The Idiot’s Guide to the Most Controversial Week in Sports History – Boston.com

I know someone who likes to needle me about how I am such a giant sports honk. I follow all four major pro leagues, locally and nationally, religiously. I watch games, read columns and articles and love to talk about all of it, sometimes incessantly.

“Yeah, but it’s not real,” she’ll tell me in no uncertain, occasionally more elaborate terms. And she’s mostly right … the events, or results, of some game or who got traded where or what have you? Those don’t have much actual bearing on how I live my life beyond whether or not I’m contributing to some future potential high blood pressure issues from shouting at the TV.

But this week… This twisted, warped, ungodly week.

If this week in the world of sports wasn’t real, nothing is. In fact, it was so real, it was unreal, with one mind-boggling headline after another taking our collective breath away. You could trace the insanity back even further, to early last week when news of the Wes Welker suspension broke.

But for all intents and purposes, when the TMZ-released video of former Ravens’ running back Ray Rice knocking out his then-fiancee in that elevator in Atlantic City emerged, sports became a free-for-all of rampant mayhem complete with violence, racism, lying, cheating and other various horridness, culminating in Friday’s mind-numbing news of Adrian Peterson’s indictment for beating his 4-year old son with a switch. Nothing that happened on any playing field this week mattered remotely as much as all that happened off of them.

It was the most controversial week in sports history.

Think that’s an understatement? Not a chance. Major figures in sports get fined, suspended, arrested and/or publicly shamed all the time but if there’s ever been such a compact stretch featuring the kind of volume of miserable happenings as this week, I can’t remember one. And since all the offenders are complete idiots (as opposed to knuckleheads), let us present to you, “The Idiot’s Guide to the Most Controversial Week in Sports History.’

THE NBA

It’s super quiet time for the world’s greatest basketball league a couple weeks out from when training camps getting underway. But Atlanta Hawks general manager Danny Ferry and Indiana Pacers injured star Paul George made sure we didn’t forget about them.

Ferry will be taking an indefinite leave of absence from the Hawks thanks to a series of racially charged comments he made about then free agent forward Luol Deng on a conference call with team officials back in June. His remarks, included among them his opinion that Deng “has some African in him,” spawned an investigation that uncovered a racially insensitive email sent by team owner Bruce Levenson a couple of years ago. Levenson is selling the team and Ferry won’t be around to see the closing.

Meanwhile George, laid up and probably feeling fairly zooted on pain pills thanks to the hideous injury he suffered in a Team USA scrimmage a few weeks ago, went on a Twitter rant seemingly defending Rice and downplaying the seriousness of domestic violence. The tweets have since been deleted and, after one of his people or someone from the Pacers organization clearly got to him, he issued a belated apology for his inane remarks. But it was too late to erase the humiliation he brought upon himself and his team.

MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL

A former employee of the New York Mets sued the team’s front office and co-owner Jeff Wilpon on Wednesday on the grounds that she was fired due to Wilpon being angry that she was having a baby without being married. The discrimination lawsuit alleges that Wilpon said during a meeting that he is “as morally opposed to putting an e-cigarette sign in my ballpark as I am to [the former employee] having this baby without being married.”

Because apparently, Jeff Wilpon believes it’s 1954 and not 2014.

Then on Friday, Baltimore Orioles slugger Chris Davis, who clubbed 53 home runs last season, was popped for 25 games for using amphetamines. Davis, who admitted to using Adderall, did not have an exemption from MLB for it, will not be available until at least four games into the American League Championship Series should the Orioles, who are primed to win the AL East, get that far. Way to be there for your team in the biggest spot of the year, Chris.

THE OLYMPICS

World class runner Oscar Pistorius could go to jail for up to 15 years after he was found guilty on Friday of culpable homicide in the Febrary, 2013 shooting death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Pistorius did avoid conviction on murder and premeditated murder charges on Thursday, which doesn’t even slightly change the fact that he’s a psychotic lunatic.

THE NFL

Last but not least, the league which features 14 players arrested for violent crimes against women in the last two years. The league for which USA Today formed an interactive arrest tracker.

Then there was the Rice video, and his subsequent release from the Ravens and indefinite suspension from the NFL. Then league commissioner Roger Goodell’s unending lies and half-truths about the videotape and when he saw it. The so-called “independent” investigation of how he and the league handled the case, to be overseen by two of his league owner cronies. And one more notch on the belt of absurdity, Peterson and the horrifying story of giving his son a “whooping.”

And this doesn’t even take into account the fact that the Carolina Panthers will play defensive end Greg Hardy on Sunday, despite his conviction for assaulting and threatening to kill a former girlfriend (the conviction is being appealed which is good enough for the NFL). Or that the San Francisco 49ers will continue to start defensive lineman Ray McDonald, despite his arrest for felony domestic violence for allegedly beating his pregnant fiancée not quite two weeks ago. At least the league officially warned Hardy he’d be fined for continuing to wear too much face paint and the Niners suspended their team radio voice for insensitive comments about the Rice case. It’s good to have priorities.

All this sickness and we haven’t even gotten to Dallas Cowboys owner/human foghorn Jerry Jones, sued for sexual assault on Tuesday by a former stripper. But hey, Jerruh says it’s not true so why should anyone think anything more of it, right? You know it’s been a mortifying week when a team owner has a sexual assault lawsuit brought against him and it’s regarded as nothing more than a footnote.

There’s two more days to go until Monday, until this hellscape of a week is finally behind us. That feels like an eternity even though it’s just over 48 hours from now. Judging by the events of Monday-Friday, it’s tough to imagine getting there without further incident. And as sad as it is to admit, especially for a honk like me, it feels like that, more than any actual competition, is the baseline of where the world of sports is today.