Josh Hancock

Here's a post that I submitted to the discussion board of the Yahoo! Fantasy Baseball league I play in:

I'm interested in other people's take on the whole Josh Hancock saga. Now it appears that at the time of his crash, he was:

- Drunk off his ass (0.157)
- Smoking dope
- Talking to some chick on his cell phone
- Doing 68 MPH in a 55 zone
- Not wearing his seat belt

It's a sad commentary on pro sports that my first reaction when I heard about the crash was that Hancock was probably drunk. It's a sad commentary on our society that there was such a strong backlash against anyone in the media who was investigating or discussing the drunk-driving theory, even after a number of pretty good leads had emerged from witnesses, teammates, etc.

The last time I really sat down and reflected on the ugly nature of the average pro athlete was a few years back when I read an autobiography by Billy Bean. It particularly sickened me to read his descriptions of the aggressive homophobia in baseball--maybe because I knew that things were probably largely unchanged 20 years later. Somehow, I was mostly unaffected by the ugly NBA incidents of recent years, or the Tim Hardaway thing, or the gangster culture encroachment into pro football.

But now LaRussa-Hancock-Gate has reawakened my revulsion for pro sports. I'm going to make a conscious effort to stop feeling bad that I care more about fantasy baseball than real baseball, because the truth is that the entire culture of professional athletics is antithetical to many of the things that I believe in.

What's to be done? How do you try to improve the culture of pro athletics?
- posted by John @ 12:45 PM