Posted 8/2/2004 7:18 PM
by Mike Lopresti

Just got back from vacation and picked up the papers to see what's been happening. The usual turmoil, shock and strife. And that was the sports page.

Let's see … Mike Tyson has become a punching bag for tomato cans. ... Bobby Fischer is in a holding cell in Tokyo. … Ricky Williams showed up in Miami Dolphins camp long enough to quit … and Wrigley Field is starting to fall faster than the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Gee, we were only gone barely a week.

Also came across the item about Roger Clemens being thrown out of a game for spitting sunflower seeds at an umpire over a call at second base.

That seemed routine enough, until finding out that the team involved was the Katy Cowboys, and the second baseman was 10 years old. Roger was told to leave his son's little league game, and we'll just have to assume there were no little Piazzas on the other side.

A big week, then, for the bad and the sad and the mad.

Tyson comes tinged with the pathetic now, a 38-year-old shadow pounded by someone named Danny Williams. If he returns, it will only be to pay the bills of a lifetime of wretched and wasteful excess. He will be a bankrupt circus show, with tattoos.

Sad, I suppose, but the figure due more sympathy the past days was Fred McGriff, a career class act cut loose by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, with only seven home runs to hit to get to 500.

He is so close, but the market is sparse for a 40-year-old hitting .181. He may never get there.

Poignant, too, is the obvious crumbling of Wrigley Field, where the ivy is pretty but stands are crumbling. The Cubs fans may consider it a holy place, but now they must beware of falling concrete, as well as foul balls.

Meanwhile, Williams apparently wants his freedom from football — and presumably the drug tests he keeps flunking. So be it, but his timing left his teammates stunned and stranded on the front porch of training camp. He has no defense for that.

Neither does Clemens, who has been around enough baseball long enough to know how not to be a Little League father.

And as for Fischer, he once was declared an American hero for beating a Russian in chess. Now he is a wanted man in his homeland, for defying sanctions against Yugoslavia 12 years ago to play a match.

He had become a cranky recluse — emerging sporadically to berate the United States, including praising the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — until he was stopped trying to leap from Japan to the Philippines.

Japan must decide whether to deport him to the United States, but for now, he ponders his next move in his cell, where it is said he is driven crazy by the cigarette smoking of his fellow detainees.

And if that isn't enough of a blow to American sport pride, a Japanese guy just became the first foreign fisherman to ever win the Bassmasters. (Clearly nothing we hold sacred is safe from Japan, for this follows one of its native sons wolfing down 53 1/2 wieners to maintain his dynasty in the 4th of July hot dog eating contest at Coney Island.)

Several days of the odd and pitiable, I missed. And we haven't even mentioned soccer, which is always up to something. Seems last week in South Africa, a coach went on the field to confront an umpire about a yellow card. The official pulled out a gun and shot him dead.

If there's a moral to the story, it's that maybe Roger Clemens is lucky he doesn't have any sons who play soccer.