Category: Other Sports

Why is Everyone Still Focused on Tiger Woods?

Dear Sports Fan,

Why is everyone still focused on Tiger Woods when it’s clear he’s washed up, past his prime and old news all at once?

Thanks,
Darren

 

Dear Darren,

When I was in college the model UN club sneakily threw the best parties. They had the biggest budget of all the clubs and somehow, when their conferences were done, they always had enough money left over to buy a ridiculous amount of booze. When you’re a freshman or sophomore, that’s all you need.

The problem was the stigma of going to a model UN party. Even if they have the best booze, everyone thinks the model UN is populated by nerds and misfits and no one who’s NOT in model UN would ever want it getting around that they were seen at one of their parties. Unless, that is, model UN has one girl in it who is so incredibly attractive that she gives you a reason – a reason your buddies will buy – to go to their parties.

The PGA tour is the model UN party, without the booze. Unless you’re a die-hard golfer watching your ordinary, run-of-the-mill PGA tournament is a lot like standing around three college students arguing about the impact of a European-based missile shield on Russia’s nuclear deterrent capability: painful. PGA tour golfers were a pretty sleepy, uniform lot. Even the exciting ones were still nerds, and you can count on one hand the number of golfers who have more charisma than your average accountant. In fact, that’s a fun game for trivia night: print off pictures of PGA tour golfers, print off pictures from some accounting firm’s website and play “Professional Golfer or Professional accountant?” If anyone in your group does better than 50-50, they’re watching too much golf, and you and your friends will probably ridicule them for it.

Tiger Woods was the hot girl who showed up to the PGA Tour party and made it ok for sports fans – and non-fans – to watch golf.[1] For one thing, he looked like an athlete: he clearly worked out, you know, like athletes do. For another, he had charisma. World class charisma? Maybe not – but remember, we’re putting him next to 300 guys  with the charisma of people who do taxes for a living. He carried himself with what white people learned was called swagger, and we all ate up the fist pumps and the screams, and him running after his putt to make sure it knew where it was supposed to go. He had the showmanship thing down.

And, maybe most importantly, he was appointment-viewing. You never knew what Tiger was going to do, but chances are if you watched him long enough in his prime he’d do something incredible. Even if he didn’t, he had that aura about him that made you want to keep watching. And he won over and over and over, with the kind of single-minded determination we all admire in people who climb to the top of their professions.[2] At his peak he intimidated everyone around him and even the mere whisper of his name on Sunday would make other golfers fall apart.

Turns out, that kind of domination by an exciting, compelling figure – unlike, say Roger Federer, who dominated tennis in a similar way but never quite matched Tiger on the charisma scale – was great for golf. More people watched on TV, which meant the PGA tour made more money, which meant purses were bigger, which attracted more talent.

The problem is, at some point the hot girl leaves the model UN party,[3] and then it’s just a bunch of unpopular kids who may have good booze. That’s the future the PGA is staring in the face: declining viewership, a wealth of talented but boring players and no clear number one. One only has to watch the current crop of players awkwardly emulate Tiger’s fist pumps to realize showmanship doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

That’s why – no matter his sins – virtually everyone knows that a Tiger resurgence would be the best thing for the game, and why you’ll hear people talking about it for a long time to come.

Dean Russell Bell

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Actually he slept with the hot girl(s) but that’s a different story.↵
  2. The same kind of determination we say will inspire us to do better and achieve more, until we go to work the next day and remember that our jobs are boring and that we don’t have some great emptiness inside us that can only be filled up by unparalleled greatness and achievement. And sleeping with lots of women.↵
  3. She’s tired of Tiger hitting on her. And here, the analogous worlds collide and the entire analogy starts to crumble.↵

Is There Any Skill in Boxing?

Dear Sports Fan,

Is boxing really about skill? I mean it kinda seems like they just pound on one another until one of them breaks. Is it more about talent/training/etc or more about whose skull is thickest (and can thus take more hits)?

Been wondering,
Thick Skull

 

Dear Thick Skull,

They call boxing the “sweet science.” They call economics the “dismal science.” I don’t know who “they” are, but they’re right. What happens in the ring can often appear to be a glorified street fight, and at times there may be two brawlers going toe to toe, too tired to do anything other than trade huge punches and see who has the bigger heart.

But watch a good boxer against a lesser boxer, and you’ll see that it’s not just the thickness of someone’s skull that makes a boxer better: it’s their ability to hit without getting hit back.

That’s partly training – the work the most successful boxers do would probably kill normal people – and it’s partly plain old-fashioned nerve. Somehow the boxer has turned off evolution’s “don’t get hit switch,” or at least dialed it down so that it doesn’t prevent him (or her) from inflicting some damage of their own. Some of it is good – biology: some guys are simply faster and quicker and, yes, some guys are less or more prone to getting knocked out depending on the structure of their skull.

But the rest of it is good old-fashioned strategy and tactics – the science part. Boxers in the early rounds often look tentative and paw at each other like blind puppies. What they’re actually doing is getting a read on how their opponent will react to different things. If I throw three jabs (short, quick punches with the lead hand), and each time I do my opponent moves his head the same way to avoid the blow, then I know just where his head will be after I throw a jab in the future – making for an easy follow-up. If I see that my opponent drops his left hand whenever he throws a punch with his right, leaving his face or body unprotected, I’ll file that away and plan a nice counter-punch sometime later in the fight.

Boxers study footage of their opponents’ previous fights to look for weaknesses; they come into a fight with a game plan; they adjust the game plan according to what they’re seeing; and they work for months to get their bodies trained to not only endure but thrive as they absorb a ridiculous amount of punishment.

It’s a brutal sport, no doubt – but if you watch enough, and pay close enough attention, you’ll see that it’s not two guys locked in a cage flailing away at each other.  It’s two scientists in a lab trying to answer man’s most basic, primitive question: how the hell do I hit this guy in the face without letting him hit me back?

That’s much more exciting than economics.

Thanks for the question,
Dean Russell Bell

Why Aren't the Rules the Rules? (Part 2)

Dear Sports Fan,

Reading about the bad call in the Pittsburgh/Atlanta game last night reminded me of something I’ve always wondered. Whether it’s because the ref is looking the other way (literally or figuratively), or because of just plain human error, the rules in sports are often either not enforced, or not enforced correctly. But in many cases, it seems like people just consider that an integral part of the game! Especially given the increasing ability of technology to settle disputes, why not just come up with what the real rules ought to be, and then enforce them as thoroughly as possible?

Thanks,
Erik

— — —

(This is a continuation of an answer to this question. The first half was posted here.)

It will ruin the game:

There is some concern that adding technology to sports will ruin the game by making it too sterile or too slow. Taking the humanity out of the game could be a concern, but as much as people love discussing disputed calls at the water cooler, they also love talking about great (and terrible) performances, and great (and terrible) decisions on the part of the players and coaches. There will always be something to talk about. As for making the game too slow… uh… it could not possibly slow down the game as much as television time-outs, arguing with refs about calls, or in the case of baseball… adjusting your batting gloves, hat, glove, or cup compulsively over and over and over again.

It’s too expensive:

FIFA, the notoriously frustrating international federation of soccer refuses to add video replay to international competition because it would be too expensive for some of its member nations to implement. This is a curious reason since it seems like knowing ahead of time that you will actually know whether the ball crossed the goal line during the game shouldn’t change any element of tactics or strategy.

What do you mean “right?”

This is the heart of the answer to your question. A rule says, “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent” but does that mean “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent” or “it’s against the rules to trip an opponent if you get caught?” It’s clear from these two sports cliches which way the sports world leans: “it’s not a foul if you don’t get caught” and “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.”

Sports, particularly baseball is all about cheating. The last twenty years have been shaped by steroids and HGH. Before that there were amphetamines called greenies. Before that teams regularly intimidated officials or just plain assaulted them when they didn’t like the calls they were getting. It’s well know that the 1919 World Series was fixed by a few players on the White Sox and there have always been unproven rumors that the 1918 one might have been fixed as well. Cyclists are jam-packed full of drugs. They have been for a long time but “tiny electric motors…?” That’s a new one.

Even if a player is clean when he steps onto the court, he or she is rarely clean by the end of the game. Some of the most memorable plays in sports history have been the beneficiaries of some incorrect or missed calls. In soccer there is the “hand of god” goal, in basketball, Michael Jordan’s famous shot to beat the Utah Jazz is an offensive foul. Watch the video and notice Jordan’s left hand on his defender’s hip… he definitely pushes off.

Jordan is not great in spite of pushing off, he’s great partially because he pushed off and didn’t get caught.

Another way to state the question is — do we really want to have the game called “perfectly?” Here’s an example of this in the non-sports world. We certainly have the technology to identify each car and driver and what road they are on. Why shouldn’t we simply fine people whenever they go over the speed limit? Why waste all the time, money, and talent of our police departments lurking around trying to catch people when we could just automate it? I know we’ve started doing this with running some red lights, but I think that if we tried to automate speeding tickets on a large scale there would be riots and political parties would shape up around the issue… and I’m not sure which would be worse! It’s the same with most sports — a totally policed game is a boring one.

Thanks for the fun question,
Ezra Fischer

Why Aren't the Rules the Rules?

Dear Sports Fan,

Reading about the bad call in the Pittsburgh/Atlanta game last night reminded me of something I’ve always wondered. Whether it’s because the ref is looking the other way (literally or figuratively), or because of just plain human error, the rules in sports are often either not enforced, or not enforced correctly. But in many cases, it seems like people just consider that an integral part of the game! Especially given the increasing ability of technology to settle disputes, why not just come up with what the real rules ought to be, and then enforce them as thoroughly as possible?

Thanks,
Erik

 

Dear Erik,

Great question! In fact, this is such an interesting question that I’m going to break my answer into a couple blog posts.

The bad call that you’re referring to is this one:

It won’t work:

Sports rules are complicated and the action happens very, very quickly. Assuming that there is no way that we’re going to be able to rework the rules to change something as integral as “if the catcher has the ball in his glove and touches the runner before he touches home plate, he’s out” then one has to wonder how technology will help. Setting aside video replay for a second, let’s look for another solution. Okay, so — let’s put a chip in the ball. Then, let’s put some material in the catcher’s glove such that the ball knows when it’s in the glove. Great — now we’re cooking with gas! Now we have to have either more material covering the runner’s uniform… and hands, arms, head, neck, etc. Or, I guess we could just monitor whether the glove is making contact by putting some sort of pressure meeter into the ball or glove. Except that won’t work because that glove could hit the ground, the ump, or the catcher’s own body. I’m not sure any of this will work, so let’s go back and examine video replay.

Video replay is the most common form of technology in sports. Football, basketball, hockey, even baseball (believe it or not) have some form of video replay in their rules. In baseball use of video replay is restricted to basically deciding whether a ball was a home run or whether it never left the ball-park, did leave but was subject to fan interference, or left but was foul (too far off to the side to count.) Other sports have more extensive video replay rules. You may have noticed NFL coaches comically struggling to get a little red flag out of their sock, pants, shirt, etc. and throw it onto the field — they are “challenging” the ref’s judgement and calling for a video replay. Every goal in hockey is reviewed by a team of video officials in Toronto. The NBA has been able to replay shots at the end of quarters and games and just recently added video replay for unclear out-of-bounds calls.

Tennis has a system called Hawkeye. This is probably as close as it gets to your suggestion. According to Wikipedia, “all Hawk-Eye systems are based on the principles of triangulation using the visual images and timing data provided by at least four high-speed video cameras located at different locations and angles around the area of play.” In tennis the rules are objective and there is technology which insures the calls are too. Or at least can be. The computer has not totally replaced the line-judges or the referee yet… although I could see a time in the not so distant future where they could.

Most other sports are not as tidy as tennis though. Take the call at home plate that started this discussion: here’s how Jonah Keri described it on Grantland.com

If you want to use replay to make a simple yes or no call, you won’t get unanimity. And no, the fact that Lugo acted as if he were out does not constitute iron-clad proof.

Watch the replay for yourself, with the sound off.

Here’s what I did see: Lugo starts his slide well in front of the plate. Home plate umpire Jerry Meals starts to make his safe sign just as Lugo touches home with his right foot. There’s no way Meals has time to process the play and rule that Lugo had already touched home. He’s also not looking at Lugo’s foot, but rather at the swipe tag. (It should be noted that Lugo did in fact touch home with his right foot the first time — the follow-up tap of home with his left foot was unnecessary.)

Either way, replay wouldn’t have resolved the issue. Not to the point where all parties, including a purple Clint Hurdle, would have been satisfied.

And, as Keri also points out, at the time of this call, the ump had been on the field working in a high-pressure environment for six hours and 39 minutes. Furthermore — even Baseball is a nice tidy game compared to Hockey or Football. No matter how many cameras, sensors, and computers you have, there is no chance in hell you’ll be able to figure out what happened at the bottom of a pile with thousands of pounds of angry football player fighting over the ball.

More tomorrow…
Ezra Fischer 

 

What makes car racing a sport?

Dear Sports Fan,

What makes racing a sport? And why do Formula One drivers get paid so much?

Thanks,
Sarah

 

Dear Sarah,

The question of what constitutes a sport will be a recurring one on this website as it is in bars and around water-coolers all over the world. In a recent post I made the only partially tongue-in-cheek comment that I consider baseball to be only nominally a sport. There is some combination of physicality, objective standards of winning, and tradition that defines an activity as a sport. In this case the element that is probably making you question whether car racing is a sport is the physicality. Certainly the objective standard for winning is clear. Whoever gets over that line first wins! As far as tradition goes, there were chariot races back in ancient rome and organized running races even before that.

I have to admit that I have been somewhat dubious of how physical the sport of racing is and how physically talented the drivers need to be. Crazy, true, but world-class athletes? I never thought so until I read this article on espn.com a few days ago. It all starts, as so much does these days with a tweet. A young NFL wide receiver named Golden Tate[1] tweeted about famous race-car driver Jimmy Johnson:

“Jimmy Johnson up for best athlete????? Um nooo … Driving a car does not show athleticism.”

During the slow summer sports season, this sparked a small controversy. Embeded into the ESPN article is a clip from their show Sports Science where they did some tests on driver Carl Edwards[2] and found that he tested very well when compared to other athletes in terms of cardiovascular fitness, reaction times, and mental focus. I came away from reading and watching with a bit more appreciation for drivers, especially because even if all they have to do 99.9% of the time is turn left, they still have to do it at 200 miles per hour and the .1% when they have to do other things like avoid a crash ahead of them while talking to their crews about whether or not to get new tires is WAY beyond what a normal person could do.

As far as why Formula One drivers get paid so much… it seems like it has something to do with sponsorships. According to this long discussion on ferrarichat.com[3] even to make it into Formula 1 as a driver, you need to have some serious financial backing. There seems to be a history of “gentlemen drivers” in Formula 1 who we’re more rich guys who drove than drivers who wanted to become rich. In the last 10 to 15 years the money seems to be driven by the 500+ million people who watch Formula 1 on television and scantily clad women — a well known symbiotic relationship. It’s not all sunny though, there have been several bancruptcies of Formula 1 teams lately. Like many sports it feels like the value is largely habit and I worry about it collapsing sometime.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Yes, I’m going to draft him onto my fantasy football team just for his amazingly cool name…↵
  2. Okay… Jimmie Johnson and Carl Edwards? Can we please get a funny name? Oh… Wait… there was a race driver named Dick Trickle? Point retracted.↵
  3. It exists!↵

How is Cycling a Team Sport?

Dear Sports Fan,

How is cycling a team sport? I remember bicycling alone a lot as a kid and it never seemed to hurt me…

Thanks,
Paul

 

Dear Paul,

Bicycling is definitely something that you can do alone, but cycling — particularly races like the Tour de France — are absolutely team competitions. The Tour de France is the most prestigious and most televised cycling competition. It is three weeks long and usually begins in early July. The riders will cover more than 2,200 miles in daily races called stages. It’s insane! The race usually follows a basic pattern. The first week or so stays mostly in the flatlands and is (in my mind, at least) pretty boring. Then the race hits some serious mountains and it gets much more exciting. This is normally where the overall winner of the tour will emerge. It’s also much more interesting strategically and from a soap opera stand-point.

Teams compete for a number of different things. There is a stage winner every day and winning even just one stage is quite prestigious for the rider and his team. Within each stage there are a certain number of points assigned to each mountain and each sprint (somewhat arbitrary spots on flat areas.) Riders earn points for going over the top of a mountain or across the sprint spot first, second, or third, etc. The number of points and number of riders that earn points varies based on the severity of the mountain or the importance of the sprint. The leader of the sprint competition is indicated by a green jersey and the leader of the climbing competition (called the King of the Mountains) wears a white and red polka dotted jersey. The leader of the race as a whole, defined simply as the rider who has finished all the stages in the least combined time, wears the famed yellow jersey. All of these things are prestigious and financially rewarding for the riders and teams that win them.

As far as I can tell, strategy in cycling is based on a single scientific fact: it’s much, much easier to ride when you are drafting on (riding right behind) another rider. So there you go, it all comes down to that. What teams do is organize themselves around their strongest rider. To win a stage what they try to do is exhaust all the other teams by riding at the front faster than anyone else can. The riders on the team who are NOT their strongest rider take turns at the front, riding full out until they simply cannot do it anymore. These guys are called domestiques which is French for servants and if you see the look on their faces as they work at the front of the pack for their team leader, you’ll understand why. At some point it’s up to the team leader (who is supposed to be the strongest rider after all) to take advantage of the fact that he’s been coddled by his team all day and all tour and accelerate (usually up a mountain) faster than anyone else can. The whole three week tour is often won by less than five or ten minutes, so a single good run up a mountain can often win the whole thing.

The soap opera of the race comes from the fact that unlike most other sports, the winning team is usually defined not by skill or tactics but by the capacity to endure pain.[1] The Stanley Cup playoffs are a little bit like this, when players regularly suit up for games with injuries that would leave the rest of us in a hospital, but the Tour de France is a unique spectacle of endurance, strength, speed, and just a pinch of lunacy.

Thanks for your question,
Ezra Fischer

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Yes, or by who has the best drugs… but really, except for Lance Armstrong who must have had Stephen Hawking as his pharmacist, I tend to think the drugs even themselves out.↵

Sam and Max Kellerman

This is an old story but it’s one of the few that I have kept a physical copy of and moved from one apartment to the next. The death of Sam Kellerman is a tragedy in the old sense of the word and in Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated it found its bard. Be warned: this article is well worth it for its inspiring depiction of familial love, kindness, and breathtaking talent, but it will make you cry. It is sports related only insofar as it has to do with people who play and love sports.

Max began to sharpen his power of reasoning, to strip the sentiment from an argument and make it stand on the legs of logic, knowledge … and will. The dinner table became his workshop. Pick a topic. Any topic. Hakeem Olajuwon, best center in basketball? How can you say he’s better than Patrick Ewing? Didn’t matter what the conventional numbers said; Max unearthed factors that nobody else at the table knew, debated in a way that made you feel he’d already rifled through the closets and drawers of your argument and discarded it. He became an animal of logic. That’s what brother Jack said.

One boy kept entering the animal’s lair. Sam, as a fourth-grader, wrote a story about a monkey in a barrel whose keeper pelted him with numbers–big, heavy ones like 110–until the monkey heaved back a huge one, 1,186, the sum of all the numbers hurled at him, and knocked out the shocked keeper. All the brothers, as sons of a shrink, knew it was a story about Sam and Max. Sam could think and articulate as fast as his big brother, lie in wait listening and then wreak havoc with a reply. Once, debating why man had invented sports, Sam unloaded this haymaker: “Sports is man’s joke on God, Max. You see, God says to man, ‘I’ve created a universe where it seems like everything matters, where you’ll have to grapple with life and death and in the end you’ll die anyway, and it won’t really matter.’ So man says to God, ‘Oh, yeah? Within your universe we’re going to create a sub-universe called sports, one that absolutely doesn’t matter, and we’ll follow everything that happens in it as if it were life and death.'” Which delighted Max, because he craved a foil, someone who would compel him to hurl ever bigger and heavier numbers.

Is There a Good, Cheap Stationary Bike?

Dear Sports Fan,

Is there a good, cheap stationary bike? Do I have to spend a ton for quality?  I just want to ride it 30 minutes a day in my basement.  I’m not trying to beat Lance or anything.

Michelle P

 

Dear Michelle,

Thanks for your question! Since no one on our staff is an expert on exercise equipment we’ve decided to answer you in the form of a dialogue. After all 0 + 0 = at least a little bit more than zero, right?

 

Ezra: A quick Google search reveals a ton of those weird recumbent bicycles which are said to be better for you. Then again, it’s also said that the western style toilet is terrible for you over the long-run, but I don’t see to many people running out to buy holes in the floor to squat over.

Dean Russell Bell: I have great rowing machine recommendations. Now, I don’t know if you have a significant other or not and, if so, how that significant other feels about you having huge lats. But if that would be something they might be interested in, allow me to recommend the Stamina Body Trac Glider. Best thing about it: once you reach the inevitable phase when you stop exercising, it folds up so tight you can disappear it into a corner, where it won’t guilt you ever again.

Ezra: I’m not entirely sure what a lat is… but it doesn’t sound like something you’d want to have huge of. As far as exercise bikes go, the Stamina 5325 is the pick of consumersearch.com for best budget upright. It looks like… an exercise bike to me. In what might be a meaningful omission the more well respected consumerreports.org doesn’t review exercise bikes, instead focusing on elliptical machines and treadmills. There is something comforting and old-school about the exercise bike though — it feels like something you legitimately could just sit on and pedal as you watch some serious television.

Dean Russell Bell: Talking about old-school, if you really want to beat Lance Armstrong you might be better served allocating your money towards some serious EPO and blood doping equipment…

Ezra: Hold it right there Dean! We’ve already had a question about the Tour de France and we’ll be covering it in separate entries starting when the race begins on July 2. Michelle, we apologize for our total lack of useful information on this subject, but we hope we have, at least, been entertaining.

Thanks for the question, Dean Russell Bell and Ezra Fischer

Why is Golf Etiquette so Funny?

Dear Sports Fan,
Why do golfers take of their hats to shake hands? Why do they wear pants in the insane heat? In other words, why are there so many rules about golf etiquette, and what are they?
Puzzled,
Kat
Dear Kat,
The short story, which is what I am going with here, is that golf is old and steeped in tradition. Many of these traditions started long ago in a much different social atmosphere. Taking your hat off or wearing pants no matter the weather today is not outside the bounds of the social mores across all of society tens of decades ago. For example, women wearing bathing suits that were more akin to a scuba wetsuit than the suits of today was not only accepted in the early 1900’s, but was the standard. It didn’t make sense to be draped in such a heavy garment at the beach in sweltering weather, but the pressure of societal influence was heavier than the physical burden of the outfit.
Another aspect to the discussion is the role that tradition plays in sports. History has always been and continues to be a highly important platform for fans. Considering the past success of your team and the great players that came before are compelling ways to honor your allegiance. Knowing the history is a demonstration of commitment. And whether it is right or not, level of commitment is often the measure of one’s seriousness about their team. To put it simply, tradition is important.
So let’s bring this back to golf and the question at hand. What’s with all the etiquette? Etiquette since the beginning has given golf its character. Things that aren’t absolutely necessary to the game, but add to the overall experience. Knowing the etiquette is a part of learning to play, it demonstrates that you know more than to keep your leading elbow straight and to keep your head down. Most rules are useful, like replacing a divot so the course quality is good for everyone or slower playing groups allowing faster playing groups to play through. And some rules are more about tradition, meant to maintain the strong character of the game and respect its history.
For a list of several standard rules of golf etiquette you can check out Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golf_etiquette.
Thanks for the question,
John DeFilippis

Why the fuss over Lance Armstrong?

Dear Sports Fan,

I thought Lance Armstrong was just the guy who rode a bike married Sheryl Crowe. Why is the U.S. Government investigating him for stuff that happened a decade ago?

Thanks,
Saoirse

— — —

 

Dear Saoirse,

Cycling is very much a niche – read, rich, white and primarily European people – sport.  The only time Americans become interested, as with most international sports, is when an American dominates the field.  Lance Armstrong dominated cycling for years and won the Tour de France something like forty years in a row.

As it turns out, even professional cyclists don’t find it particularly easy to ride a bike 125 miles a day through a mountain range in crippling heat. So they look for every advantage they can find. Stunning fact number one: some of them probably cheat. Stunning fact number two: most of them get away with it, because of stunning fact number three: the powers that be can’t keep up with doping technology.

Now, lots of people in the sport were (are?) doing it – but Lance Armstrong won a lot, got famous and married Sheryl Crowe, so he’s all over the feds’ radar. His urine is probably the most studied liquid in history, and it’s always come back clean.….but now his former teammates are telling 60 Minutes (and, one assumes, the Feds)  that he not only took the illegal drugs, he trafficked them and basically dealt them too.

Sincerely,
Dean Russell Bell