A famous multimillionaire athlete falls in love. He invites his new girlfriend to live and travel with him; he registers hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property and assets in her name; he lavishes her with gifts, assures her of his undying love and even goes so far as to marry her in a private ceremony. Eight years later, the athlete has cast his wife out of his life, denied her every financial claim and left her with little more than the clothes on her back.
Here’s a question. Would any court in the land deny this wife restitution? And in the court of public opinion, would anyone take the side of a husband so stingy and unfeeling?
Let us now switch the husband’s gender. He is now a she: a lesbian tennis star willing to use the legal system to extract herself from another unhappy relationship. This makes the case more complicated, to be sure, but it does nothing to alter the injustice. And, if anything, the outrage should be greater.
In the past week, Martina Navratilova has been sued by a former lover, Toni Layton, who claims she was unceremoniously dumped and is now owed millions of dollars in damages and spousal support. Layton claims she and Navratilova had agreed “to evenly share all funds and assets earned and obtained by either while together.” These assets apparently include four multimillion-dollar homes.
By now, the suing of athletes by ex-lovers has become a staple of tort law, but unlike Roberto Alomar or Michael Jordan or Chris Bosh, Navratilova is able -- and has been willing-- to take advantage of a legal double standard that is both sexist and homophobic. And the gay community should be first in line to oppose it.
I say this with some regret because I have enormous admiration for Navratilova. She is one of the two or three greatest women ever to play the game of tennis. She has transformed society’s understanding of athleticism. And she has been candid and unapologetic about her sexuality at a time when most gay athletes, male and female alike, still have to be dragged from the closet.
But her current legal troubles remind us that even gay icons have some growing up to do when it comes to gay relationships. We cannot know whether all the assertions in Toni Layton’s lawsuit are true. We can say, however, with some certainty that the two women lived together as a couple, that they celebrated their relationship in a ceremony in New Hampshire, that they shared property and assets, and that Navratilova is much the wealthier of the two. If this were a no-fault heterosexual divorce, the law would unequivocally side with Layton, awarding her alimony and some division of property.
But the law, of course, still has different standards for same-sex relationships, and Layton has been forced to file a "domestic partnership" lawsuit in the deeply inhospitable legal climate of Florida, which has traditionally taken a dim view of alternative lifestyles. Barring a settlement, then, Navratilova stands to emerge from her most recent long-term relationship with little more than bad press and some whopping legal fees. If, that is, she can convince a court that her relationship with Layton doesn't rise to the contractual level of heterosexual marriage.
This stratagem is not new to her. In 1991, Navratilova’s ex-lover Judy Nelson sued her for $7.5 million in spousal benefits -- or, as the slavering tabloids used to call it, "galimony." To buttress her case, Nelson argued that the two women had engaged in not one but two marriage ceremonies and had filmed a video will together.
Nelson also got vocal support from another Martina ex, Rita Mae Brown. In her memoir, "Rita Will," Brown writes that her sympathies shifted toward Nelson during a pretrial hearing in which Navratilova's lawyers argued (Brown's words) that "Martina and Judy had had a contract for sex," which "amounted to prostitution and therefore was against public policy." By demoting same-sex relationships to the level of a roll in the hay, Brown argued, Navratilova "could inflict colossal damage on every gay person in the United States."
Brown's motives in entering the case were suspect -- she had famously shot out the back window of Navratilova's BMW after a quarrel, and she herself enjoyed a brief liaison with Nelson -- but politically she was on target. The only way Navratilova could escape her financial (not to mention moral) obligations was to argue that her gay relationship did not carry the same legal standing as a straight relationship.
What was cynical then has become indefensible now. Martina Navratilova can no longer cast herself as an apostle for gay rights while using a homophobic legal code to deny her ex-partners alimony. This is more than bad behavior, it is bad precedent. And it comes at the worst possible time.
Very soon -- sooner than anyone could have guessed -- gay marriage will become the law in much of the land. A great deal has been written about whether straight America is ready; less has been written about whether gay America is ready. Not just to be held to the same contractual standards as heterosexual couples but to believe (after years of being told otherwise) that their relationships really are of equal standing. And to go on believing it when those relationships collapse.
In reporting on Toni Layton’s lawsuit, Britain’s Daily Mail used the following headline: "Martina Sued for Millions by 'Wife.'" I hope and expect that those archly condescending quotation marks will one day disappear, but it is the job of the gay community to make them go. If we want our relationships to be taken seriously, if we want the legal sanction of marriage, we must be ready to stand by our contracts and our obligations -- no matter how expensive or inconvenient it is and no matter what example is set by our culturally designated "heroes." Equality has its blessings. It also has its price.
I love baseball. I love the Olympics. Baseball's getting kicked out of the Olympics. I'm glad.
Softball, which I don't love, is also getting kicked out. I'm sad about that. Life's complicated.
As much as I enjoy the chance to watch the mostly non-elite minor-league prospects who make up the U.S. team -- seriously; I'm nerdy like that -- I agree with the International Olympic Committee's decision to drop the sport after Beijing.
Because the U.S. major leagues rightly refuse to interrupt their schedule to allow players to go the Olympics, Olympic baseball is missing most of the world's best players. Big-league teams are reluctant to let their top minor-leaguers go to the Olympics, so the games don't even really work as a treat for prospect hounds. The U.S. team features a few top guys, such as Matt LaPorta and Trevor Cahill, but it's dominated by Quadruple-A types like Nate Schierholtz and Jayson Nix.
Baseball also requires a specialized stadium that in most cases becomes a white elephant the day after the last game because -- and this is another good reason -- there are large swathes of the world where baseball doesn't matter. Europe is one of those, and the Olympics have a European sensibility.
The baseball tournament began Wednesday, and it's an eyesore on TV. There's a giant, NHL-style safety screen behind home plate that stretches all the way around to the bases. It appears to be a chain-link fence painted black. For some reason, whoever's supplying the pictures insists on using a camera behind the plate, which in U.S. ballparks is above the backstop and screen, but in Beijing's park is looking through the chain-link fence.
It looks like your TV's broken. It's terrible. Not to get all technical for the TV people but: Move your camera!
Good riddance, baseball. You won't be missed. Major League Baseball runs its own quadrennial international tournament now, the World Baseball Classic, which does attract the world's best players.
Three years ago Sports Illustrated took a poll of its readers, asking what sports should be eliminated from the Olympics. S.I.'s a pretty baseball-centric mag. The girly synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics were 1-2, as you might expect. Baseball was third. Daylight fourth.
Take tennis with you when you go, baseball. Tennis does bring the best players in the world to town, but so does Masters Series Hamburg. Olympics tennis looks like just another tournament. A pretty big one. The stars do show. But the Olympics are supposed to be special.
NBA or NHL stars get sorted out into national teams for the Olympics, so you get to see LeBron James and Kobe Bryant play together, Michael Redd and Andrew Bogut play apart. There's nothing particularly Olympian about Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal, should they meet for the gold medal, for the fifth time this year.
Bringing tennis into the Olympics was a pretty blatant attempt to cash in on a big-money sport, as was baseball. Basketball's a big-money sport too, of course, but it was an Olympic sport before it was a big-money sport. A requirement for new Olympic sports should be that, upon the sport's entry to the games, the Olympic tournament would immediately become its pinnacle.
That would be true for squash, a good candidate these days. It's not true for baseball or tennis.
Unfortunately, it's true for softball, which is being tossed out with baseball. It's collateral damage. I'm not a big fan of softball -- I think it's a low-scoring bowdlerization of baseball -- but the best players show up and the Olympics are the pinnacle. Except for the ballpark thing, a problem that seems solvable with a smaller, temporary stadium, softball is everything you'd want in an Olympic sport.
So where were we? Ah, yes, Brett Favre.
This column's alleged favorite subject just keeps giving, doesn't he? When last we spoke, ESPN's Chris Mortensen was just reporting that Favre wanted to play again, according to sources close to the quarterback and the Green Bay Packers.
That story has borne out, and now Favre's in a game of diva chess with the team, having asked for his release so he can sign somewhere else because he's not feeling the love radiating properly from Green Bay. The Packers have said he can come back to hold a clipboard for Aaron Rodgers if he wants to. Oh, snap! The club knows he wants no such thing. It's a standoff for the moment.
What the Packers would really like is for Favre to go away and stay away. Come back to get his number retired, talk to the team before a big game now and then. But not go away just any old way. If the Packers release him, he could go sign with an NFC North rival -- the division isn't exactly brimming with All-Pro quarterbacks these days -- and come back twice a year to haunt the Packers as a Lion, Bear or Viking.
Alas for the Packers, they can't tell Favre he can have his release as long as he signs with an AFC team, preferably one unlikely to be on the other sideline should the Packers make it to Tampa next February. How does Oakland sound to you, eh, Brett?
What they can do is offer him up in a trade to whomever they want. They could make the price for anyone on Green Bay's 2008 schedule exorbitant, but that's about all they can control, and even with that they couldn't go too far.
The Packers really can't win here. They look like they're treating one of their legends shabbily if they refuse to let Favre follow his bliss, whatever he thinks that means this week, and they risk the humiliation of getting beaten by Favre at Soldier Field -- without even having been compensated -- if they magnanimously let him go.
Seems like the thing to do is wait for another change of heart. One's due any second now.
What else we missed: Every time this column retreats to the woods for a week of contemplation and ascetic living, all hell breaks loose in the sports world. This time it wasn't so bad, only a Wimbledon men's final that various chatterers have been calling the best ever.
Rafael Nadal beat Roger Federer in five sets, ending Federer's five-year Wimbledon streak and becoming the first man since Björn Borg to win the French Open and Wimbledon in the same year.
Maybe you heard about it.
"Let's be unequivocal," wrote Jon Wertheim in Sports Illustrated. "This was the greatest match ever played." Wertheim was so unequivocal he didn't even really bother defending the point, though he did later in a "Mailbag" column on SI.com:
You had an impossibly rich -- Shakespearean, even -- subtext. You had two gentlemen. A dazzling rivalry. One versus two. Lefty versus righty. In the Wimbledon finals -- the friggin' Wimbledon finals! Then the match is of the highest quality. And it had everything: serves, returns, shot-making, net play speed, power, grace, alternating momentum, mental strength, injury, acts of God. With literally seconds to go before darkness, the match is won 9-7 in the fifth. Add those ingredients, put it in the Bass-o-matic and you've got an unrivalled sporting event.
Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News joined Wertheim in the extra superlative, writing that it wasn't just the best tennis match ever played, it was "one of the best championship events that any sport has ever had."
When I announced I'd be off for a week a reader needled me, saying he was frustrated I'd taken off because he figured the presence of the Williams sisters in the women's final would force me to write about Wimbledon, and thus I would have no choice but to write about the great Federer-Nadal rivalry. I wrote back, mostly joking, that I was perfectly capable of writing about the Williams sisters without writing about Federer and Nadal.
Theirs is a rivalry I've been aware of but haven't really followed. I find tennis uncompelling in the extreme these days, and where I once tuned in to the late stages of most major tournaments -- Australia never did it for me because it happens at a bad time of year, but I rarely missed the semis and finals of the other three -- I now sometimes catch a few sets of the Wimbledon finals, if that.
I'm clearly not alone here, as evidenced by sagging TV ratings -- though this year's finals drew good numbers -- and the sad spectacle of NBC Wimbledon commentators Ted Robinson and John McEnroe saying throughout the Federer-Nadal match that it was somehow proving that tennis is not irrelevant or in trouble.
Embrace the nichetude, fellas, and quit worrying that maybe soccer has passed tennis as America's favorite non-favorite sport.
Nadal-Federer was every bit as great as Robinson and McEnroe kept saying it was, maybe even as great as Wertheim and Lupica say. I'm in no position to compare a tennis match to its antecedents, and comparing the 2008 Wimbledon men's final to, say, Game 7 of the 1960 World Series or Jesse Owens' performance at the 1936 Olympics is just silly bar talk. Nadal-Federer was better than all but two burritos I've ever had and not quite as good as "Vertigo." You?
I don't know that it needs to be anything more than what it was, a great tennis match, maybe even the best ever. It's not going to save tennis, make America embrace this great game again, as McEnroe suggested it ought to do.
Any sport can cough up a great event, as we're about to relearn from the Olympics, when millions of us will be spellbound by some badminton match or team handball game. Everything came together for tennis last week, as Wertheim points out, and it coughed up a doozy. Good for tennis. What's next?
The rest of the week seemed to involve a whole lot of Alex Rodriguez's private life. Now there's a niche that does not need to be embraced.
It sounds like the setup of some oddball espionage flick: On consecutive days, the world's top-ranked women's golf and tennis players announce their retirement. Who is retiring the great female sports stars of the world?
Annika Sorenstam said Tuesday that she'll be ending her career at the end of the golf season. On Wednesday, in a much bigger shocker, world No. 1 tennis player Justine Henin, two weeks shy of her 26th birthday and not injured, said she's walking away from the game effective immediately. She's the first player ever to quit at No. 1.
Imagine if Tiger Woods and Roger Federer had announced their retirements on consecutive days. They'd knock the NBA and NHL playoffs off the front pages for a week.
The bizarre coincidence of the timing of their announcements aside, Sorenstam and Henin's retirements don't have much in common. It would be easy to clump them together and ponder what it is that's forcing the top women out of their sports early. But it might not be all that fruitful. Sorenstam and Henin are separate cases.
Sorenstam is 37 and at a more logical point in her career to step away than Henin, especially since she's soon to be married for a second time and says she wants to have a baby.
Woods can shuffle his calendar to accommodate the birth of his daughter. It's a little more complicated than that for a woman. Henin's countrywoman Kim Clijsters, also a top tennis player, retired a year ago at the age of 23 because she wanted to have a baby, which she did in February.
While Sorenstam's still a top player, she hasn't returned to her earlier dominance since returning from a bulging disk in her neck last year. Even if she never swings another golf club in earnest again, she won't have a legacy of what might have been.
"I'm very content with what I've achieved," Sorenstam said, "and it just feels right." Except for chasing Kathy Whitworth's record of 88 career victories, which Sorenstam says doesn't matter to her, she's pretty much accomplished what she was going to accomplish.
Not so for Henin. The winner of seven Grand Slam titles including four French Opens, the last three in a row, she won't defend her title at Roland Garros starting next weekend. Had she played in Paris and won, she would have become the first woman in the open era to win four straight championships there.
Reuters reports that she had spoken excitedly about the French Open just last week. She also had talked about playing in the Olympics and at Wimbledon, the one Grand Slam she hadn't won.
Sorenstam is also that rare sports figure who has transcended her sport. She's reasonably well-known to people who don't follow women's golf, mostly because she was so good she was able to compete against men in a PGA event.
Henin recalls the famous answer the drama critic gave to the Broadway publicist who asked how he could get his leading lady's name in the New York Times: "Shoot her."
Though she's an exciting player with a full arsenal of shots, including a one-handed backhand that sends tennis-heads into veritable paroxysms of admiration, she's had some personal drama -- estrangement and reconciliation with her family, divorce, a feud with Serena Williams stemming from an incident at the 2003 French Open -- and she's notably smaller than most of her opponents and all of her top rivals, Henin, like Federer, has never captured the attention of those who weren't already fascinated by tennis.
She has never been more famous than she is today, the first full day of her post-tennis life.
Unless she changes her mind. That's always the speculation when an athlete retires while still playing well. Sorenstam even referenced that ultimate "did you say don't go" diva of recent sporting times, Brett Favre.
Henin talked about how she'd lost her passion for the game she'd been playing since she was 5: "I gave the sport all I could and took everything it could give me," she said at a press conference at her tennis academy in Belgium. "I take this decision without the least bit of regrets. It is my life as a woman that starts now."
Yeah, yeah, say the chattering classes. See you in a year. Federer said he'd have taken a year off rather than retiring had he lost the ol' belly fire.
Rare is the athlete who retires early and doesn't feel the itch. Even Bjorn Borg, who walked away at 26, came back eventually, toting his wooden racket long after such primitive tools had themselves been retired.
Even more rare are sports figures who go out not just when there's something left in the tank, but at the very top. It takes tremendous courage -- or tremendous, Martina Hingis-like turmoil, which Henin and those around her say is not the case -- to walk away at that point. It's a hell of a thing to plunge from a world you reign over to one in which you're just another person, albeit a rich one, trying to get by -- "my life as a woman." Henin sounded confident and appeared content and relaxed Wednesday. It was her coach, Carlos Rodriguez, not her, who choked up.
"I want to rediscover the small pleasures, not look at my watch all the time because I have to get to training the next day," Henin said Wednesday. "I want to stay in shape but I want to spend time with the people I love, drive my nephews and nieces to activities, have time. It's all I want right now."
That all sounds great right now to someone who's spent her entire adult life in a pressure cooker. But it might sound like torture a year from now to someone who, whether she realizes it or not, has been largely formed by that pressure cooker. My niece needs a ride again?!
Sorenstam plays a game that lends itself to much longer careers. Golf is that rare profession that, upon retirement, becomes an amiable pastime. Most people retire to, not from, golf. If she wanted to, Sorenstam could probably have a couple of babies, get them to middle school and then come back and at least compete on the LPGA and win on the Legends Tour.
The WNBA season gets under way this weekend. Lisa Leslie, one of the league's biggest stars, will return to the court after skipping a year for childbirth and maternity leave. Here's hoping Lauren Jackson, Diana Taurasi, Laura Beard and Seimone Augustus aren't getting any big ideas from Sorenstam and Henin. The same goes for Danica Patrick, who's in Indianapolis trying again to become the first woman to win the Indy 500.
It's been an interesting week in women's sports. A few more interesting weeks like it would be downright disastrous.
Mark Schlereth of ESPN and Jeff Zillgitt of USA Today are the champions of this year's NFL Panel o' Experts, having correctly picked the winner of 171 of the 256 regular-season games played in 2007. Their victory -- by three games over you, the teeming masses, as represented by Yahoo's users -- entitles them to a valuable prize that has been won by many and claimed by none: dinner at my house.
This is the second straight tie and the fifth time in the five-year history of the panel that an ESPN expert has won at least a share of the title. That's not surprising given that the four-letter has at times made up about half of the panel and even in this year's expanded field accounts for a third of the players.
Zillgitt, like USA Today colleagues Jarrett Bell and Larry Weisman a first-time entrant this year, rallied in Week 17 to catch Schlereth at the wire, going 12-4 while Schlereth went 11-5.
Mike Golic shared the championship with Charles Robinson of Yahoo Sports last year. The other winners were Ron Jaworski in 2003 and Sean Salisbury in 2004 and '05, the only repeat winner. Jaworski had the highest winning percentage this year, but since he didn't pick a winner in any of the Monday night games he announced for ESPN television, he finished in a tie for seventh place.
The Panel o' Experts is based on correct picks, not winning percentage. So ESPN's conflict-of-interest rules -- which are awfully persnickety for a network that's one giant conflict of interest -- may have kept Jaws from claiming a second title. He would have had to go only 6-9 in the Monday games to beat Schlereth and Zillgitt.
While Robinson made a solid showing, finishing in a three-way tie for fourth, Golic came close to pulling off a rare first-to-worst tumble. He went 149-106, one of only four panelists -- out of 21 -- to miss on more than 100 games and post a winning percentage under .600. He even finished behind ESPN colleague Eric Allen, an incorrect-picking machine whom I keep on the panel as insurance against my finishing last.
Golic was kept out of last place by porn star Adriana Sage, who followed last year's strong showing -- she finished third -- by going 146-110, three games worse than Golic. Sage was philosophical and defiant Wednesday, saying by e-mail that she'd expected to have a tough year picking.
"I spent a lot of my time pursuing new endeavors, allowing less time to follow the league," she wrote. "Aside from that, instead of making my picks from a logical and neutral perspective, they were made with wishful thinking."
She said she'll keep picking games through the playoffs on her nonporn site Erotic Model Picks, and vows to be back picking next year.
My daughter, Daisy, the coin-flippinest 2-year-old west of Gillette Stadium, went 162-94 in her debut, good for a 14th-place tie with former two-time champ Salisbury. Salisbury travels around the country and breaks down film and watches practices and talks to coaches and players and uses the expertise gleaned from his college and pro playing careers, and he's right as often as a 2-year-old with a quarter.
My 4-year-old son, Buster, who actually picked games rather than flipping a coin for the first time, finished 18th at 153-103, one place and five games behind his dad. My What the Heck™ Picks went 3-13.
Overall, the panel had a .642 winning percentage, way up from last year's worst-ever .593, and second only to the .656 winning percentage we put up in '05.
I've discontinued the Preseason Panel o' Experts, in which experts' preseason picks of division winners and wild-card teams are compared. I decided it was way too much work for how interesting it is, which is not very. It's mostly guessing anyway. At least the week-to-week picks of games are educated guessing.
And coin flipping.
Here are the final standings.
| Name | W-L | Pct. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | Mark Schlereth, ESPN | 171-85 | .668 |
| 1. | Jeff Zillgitt, USA Today | 171-85 | .668 |
| 3. | Yahoo Users | 168-88 | .656 |
| 4. | Cris Carter, Yahoo | 167-89 | .652 |
| 4. | Merril Hoge, ESPN | 167-89 | .652 |
| 4. | Charles Robinson, Yahoo | 167-89 | .652 |
| 7. | Vinnie Iyer, Sporting News | 166-90 | .648 |
| 7. | Ron Jaworski, ESPN | 166-75 | .689 |
| 9. | Chris Mortensen, ESPN | 164-92 | .641 |
| 9. | Michael Silver, Yahoo | 164-92 | .641 |
| 11. | Accuscore | 163-89 | .647 |
| 11. | Jarrett Bell, USA Today | 163-93 | .637 |
| 11. | Peter King, Sports Illustrated | 163-93 | .637 |
| 14. | Daisy, C, the Coinflip Magazine | 162-94 | .633 |
| 14. | Sean Salisbury, ESPN | 162-94 | .633 |
| 16. | Larry Weisman, USA Today | 160-96 | .625 |
| 17. | King Kaufman, Salon | 158-98 | .617 |
| 18. | Buster, B, the Buster Magazine | 153-103 | .598 |
| 19. | Eric Allen, ESPN | 150-106 | .586 |
| 20. | Mike Golic, ESPN | 149-106 | .584 |
| 21. | Adriana Sage, EroticModelPicks | 146-110 | .570 |
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Year in Sports: Missing [PERMALINK]
It's not possible to write a year-in-sports piece without leaving something out, assuming the piece is shorter than book length.
Readers pointed out a lot of things I missed in my annual year-ender in the story's letters thread. With some of these sports -- bird-watching, netball -- I just have to thank you for writing and invite you to read someone else's column.
But there are a few things I left out that, if I had it to do again, I'd include. I don't have to do it again for another year, but in the meantime I think I should have mentioned Marion Jones. She finally went down as part of the litany of drug abuse of 2007. Her tearful press conference and Olympic-medal surrender were such a long time coming I think I kind of dismissed them, but they were a big part of the year.
I also should have mentioned all the drunken driving, particularly the twin incidents involving the St. Louis Cardinals. Manager Tony La Russa was arrested for a DUI during spring training in Florida, and then pitcher Josh Hancock died in a drunken-driving accident in June. Toxicology reports showed his blood-alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit.
Late in the year, former New York Yankees World Series hero Jim Leyritz was charged with DUI manslaughter following an accident in Florida that killed the driver of another car.
I also should have mentioned that tennis was rocked by a series of match-fixing incidents in 2007.
Pretty depressing, no? The Year in Sports piece was all about what a horrible year it was, nothing but death and tragedy and scandal. And I left a bunch of stuff out. The headline on my 2003 Year in Sports piece was "The Year of Behaving Badly."
It's already starting to seem like kind of an innocent time.
Previous column: Dear '72 Dolphins: Shut up
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The year in sports started a few hours earlier in 2007 than it usually does, and it started as badly as a year can start. Darrent Williams, an up-and-coming Broncos cornerback, was shot to death outside a Denver nightclub following a dispute at a New Year's Eve party. He died in the arms of teammate Javon Walker. He was 24.
Later that New Year's Day at the Fiesta Bowl in Glendale, Ariz., Boise State beat Oklahoma 43-42 in overtime. The ridiculously thrilling upset -- which featured three touchdowns in the last 86 seconds, a hook-and-ladder play and, on the game-winning two-point conversion, a Statue of Liberty play -- was one of the greatest college football games ever played.
So it goes? Good with the bad. Cycle of life. A rainbow for every storm-cloud and a birth for every death.
If only.
How many great games and thrilling moments would have been needed to make up for all of 2007's tragedies? More than any year can provide. There were some nice moments in 2007, but it was a year of death and a steady rain of scandal.
By the time it drew to a close, three other 24-year-old active NFL players would be dead, the last of them, budding superstar safety Sean Taylor of Washington, murdered in his own bedroom by intruders. Formerly admired stars in basketball, baseball and football would be revealed as abusers of women, drugs and animals. A crooked-official scandal would shake the NBA and all other North American leagues.
There was violence. Two NBA stars, Antoine Walker and Eddy Curry, would be the victims of home-invasion robberies that fortunately were not as deadly as Taylor's. Tennessee Titans star Adam "Pacman" Jones would be suspended for the year by the NFL for multiple arrests, including his role in a shooting during NBA All-Star weekend in Las Vegas that left a nightclub bouncer paralyzed. Other NBA stars were also involved in shootings, as either targets or bystanders.
Referee Tim Donaghy resigned from the NBA and pleaded guilty to federal charges after an FBI investigation revealed he'd bet on games and fed inside information to gamblers, a devastating scandal for the league and for other sports, which found themselves in the position of trying to prove the negative that Donaghy was not one of many officials on the take.
Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons, once one of the NFL's most charismatic and marketable stars, was arrested as the ringleader of a dog-fighting operation based on property he owned in Virginia. Vick eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges and was sentenced to 23 months in prison. He could still face state charges. If his playing career isn't over, it's hideously damaged.
New York Knicks coach Isiah Thomas and Madison Square Garden lost a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by former team marketing executive Anucha Browne Sanders, who had accused Thomas of alternating between verbal abuse and sexual come-ons before she was fired in 2006. Browne Sanders won a judgment, then settled the case for $11.5 million.
And we haven't even started talking about drugs yet.
From major raids on pharmacies and drug labs to Barry Bonds' fraught chase and capture of the career home run record, performance-enhancing drugs were seemingly everywhere.
Late in the year former Sen. George Mitchell's report on drug use in baseball dominated sports conversation. The Mitchell Report concluded that "for more than a decade there has been widespread illegal use of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing substances by players in Major League Baseball." The report named almost 100 names, the biggest of them seven-time Cy Young Award-winner Roger Clemens, who in a statement denied ever having doped.
But the games did go on. They really did. And from that lulu of a Fiesta Bowl to the New England Patriots' pursuit of a perfect season, they still had the amazing ability to dazzle, delight and make us forget the troubles of the world -- even the troubles of the sports world.
2007 was a year of fresh champions such as the Anaheim Ducks, who took home their first Stanley Cup, and of dynasties such as the San Antonio Spurs, who won their fourth NBA title in nine years. And then there were the Boston Red Sox, who moved from one category to the other. Three years after winning their first World Series in 86 years, the Sox won again, then began negotiating to trade for Minnesota Twins ace Johan Santana in an attempt to solidify their position atop the game.
Barry Bonds' approach to Henry Aaron's lifetime home run record of 755 provided the baseball season with a long, strange psychodrama. San Francisco fans, and almost no one else, cheered when Bonds broke the record in a home game in August; one of baseball's most respected figures had been supplanted by the face of the steroid era. After the season, Bonds would be indicted on perjury charges for allegedly lying to a grand jury in the investigation of the BALCO lab when he said he'd never knowingly taken steroids.
Bonds, now a free agent with 762 career home runs, pleaded not guilty and is expected to go on trial in 2008.
Though the baseball postseason ended with a fizzle -- the Sox's win over the Colorado Rockies was the third World Series sweep in four years -- the regular season ended like firecrackers. The Rockies made the postseason by winning 13 of their last 14 games just to earn a tie for the wild card with the San Diego Padres.
They won a humdinger of a one-game playoff in extra innings, then swept the Philadelphia Phillies and Arizona Diamondbacks in the playoffs. They reached the World Series having won 10 straight and an astonishing 21 out of 22. Then they got swept.
The New York Mets crashed as spectacularly as the Rockies soared. On the morning of Sept. 14, the Mets led the National League East by six and a half games and had won 10 of their last 12. Starting that night they were swept by the second-place Phillies, the beginning of a 5-12 tumble that knocked them out of the playoffs, the Phillies winning the division instead. The Mets went 1-6 in the last week of the season, a pratfall as spectacular as Philadelphia's own famous nosedive in 1964.
The big news of baseball's other season, the offseason free-agent frenzy, was New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez opting out of the last three years of his famous 10-year, $252 million contract and re-signing with the team for 10 years, $275 million. A-Rod and his agent, Scott Boras, angered the baseball world by announcing his decision to opt out during a World Series game.
In the NFL Peyton Manning shed his reputation as a big-game loser by leading the Indianapolis Colts to their first Super Bowl victory since the 1970 season, when the team played in Baltimore. Along the way the Colts beat their habitual playoff tormentors, the Patriots, in a thrilling AFC Championship Game that included a comeback from a 21-3 deficit.
The Super Bowl, in which the Colts beat the Chicago Bears, 29-17, was the first to match two black head coaches, Tony Dungy of Indianapolis and Lovie Smith of Chicago. It was also the first Super Bowl played in the rain. And it was the first played in the rain by two teams with black head coaches.
The Colts and Patriots met again in Week 9 of the 2007 season in a game that wags semi-facetiously dubbed the "Game of the Century." It was the latest week in an NFL season that two undefeated clubs had met. The Patriots won 24-20 and kept on winning, 16 in a row to become the first NFL team to go undefeated in the regular season since the Miami Dolphins in 1972, when the NFL season was only 14 games long.
New England's perfect record was marred in the eyes of many -- including Don Shula, who coached the '72 Dolphins -- for what came to be known as "Spygate." During the first quarter of the first game of the season, against the New York Jets in New Jersey, NFL security officials confiscated a video camera and tape from a Patriots employee who had been pointing the camera at the Jets bench, which is against the rules because such tape could be used to decode coaches' signals.
Shula went so far as to say at midseason that if the Pats went undefeated, their record should have an asterisk because they gained an illegal advantage, though it's unclear how a team could gain enough of an edge to win 16 straight games from less than one quarter of taping on opening day. Shula later backed off from his comment.
The Patriots were fined $250,000, coach Bill Belichick was dinged for twice that much, and the Pats were docked their first-round draft pick in 2008. Whether that punishment was appropriate or a slap on the wrist largely depends on what team you root for.
The Bears took the traditional path of the Super Bowl loser and stumbled through the '07 season, missing the playoffs. They were replaced atop the NFC by two historic powers, the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys, who were led by similar quarterbacks.
A resurgent 37-year-old Brett Favre led the Packers to their first playoff berth in three years while Tony Romo, a Wisconsin kid who grew up idolizing Favre, recovered from a disastrous muffed snap that cost the Cowboys a playoff win in January to take his place among the league's elite players in the fall.
Throughout the year the health of former NFL players continued to gain prominence as an issue. Congress held hearings, and former and current players tried to raise money for and consciousness about ex-players with serious health issues, many of whom blame the league and the players union for failing to help them despite their role in helping to build the NFL into a multibillion-dollar business.
In college football, that Boise State win over Oklahoma --exciting as it was -- was essentially an exhibition game. The bowl game that counts, the BCS Championship Game, was played a week later, and Florida routed Ohio State 41-14.
Eight months later the tone was set for the 2007 season when Appalachian State, a member of the so-called NCAA Football Championship Subdivision -- formerly known as Division I-AA -- beat Michigan in Ann Arbor. Appalachian State would go on to win the -- oh, let's just call it Division I-AA -- championship.
Division I-A, officially known as the Football Bowl Subdivision, would go through a topsy-turvy season, with teams cycling in and out of the top 10 willy-nilly, only to end up with usual suspects Ohio State and LSU scheduled to meet in the BCS Championship Game Jan. 8.
This year's Boise State -- that is, the undefeated smaller-conference team shut out of the championship picture, illustrating once again that Division I-A is a league in which not everyone is eligible for the championship -- is Hawaii.
In a first, the same schools that played for the football championship met again for the men's basketball championship three months later, the Gators winning that one too for their second straight basketball championship. Florida is the first school to win the football and men's basketball titles in the same academic year.
Greg Oden, freshman center and star of that runner-up Ohio State team, went on to become the first overall pick in the NBA draft over the summer, taken by the lottery-winning Portland Trail Blazers, but he'll miss the entire season after undergoing knee surgery.
Tennessee won the women's basketball Tournament for the record seventh time, beating Rutgers in the Championship Game 59-46. The next day, radio host Don Imus, evidently aiming for humor, referred to the mostly black Rutgers players as "nappy-headed hos." The resulting uproar eventually led to Imus being fired by CBS Radio. He reached a settlement on his contract in November and was back on the air with ABC Radio soon afterward.
Another dynastic group was the San Antonio Spurs, who won their fourth NBA championship since 1999. The Spurs, led by Tim Duncan and Tony Parker, swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals, a series notable only as the first appearance on the league's biggest stage for LeBron James, the 22-year-old fourth-year player who figures to be the NBA's great star for the next decade or so.
The one-sided Finals were a fitting end to a mostly dreary playoff season that was marred by a terrible disciplinary decision in what might have been the most exciting series, the second-round Western Conference matchup between the Spurs and the Phoenix Suns.
In the waning moments of Game 4 of that series, won by the Suns, Robert Horry of San Antonio committed a hard foul on Steve Nash. Several players on the Suns bench jumped up and took a few steps toward Horry but were quickly herded back to their seats by coaches.
But commissioner David Stern, applying the letter rather than the spirit of the rule forbidding players from leaving the bench to join an altercation, suspended two key Suns, Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw, for Game 5, giving San Antonio a huge advantage in a series that was tied 2-2. Horry was also suspended, but he played a much lesser role for the Spurs, who won Games 5 and 6 to advance.
They weren't seriously challenged again in the playoffs, easily beating the Utah Jazz and then the Cavaliers for the title. The Dallas Mavericks, who, along with Phoenix, had figured to be San Antonio's chief rival, were eliminated in the first round in a memorable upset by the Golden State Warriors, in the playoffs for the first time in 13 years under coach Don Nelson -- who had most recently coached the Mavericks.
A highlight of the NBA season for some was the publication of "Man in the Middle" by former journeyman center John Amaechi, who used the book to come out as gay. The reaction was mostly positive. The most notable exception was that of Tim Hardaway, who said in a radio interview that he "hates gay people" and wouldn't want one as a teammate.
His comments resulted in the former All-Star losing his job as a consultant with a minor-league team and the NBA withdrawing its invitation for him to take part in All-Star festivities. Later in the year, Hardaway reportedly took it upon himself to attend classes at a Miami youth center to learn about problems faced by gay youth.
The early part of the 2007-08 season was notable for the resurgence of the Boston Celtics, who in the offseason traded for Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to team with veteran Celtic Paul Pierce. The Celtics, once the colossus of the NBA, haven't been to the Finals since 1987 and were coming off a 24-58 record last year. But with the new Big Three, the Celtics raced out to a 25-3 start, bringing up memories of the great Boston dynasty.
Roger Federer continued his own dynasty on the tennis court, winning the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in the same year for the third time in four years. He was beaten in the semis in Australia in 2005. For the second straight year, Federer lost to Rafael Nadal in the final of the French Open, the only Grand Slam Federer's never won. He beat Nadal, his chief rival, in the Wimbledon final.
The Williams sisters made a comeback on the women's side, starting with Serena winning the Australian Open in January from the 81st seed. She was the third-lowest seed ever to win a Grand Slam tournament. It's her third Australian victory and eighth career Grand Slam tournament win.
In the other Grand Slam events, Justine Henin won the French and U.S. Opens and Serena's sister Venus Williams won Wimbledon from the 23rd seed. Saying she'd been inspired by Serena's performance in Australia, Venus Williams became the lowest seed ever to win Wimbledon -- breaking her own two-year-old record. She'd been seeded 14th in 2005. The win was Venus' fourth Wimbledon and sixth Grand Slam title.
In golf Tiger Woods' win at the PGA Championship allowed him to avoid a year with no wins in major tournaments, which would have been his first since 2004 and only his third since 1998. Woods now owns 13 major titles, five shy of the career record held by Jack Nicklaus. At the same age, 31, Nicklaus had won nine majors. The other majors winners were Zach Johnson at the Masters, Angel Cabrera at the U.S. Open, and Padraig Harrington at the British Open.
Morgan Pressell, 18, became the youngest woman to win a major when she took the Kraft Nabisco Championship in April. The other three majors were also taken by first-time winners: Suzann Pettersen at the LPGA Championship, Cristie Kerr at the U.S. Women's Open, and Lorena Ochoa at the British Open. Ochoa was easily the top player on the tour, topping the rankings and the money list by a wide margin.
Annika Sorenstam, the young century's most dominant woman golfer, had an off year. She was bothered by neck problems, missed significant time, and did not win an LPGA event for the first time since her rookie year in 1994.
Jimmie Johnson won his second straight NASCAR Nextel Cup. Kimi Räikkönen won the Formula 1 drivers championship. Dario Franchitti won the Indy 500.
A horse named Street Sense won the Kentucky Derby, Curlin and Rags to Riches taking the other legs of the Triple Crown. This wasn't one of those years when a horse transcended the sport. But the biggest news to come out of racing did involve such a horse, Barbaro, the 2006 Derby winner, who was euthanized in January, the eventual result of his breakdown in the '06 Preakness Stakes.
David Beckham, the 32-year-old metrosexual icon soccer player, left Real Madrid after it won the 2006-07 La Liga championship and joined the Los Angeles Galaxy of Major League Soccer, a minor league in international terms. The American soccer league hoped the aging English star would raise its profile both internationally and among American sports fans, but while Beckham was a merchandising smash, he didn't amount to much on the pitch, missing significant playing time with injuries.
In more significant soccer news -- except on these shores -- AC Milan beat Liverpool 2-1 in the UEFA Champions League Final.
The Tour de France continued its drug-fueled decline into farce. Not only was 2006 winner Floyd Landis officially stripped of his title following his positive drug test, but in the 2007 race, the leader, Michael Rasmussen, was kicked out of the race by his own teammates for lying about why he'd missed two dope tests prior to the season.
Like so much else that happened in 2007, it might have been funny if it weren't all so sad. As the year ended, baseball was squabbling over the facts and meaning of the Mitchell Report, football was still mourning the death of Sean Taylor, who was named posthumously to the Pro Bowl, and all and sundry were looking forward to a better 2008.
After all, it couldn't be much worse than '07 was.
I wish I had more time.
Letterman
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