by Andre van der Merwe
Daily Lobo
Summer of 2007 will forever live in my memory as the Summer of Scandal.
I've never seen three major sports get hit so hard in such a short amount of time.
We'll start with the NFL, which will soon be looking into buying its own prison to house all of its delinquent players. Of course, the prison will have to have a wing dedicated to the Cincinnati Bengals, but I'm sure they could use some of Michael Vick's dog-fighting winnings to pay for that. The NFL's downward spiral started with Adam "Pacman" Jones, who apparently refuses to leave the strip club until he's "made it rain" on every one of the girls in the joint. Then some players around the league got sent to the slammer (most of them Bengals), but that's not what changed ESPN into CNN and "SportsCenter" into
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"Hardball." No, it was Vick's dog-fighting ring that brought the NFL and, unfortunately ESPN as well, down a couple popularity points. None of that compares, however, to the circus that the NBA and MLB
became.
The scandals in the MLB and the NBA this summer were a tight race, like Lindsay Lohan and her father when they see who can go back to prison/rehab faster. Since we all know that Barry Bonds and most of baseball's sluggers have been on steroids for the past decade, baseball comes in at a close second. The incident that nearly vaulted them into first place was the breaking of Hank Aaron's home run record by steroid - I mean Bonds. Bonds broke the record after going 0-255 once he tied the record. But I've seen stranger things from Bonds. When Bonds entered the league, he was a little guy tilting the scales at a paltry 160 pounds. Now, as Bonds comes ever closer to making his exit, he'll be leaving with 160 pounds coming from his gigantic head alone. Now that Bonds is in the record books - hopefully with a fairly large asterisk next to his name - the last scandal left is
the NBA's.
So what are the NBA commissioners to do after the referees have turned crooked? Well, they can take a page out of the MLB's handbook and leave an asterisk next to the Spurs' fraudulent championship. Or they could follow the same steps as the NFL and buy a prison to harbor the criminal players and refs.
Then they can gain revenue from all the other major sports leagues in the nation and actually turn their own misfortune into a fortune.
