"It's not representative of how I live my life …"
Sacramento Kings coach Eric Musselman regarding his recent arrest on DUI charges""We don't like fining anybody. We don't attack anybody. It's not in our nature."
Sacramento Kings owner Joe Maloof on potential penalties stemming from Musselman's arrest"I realize this is a serious situation. ... I'm being counted on as a leader, and I have let my teammates down."
Illinois senior guard Rich McBride
regarding his arrest on DUI charges"… there will be severe penalties forthcoming."
Illinois head basketball coach Bruce Weber
on potential penalties stemming from McBride's arrestThe coach screwed up. No mistake about that. So did the kid guard.
At 2:15 on Saturday morning, Eric Musselman, the 41-year-old first year coach of the
Sacramento Kings, was pulled over when local cops say he made a right turn from a left lane and cut off another car. He subsequently failed three sobriety tests. (What, did he get a couple of mulligans?) His blood alcohol level registered .11; the legal limit is .08.
In late September, McBride crossed law enforcement officials in Savoy, IL, near Champaign, for "improper traffic lane usage," as it was described in the police report. He was cited for DUI after his blood alcohol level reportedly checked in at .181, two times the legal limit.
DUI arrests in sports seem as common these days as tirades by T.O. From the NFL to the NHL, in almost every league, players and officials have walked the line. Not long ago, a
San Diego Chargers
linebacker
Steve Foley
was shot three times by an off-duty officer in an incident in which he was subsequently charged with DUI. His blood alcohol reportedly registered a frightening .233, nearly four times the legal limit.
Don't go fuzzy over the numbers and the decimal points and allow the proliferation of DUI arrests to skate by without scrutiny. Heck, a smashed coach or player on the road enrages me more than a baseball player on steroids. Far more.
DUI is today's quiet plague, in and beyond sports. Hardly a day goes by without a local headline mixing true tragedy and DUI. Recently, in the New York area, a middle-aged My Space-loving mom crashed her car while returning home from a night of clubbing with her daughter and her daughter's friend. The friend, 17, was killed. On another sad night a rookie police officer killed her friend, a fellow rookie cop, in another DUI-influenced accident. And just last week, a Long Island jury convicted a drunk driver of murder – a rarity in DUI cases. Jurors concluded Martin Heidgen, in a stupor, showed "depraved indifference to human life" by continuing the wrong way on a highway in July of last year after motorists tried to alert him by flashing their lights and honking their horns. Heidgen crashed into a wedding limousine, killing the driver and a seven-year-old flower girl. She was decapitated. Those are the realities of DUI.
Thankfully, no one was injured in the excursions by Musselman and McBride. Their alleged crimes were only "lane changing" not "life changing."
But why were they treated so differently? Musselman, the grown up, was embraced by his bosses (team owners and management) and his players. In a display of earnest compassion, Musselman stood at a podium Sunday and publically apologized for his actions while surrounded by the Kings owners and players, all of whom expressed their support. "He said he was sorry," said team owner Joe Maloof. "We told him we were disappointed."
"The situation with coach, it was the wrong thing," said Mike Bibby, the starting point guard. "We don't condone it but we're going to back our coach up. Wrong or right, we're going to be with him. ... He's a grown man. He knows it wasn't right what he did."
Added
Geoff Petrie, president of basketball operations: "I think he understands completely the gravity of the situation in which he finds himself and the potential ramifications of that. At the same time though, we don't intend to desert him in his hour of need."
McBride may have used his quotient of compassion three years ago when, as a freshman, he served a four-game suspension for an alleged off-campus robbery in which two teammates also served suspensions. This time, in this hour of need, he was met with a quick reprimand, an indefinite suspension by Illinois head coach Bruce Weber. The school could announce its final sanctions on Monday. One report says he'll likely be suspended for a number of games rather than kicked off the Illini squad altogether or expelled from the university -- the kind of "severe penalties'" described by Weber. One factor in his favor: McBride's academic progress. After this semester he'll reportedly only need nine hours of credit to graduate with a degree in sports management.
There may be no right answer, nor any wrong one, to the quandary of how teams, leagues and institutions handle DUI charges by players and coaches.
The Kings are a family-run enterprise in a market that may be a bit more tolerant than many others. It handled Musselman's lapse as you would expect of them. Weber's very quick, very public reprimand of McBride's wrong turn was not surprising, either. Universities, with millions in donations riding on a school's rep, are hyper-sensitive to anything that might cause a potential donor to allow his or her checkbook to start collecting dust.
It may be a bit too early to charge a double-standard when it comes to how teams, leagues and universities handle similar transgressions by coaches and players. But it's not too early to ask the question, and wonder whether we already know the answer.
