Normally, when someone int he public eye admits to smoking some marijuana in their youth it makes the obligatory appearance on the CNN news crawl, causing us to collectively shrug our shoulders and go back to wondering why DanRather is camped out on Jon & Kate's front lawn. But in the case of a sports figure, that formula varies slightly. Typically it surfaces on segment 2 of Around the Horn so Woody Paige can recycle a joke he had an intern find on Google and Jay Mariotti can offer an opinion based entirely upon his ability to assign a nickname to the subject. But when Lou Piniella talks about lighting up, you have to take notice.
For me, Lou ranks slightly below Dwight Eisenhower and Kelly Kapowski on the least likely to be a friend of the leaf scale. The man is rumored to have tried to flush a bat down the toilet in anger during a slump during his playing days in Kansas City, is a world class base tosser and does not hesitate to throw down with Rob Dibble. Not exactly the side effects Nancy Reagan and Reefer Madness warned us about.
The good news from this is that the leaf didn't take with Lou, "it didn't do a damn thing for me." Who knows where Lou would be right now if he gave it another try. Would he mellow out a bit and become more a Phil Jackson-style zen philosopher/coach? Or would he have never pursued the managerial track and ended up in the annual Sports Illustrated Where Are they Now issue as the owner of a San Diego surf shop?
I guess we'll never know, but it would have been interesting to see Piniella storm out of the dugout only to lose his thought before he could get to home plate.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment