Lawyer can’t pass bar
Quick memo to Pats fans who might have been worried about their team’s paper-thin secondary after seeing this past week’s headline, O’NEAL, SON, ARRESTED IN DRUG SWEEP AT HOME: that wasn’t Deltha O’Neal, but Ryan O’Neal. Just because the wrinkly old actor pulled a Ty Law — “The drugs found were not his. He would never use them,” his attorney told reporters — doesn’t mean it was actually a football player getting busted. So, relax.That said, there was a recent arrest of a onetime member of the Patriots defensive backfield — old friend Lawyer Milloy, who went from celebrating on a Super Bowl team to sucking in Buffalo to, now, patrolling the artificial-turf-covered purgatory that is the Atlanta Falcons secondary. Milloy was busted for a DUI in the Atlanta suburbs around 4:30 am on September 15.
This probably won’t be the last straw, but it might be — is there a phrase for this? — one of the last straws. “I’m extremely disappointed and I can’t stress enough — it’s unacceptable,” Falcons coach Mike Smith said before wavering on whether there would be concrete punishment.
Milloy has been playing for 13 years, hasn’t been able to cover a tight end since at least 2006, and is in the last year of his contract. Something tells me he’ll be riding the Otis Nixon/Andre Rison Oft-Troubled Retired Athlete Express before long. Give him the minimum points for the DUI. (That’d be 25.)
Minor league mischief
Hey, I didn’t know there was an “ABA” basketball league any more. Like most Americans, I thought the ABA of Dr. J, Artis Gilmore, and the tri-colored ball went out with Gerald Ford, Karen Ann Quinlan, and the Gang of Four. But apparently a new ABA, called “ABA 2000,” was formed in 1999. It also uses a red, white, and blue ball, and has more than 50 teams. Former NBA player John Salley was one of the founding commissioners; Sports Illustrated writer Alexander Wolff was the owner of one of the more successful franchises, the Vermont Frost Heaves.
Originally the league was semi-serious, as it cost $50,000 to start a franchise and most of the scheduled games actually occurred. Then disputes between the CEO and the COO, as well as several absurd controversies (teams flying to China to play the league’s Beijing squad were forced to spend a road game in a hotel that doubled as a brothel), basically knocked out the league’s credibility. By this year, multiple franchises were folding almost every week — any swinging sack with 10 grand could buy a team.
And now we have another fun headline for the league, because Jason Smith, owner of the (already defunct) Kentucky Mavericks, has been indicted on charges of passing bad checks in the Bowling Green area. ABA CEO Joe Newman reported that “I started getting phone calls from vendors saying, ‘Do you know Jason Smith? He gave me a bad check.’ ” Newman said he now has a folder full of Smith’s bad checks and forged documents.
The team has since been handed over to a new owner, has been renamed the Kentucky Bisons, and will play not in Bowling Green but in Owensboro. We’ll see where they are two weeks from now. In the meantime, 10 points for this loser.
Mile-high drama
Small footnote to the intriguing start by the Denver Broncos this season: emerging star wideout Brandon Marshall, a bruising monster of a pass-catcher who might yet turn into the next TO, is also laying the foundation for a role as the next NFL star to have his life unravel in the courts. Authorities in Fulton County, Georgia, dusted off a six-month-old complaint earlier this month and finally filed battery charges against Marshall, stemming from an incident in which he allegedly threw his girlfriend on a bed, slapped her, and damaged her apartment.
Marshall was suspended for the first game of the season after racking up his third arrest in less than a year; he was also busted for, among other things, using a car to block a taxi a different girlfriend was using to leave his place after a fight.
Question: how does a guy who has multiple domestic-violence busts get the same punishment — one game — as Kevin Faulk, who was busted for smoking weed at a Lil Wayne concert? Absurd.
When he’s not googling “Lawyer needs a lawyer” and “Marshall, Marshall, Marshall,” Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at m_taibbi@yahoo.com.
