizards’ locker room and invited Jarvis Crittenton to choose one, Crittenton surprised Arenas by throwing one of Arenas’ guns to the floor and producing his own, into which he inserted a round, while singing.

Meanwhile Arenas, while saying all the right things through his lawyers, has continued to say and do all the wrong things himself, including his continued ill-advised tweeting and his taking the court for a recent game while pointing his fingers at his teammates as if they were guns (ha-ha).

All of which got him suspended indefinitely. Arenas seemed to expect such a turn. After meeting with the law Monday, Arenas said he feared NBA commissioner David Stern more than the authorities because he was “mean.”

Two comments:

1) Stern might or might not be mean, but he can’t put Arenas in jail. That the authorities can do.

2) Stern might or might not be mean, but he’s not stupid — stupid enough to allow Arenas to continue to tarnish the league’s reputation without responding both quickly and decisively. The difference between Stern and Arenas is that Stern — whatever else you think of him — is an adult.

Friday column: It would all make sense in an alternative universe

Man is said to be a rational animal, though one wonders in a world where New York City spends taxpayer dollars to teach people how to shoot heroin and a Saudi program tries to rehabilitate terrorists with art therapy.

Thank God for the world of sports, that bastion of sanity, where:

* The Washington Wizards’ Gilbert Arenas can store four handguns in his locker at the Verizon Center and justify this violation of NBA rules by stating he wanted the weapons out of his house because of the birth of his third child.

You were worried about the safety of your third child, Gilbert? What were your first two, chopped liver?

* Florida coach Urban Meyer can flat-out lie about his recent hospitalization for chest pains and claim he did so to protect his children and his football team.

What’s more dishonorable than using your kids as an excuse? I’m guessing, Urban, your lie was actually designed to keep your next batch of recruits from straying to other programs.

* Gilbert Arenas (yes, same fellow) can get into an argument over a gambling debt with Javaris Crittenton, bring out guns from his locker, tell his teammate to choose one, and explain it away by saying he has a “goofball” sense of humor.

Right — nothing funnier in the African American community than gun violence, Gilbert.

* After four of his players are arrested on gun, drug and alcohol charges, Tennessee men’s head basketball coach Bruce Pearl can tell women’s coach Pat Summitt he’s sorry “if” his team has tarnished the good image she’s worked hard to build.

Any apology with the word IF in it is worthless, Bruce.

* Urban Meyer (yup, same one) can resign one day, citing health concerns and the importance of being there for his family, then turn around and unresign, claiming his change was a family decision.

Using your family as a crutch for what YOU want to do is really getting old, Urban.

* University of Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton can sound as though the school is doing something about its problem athletes, saying he wants to “make sure we’re doing everything possible in the education process to make sure our student athletes understand exactly what our expectations are …”

You mean you have to EXPLAIN to your … um … student-athletes that your expectations don’t include them getting arrested for drugs, alcohol and firearms?

We’ll turn the floor over to one Alvin Jackson, a pitcher who had the misfortune to toil for the worst team in baseball history, the 1962 Mets. One day after five straight Mets errors, his manager — in order to spare his sanity — decided to relieve him, but neglected to inform him of that fact. As Jackson walked back to the mound to start the next inning, he heard the PA system blare, “Now pitching for the Mets … Ray Davialt!”

Jackson threw up his hands and yelled, “Everybody here crazy!”

Indeed.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.

Just what an NBA star needs — more adulation

When Gilbert Arenas recently went to the basketball-crazy Philippines to push Adidas shoes, he was treated like a rock star.

Actually he was treated like conquering hero.

Actually he was treated better.

This from "The New York Times":

"When he landed at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Arenas was met by a horde of television and newspaper videographers and photographers who followed him throughout his three days in Manila. Arenas said that he was so taken aback by the size and opulence of his presidential suite at the Peninsula Manila Hotel that he took pictures to prove he stayed there.

"To visit Adidas stores, he traveled in a motorcade of dark sport utility vehicles with an escort of three police motorcycles. Before he arrived at each site, bomb-sniffing dogs swept the areas, and brawny Adidas-clad security guards wearing Secret Service-style earpieces set up barricades to corral the fans who had crowded mall walkways to catch a glimpse of him."

The best quote in the story came from Arenas: “They make you feel like you’re a god. When my N.B.A. career is done, I have to play here one year just to feel that.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/sports/basketball/17arenas.html?ref=sports