Good Sports & WYSIWYG

In the last 48 hours, three stories from the world of sports have dominated the ESPN.com front page:

1. ROGER CLEMENS VS. BRIAN MCNAMEE HE-SAID/HE-SAID ACT GOES BEFORE CONGRESS
2. NFL COMMISSIONER ANSWERS SENATOR’S QUESTIONS ABOUT SPY-GATE EVIDENCE DESTRUCTION, and
3.INDIANA BASKETBALL COACH BRINGS BAG OF ILLEGAL TRICKS FROM OU TO BIG-10 RECRUITING

In the interest of fairness, all of these sordid stories are alleged and not proven as of this moment. But, taken together, they’re incredibly unsettling and so disappointing.

Not because sport was pure prior to yesterday. Cheating and competing have gone together ever since Abel went toe to toe with Cain in the first-ever Offering Olympics. But, this confluence of competitive controversy continues a definite trend. From Barry Bonds and baseball’s version of Don’t ask-Don’t tell to the prison term of Olympian Marion Jones, arguably half of all sports stories in the media have nothing to do with what happens between the lines.

As I listened to the Congressional testimony of Clemens and McNamee yesterday, I found myself returning to the word mis-honesty. It's a word I made up defined as follows:

MIS-HONESTY: the intentional misleading of someone to make an inference without technically lying.

Anytime we have to get technical with our language, we've crossed the line of mis-honesty. It was rampant in Clemens' and McNamee's ping-pong accounts of what transpired three and five years ago, and it’s epidemic throughout the sports scandals currently swirling around.

Swirling…like what happens when you flush. Hmm.

I believe in the power of sports. Wholeheartedly. Competition is good and healthy, it makes us good and healthy, and it frequently brings out the best in us. But, the big business that is major sports can also flush out the worst in us.

Personally, I’m going to miss Bobby Knight. Not the tirades, the profanity, or the condescension. But, at least we knew with Coach Knight what you see is what you get.