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OK, I give. Can someone please tell me what some of these Bengals knuckleheads are thinking? Is a night on the town worth a lucrative NFL career? Is it worth all those flashy cars and big houses and a lifetime of security for their families? Is it worth trading a job that allows them to play a game in front of millions of viewers the world over for one in the lawn and garden department at Sears? The places some of these guys go to to do their socializing must be unbelievable. Maybe they can’t wait to get their careers over so they can go home and tell their friends stories about hot bands they heard, the expensive liquor they drank and the beautiful women they, uh, danced with. Or maybe, just maybe, they figure that when you’re a rich and famous football star, there are no consequences. Maybe they think they can do whatever they want as long as they want and nothing will ever happen to them.
This is where Marvin Lewis comes in. It’s obvious Lewis is a good football coach. The way he has turned around a Bengals team that was the laughingstock of the sports world in a little more than three years is extraordinary, and he deserves all the compliments we can give him. But it’s just as clear that some of his players believe that winning is the only thing that matters to him. It’s clear that they aren’t at all worried that he will come down hard on them for mistakes they make away from the field. And maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe he won’t. Chris Henry is the test case for this. Henry has been arrested four times in three states since December. As a condition for bond in one of the cases, in which Henry is accused of providing alcohol to three underage girls, the judge ordered Henry to abstain from alcohol. So there Henry was early Monday morning, reportedly throwing up out of one of the car windows while Odell Thurman was reportedly telling police officers that "I was driving because they had more than I did." Lewis didn’t address this at his Monday news conference, answering a question about Henry’s involvement by saying only "I think again that it’s probably bad timing." Hopefully, this was just his way of avoiding a question about an issue that he hadn’t had time to resolve. But if it’s his way of keeping an immensely talented guy on the field against New England this week, it might explain why this stuff keeps happening with the Bengals. Thurman is a lost cause at this point, at least for this season. Because he was already serving a four-game suspension as a two-time violator of the NFL’s substance-abuse policy, the league is expected to give him a year’s suspension. But Henry, who wasn’t charged with anything in this instance, is wholly within Lewis’ purview. So far, he has been lucky. He was given two years of probation for a gun charge in Florida — he stepped out of a limousine in downtown Orlando and pointed a 9 mm Luger at a group of people in which he and others in the limo had been arguing — that would have landed most of us in jail. Being one judge from prison probably should have been a wake-up call for him. Lewis’ presumed tongue-lashings for all those arrests probably should have been a wake-up call for him. The fact that he hasn’t been arrested since June 3 (a drunken-driving arrest) seemed to say that he had learned his lesson — we all know how tough it is to go three months without getting arrested, right? — but now it’s hard not to wonder whether he didn’t keep right on living recklessly without getting caught. "I am not pleased," Lewis said Monday. "It’s not right. It’s not what we stand for." Really? Then give Henry tickets in the top row behind one of the end zones for the next two or three games and make him watch the action on the field from there. If he doesn’t get it then, he probably never will. Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for The Dispatch.
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Columbus Dipstach
http://www.dispatch.com/bengals/bengals.php?story=dispatch/2006/09/27/20060927-C1-02.html |
