Sports columnists are a jealous bunch - myself included.
Not lithe enough to tiptoe a sideline, not explosive enough to dunk a basketball, not buff enough to bench press Muggsy Bogues, we instead spend our precious days and nights stabbing our sardonic pens right through the backs of the athletes we always revered but never were good enough to become.
Rarely does a sports journalist turn defense attorney, but that's exactly what I'm prepared to do. I'm willing to do the unthinkable, to sign my journalistic death certificate, to plunge wildly into the columnist's world of no return. I'm here to defend athletes.
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Why, you might ask, would I risk eternal professional blacklisting to champion a jock's cause? The answer is simple. While athletes often lead a life of absurd luxury - receiving phone calls from the president for winning a simple game, endorsing denture cream at age 25 for a cool couple Gs - when it comes to legal matters, they often get the shaft.
Innocent until proven guilty used to mean just that; now when it comes to the idols of childhood, it means nothing at all.
Don't believe me? Ask Ray Lewis. He'll use his one phone call from jail to tell you.
The double murder charge against the Baltimore Ravens' All-Pro linebacker has ascended to near folkloric status in the eyes of the American public, waiting with bated breath to find out whether the NFL's leading tackler stabbed a pair of 20-something men outside an Atlanta nightclub the night after the Super Bowl.
Police also wanted to know.
Maryland's finest have torn through Lewis' house like tornado season in Texas to unearth any clues. They have interviewed Lewis and the other five passengers present in the infamous limousine that fled the Cobalt Club after the slayings. Each ardently asserts Lewis' innocence. In total, they have interrogated over 30 people and found little concrete evidence.
Yet only one man, sporting a fluorescent orange jumpsuit and a pair of gleaming silver handcuffs, sits shackled in the Atlanta Detention Center. His name is Ray Lewis.
"Everyone ... says Ray wasn't the one," insists Don Samuel, a member of theLewis defense team.
So then why is Lewis the only one behind bars? Why haven't the other five passengers in Lewis' limo that night been the subject of similar investigations?
One police explanation centers around an affidavit used to obtain an arrest warrant that cites an unidentified witness declaring Lewis the perpetrator.
An unidentified witness? Puh-leeze. So Lewis is supposed to sit patiently in his one-room steel apartment while the legal system runs its course? Yeah right. A man's life and future are at stake here, and we're willing to lock him up without bothering to tell him or anyone else for that matter who squealed, landing the linebacker in the fun house.
Then there's the ever-popular probable cause excuse. Since when does a man get cuffed when all key witnesses publicly assert his innocence? Since when do those same witnesses, equally implicated in the events of that dark Atlanta night, go unscathed? Since when does one man get a one-way ticket to jail when accounts as to what happened vary wildly?
Since Ray Lewis became a tackling machine, an all-world gridiron warrior, that's when.
Overnight, Lewis was transformed into an alienated athlete served up by the legal system as a societal guinea pig. Why?
Maybe police feel that by stripping his fame and locking him away in a maximum-security cell, they can deter others from committing such heinous crimes.
Maybe they're out to prove some kind of point, possibly that athletes are nothing more than pedestrian humanoids just like us. Slam a steel door in Lewis' face and suddenly a sublime star once atop a communal pedestal sure looks a whole lot more human.
Maybe they're just jealous.
Whatever the case, until proven guilty in an official court of law, Ray Lewis is still innocent. Right?
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