I May Be Wrong But I Doubt It (7 page)

Scams and Double
Standards

The punishment for priests who confess to having had sex with minors, and for priests proven to have had sex with minors is really simple:

They ought to be put in jail.

I want to make sure I’m clear on my position on what should happen to grown men who have sex with children. They should be convicted and thrown in jail.

Thrown.

In.

Jail.

What we seem to do best now is hold hearings or convene meetings. We don’t need meetings to figure this out. The Catholic Church shouldn’t spend another minute or another dollar gathering bishops together in Rome or flying cardinals in from all over the world. If you’re having sex with little kids, you need to be taken not only out of the church, but off the streets. We, as a society, can’t spend one minute hiding behind political correctness on this one. If your ass is caught having sex with a minor, you’re a pedophile and you’ve got to serve jail time.

I guess if R. Kelly had become a priest he’d be fine because then he’d be protected from the laws that any other pedophile is subject to.

We don’t need to adopt any more policies. We don’t need to have any more conferences. The Catholic Church needs to stand for children and decency and the U.S. government ought to start prosecuting people and putting their asses in jail. The people who knew about children being sexually abused by priests and protected them ought to be prosecuted as accomplices and be subject to jail time. Law enforcement officials shouldn’t even be leaving punishment up to the church. When did the United States start letting criminal acts against little kids go unprosecuted? The same church that opposes gay marriages and abortion rights has priests who sexually abuse children and does nothing but hold conferences?

I’m sorry, this is a zero-tolerance situation. How can you claim the moral authority any church needs if the people who are supposed to be leading the church are violating little kids? This is sick, and yes it is serious enough to make people pay for their actions. I believe in forgiveness and tolerance, but I also believe in punishment. This doesn’t really have anything to do with Catholicism. Yeah, in this case it involves the Catholic Church. But I don’t care who it is. If violating our children doesn’t call for punishment, what the hell does? If we’re not going to get angry and put a stop to this, then when are we going to?

If I see something that isn’t right, I’ve got to hit it. This is why I can’t wait to do the CNN show this fall. We’re going to call it like we see it and we’re not ducking any issues and we’re not sugarcoating anything, especially the serious stuff.

Probably nothing is as serious as children being abused, but there’s other stuff that needs addressing. First it was Enron and then it was WorldCom involved in all this financial fraud. I was watching television one night this summer when the WorldCom scandal first broke, and there was a woman with tears in her eyes asking, “When are these people going to jail?” And I’m talking to the TV, saying, “Lady, rich folks don’t go to jail; poor folks go to jail.”

If some penny-ante drug dealer gets caught making a $10,000 drug deal, he’s going to jail and his house and car are going to be confiscated, which is what ought to happen. But Martha Stewart ain’t going to jail. She’ll sell all of her stock the day before the company announces huge losses. We can’t possibly think Enron and WorldCom are the only ones guilty of this stuff, can we?

I’m sitting there riding the stationary bike and watching these lying, stealing executives on TV. The top executives refuse to testify before Congress about a $4 billion accounting scandal. The financial markets are in turmoil. The employees are losing their jobs and their pensions and their 401(k)s, and these guys—top guys, mind you—are refusing to talk to Congress. Come on now. Constitutional right to not talk? What about working people’s rights not to be ripped off and defrauded?

How many billions did WorldCom underreport or improperly account for? Four billion, right? How do you simply misplace $4 billion? Four billion doesn’t just disappear. Look, $50,000 is a mistake. But four billion? Four billion is stealing. Those are damn crooks. A guy buys a $15 million house in Florida with money that ain’t his and he’s not in jail? That guy’s got to go to jail except . . . we all know he ain’t going to jail. What’s the worst that’s going to happen to his ass? He’s going to resign. Resign! Why the hell would he need to work if he’s already paid for a $15 million house? And by the way, where was the SEC during all this? Why shouldn’t we think that the people who are supposed to be holding people accountable are in cahoots with the crooks? The only thing that’s going to come out of this, and out of Enron, is that some poor people are going to be poorer ’cause they’ve been robbed of the little money they had in their pensions and retirement funds and the crooks are going to walk away with a slap on the wrist, if that.

Poor people and working people just have no voice at all. They get bombarded by people trying to take what little they have. I want to do a show on what a rip-off credit cards are. Credit Cards enable somebody who barely makes ends meet to buy a $300 item and over time pay $900 for it because of 19 percent interest rates. And the ones who have bad credit pay a higher rate than that. Tell me this isn’t a rip-off. Make the guy who can least afford it pay more. I use two credit cards, both of them American Express, where you have to pay off the balance every month. The biggest obstacle for poor people, besides having no money, is giving in to instant gratification and deferred payment. You’re trying to make ends meet, so you keep paying the minimum to have some money left over, except the interest and the growing balance are kicking your ass.

I don’t want to hear anybody say, “Charles, why do you care since you’re not poor?” I used to be poor. I’ve been rich less than half my life. There are just so many scams out there and this is one of them. I guess scams and double standards are things that I’m very disturbed by. I’ll tell you another double standard, and this is a very sensitive issue to deal with but it needs addressing. People just sit in judgment and decide who gets a pass and who gets hammered.

Darryl Kile, the Cardinals pitcher who died of heart-related issues this summer in his hotel room at thirty-three years old, was a really good guy by all accounts. I mean, anybody who knew him said he was a really good guy. And it’s tragic when a man with a wife and young children passes away in the prime of his life. It’s just sad whether the guy is a professional athlete or a plumber.

What I’m wondering about, though, is why it was so glossed over that marijuana was found in Kile’s room when he died. I mean, it was reported, and pretty much just dismissed. It was reported that the marijuana had nothing to do with his death, and there’s no reason to think it did. But man, if that happened to a guy people didn’t like, it would have been a week’s worth of news. If someone judged to be a “bad guy” had died with marijuana in his room, the hammer would have come down on his ass.

Why is it that Patrick Roy gets arrested for spousal abuse and very little is said about it, but Jason Kidd is involved in the same situation and is just hammered? I mean, I don’t know Patrick Roy and it shouldn’t be important whether I know him. Yes, Patrick Roy’s case involved property and ultimately it was dismissed, but it’s not like nothing happened. So who makes up these rules on who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy? And is that how we want to decide how people are treated publicly? Who decides who gets a pass on this stuff? I just think we’ve got to be really careful about double standards and how they’re applied. Wrong is wrong, and if we’re going to hold people accountable for actions, then let’s be evenhanded about the punishment—even if the person in question is a priest.

The Worst Thing About
Playing Professional
Sports

The only time professional athletes are ever completely healthy all year, and by that I mean feeling their 100 percent best, is the first day of training camp. After that, it’s sprains and muscle pulls and tissue damage and bruises and dislocations the rest of the season. After the first few years of my career, I was taking injections once every couple of weeks and/or pills every few days. And I wasn’t the only one taking anti-inflammatory agents. Although there’s no proof of what exactly led to Alonzo Mourning’s kidney problems, there’s a whole lot of fear in the basketball community—particularly among players—that anti-inflammatories had something to do with it, that taking them in order to play took a toll on a vital organ. And if that turns out to be true, there are going to be a lot of terrified professional athletes out there, and a whole lot of people needing organ donations because we’ve all done it.

People who haven’t played professional sports cannot understand the physical demands pro athletes are under, and the amount of discomfort, aches and pains guys endure just to put on the uniform and play. I would never try to diminish guys who played at the semipro level or the college level. But a college basketball player, for example, plays thirty games a year, while a guy in the NBA plays a hundred if his team goes deep into the playoffs. There’s nothing like the physical demands on a pro athlete. Unless you’ve run into Karl Malone’s body or been slammed by Bill Laimbeer, you just can’t have any idea. When I would drive to the basket against the Detroit Pistons in the 1980s when they had the “Bad Boys” I would say to myself, “Just close your eyes and let the ball go because you’re gonna get hammered. Just go up strong and finish because they’re gonna knock the hell out of you.” And they did. Most people, even people who are fairly tough and athletic, couldn’t withstand one game of that, much less ten to twelve years of it night after night.

My first season in the NBA, 1984–85, I only played 14, 15 minutes a game and I remember thinking, “Oh, this ain’t so bad physically.” But after my second year, when I started playing more than 30 minutes a game, it changed. When you start playing killer minutes you notice. You feel the toll that all those minutes, all that jumping and running and banging, are taking on your body. I remember my sense of it changing to “Man, this is damaging my body.” You hit the wall as a rookie, but that’s fatigue from never having had to play so many minutes and so many games in college. But pain is different. It’s much worse. You dislocate a finger two or three times a season, and after a while your fingers aren’t pointing in the same direction. Six times I’ve been operated on. Both knees have been ’scoped multiple times. I had to have my torn triceps repaired, then my quad at the end of my career. You feel an obligation to play anyway, especially the stars in any sport, because you know how much your teammates are depending on you, you know how much the fans are hoping to see you play; that’s why they pay all that money for those tickets. You want to be out there because you want your team to win and you know how difficult that is if you’re the best player, or one of the two best players, and you’re unable to play. But the overlooked thing is how management rushes athletes back to play. They’re notorious for it.

Anytime an athlete gets injured, you hear or read the next day that he’ll be out two to three weeks or four to six weeks, or some specific period of time. That’s based on what the team physician and trainers tell him. So they tell you that you’ll be out four to six weeks—everybody knows because it’s in the newspaper and on TV—but after you miss one week they start asking you, “How long are you going to be out?” And you’re thinking, “You just told every reporter in the world I’m going to be out four to six weeks, so why are you asking me after one week how long I’m going to be out?”

The last time I got ’scoped—I was playing in Houston—I played in a regular season game exactly two weeks later. I had sprained a knee, got ’scoped on a Sunday, and played on a Sunday fourteen days later. There’s no question I came back too fast. There’s pressure coming from everywhere to play as quickly as you can, even though nobody really knows the extent of some of these injuries and nobody knows or cares about the long-term damage you’re doing to yourself. That’s the culture of the sport, and it’s something we accept. When a guy is hurt and he keeps playing, you’re thinking, “Aw, man, look at that guy still out there playing—I’ve got to keep playing if he’s playing.” So you stay in the lineup anyway. Or you might miss one game and come back sooner than you should. Several times I’ve asked physicians outside team sports how long I would be inactive if I wasn’t a professional athlete. In other words, how long would a normal person take to come back from this injury I’m expected to recover from in four to six weeks? And they’ve told me, well, probably six weeks instead of four, or eight to ten instead of six. You hear stories from your first day in any professional sports league. We all know stories about guys in the NFL playing with fractured legs and broken bones and fingers nearly severed.

I hope people were really listening to the details that were reported about the day Korey Stringer of the Minnesota Vikings died from heat exhaustion in training camp. He came out of practice twice, and he was vomiting. And the guy sitting at home listening to this is figuring, “Well, if he was vomiting and came out twice, he must have known there was something seriously wrong.” People who haven’t been there have no idea how many times guys vomit during an NFL training camp or have to come out for a few plays, then go right back in because of the pressure to keep playing. Now, that’s the most extreme case because it’s a tragic example, that a young man with a family died because he felt he just had to play through some kind of suffering. But the pressure to keep playing is tremendous. People have no idea.

And there really is a difference between being injured and being hurt in the culture of professional sports. And you have to figure it out yourself. You’re hurt all the time, and by that I mean having sore ankles and back spasms that wouldn’t let some people sleep at night. Athletes don’t get nearly enough credit for playing with pain season after season. But being injured is another story altogether. And one of the saddest things in sports is when a guy is injured—not just hurt but injured—and he’s made to feel like some kind of slacker and the public and the media are on his ass even though he shouldn’t even be trying to play.

Early in my career in Philadelphia, the 76ers owner Harold Katz questioned whether Andrew Toney’s feet were really injured. Andrew had missed some time and was really struggling with his feet, and everybody was expressing an opinion as to why he was missing games. And Philadelphia is not the kind of place where you can just shrug off that kind of criticism and ridicule. I need to point out that this was happening in the mid-1980s, before MRI tests were around, or at least before they were commonly used. Team physicians had to read X-rays, and stress fractures apparently didn’t show up on X-rays. But because he was made to feel like he had to play, Andrew tried to play. And he shouldn’t have been playing at all, not at all, not even a little bit. A couple of years later, as new medical technology was put to use, the doctors found Andrew had all kinds of stress fractures in his feet. The guy was injured. I felt guilty for thinking at times that he wasn’t injured as seriously as he really was. I think about it now because Andrew Toney was probably the best player in his prime that I played with. Doc and Moses had already had their best years by then, but Andrew was just coming into his prime when I got to Philly in the fall of 1984.

My very first practice, there’s Toney shooting jumpers, and he’s in the process of making something like fifty straight shots. I called my friends after practice and said, “This guy, Andrew Toney, may be the best shooter I’ve ever seen.” It was unbelievable the way he shot. Man, we could have done some damage together. He was just a tough old southern dude. (He’s also the one who got me started playing golf.) And he wasn’t the kind of guy who would ever complain, so it was hard to know exactly when he was in pain or how much pain he was in.

But one night, I’m sitting on the bench next to him. And you know how close guys are sitting next to each other on a bench. I was moving around and accidentally kicked his feet and tears literally came to his eyes. I saw that and I thought, “My God, there must be something seriously wrong with this man’s feet.”

I never had anything quite like that. But I know the cumulative effect is going to be serious. I hurt my back the first time when I was playing in Philly. And I would have back problems the rest of my career. I know my body’s going to be shot when I get older. A lot of my friends are pro athletes and their bodies are going to be shot, too. I go to these charity events and all the legends are limping around so badly. Right now, when I play golf with John Elway and Dan Marino, we’ve got the same ex-athlete walk and we’re just forty years old. The way we’re moving now, I look at the legends and I know that’s going to be me in a few years. That’s the biggest negative about playing professional sports. People ask me about being approached in public and signing autographs and being asked to do so many things. And while that might inconvenience you and consume your time, it doesn’t take a toll on your health. But you make your peace with it by simply saying, “This is the price you have to pay to play.” Your last two, three or four years, it’s hard just getting out of bed in the morning. Past thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four years old, it’s a struggle and I don’t care who you are. Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, John Stockton . . . I don’t like to see them struggling. People say it’s amazing that John and Karl can still play like that at forty, and that’s true. But these guys coming into the league now couldn’t hold their jockstraps when they were thirty. Most of my career, I played above the basket whenever I needed to, or wanted to. But late in my career, I would see guys flying to the basket and think, “Damn, these guys are running fast and jumping high.”

That’s why the notion of coming back to play sounds great, but it doesn’t feel great. You love the game so much you want to play, but your body isn’t cooperating with your spirit. I told Michael Jordan, when we were talking about my coming back, that he might have been getting in shape but I was just getting tired. And as amazing an athlete as Michael is, his knees just wouldn’t cooperate with him when he came back to play with the Wizards. The shocking thing is that he hadn’t needed more ’scopes before on his knee, considering the jumping and running he did for thirteen years. Every basketball, football, hockey and baseball player in the world could probably have at least one knee cleaned out right now with a ’scope. But that doesn’t cure the tendinitis or the arthritis or restore the cartilage.

And I don’t know how football players can ever have their health. The collisions those guys have are violent and damaging enough. And then on top of that, they’ve got to play on AstroTurf, which is the worst invention in the history of professional football. I see ex-NFL players now, guys in their fifties and sixties, and I just say to myself, “Damn.”