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.

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.