The Toronto Raptors play-by-play man, the guy who barely blinked when former Raptor Charles Oakley speculated that 60% of the NBA's players smoke marijuana, uses his afternoon call-in show to proclaim that the city doesn't need an athlete like Ricky Williams.
The Vancouver Province reports that the head coach of the B.C. Lions, working in a city where smoking a joint is as socially acceptable as swigging a beer, thinks bringing Williams to the CFL would bring too much "negative" attention to the league.
Hamilton Ticats legend Angelo Mosca, a former bar brawler considered in his heyday to be the most vicious player in Canadian football, announces that he "will not be going to a football game" with Williams in it, because guys like him are turning the CFL into a "dumping ground." It's as though the sports world exists in some alternate universe, disconnected from all sense of perspective. Or maybe, there are just a lot of hypocrites out there.
Williams, for those who wisely manage to avoid sports talk radio, is the Miami Dolphins running back - currently serving out a suspension for drug use - who is being actively pursued by the Toronto Argonauts. To listen to the talking heads, he's the latest gridiron degenerate to come skulking up to Canada - one and the same with the wife-beaters, cocaine addicts and convicted criminals who make up football's rogues' gallery.
Even the team that's seeking to bring him north feels compelled to do some finger-wagging. Williams, the Argos have suggested, deserves a chance to rehabilitate himself. To play for them he will need to prove he's a changed man and go talk to kids about the error of his ways. He might even be subjected to regular drug tests.
That, of course, is what happens in the NFL - just as it does in many American workplaces. We like to think we're more sophisticated, up here north of the border. But based on the uproar over Williams, some of us have a ways to go.
Unlike several other players currently on the Argos, Williams has never been convicted of a crime, never had a problem with hard drugs, never come to blows with his teammates. His big transgression, aside from having a personality disorder that makes him unusually shy, is that - like many of his fellow athletes, and the people who pay to watch them - he likes to smoke pot.
Granted, Ricky likes it more than most - enough to skip out on the 2004 NFL season rather than give up his recreational drugs. But it's hard to imagine anyone can deliver all the faux shock at his habits with a straight face.
Last weekend, thousands of Torontonians marked the city's annual Marijuana March by setting up camp outside the provincial legislature at Queen's Park. From what I could see driving by, it was less a march than a bunch of potheads hanging around a lawn getting high. And as they did so, police officers stood beside them - worried only about crowd control, and happily turning a blind eye to the endless supply of pot.
It captured perfectly the modern attitude toward soft drugs. The federal government may have declined to legalize or decriminalize marijuana, but social acceptance of the drug is so widespread that even cops don't much care about possession for personal use.
The radio hosts, the pundits, the fellow players and coaches - they all know this. If they haven't smoked pot themselves, it's a fair bet their friends, family members or coworkers have. Tell Chuck Swirsky, the aforementioned Raptors radio voice, that one of his colleagues at Toronto's sports radio station smokes, and it's hard to imagine he'd go running from the building screaming in horror. But give him a chance to rail on Ricky Williams, and it'll fill a half-hour of airtime.
To arbitrarily attack one person for something millions of Canadians do isn't just disingenuous - it's cowardly. If these people really think marijuana is dangerous - a shaky argument, but one that can still be put forward - then they should be consistently fighting prevailing attitudes toward it. Swirsky should be campaigning daily against the plethora of NBA players who smoke pot, exposing them as the poor role models he supposedly thinks Williams is. Other coaches should impose mandatory drug tests on their players, even if it means losing a bunch of them. The Toronto Star, which used its editorial column to slam the Argos for wooing Williams, should do likewise with its own employees.
They won't, of course, because all the outrage is just a nasty little charade. If they're really worried about the lessons being taught to kids, they'd do best to stop teaching them to be judgmental hypocrites.
