Perhaps the single stupidest comment I’ve seen on “L’Affaire Tigre,” was this one on one of the all-Tiger, all the time blog sites was this one: “HAPPY NEW YEAR TO THE MICKELSONS!! Thanks Phil for being a good Husband and a Great Golfer!!! you are the best EXAMPLE for the PGA tour, GOOD SHOW BRO!!”

Haven’t people learned ANYTHING from this fiasco? In particular, haven’t they learned that we should assume that NO ONE in the public eye is without flaws or deserving of our mindless, unconditional adoration? Resolving a disappointment at the disappointing behavior of one fallen public figure you mistakenly hero-worshipped by transferring your devotion to another one who hasn’t yet been exposed isn’t the answer. EVERY public figure has something in his or her private life that will infuriate some segment of society if exposed. The answer is to STOP HERO-WORSHIPPING people whose only claim to your allegiance and affection is that they can do something athletic that you can’t.

I’m not, by saying this, trying to throw Mickelson under the bus. I have no knowledge of his private life other than what he and his handlers have let any of us know. But he is a human being. It’s simply inconceivable that he doesn’t have flaws of character, personality or behavior that wouldn’t play well with the public in the up-close magnification of a media frenzy. Forewarned, as they say, is forearmed.

Oh, and Fox News’s Brit Hume, about that “Tiger, convert to Christianity and repair your image” advice? Please can that. Nothing against Christianity, or any religion, but whatever it is, it surely must be more meaningful than a “get out of Jail free” card. “Finding Christ” may be laudable; but it doesn’t and shouldn’t wash away all sins.

One of the biggest Bible-thumpers in pro sports, Eugene Robinson of the Falcons, was arrested in a seedy section of Miami the night before the 1999 Super Bowl for soliciting an undercover police officer for oral sex. He was a real “family man,” too. In fact, a few hours before he was arrested, he was lounging by the pool at the team’s hotel with his wife and 9-year-old son, the very picture of domestic bliss.

Oh, it gets better. A mere 12 hours before his arrest, a Christian athletes’ group had selected him the winner of the Bart Starr award, an honor bestowed for “high moral character.” When he won the award, he burst into tears and profusely thanked his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He had been nicknamed “The Prophet” by his teammates because of his “deep religious beliefs.” All week before the Super Bowl, he had been professing the importance of his wife and children and was constantly preaching biblical values. Apparently, his deep Christian values didn’t make all that much of a difference where the care and well-being of his schlong were concerned.
Which comes as no surprise to the people who make parole decisions for prisoners, all of whom seemingly come to their hearings ostentatiously carrying a Bible and claim to have “found Jesus” and turned over a new leaf in the can. Maybe some have and did. Just like, maybe, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford was thinking about Jesus when he was doing the horizontal lambada in Argentina with a woman other than his wife – on Father’s Day weekend, no less. Or just like the “Crystal Methodist” preacher, Ted Haggard, of “Focus on the Family,” must have been thinking of Jesus when he was paying a male “escort” to come to his Denver hotel room to give him a “massage” and sell him methamphetamine – for research purposes only, of course.

Not to say that religion is inherently bad, or that many people who are religious don’t practice its precepts in their daily lives, but lots don’t. And many of the ones who don’t are precisely the ones who make the biggest public displays and proclamations of their false piety. To paraphrase Disraeli, religion is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

One thing I haven’t seen much discussed in the whole Mike Leach – Texas Tech fooferaw, is the ridiculous notion that Tech fired him for “insubordination” – that is, for refusing to comply with “orders” from his employer – and was therefore somehow legally justified in firing him (suspiciously, just before it was due to pay him an $800,000 bonus). Stuff and nonsense. The “insubordination” may well have been one of the “real” underlying reasons for the decision. After all, bosses don’t like uppity underlings, and especially don’t like uppity underlings who’ve already publicly embarrassed them. But I strongly suspect that no court of law is going to find that Tech could get out of paying Leach if that was the supposed reason.

Texas, like California, is a “right to work” state, which means that every employee serves at the pleasure of his employer, who may terminate him for any reason or for no reason. However, one of the exceptions is where the employee has a written employment contract that gives him certain rights against arbitrary termination. Leach, like all D-1 college football coaches, did. A website called “CoachesHotSeat” has provided it. I’ve read it. The contract clearly provides that, while Tech can fire Leach any time “without cause,” if it does so, it still owes him a boatload of money. Only if it fires him “with cause” – and the “cause” holds up in court – can it get out of paying him.

Well, guess what? Tech’s termination letter handed to Leach’s lawyer just minutes before a scheduled hearing for a court order to allow him to coach in the Alamo Bowl, specifically says that Tech fired Leach “for breach of the provisions of Article IV” of his contract.

Guess what, part deux? There is NOTHING in Article IV that says Leach can be fired “with cause” for simple “insubordination.” True, he has to “follow all University policies and procedures,” as well as state and federal laws and NCAA and Big 12 guidelines, but something gerry-rigged just to address the Adam James situation AFTER it happened doesn’t qualify as a “policy or procedure.” In other words, unless a court finds that not only did Leach mistreat James, but that such mistreatment was against existing rules and regulations, I’m betting that Tech had better be prepared to pay a nice chunk of change to make this thing go away.

Not for nothing, as well, about this contrived outrage over the fact that Leach dared to sue his employer when he felt it had acted high-handedly? Get over it, people. Of COURSE employers hate being sued, because without the possibility that they can be sued and lose, employers would have no incentive to act in a reasonable and evenhanded manner. It’s the ability to go to court that keeps employers as minimally honest and fair as they are. Those of us who aren’t employers should bow down and thank whichever almighty works for them that there are legal ways to check the untrammeled power of employers to screw us over. No offense to Jon Castro, who I’m sure is an exemplary employer, or to all the other employers out there who wouldn’t take advantage even if they could. There just aren’t enough of you.

Oh, and about that video that’s just surfaced of Leach criticizing James’s non-performance in practice with “colorful” language? If that’s a basis for terminating Leach, I hope that AD Myers will be able to explain with a straight face exactly why the university allowed Bob Knight, who never met an f-bomb he didn’t like to use, to continue coaching after he unleashed those epithets, not just on his players, but on the university’s CHANCELLOR – in public, at an upscale Lubbock grocery store. (To its meager credit, the university did “reprimand” Knight for that, although it didn’t suspend him.)

By the way, the very concept that a college coach and molder of impressionable young men could POSSIBLY ever, ever resort to the use of profanity in making his point is as shocking, in its way, as the revelation in my prior post that a study has found that universities routinely relax and bend their admissions requirements so that otherwise underqualified athletes can attend (at least until their eligibility is used up). Yet another entry in my “no s***, Sherlock” files.

Good to see Andy Murray get jettisoned by the Blues for replicating his miserable performance while coaching the Kings. He wasn’t the only thing wrong with the Kings when he was coaching them, and certainly didn’t singlehandedly cause them to fail, but he most definitely wasn’t the solution to their problems, either. Of course, he’ll get at least 2-3 more coaching jobs, and fail at those, as well, before he’s finally relegated back to high school hockey, where was WAS successful, and where he probably belongs.

The “real” story on Murray may well be that he was fired during THIS miserable season, after being one of the finalists for coach of the year last season. In this, he has a lot in common with Byron Scott and a host of other NBA coaches.
For months last year I heard that the Pac-10 was the second-best league in college football, and wasn’t getting any respect because of “East Coast Bias.” I believe, mind you, that there is such a thing as “East Coast Bias,” and that it certainly applies in college football, almost always to the detriment of the west coast teams. That’s certainly one of the reasons why Mack Brown’s whining a few years ago got Texas a BCS Bowl gig in lieu of a clearly more deserving Cal team. (Of course, Cal didn’t help its cause by folding like a cheap suitcase in the lesser bowl it did get, as it so often does). And it sure looked like our whining was justified when the Pac-10, alone of all the conferences, went undefeated in the 2008-09 bowl games.

What a difference a year makes. Not only does the conference have a losing record this time around, at 2-5, but it’s looked pathetic in the process. The only two “winners” were USC and UCLA in nonentity bowls, and both of them underwhelmed. Oregon State, Cal (what else is new?) and Arizona got their butts kicked, and only Oregon and Stanford performed creditably against high-caliber completion (if 8-5 OU qualifies). I don’t know what any of that means, but it must mean something.

Inevitably, this brings us back to USC, and exactly how good (or bad) it really was this year. USC couldn’t beat Arizona at home. Nebraska was clearly capable of creaming ‘Zona in a neutral setting that was, for all practical purposes, a home game for the Wildcats. Of course this doesn’t prove anything. There’s a reduction ad absurdum feel to comparing teams by doing a ‘six degrees of separation” analysis on everyone’s schedule. After all, USC beat Ohio State AT THE HORSESHOE; Oregon pounded SC into pulp; and Ohio State beat Oregon in the Rose Bowl.

But still. The way Nebraska, a good team that gave Texas a run for its money in the Big 12 championship game, certainly cast USC’s season in an even worse light. Enjoy it while you can, Trojan haters. I don’t see SC faltering like this next year, when they’ll have veterans at a number of key positions vacated this year by injuries and by graduation/early entry into the NFL draft. But still, schadenfreude is fun, no?

Speaking of USC, smooth move to screw over the basketball program to take the heat off the moneymaking football program. Reminds me of Jerry Tarkanian’s quip about UCLA when he was coaching Long Beach State, to the effect that any time the NCAA found violations with UCLA basketball, they’d punish UCLA by taking another couple of scholarships away from Long Beach State. Gotta take one for the team, I guess.

Can the Lakers actually beat a team that’s (a) over .500 and (b) not coming into LA after a tiring road trip, to play the Lakers at Staples in the second game of a back-to-back (so much for the two home wins over the Suns, or the Sunday win over the Mavs)? I guess they have beaten a few lower-echelon “winning” teams, like the Rockets, Thunder, Jazz (at home only) and the Heat, but they sure did their best in pretty much every one of those wins to prove Tim Donaghy right. All of those wins could easily have been losses. They may be the defending champs, but if they went into the playoffs right now, it’s unlikely they’d be the favorites to come out of the West, let alone win it all.

One of the players whose play this year has been particularly disappointing (despite a very nice outing last Sunday against the Mavs) is Lamar Odom. The Sportsgod is always on about how marriage causes most athletes’ performance to decline. I don’t know how statistically valid that is, but it sure seems anecdotally valid as to Mr. Odom. Perhaps it’s not “marriage” per se, but with whom. Marrying publicity whore Khloe Kardashian and the chaos of the bogus “reality” show lifestyle she brings to the marriage, can’t possibly be conducive to better play, can it?

For those who misconstrue such things, I’m not calling Ms. K a woman of loose morals. I have no idea what her personal morals are. I do know that she and her sisters, her odious mother and her scary stepfather, whose botched serial plastic surgeries have earned him a place of honor – I’m not making this up – on www.menwholooklikeoldlesbians.blogspot.com (bottom row, next to Al Franken!) – apparently have never met a camera or an opportunity for self-promotion that they don’t like!

And let’s not even get started on Andrew Bynum, whose play has regressed to the point that he is, once again, someone with “potential” who might be OK one of these days if he ever figures things out. The team doesn’t need his offense, which is all he seems to care about. Heck, his body language pretty much shows that he’s channeling the Shaq of the “if you don’t feed the big dog, the big dog won’t work” comment.

It desperately needs his presence inside – you know, rebounding and defense – as to both of which he has nary a clue. He’s got good feet, but lousy footwork; excellent hands but can’t snare a rebound that isn’t uncontested. He’s now in his 5th year playing (or, equally often, rehabbing) for one of the top teams in the NBA. His sole job during all that time has been to get better as a basketball player, so the excuse that he didn’t play much in high school is wearing thin. And he’s been tutored one-on-one by HOFer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and by experienced big man Kurt Rambis. Say what you will about either, both are highly intelligent and know what inside play is all about. If Bynum hasn’t figured it out by now, it’s on him, and no one else.

It always hurts me to agree with The Sportsgod, but facts can’t be ignored. The stats from Bynum’s game against the Mavs last Sunday, when he allegedly “rediscovered” his mojo when Pau Gasol went down with the hamstring injury, are particularly telling. 28 minutes, perfect 8 for 8 from the floor, but only FIVE rebounds, none of which was offensive, and zero blocks. Apparently Bynum’s contract specifies that he gets paid only for balls put into the hole.

I seem to recall that in his Cincinnati Royals days, Jerry Lucas once whined to Oscar Robertson that he didn’t think he was getting the ball enough in the paint. The Big O pointedly suggested that if Lucas wanted the ball so much, maybe he should man up and GO AND GET IT. Which Lucas, to his credit, did. Sage advice. Too bad there’s no Big O here.

Man, oh man, how about Gil Arenas and former Laker J. Crittenden? Guns in locker rooms? Makes no difference to me that Arenas’s THREE pieces were (allegedly) unloaded. How many people have been shot with guns everyone thought were unloaded? How many have been shot by people packing heat, after brandishing empty guns? I know that Arenas has been accused of being a “gunner,” but who ever thought that they were talking about bullets instead of Spaldings? That old Second Amendment makes itself some STRANGE bedfellows.

I don’t believe that the NBA is a “thug” league. Or certainly not any more of one than the NFL or even MLB. But news like this sure isn’t going to induce middle Americans to fork over big bucks to fill the half-empty arenas we’re now seeing on a regular basis. Better hang onto those guns, Gil. After you’ve run through your bloated salary, you may need them to earn a living.

Please send comments and criticism — especially criticism — to thonglaw@sprynet.com, where it will be dealt with appropriately.