Cruel, funny day in sports

Two great articles for your amusement. First, from Deadspin:

The 100th season of the Montreal hockey club has had ups and downs, but it's not clear yet where "finding out two of your players are mobbed up" falls on the spectrum of season highlights.

Now that hockey's gone all Sonny Liston on us, maybe I'll watch a game. I mean, the fighting parts are ok, but fighting and mafia ties? Add some cheerleaders (and maybe actually televise a game) and I'm in.

 

Second, Ken Rosenthal over at Fox Sports has a story on athletes being caught up in financial scandals. Notably, Johnny Damon has had his assets seized as part of the investigation into financier Robert Allen Stanford.

For those of you not in the know,

this goofy looking guy allegedly hoodwinked $8 billion from investors. Apparently sports figures have been caught up in this, as clients of both the Scott Boras, Inc. and IMG agencies have been taken. This is another example of rich people not watching their money; Mets' owner Fred Wilpon was taken in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.

The humor here is that Johnny Damon, making $13 million per year, can't pay his bills. And I find this funny because Johnny Damon went from wunderkind to impossible asshat in the span of about a decade. It's a story of how money corrupts, so it's only fitting that he now can't access that money.

The simplified story of Johnny Damon goes like this: boy wonder from Wichita gets taken by his boyhood favorite team, the Royals, in the first round of the draft. He marries his high school sweetheart. He tears up the minor leagues and says all the right things. He gets to Kansas City, becomes an all-star, declares he wants to be a Royal for his career. Then he sees the money around him and fires his agent in order to replace him with Scott Boras.

Boras then makes it known that Damon will not resign with the team before testing the free agent market, in spite of a reported four-year, $30 million contract offer (give or take) from Kansas City. So the Royals trade him to Oakland (for far too little, but that's another story) where Damon plays out his final year before free agency by playing the worst he's ever played. So now he's burned his bridge in Kansas City and takes a four-year, $30 million contract from the Red Sox.

Somewhere along this timeline, he has divorced his high school sweetheart and replaced her with a model.

Damon was, of course, instrumental in the Red Sox run to finally win a World Series. He then spurned another fan base when he left for the Yankees' money, but not before he could publish a book that he "wrote" where he could profit still more. He hasn't been healthy since. He is, however, in a contract year, so expect big things in 2009 from the 35-year-old. And pray your favorite team doesn't sign him next year.

Also, pray he doesn't "write" another book to get him out of this cash bind he's in.