NEWS & VIEWS

                NEWS: Kerry Wood retires.

                

                VIEWS:  All athletes retire eventually, either on purpose or by necessity, but this one came as a jolt. That’s not because of Wood’s age (34) or professional longevity (14 seasons in the Major Leagues), both of which were appropriate to his announcement. It’s because of the image that I and, I’m sure, others carry of the pitcher.

                It stems from the May 6, 1998, weekday afternoon in which Wood, a 20-year-old Chicago Cubs’ rookie, tied a record by striking out 20 Houston Astros en route to a one-hit, 2-0 victory. Memorable days like that have been rare in the annals of his woebegone team, but this certainly was one. Working at home I was able to watch the game on TV, and it was marvelous to behold.

The Astros that day were a formidable bunch, their lineup including the probable future Hall of Famers Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, but the tall right-hander handled them like the big kid pitching to little ones in a Little League matchup. His fastballs hissed and his sliders seemingly took 45-degree turns. And he was so young! His—and his team’s—future glowed rosily.

It didn’t work out that way. Wood missed a month with arm problems before his rookie year ended, and he sat out the entire next season with elbow surgery.   While he managed to have a few decent seasons after that, he spent so much time on the Disabled List that some thought his initials were D.L. His career victory total of 86 fell about 200 short of what many might have predicted after his signal achievement.

Steve Stone said when Wood retired that the pitcher’s body failed him, but I think the canny broadcaster was being disingenuous. My take is that Wood’s problem was mental, and perhaps rooted in his May glory day. He didn’t want to just retire the batters he faced, he wanted to blow them away, every one, and in consequence strained and restrained his arm while never bothering to develop the subtler ascents of his art.  His focus seemed always to be on the “K,” not on the “W,” which, as you may have noticed, are his actual initials.

NEWS: Joe Ricketts doesn’t like President Obama.

VIEWS: Most billionaires don’t, of course, and some of them are bankrolling ad campaigns to persuade people that the Prez is a freedom-hating Kenyan socialist who is either a Muslim or an acolyte of the black-liberationist Christian preacher Jeremiah Wright (never mind which). But most billionaires don’t head a family that owns a Big League sports team, as Ricketts does.

 When poppa’s political plans surfaced, his offspring who run the Cubs dived for cover, and eventually took him with them. That was after someone pointed out that the team was seeking city and state financing for a proposed $300 million Wrigley Field renovation, and that the city and state involved are led by Democrats who might not appreciate their patriarch’s activities.

In truth, though, the government-off-my-back political stance Ricketts espouses has been thoroughly trashed by his family’s ball club. While the Cubs are looking for taxpayer bucks in Illinois they already are getting them in Arizona, the otherwise famously conservative state where they make their spring headquarters. There the city of Mesa is putting up $84 million of the $99 million it’s supposed to cost to build the team new spring-training digs, replacing the ones the city had built for it previously. The deal also includes a Cub option to buy city land for commercial development around the stadium, at lower-than-market prices.

The Cubs have trained in Mesa since 1979, yet like most enterprises angling for a government handout they threatened to move (to Naples, Florida) if they didn’t get one. This is from a low-rent burg that’s as hard up as most these days and has had to lay off employees to close budget gaps. But what are political principles when there’s money to be made, right Joe?

NEWS: I’ll Have Another goes for horse racing’s Triple Crown.

VIEWS: No three-year-old has won the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes in the same year since Affirmed in 1978, but I’ll Have Another could end that drought at the Belmont in New York on June 9. That would give his sport a needed shot of favorable publicity, albeit probably a short-lived one.

Don’t get your hopes too high, though. Since Affirmed’s feat, 10 other colts have won the Derby and Preakness but failed in the grueling (1 ½-mile) Belmont, and trends in equine breeding and training that emphasize speed over stamina make its accomplishment less likely than in past years. Also, the Derby co-favorite Union Rags and Dullahan, the fast-closing third-place finisher in the Kentucky race, should be on hand to challenge, and because they skipped the Preakness will have the advantage of freshness.

Further, and typically for racing, I’ll Have Another’s tale has a dark side. That would be the history of his trainer, Doug O’Neill, who last week was slapped with a 45-day suspension and $15,000 fine for doping another horse in California, his usual stomping grounds. The penalty was the fourth levied against the man whom my Turf Paradise race-book cohorts say is known back home as Doug O’Needle.

O’Needle (oops, O’Neill), however, is an angel compared with Rick Dutrow, who in 2008 saddled the last Derby-Preakness winner, Big Brown. That fella has been cited for various violations 64 times in nine states since 1979, and last October in New York was socked with a big one that includes a 10-year suspension. Still, he trains on while his appeals pend and was the second-winningest trainer in the last meet at Aqueduct. Similarly (and conveniently), O’Neill’s most-recent penalty won’t kick in until after the Belmont.

Racing’s big story in recent decades has been the rise in the use of medications, legal and otherwise, to keep horses running, and the related upswing in on-track spills that threaten the lives of horses and jockeys. The underlying problem is that the sport is run by a hodgepodge of state governing bodies that vary greatly in honesty and competence. It and boxing need the most regulation but get the least. No Triple Crown should obscure that.   

 

BOOK 'EM, DANO

                Have a yen for mayhem? There are places you can satisfy it without fear that the law will intervene.

               

I’m talking about our fields of play, all of them. What happens in Vegas may or may not stay in Vegas, but what happens in sports—no matter how appalling-- stays in sports. You can get away with just about anything short of murder without the cops taking much notice.

               

Recent examples abound. Last month in a Stanley Cup playoff game the Phoenix Coyotes’ Raffi Torres blindsided the Chicago Blackhawks’ Marian Hossa with a leaping blow to the head that left Hossa concussed and ended his season. Torres was ejected and suspended but not otherwise charged.

                A few days later the curiously self-named Metta World Peace of the L.A. Lakers, a thug formerly known as Ron Artest, celebrated a dunk by viciously elbowing the Oklahoma Thunder’s James Harden in the ear, leaving Harden writhing on the court.  Peace, too, has escaped any punishment except the one imposed by his sport.

 You may recall that the pre-Peace Artest also was a central figure in basketball’s biggest recent-year explosion of lawlessness, the 2004 “Malice in the Palace” brawl that spilled over into the stands of the Detroit Pistons-Indiana Pacers NBA game in Detroit. Yet he happily dribbles on, wreaking havoc and paying his fines from his ample purse (his contract will pay him about $7 million this season).

Then there’s the granddaddy of them all, the “bounty” scandal involving the football New Orleans Saints.  This one spans several  years and involves coaches and team executives as well as players.  If evidence of criminal intent sometimes has been lacking in other instances of playing-field violence, it certainly is present here, with coaches caught on tape exhorting their charges to go beyond the rules of the game to injure key opponents in return for direct cash rewards.

 Properly, the National Football League has cracked down hard on some of the perpetrators, issuing an open-ended suspension on Saints’ ex-defensive coordinator Greg Williams and sitting head coach Sean Payton and linebacker Jonathan Vilma for a season. But while the organized nature of the scheme raises the possibility of conspiracy charges as well as those against individuals, the criminal authorities have been silent on the matter to date.

The reasons that you can get away on the field with acts that would bring prison time if committed on the street or in a bar are several. One is our tradition, however goofy, that holds that sports are a realm apart and gives their overseers wide latitude in dealing with infractions of all sorts. Another is the political nature of criminal prosecutions in this land; athletes generally are popular and elected law-enforcement officials are loath to pursue them. It’s noteworthy in this regard that in the rare instances where prosecutions have followed on-field criminal acts it’s usually been visiting-team players who were targeted.  Five Pacers were hauled into court after the ’04 Palace fight, and while their sentences were laughably light (probation and a few hours of community service) that was more than the Piston combatants got, which was nothing.

Mostly, though, boys are allowed to be boys in sports because of the long-established legal doctrine of assumed consent, which states that people who engage in risky activities knowingly accept the dangers inherent therein.  These include the physical pummeling participants inevitably get in the normal course of sports like boxing, football, hockey and basketball.

 Thanks to recent revelations about the long-term consequences of concussions, it now turns out that those risks are greater than once was supposed.  In any case, though, they generally haven’t been interpreted to cover injuries that result from blatant rules violations. For example, when Evander Holyfield entered a Las Vegas boxing ring against Mike Tyson in November of 1998 he might have expected to get smacked around some, but he probably didn’t anticipate having a chunk of an ear bitten off.  Tyson could have been prosecuted criminally for doing that but, typically, he wasn’t. His sole penalties were a one-year suspension from his sport and a $3 million fine, payable to the Nevada Athletics Commission. That amount looks large until it’s noted that his purse from the fray was $30 million.

 Indeed, what screams out at anyone who looks into such matters are the consistent discrepancies between the treatment of the perps and their victims.  Nothing makes this point better than the February, 2004, episode in which Todd Bertuzzi, of the hockey Vancouver Canucks, punched the  Colorado Avalanche’s Steve Moore from behind during a game and drove him head-first into the ice, breaking three of Moore’s neck vertebrae and giving him a severe concussion. Don’t view the tape of this unless you have a strong stomach.

Bertuzzi was criminally charged in Canada and got off with the usual slap on the wrist—probation and public service. He was fined and suspended for 17 months by the National Hockey League but missed only 20 games because of the players’ strike during that period.  Reinstated in 2005, he was named to the Canadian Olympic team the next year, putting his country’s stamp of approval on his character. He’s still in the NHL.

Moore never played hockey again, and still suffers from his injuries. He sued Bertuzzi for damages  in 2005. Seven years later, his suit has yet to come to trial.

NOTE: To see my prescription for saving the Chicago Cubs, check out my latest piece on chicagosidesports.com.  

               

               

               

                   

PACE MAKES THE RACE

Every year when the Kentucky Derby approaches I think about the weather. On a nice day in Louisville it’s a glorious affair, full of prettily dressed women and the smells of horse, flowering trees, bourbon and risk that makes it unique in sports. When it rains it’s a soggy mess that’s best avoided.

 When I think of horses and rain I think of my old friend and race-track mentor, Sam “The Genius” Lewin. Sam had few peers as a handicapper but he couldn’t beat the mud, and knew it. He had an ego as big as all outdoors, and that admission was as close as he ever came to acknowledging fallibility.

 I met Sam on purpose through several references in the winter of 1968, pursuing my interest in writing stories about people who lived off their wits. His “office” that day was a table in the clubhouse dining room of the old Tropical Park Race Track in Miami. There he sipped iced tea and chatted with his cronies (who included Saul Silberman, the track’s owner), rising occasionally to place a bet or two on the equine contestants.

 His afternoons were leisurely because he did his serious work in the mornings, rising before dawn to spend a couple of hours hobnobbing around the stables, then poring over the past performances of the day’s entries in The Morning Telegraph, a precursor of The Daily Racing Form. He pretty much knew how he was going to bet before he got to the track but attended to watch the races and make mental notes for future reference. He agreed with Yogi that you could see a lot just by looking.

 Sam was a big, hulking man with a voice to match. If he liked you, you were a prince, and if he didn’t, you were a bum. If he really didn’t like you, you were a “pure bum,” and he let you know it. People put up with him because of the benefits: he’d mark the programs of just about any nonbum who asked. They asked because his nickname wasn’t ironic. While he had a “square” job as manager of a rich friend’s racing stable, it was mainly a way of getting the credentials that admitted him to the horsemen’s parking lots and the tracks’ working areas. He made his living by betting, and quite a good one. Then as now, that was very, very rare.

 I wrote a front-page story about Sam for The Wall Street Journal that year. A publisher saw it and asked if we’d like to do a book together. We agreed, and “The Education of a Horseplayer” came out in 1969. It’s still around on the internet, and while the human actors we wrote about are long gone, and some of the tracks Sam frequented no longer exist (Tropical Park, Hialeah, Garden State, Atlantic City), it’s still a good primer on weighing the many variables that go into a race-track bet. Add the reminiscences of a guy who knew gangsters by their first names and was on J. Edgar Hoover’s Christmas-card list, and you had a pretty good read besides.

 The book was fine as far as it went, but it didn’t contain all the reasons for Sam’s success; indeed, it couldn’t. In his four decades of daily attendance at the tracks he came to know everyone and anyone, and what they were up to. He knew which horses were sound and which sore, which trainers were running their nags for real on a particular day and which for exercise, which jockeys were showing up hung over. It all went into his calculations stew.

 His main analytical tool was his application of the dictum “Pace Makes the Race.” That means that the manner in which a race is run determines its outcome. In every race one or more horses will try to lead, some will lurk just off the pace and some will lag, hoping to prevail with a late charge. With that model as a guide, Sam would mentally preview every race. When he could see the winner clearly, and the odds were right (he almost never took a horse that went off at less than 2-to-1), he’d bet. When he couldn’t he wouldn’t.

 I summon up Sam’s example every time I’m at the races, as best I can. Like most recreational bettors I lack his patience and discipline; while he could pass race after race waiting for an optimal situation, I’m there once a week for fun and take more than an occasional flier. I do play the “race-in-the- mind” game, though, and it mostly determines where my money will go.

 Let’s look at the current Derby field through this lens. It’s always a tougher-than- usual race to handicap because its distance of 1 ¼ miles is 1/8-mile longer than any of the contestants will have run, and because its big field of 20 or so makes inevitable the kind of banging around that can sidetrack worthy contenders. On the other hand—and definitely this year, when every major Derby prep race had a different winner—there’s usually no clear favorite, meaning than you can get good odds on some very good horses. That as much as anything else makes it the sport’s biggest betting race.

 When the gate opens on Saturday I expect three horses to burst out ahead—Bodemeister, Hansen and Trinniberg. Of the three, Bodemeister seems to have the best chance to also finish in front. His 9 ½-length victory in the Arkansas Derby—all on the lead-- was an eyepopper and will attract a lot of betting support, so expect him to go off at about 5 to 1. The early fractions should determine how far he or any other leader can go. If the first quarter-mile is run in less than 23 seconds, chances are he’ll be too pooped to last. Anything over 24 seconds and he’ll have a chance. Remember that the simplest way to win any race is from the front.

 Right behind the leaders should come a group of five or six, including Union Rags, Gemologist, El Padrino, Mark Valeski and Creative Cause. Union Rags should go off as the favorite at around 4-to-1. He would have been a stronger choice if he’d won the Florida Derby, but he ran almost the entire race in a box, never breaking free until it was too late but still showing enough to justify his likely favored status on Saturday. Gemologist must be considered because, as Sam would have said, he does nothing but win (he’s 5 for 5), but he doesn’t seem to have quite the speed of some other contenders.

 Among the closers should be Dullahan, Alpha and Went The Day Well. Dullahan, the Bluegrass Stakes winner, looks to be the best of these, but Alpha also might be attractive at good odds. While I won’t make my final betting choices until just before race time, I’ll probably take one each from my Columns A, B and C—Bodemeister, Union Rags and Dullahan—and throw in a longshot to make a four-horse exacta box costing $24. At the least, that should give me something to root for at every stage of the race.

 I’ll also be rooting for sunshine. According to the Weather Bureau, there’s about a 20% chance of rain at Derby time, meaning it’s 80% against. That’s about as good odds as you ever get at the track.

SPORTS LITERACY 101

For sports fans, this is among the best times of year. The Major League Baseball season has begun, hockey is in its playoffs phase, pro basketball soon will be there and the pro-football draft is about a fortnight away. Gatherings of all sorts are abuzz with sports talk, to the virtual exclusion of other topics.

For nonfans—a persecuted minority at any time—the situation is uncomfortable, if not dire. Not only are they left out of the chatter, they’re apt to feel bewildered and culturally derived as well. That’s because sports has a vocabulary of its own, understood only by the cognoscenti. If you’ve traveled broad and aren’t adept at foreign languages, you know what it’s like to overhear conversations that are totally unintelligible. Imagine how that must feel in your own land.

I’m a sports fan, of course, but have some knowledge of the psyche of the nonfan. My daughter Jessica, raised in a four-brother family of fans, is one, as were both my parents and my lone sibling, sister Judy. Their examples have caused me to ponder the fan/nonfan phenomenon and conclude that it stems from nature, not nurture. Somewhere in our makeup is a gene that twisted one way produces fans, and twisted another produces nons. Some day someone will identify it, and, thus, open the way to its manipulation. Couples of the future will be able to control whether or not their offspring will follow sports, ending the heartbreak of houses divided. Indeed, the time can’t be far away when parents will be able to specify which sports will enthuse their children—and, even, which teams!

Until that happy day comes, however, we must depend on education to close the gaps, but there are difficulties. Rather than educate, the sports pages of our daily newspapers obfuscate, regularly employing the sort of shorthand that widens the cultural divide. As a young reporter I was told by a wise editor that the three main rules of journalism were “explain, explain, explain,” but that message never seems to make it to the sports departments. They throw around initials such as NBA and NHL with nary a word of explanation, and just about daily carry entire stories in which the subject sport is never named.

Like most fans I ignored that last thing until a jarring experience set me straight. It came during a long-ago trip to England, where I made my way through a lengthy, jargon-filled sports-page piece without ever discovering what sport it was about. (It was cricket, I later learned.) Then and there I resolved never to write a sports story without naming the sport early on. One of my proudest boasts is that I’ve stuck to that pledge.

So call a nonfan to read this over your shoulder—he or she will learn something. NBA stands for National Basketball Association and NHL for National Hockey League. That’s important to know even if candor requires me to point out that both titles are misnomers because the entities really are international, encompassing teams from both the U.S. and Canada.

Obversely, our annual baseball championship is grandly called the World Series even though only U.S. teams (and one from Toronto) are eligible to participate. Since 2006 there has been a real world series, called the World Baseball Classic, involving national all-star teams from many countries. It’s been contested twice (in 2006 and 2009), with Japan winning both times. That the U.S. never has finished higher than fourth in the event is something our Major League would prefer to ignore.

Now let’s move on to decoding things that sports figures say; like the writers who describe their deeds, they have a language all their own. The main places to hear it are the ESPN television stations. Without a glossary the talk they broadcast is meaningless.

For example, when a player says he is “struggling” it means he is failing; a baseball player who confesses to “struggling at the plate” means that he couldn’t get a hit if the pitcher handed him the ball. The reasons usually given for such struggles are called “distractions.” These can be anything that might keep an athlete’s mind from his on-field duties, from a hangnail to a pending rape trial.

When a player signs a multi-year, multi-multi-million-dollar contract, he typically expresses his satisfaction by saying that the vast sum finally will enable him to “take care” of his family, even though it guarantees than even with moderate overspending none of his descendants for many generations will have to work. The flip side of that line is a team owner saying he won’t meet the market price for a desirable player because he needs to maintain his team’s “salary structure.” That means that if he pays one guy what’s he’s worth his other employees also might demand similar treatment.

“All I really want is a ring” is another thing an athlete says after he’s signed a huge contract. Members of championship teams usually receive rings, which have come to emblemize unselfish achievement.

But when his contract offers an “out,” whether or not a ring has been attained, this same fella is as likely as not to ditch his team for one that offers him more money. Why would he do such a thing? BECAUSE HE HAS TO TAKE CARE OF HIS FAMILY.

See how easy it is once you get the hang of it?

SMELLIVISION

I like boxing but hate to admit it. It’s a brutal activity that offends just about everyone’s notions of civility and is saved only by the courage and skill of its best practitioners. Still, for the tingle of pure excitement, nothing beats the opening bell of a big fight. I attended many as a columnist, and miss the privilege of a ringside seat.

I feel pretty much the same about college sports, the annual climax of which—the NCAA basketball title game—tips off tomorrow (Monday) night. Yeah, the games are swell, and well worth watching, but their administration is so steeped in hypocrisy and corruption that the odor comes right through my television set and into my living room. That also was the case when I had a much-less-fancy TV than I do now.

Nothing makes that point better than the contrast between the parlous state of higher education in this land and the lavishness of the college-sports establishment. While states slash their support of public colleges and universities, and the resulting tuition increases turn a college education for most into a luxury supportable only by painful borrowing (total student-loan debt exceeds credit-card debt in the U.S.), schools pour ever-larger sums into new stadiums and athletics-support facilities. Nothing is too good for our jocks.

I thought the prevailing mindset on this issue was expressed nicely a few weeks ago when a member of the fine legislature of my home state of Arizona introduced a bill requiring every scholarship student at a state university to make a minimum tuition payment of $2,000 from his own or his parents’ pocket. The gentleman was quick to note, however, that holders of athletics scholarships would be exempt from the charge because their talents “help” their schools.

As exemplified by this season’s basketball Final Four, the nothing-is-too-good rule goes double for big-time college head coaches; according to USA Today the combined annual salaries of the four schools’ sideline bosses total $17.6 million, or, probably, more than that of the entire engineering faculties of the institutions involved. Louisville’s Rick Pitino heads the list at $7.5 million a year, a sum which, as far I can tell, exceeds the salary of any NBA coach now that Phil Jackson has retired. Kentucky’s John Calipari is next at $3.9 million, and Kansas’s Bill Self is close behind him at $3.6 million. Thad Matta of Ohio State makes a paltry $2.6 million, but I’m sure he’ll get a raise soon.

It would be good to report that the above-named gentlemen are moral exemplars who are a credit to their schools, parents and race. Hah! Calipari heads just about everyone’s all-sleaze list, with Pitino close behind. The jury remains out on Self and Motta, as it does on just about every other college coach at their level of pay and accomplishment.

Calipari’s rep is based mostly on the fact that he’s the only coach to have had the NCAA vacate the records (and take back the trophies) of two Final Four teams he guided—Massachusetts in 1996 and Memphis in 2008. UMass was whacked after it was revealed that its star center, Marcus Camby, received about $40,000 in cash and gifts from an agent while he was a so-called student-athlete. Memphis got it because Derrick Rose, the freshman leader of its 2008 national runnerup, got into the school because someone else took his college-entrance exam.

Calipari, of course, maintained that he’d been ignorant of those misdeeds. The NCAA chose to believe him despite the fact that coaches of his ilk know what each of their players eat for breakfast every morning. That’s why they call the cartel the No Consequences Athletics Association.

Indeed, Calipari’s career has sailed right along no matter what ethical icebergs he’s banged into, culminating in 2009 in the UK job, reputed to be the best in academe. He’s so far escaped formal obloquy there, but not for lack of trying. Eric Bledsoe, the star freshman guard of his first Kentucky team, left school for the pros after an examination of his high-school records revealed evidence that his grades had been altered to meet college standards. Then the coach tried to get Enes Kanter, a Turkish seven-footer, cleared to play at UK despite Kanter having been paid more than $100,000 to perform for a season at a top-tier professional team in his homeland. Calipari lost that one, and Kanter took the next-best offer, with the NBA’s Utah Jazz.

Fact is, though, that the young Turk spent only one year fewer in college than have many other Calipari recruits. He’s the master of the one-and-done, the cup-of-coffee college stay for the highly talented dictated by a 2005 NBA decision to deny employment to kids until they turn 19 years of age and are a year out of high school. Four members of Calipari’s first Kentucky team escaped to the pros after taking this academically dubious path, as did two of his second. A few from this team probably will, too.

Louisville’s Pitino made his early mark on his sport with his Armani suits and have-whistle-will-travel portfolio that had him flitting at short intervals between the colleges and the pros. His notion of allegiance is best illustrated by his signing with Louisville in 2001 after having led UK against the school in one of college hoops’ bitterest rivalries.

Pitino gained tabloid fame a couple years back when a woman who would marry and divorce his team’s equipment manager (!) claimed Pitino had raped her. The married father of five admitted to having had consensual sexual with the lady, and giving her $3,000 for “health insurance” (she said it was for an abortion), but that was it. The episode came to light when the woman was arrested and later convicted for using the episode to try to shake down Pitino for further funds. He came off as the victim, and not only has survived as a leader of young men, but also has prospered.

Matta’s Ohio State basketballers have been OK with the NCAA but the school’s football team recently was ensnared in scandal. Typically, the NCAA focused on the trivial benefits (tattoos) Buckeye football players got from a booster while ignoring the fact the guy was a drug dealer and his Columbus tattoo parlor was their social club. If a lot of gridders found the place maybe a few cagers did, too, huh?

Kansas under Self has prospered by recruiting from yon rather than from hither. The current 15-man Jayhawks’ roster contains only two Kansans. They sit on the bench while kids from Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Washington D.C. perform. Did those youngsters seek out the bright lights of Lawrence, Kas., only because of Self’s cute smile? Just asking.

So enjoy tomorrow night’s finale, but don’t forget the clothes pin for your nose. If you don’t have a clothes pin a big paper clip will do. I’ve used both.

TAKE A NUMBER

If I were a law student pondering a specialty, I’d consider personal injury suits with an emphasis on football. Former National Football League players alone could create a clientele that would keep me busy for an entire career.

If you’ve been reading the sports pages for more than the box scores lately, you know what I’m talking about. Not only have former NFL players—some still in their 20s-- been suing the league en masse for compensation for the results of concussions they sustained on the gridiron, but revelations about the organized administration of the post-surgical pain-killer Toradol, to keep players with various ailments on the field, have opened a broader area of litigation.

Then came the NFL itself with the appalling charge that the New Orleans Saints made “bounty” payments to defensive players who maimed opponents, and comments by players from other teams who said that, yeah, their clubs did pretty much the same thing. According to experts quoted in a piece in last week’s the New York Times, this means that individual players, coaches and teams might be dragged into civil court to answer (and pay) for their misdeeds, with consequences as yet undetermined. Suffice it to say that the defense-lawyer side of the situation might prove as lucrative as the plaintiff’s side.

Of course, as any honest lawyer (I’m sure there are some) will tell you, suing ain’t the same as winning, so it’s too soon to start toting up damages. Further, football being the institution that it is, predictions of the NFL’s demise under the lawsuit avalanche probably are overstated. Nevertheless, the NFL certainly is in for a rocky stretch and may suffer collateral problems from the spotlight on injuries the legal actions will bring. Given the sport's multiple dangers, more parents will be withholding permission for their kids to play it on the lower levels, and without such feeders the head eventually could die. As evidence mounts that concussions’ effects are cumulative and that even ones not recognized at the time of occurrence may bite years later, would you sign Junior’s consent form?

Over the past couple of seasons the NFL has taken steps to deal with the issue. Ironically, however, that may only strengthen the legal hands of head-injury suffers who say that those measures are based on information previously known but ignored. Surely, the NFL can’t claim to only recently have heard about “The Silent Epidemic.” I began writing about it in the Wall Street Journal in 1982, and I wasn’t the first.

The recent case that most stirred the pot was the 2011 suicide at age 50 of Dave Duerson, an ex-Chicago Bears safety who shot himself to death after wrestling unsuccessfully with the progressive headaches, memory loss and general lack of function his head injuries caused. Duerson’s post-mortem exam revealed that he suffered from advanced brain damage called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, rare in someone his age. Team doctors must have—or should have—noticed this and blown the whistle on his career long before the condition became acute, his heirs assert.

To make that point in court, though, they’ll have to stand in line. About 650 other retired players also have filed suit against the league, saying it taught such unsafe practices as head-first tackling, ignored scientific evidence of the seriousness of head traumas and failed to treat them properly once they occurred. So many such suits pend that a Philadelphia federal judge recently consolidated some of them, but 18 separate actions remain and the number climbs.

The damaging assertion that teams encouraged players to play through injuries was underlined in a New York Times op ed piece on Toradol last December by Nate Jackson, whose eight-year NFL career as a wide receiver and tight end ended in 2009. By using such pain-maskers, players run the risk of turning small injuries into large ones. Jackson wrote:

“When I played for the Denver Broncos from 2003 to 2008, Toradol was a popular pregame injection. The night before we took the field 10 to 20 of us would go into a designated room and stand in line to receive our shots. I don’t remember what if any specific injury I was nursing but I do remember that my body was perpetually feeling bad, as were those of my teammates. Our training staff knew this and would encourage us to get a shot. We were told it would make us feel better so we lined up for the needle.

“When I got to the front of the line I was told that the shot was known to cause internal bleeding in a very small percentage of patients but was otherwise safe. The disclaimer was given with needle in hand and a line of men waiting behind me. There was no hesitation, no trepidation, no point at which I felt that taking Toradol was a risk… The big risk, in my mind, was not being at my best the next day. The big risk was not taking the shot, playing poorly and being viewed by the staff as unwilling to do what it took to help the team win. The big risk was losing my job.”

The fact that Jackson and others like him weren’t forced onto the field at gun point will be used in its defense by the NFL, and by the individuals possibly sued for “bounty” hits. So will the concept of “assumed risk,” which in football means that anyone who plays the brutal game does so knowing that the potential for injury is high. Indeed, a case can be made that whatever they tell their wives football players are daredevils like test pilots, fire fighters and war correspondents, machos types for whom risk adds to their jobs’ appeal.

The league, however, ought to immediately do a couple of things to protect players from themselves. One is to award lifetime, Cadillac-level health coverage to anyone who dons an NFL uniform; it’d be expensive but probably less so than what the current lawsuits will cost. The other is to abolish forevermore the post of team doctor; while medical personnel should be available for sideline emergencies, further care should be entrusted only to the players’ own physicians. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone who works for someone else sticking a needle in my butt.

JEREMY & RYAN

People used to ask me (and sometimes still do) where I got my column ideas. We in the business know that’s no mystery. God always provides.

The last several weeks have been a case in point. Before February the only people who’d heard of Jeremy Lin were Harvard basketball fans and members of his immediate family, a group you could count on your fingers and toes. Now, just like that, everybody has.

And until last week the common wisdom had it that Ryan Braun, the Milwaukee Brewers’ strongboy, was going down for steroids use, the latest in a dreary line of baseballers to suffer that fate. But what do you know, he beat the rap! How’d he do that?

First things first, so let’s start with young Jeremy. His is a heart-warming tale if there ever was one, that of a modest-appearing, Chinese-American kid from California who suddenly—magically!—blossoms into an NBA star, kind of like the guy who turned into Spiderman. And in New York, no less. That’s astonishing in an era when kids are cataloged nationally for athletic ability starting at about age 10.

For my money, Lin’s emergence is only the second-best recent-year story of its sort, ranking behind that of the football quarterback Kurt Warner. Lin was a three-year starter at Harvard and All-Ivy twice, while Warner never cracked the lineup at far-more-obscure Northern Iowa U. until he was a senior. Further, Lin went right from college to the top pro level (albeit as an undrafted free agent), while Warner worked as a grocery-store stock clerk and labored for years in his sport’s basements before getting his break. That’s a quibble, though.

The more one reads up on Lin, the more sense his success makes. He was a good athlete from the start—an all-state guard as a high schooler in his populous state—and probably was passed over by the top-echelon basketball schools only because of the stereotypes that attach to his ethnicity. Although he was undrafted he made the Golden State Warriors’ roster out of school. He played little in SF last year but made the best of his Development League assignments there, and early this season with the New York Knicks. An inveterate and maybe obsessive gym rat and game-film watcher, he worked diligently to improve every facet of his game, all the while adding weight and strength. Withal, he was a player whose whole exceeded the sum of its parts, and when his prime-time opportunity came he was ready for it.

The other day on the radio I heard Frank Deford, the Sports Illustrated and NPR wiseman, say that Lin’s story makes the sad point that there are other benchwarmers in great number who will go to their graves undiscovered for lack of a chance to shine. I disagree. In this land athletics and the performing arts are about as thoroughly meritocratic as can be imagined, and talent will out. But not often, however, with the splash that Lin’s has.

Ryan Braun’s saga has been quite different from Lin’s. He’s been the can’t-miss kid who didn’t miss—the fifth choice overall in the 2005 Major League Baseball draft, National League rookie-of-the-year in 2007, the NL’s most-valuable player last season, and a reputed nice guy to boot. He appeared almost too good to be true, and when word leaked last fall that he’d flunked an MLB test for performance-enhancing drugs, it seemed that he was.

Braun appealed the ruling. Lo and behold he won, thanks to a lawyer who discovered a hole in the game’s handling of his client’s drug sample (it sat around a courier’s home for two days before being sent to the lab) and convinced an arbitrator that that alone was grounds for overturning a positive test result. No player had won such an appeal in a dozen previous cases in baseball.

Back on the field without penalty last week, Braun might have greeted his acquittal with a wink and a nod, but he went further, full-voicedly declaring his innocence of ever doping even though his appeal succeeded on purely technical ground. That’s what athletes say even after they’ve been nailed beyond doubt, so his denial rang hollow. But some aspects of his case give cause for doubt.

Braun flunks none of the smell tests for steroids use. He doesn’t have the perennially pissed-off personality of, say, Roger Clemens, and his listed weight of 210 pounds (he stands 6-foot-1) was the same last season as it was in his rookie year, meaning that he hasn’t turned into the Michelin Man the way Barry Bonds did. Braun has declared—so far without contradiction—that Brewers’ records show that his speed afoot and weight-room stats also haven’t changed much since he broke in, meaning either that he’s clean or that he’s always used, something that’s doubtful because he’d passed some two dozen official drug tests since 2005 before coming up short last fall.

Finally, Braun’s performance signature has been consistency, not the sudden surges one sees from drug users. With a .332 batting average, 33 home runs and 111 runs batted in, 2011 was his best year overall, but he hit more home runs in 2008 (37) and had more RBIs (114) in 2009, and on a per-game basis his power numbers last year weren’t as good as those of his first season. Contrast that with the stats of Luis Gonzalez, ex of the Arizona Diamondbacks, who averaged 15 home runs a year over a dozen Major League seasons before up and hitting 57 in 1998.

Now that was amazing—almost as amazing as Jeremy Lin’s debut. Hey, maybe it’s Lin who should be drug tested.

NOTE: You might check out ChicagoSideSports.com, which, as its title suggests, is a new web site devoted to athletic doings in the Windy City, where I’m from. Already up and running, and scheduled to go daily on April 1, it will feature bright sports writing from a number of sources, including me. Its editor is Jonathan Eig, an ex-Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of excellent biographies of Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson. You should check those out, too.