When Bad Things Happen to Bad People
Pete Rose, Jr., has pleaded guilty to charges of drug distribution. And the
Eagles have suspended obnoxious wide receiver Terrell Owens for the rest of the football season.
I don't know much about Pete Rose, Jr., but I'm not a fan of his father, and it sounds like the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.
And good for the Eagles! Though usually I find it odd when a player gets suspended for exercising free speech, this couldn't have happened to a more deserving athlete. Owens is, you will remember, the man who scored a touchdown, then pulled a Sharpie out of his sock and signed the football on the spot. He is a great football player. But he is arrogant, obnoxious, selfish, crude, boorish, and destructive to the teams on which he plays. Most recently, he announced that the Eagles would be undefeated if they had the Packers' Brett Favre as quarterback, rather than their own excellent Donovan McNabb.
What a bonehead.
I can't stand the Eagles, who are rivals to my beloved New York Giants, and I think this move will actually help them get their season back on track. Still, I'm glad they suspended Owens. It was the right thing to do.
Last week HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel ran
a piece about a young woman named Mallory Code who, at the age of 15, was one of the country's top amateur golfers. What made this accomplishment all the more impressive was that Code has cystic fibrosis, a debilitating and always terminal disease.
Real Sports—which is the best journalism show, about sports or anything else, on television—profiled Code five years ago, when she was still in relatively good health. But as this current profile showed, she's become very sick and almost died since then. She will likely never play golf again. Yet her spirit was unbroken. As she said to reporter Mary Carillo—I'm paraphrasing—"I have an amazing family. I have incredible friends. Everything else in my life is awesome. So I have this one little problem. Why would I complain?"
This from a woman whose lungs are slowly filling with mucus, and who will almost certainly die within the next few years.
I've watched the segment twice, and both times Carillo's story had me in tears.
And then I think of Terrell Owens, who is so gifted yet treats the world around him with such negativity, and I'm reminded that just because the pros get paid the most money doesn't make them the greatest athletes.
