It seems a bit early to be spewing nominations for Sports Person of the Year, but when a man or woman steps forward and shows the right stuff, you can throw out all the record books, along with the calendar.
More Top Picks Best Travel Water Bottles For Dogs
By the end of 1998, someone in the playpen will have to accomplish the extraordinary to surpass the contributions of John D. Feerick, a civilian who, without expending a droplet of perspiration, symbolizes everything we know about modern athletics but are afraid to admit.
Feerick is the arbritrator who reduced the punishment assessed Latrell Sprewell, on the grounds that his aborted attempt to choke coach P.J. Carlesimo of the Golden State Warriors did not, ho, ho, violate a clause in the standard NBA player contract about “moral turpitude.”
Mind you, Feerick is a highly decorated scholar who serves as dean of the Fordham University Law School. But he might as well be professor for Anarchy 101, the sports course of the ’90s. Either that or this egghead is auditioning for the still vacant post as commissioner of baseball.
Had he been the hollow gray suit occupying that empty chair in September of 1996, Feerick no doubt would have judged John Hirschbeck at fault for allowing his face to interfere with the natural flow of Roberto Alomar’s saliva.
Feerick was otherwise occupied then, so the case fell into the uncertain grasp of Gene Budig, the impotent American League president who did what executives of our former national pastime usually do: next to nothing.
David Stern, the NBA commissioner who actually has a pulse rate, expressed the opposite reaction when Sprewell not once, but twice accosted Carlesimo in December. Stern banned Sprewell for a calendar year.
Stern might have overreacted in his desire to make a statement about the madness that prevails in his league, but he no more snapped than did Sprewell, who earns $8 million per annum and thus should be able to withstand a boss’ request to put a little mustard on his practice passes.
The all-powerful NBA players union intervened, of course, charging management brutality and, of course, Feerick returned Sprewell c.o.d. to the Warriors, who don’t want the thug any more than the thug wants them.
Perhaps if Sprewell had been successful, and his rage had resulted in Carlesimo’s death, Feerick and the union would have thought differently and sent flowers to the bereaved. Perhaps.
But Carlesimo is alive and well. Meanwhile, the Warriors and every other professional sports organization must deal with the imponderable: What exactly does it take for a team to fire an undesirable employee? How much uncivilized behavior is required to desecrate the sanctity of a guaranteed contract in Feerick’s weird little world? Feerick’s version of “fairness” is based on a lame finding, that there exists no precedent for the NBA and a member franchise double-teaming an athlete who takes into his hands a coach’s neck. How Feerick can be so fastidious about facts there, then turn around and say that Sprewell’s twin tantrums were not premeditated, is utterly absurd.
Feerick’s phone must be ringing off the hook. The United States Olympic Committee is in a punitive mood about recent events in Nagano, Japan, but one call to Fordham and those 23 interior decorators will rest easy, because there is no precedent for American hockey players disgracing themselves and their country during the hallowed Winter Games.
Can’t you just hear Feerick, the all-omniscient one, deciding that those fire extinguishers dislodged themselves from dormitory walls, emptied on their own, then mystically tumbled into the courtyard while our heroic skaters slept?
The NBA is headed toward a summer of discontent, maybe to be followed by a lockout, but to hell with rules and common sense. There’s a whole lot of turpitude in sports now. However, don’t sell the inmates short. They aren’t merely running the asylum. They own it.