Oh shoot! Harvest of shame

Sporting News, The, August 18, 1997 by Dave Kindred

Before we're done here, we'll get to Barry Switzer, Allen Iverson and every fool's destructive obsession with guns. But first a story about Calvin Hill, now famous as Grant Hill's father, once famous as an NFL running back with the Cowboys and Redskins.

In the last days of his football career, Hill wore a full and gray beard that gave him the look of an Old Testament prophet. But he spoke not with righteous anger; he spoke softly and gently. Still exceptional at work, he yet seemed at odds with a game demanding violence. From Calvin Hill? From a Yale graduate in theology?

But God has a sense of humor, as He proved in the late 1970s by arranging for Hill to join the Redskins. For then the Redskins were coached by the eccentric genius, George Allen, who, like his soulmate, Richard Nixon, believed that paranoia was an essential state of mind. If enemies weren't apparent to George Allen, that didn't mean they weren't out there plotting their evil deeds.

Chief among the dark villains were the Cowboys. Every season the Cowboys found a new way to bedevil the Redskins. So exquisite were the tortures that Allen, in his conspiratorial rasp of a voice, once began a team meeting in Dallas Week by balling up his fists, shaking them and telling players, "Oooh, I just wish it was me and Tom Landry at the 50-yard line." Then he asked each Redskin to speak.

Witnesses remember room in which every atom of oxygen carried a profanity -- until George Allen said, "Calvin, what do you think of Dallas?" There came from Calvin Hill, the theologian, a long sermon of philosophy framed in polysyllabic words. Most Redskins scratched their haircuts. Hill finished by saying, "And I believe the Dallas organization is an example of man's inhumanity to man."

Patience, please. We're getting to Switzer, Iverson and other fools -- which, speaking of other fools brings to mind a story about Andre Rison, the gifted/ troubled NFL wide receiver who has been more trouble than gift in Atlanta, Cleveland, Jacksonville and Green Bay. You may remember Rison's departure from Atlanta came soon after his girlfriend burned down his multimillion-dollar mansion. She's a rap artist named Lisa "left Eye" Lopes.

The nickname comes from the safe-sex message she imparts by wearing glasses with a condom stretched over the left-eye lens. When Left Eye decided that Rison had seen too much of another woman's left and right eyes, she got hot. Then she got the house hot. The housewarming followed a parking-lot incident in which rison pulled a handgun from his car and shot a Kroger store. He shot the Kroger store because two gentlemen had tried to break up an argument Rison was having with Left Eye.

Rison didn't mean to shoot the Kroger store; it just got in the way when he started firing to scare away the gentlemen trying to help Left Eye. As to why he reached for his gun, Rison told police, "My manhood was threatened."

What, was Lorena Bobbitt shopping at Kroger that night? Or did Rison mean those words in a sociological sense; did the gentlemen coming to Left Eye's rescue diminish his idea of who he is? With those words, Rison revealed an insecurity so profound as to be pathological. Even with fame, money, youth and strength, he yet believed he needed a handgun to be a man.

Is that what this is all about? Is that why we read so many stories about professional athletes carrying guns? The athletes all have explanations. Most say they pack heat for protection against people who would hassle them. But I ask you this: Have you read anywhere of an athlete using his gun to stop a robbery?

No, the athlete's gun always comes to attention when it's used to shoot up a Kroger store. Or when it's on the floor mat by the front seat of Allen Iverson's car in which marijuana cigarettes are flying 93 miles per hour in a 65 mph zone. Or when Barry Switzer puts a loaded .38-caliber pistol into a bag to hide it from children and carries it loaded to an airport where he is arrested and explains he'd forgotten it was there.

Forgotten? So casual is the man with a killing tool that he forgets it's there? Texas authorities have downgraded the charge against Switzer to the misdemeanor charge of carrying a handgun without a permit. Seems to me any unlicensed fool who carries a loaded .38 and doesn't know it should be charged with aggravated stupidity.

The crime ought to carry a mandatory sentence. The sentence should be 30 days of solitary confinement in a small, windowless room into which Left Eye Lopes' greatest hits are played on an endless loop, the volume turned up. In the meantime, the Cowboys' owner, Jerry Jones, has fined Switzer $75,000 (one game's pay). The owner says the imposed the largest fine on a coach in NFL history to reinforce his order, in the wake of player arrests and embarrassments, that the Cowboys straighten up.

Switzer himself made certain nightclubs off limits. He also installed video cameras in dorm rooms to detect curfew violations. All of which is laughably hypocritical. The Jerry Jones who wants rules enforced is the Jerry Jones who has broken any NFL rule he didn't like. He has created for the Cowboys an atmosphere of disdain for anyone outside themselves.