All hot and bothered

I gotta say, I'm hot today. And I'm not talking about my appearance. I mean, I'm hot in that regard as well, but that's an everyday reality and thus not noteworthy enough to be specifically mentioned on my blog. I mean hot as in angry, perturbed, pissed off. You may ask why. Well, there are two separate sports stories that have really grabbed my attention over the last 24 hours. And, unlike most sports stories, which only have the ability to mildly irk me due to the fact that I do my best to keep sports in their proper perspective, these two stories have some real life implications that really allow me to get worked up over them.

The first story will be out in this week's Sports Illustrated, and is already up online. The article is an overall look into the kind of over the top negative behavior that is becoming all too common around college basketball these days. 2 stories in particular really caught my attention. The first was that of Kevin Love, an Oregon native who was a highly touted recruit, and now one of the best freshman players in the country, who had the audacity to choose to go to Pac 10 rival UCLA, rather than to Oregon. Apparently this truly horrific act merited his cell phone number being circulated among a large group of Oregon students, and him receiving 30 voicemails the day prior to UCLA's game at Oregon, the first two of which being death threats directed at him and his family. Love didn't check the remaining messages and immediately canceled his cell service. The second story surrounds another highly touted freshman Eric Gordon, who committed the atrocity of switching his (non-binding) verbal commitment from Illinois to conference rival Indiana. His earned punishment for this? Having his mother struck with a cup of ice water during his game at Illinois, along with the other, more standard abusive taunts.

What in the world have we come to here? We're talking about 18-19 year old kids receiving death threats and having their parents requiring security details because they did what? Choose the "wrong" college to play for? Look, I love college students, in general, as sports fans. Their passion for their team just can't be matched. And I'm all for some good, playful, clever banter/trash talk between rivals. I even argued against one conference's rule outlawing profane/taunting coordinated cheers. At some point though common sense has to kick in, and clearly it just hasn't in these cases. These kids (and they are just kids) are being subjected to a level of abuse that you rarely even see directed at professional athletes. Filling up a kid's voicemail with death threats, whether they are serious or not, isn't funny, it's criminal. Throwing something at a mother who is just trying to watch her son play basketball isn't clever, it's deranged. The NCAA made a point of cracking down on coaches and their sideline behavior this season, and yet this kind of thing goes largely unchecked, unless you consider the apologies the schools in question issued after the fact as sufficient. And if you do, well, I might have to yell at you for a while. I know Kevin Love, for instance, doesn't want to make a big deal out of this, but the reality is that he shouldn't have to. Oregon should have been all over this the second it was reported. I sincerely hope they do deal with it on their own. Seriously, everyone, this is just sports. It's not like it's anything of real consequence. Chill out and enjoy it.

The second story is really just the latest development in an ongoing story, so I won't spend as much time on it, but Congress was once again sticking it's nose into the business of drugs in professional sports today. It looks like they might be getting serious about legislating a common drug testing program for all 4 major pro sports. This stuff just continues to make me red in the face. Congress has zero business legislating drug testing policies for a private enterprise, no matter how big and well-known, and yet they are about to officially make it their job. I think it's absolutely comical for a bunch of Washington politicians to suggest that they know better than the leagues themselves how to address performance enhancing drugs. I've said this before, I'll say it again - these drugs are illegal, and if Congress really wants to do something to make sure the leagues get really serious about cleaning up their act, they can instruct the Justice Department to start locking up using players. Short of that, they need to just back off. And if Congress is allowed to legislate baseball's drug testing program, what's to stop them from one day deciding to step in and legislate it's economic structure, or the rules of the game, or any other number of things they have no business touching? And what's to keep them from doing the exact same thing to any other business?

The other reason I'm upset about this is that I didn't know about it until yesterday, because the sports media is spending all its time on the comparatively insignificant matter of whether Roger Clemens is going to be investigated for the lies he's believed to have told to the last Congressional hearing on baseball that should never have happened. At this very moment, the Clemens saga is the featured story on the front page of ESPN.com, while the story about the hearing is just a side link. As has been the status quo since the Mitchell Report dropped, the real developments are being pushed to the back page while the media jumps all over the red herring that is Roger Clemens. There are going to be a lot of baseball fans rather surprised about a number of things once the dust finally settles around Clemens and attention turns to what's actually gone on while we were all looking the other way.