I admit it; I blew it.
A few columns back, here, I hammered CBS for hiring ex-Jet Bart Scott following a career in which he became stridently anti-media, threatening violence, cussing out those who covered the team, even instigating a failed team boycott of the media.
Yet, at the same time I’d missed the fact that FOX already had embraced one of the most repugnant humans to wear an NFL uniform, Randy Moss.
Even by current, sorrowfully diminished TV standards — the hideously thoughtless identification, rewarding and marketing of sports’ worst acts as the most preferred — FOX’s hiring of Moss as a studio analyst is extraordinary, a sick, twisted parody come real.
There was a reason, after all, that Moss, an enormously talented wide receiver, was treated as an expendable by six different teams until kaput. So antisocial, selfish and dismissive of the most rudimentary sense of right from wrong was Moss that even after the Vikings assigned him his personal baby-sitter, fellow WR Cris Carter, he was unable to lift himself from his own, self-brewed extract.
That FOX even considered Moss for any kind of on-air gig, let alone handed him a pen to sign on, is a kick in the groin to all of us who still hope that some sport — any sport — might one day be returned to our sports.
A Moss sampler:
After Florida State rescinded its scholarship offer to Moss for excessive misconduct — Florida State, fer crying out loud! — he transferred to Marshall. In 1970, after a game at East Carolina, Marshall’s entire football team and staff — 75 souls — were killed in a plane crash. It’s still considered the worst disaster in American sports history.
Moss’ reaction: In 1997, he told Sports Illustrated that it was “a tragedy, but it really wasn’t nothing big.”
In 2002, he was preparing to make an illegal turn when stopped by a traffic cop. Moss did not comply and the female traffic control officer was bumped by his car. He was jailed overnight. Though he bargained an assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge to a misdemeanor conviction, the traffic controller successfully sued him and won a six-figure settlement.
From the sidelines during a game, he was penalized and fined for spraying an NFL game official with the contents of a water bottle. (For some reason — pandering? — FOX’s John Madden, who was calling that game and now serves the NFL as a consultant, laughed his enjoyment at Moss’s conduct).
In 2004, Moss left a close game — just took off for the locker room — before it was over. Perhaps he was late for something else.
A year later he was fined $10,000 for pantomiming a “mooning” toward the crowd in Green Bay.
Among his illegal drug capers, he smoked pot just before serving the remainder of a 30-day jail sentence, thus failed the facility’s drug test and was hit with an additional 60 days.
In 2006, he admitted to dropping passes and running can’t-be-bothered pass routes because he didn’t like playing for the Raiders.
And that’s just a sampling! Yet, this is a guy FOX chose to communicate to us his thoughts and insights on a team game!
Hey, but don’t forget to make fun of Tim Tebow.
So, with the NFL season just begun, here are three of national TV’s new hires: Moss (FOX), Bart Scott (CBS) and Ray Lewis (ESPN).
Lewis is still a POI (person of interest) in an unsolved double homicide and the payee of settlements to the families of the murder victims. But he, albeit later than Tebow, has found the Lord, thus he must be respected.
Soon, when sports issues of right vs. wrong are debated, there will be few left who can distinguish between the two. And those who might otherwise choose “right” might feel frightened for their futures.
By the bare minimal standards of common sense and common decency, the NFL’s partner networks defy the practice of functional social logic. As our sports dig lower, TV’s always available to distribute the shovels. Randy Moss?!
Sanctuary!