Bad sports, good sports: Colts owner Irsay sets a very bad example
It is a shame, but we are used to professional athletes behaving badly. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to write this column if there weren’t a world full of these people doing stupid, bad things on a very regular basis. Occasionally, it’s not the players but the coaches that are committing these acts of idiocy. Every once in a while, though, it goes higher up the ladder than that. On Sunday night, Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay was arrested for driving while intoxicated in a suburb of Indianapolis where he lives.
I am not sure why it surprises me when someone like Irsay turns out to be just as big of a dope as some of his players, but it does. I guess maybe it is because he is not just some schlub on a team’s payroll. He owns the team, which means he has a whole lot of money. Of course, having a lot of money certainly does not mean that one is particularly smart or wise. In fact, in Irsay’s case it doesn’t even mean he was intelligent enough to make a fortune in business to enable him to buy the team. Instead, he inherited the team from his father, Robert Irsay, who bought the Colts back in 1972. His dad gave him the jobs of Vice President and General Manager in 1984, and he took over ownership when his dad died in 1997.
Sure, the guy owned the Colts when they won the Super Bowl in 2006, and they have been a generally successful franchise for a long time now, most of it with Peyton Manning as the quarterback. Over the past couple of years, though, Irsay has been making news for the wrong reasons. First, he parted ways with Manning, one of the greatest quarterbacks in league history and a guy who was (and still is) idolized in Indianapolis. He then appeared to badmouth Manning and minimize his contributions as a Colt while discussing his former quarterback’s new team, the Denver Broncos. He tweets constantly, and there have been numerous times that his Twitter contributions have appeared to come from a less that sober mind. He is an admitted alcoholic, and despite claiming that he has not had a drink for fifteen years last year, his actions show otherwise. This new episode is certainly the worst of it. When he was pulled over, the officers immediately suspected he was impaired based on his behavior. He failed more than one field sobriety test, and they found a bunch of prescription drugs in the car in bottles in which those drugs did not belong. He may not have actually been drinking, but the results were the same.
Addiction is terrible thing, and I hope Irsay gets the help he needs. At the same time, I hope he is held fully accountable for his behavior, both by the legal system as well as by the NFL, who would not hesitate to make an example of a player who did the same thing. If anything, an owner should be held to an even higher standard.
Bad sports, continued:
2) Rutgers will be leaving the American Athletic Conference (formerly the Big East) for the Big Ten after this season. Their basketball team must have decided to leave in style, laying a massive egg against Louisville in the quarterfinals of the conference tournament on Thursday, losing 92-31. That is not a typo. They trailed 58-16 at the half, and then didn’t do much better in the second half.
3) Rich Peverley, a forward for the NHL’s Dallas Stars, collapsed on the bench on Monday during a game against the Columbus Blue Jackets. He was hospitalized for two days and was treated for some kind of cardiac issue. He will miss the rest of the season.
4) Francisco Rodriguez of the Milwaukee Brewers injured himself in an interesting way this week. The relief pitcher apparently stepped on a cactus while barefoot on Monday. Oops.
5) The Oakland Raiders signed offensive lineman Rodger Saffold to a big free-agent contract on Tuesday right after the signing period started. The next day, that contract was voided by a failed physical. This was a bizarre story, as the St. Louis Rams, for whom Saffold had played previously, immediately re-signed him and stated that his shoulder was just fine. Oakland came out of this looking very had, but that is nothing new.
6) Walking Bad Sports story Justin Blackmon of the Jacksonville Jaguars is at it again. Last weekend, he crashed his car into a tree at 4:00 in the morning in the Jacksonville area.
7) Jim Kelly, the Hall-of-Fame quarterback who played for the Buffalo Bills in the eighties and nineties, has seen his cancer return. He was treated for it last year with surgery, and it looks like he will need some more of that, as well as radiation and chemotherapy.
8) Speaking of Hall-of-Fame players with cancer, former Philadelphia Phillies great Mike Schmidt revealed this week that he was recently treated for skin cancer, undergoing chemotherapy and radiation this past fall and winter.
9) Former Piitsburgh Steelers wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders is now a member of the Denver Broncos, but it was a bizarre, very windy road that got him there. His agent, Steve Weinberg, had been decertified as an agent for years by the NFLPA after some shady dealings over ten years ago, until just recently. Now, he reportedly reached an agreement with the Kansas City Chiefs for Sanders, but then continued to shop his client to other teams, eventually settling on the Broncos.
Good Sports:
1) Cristiano Ronaldo, one of soccer’s biggest stars who plays for Real Madrid, donated 60,000 Euros to a family to pay for surgery for a 10-month-old baby with a brain disorder.
2) Lionel Messi broke the all-time team record for goals scored for Barcelona on Sunday, netting three goals to run his total to 371. The previous record of 369 stood for 87 years.
3) Finishing off our own soccer hat trick here, check out this ridiculous goal scored by Motaz Salhani of Al Wahdat of the Jordan Pro League on Saturday. To make it even better, it was Salhani’s first goal with that club, and it was also the only scoring in the game.
Bad sports, good sports appears early each week
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Thank God for Good Sports. I was absolutely depressed by all the bad news coming from people dealing with bad news, as weel as people creating their own “bad news.” Thanks for reviving us with “good news.”