Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Sports Scandals of Yore (And a Revolutionary War Book)

 

What’s this? A Scandal? If it’s not politics, it must be sports.

 

So much money is involved that the temptations are staggering.

 

The latest involves the highest-paid player in baseball, Shobei Ohtani, who is both one of the greatest pitchers and one of the greatest hitters in the sport.

 

Ohtani’s  interpreter and close friend ran up such huge gambling debts that he used $4.5 million of the star’s money to help pay them off. Whether Omani gave him the money or the interpreter stole it is in dispute.

 

Now that’s not a lot of money for a player with a $700 million contract over 10 years with the Los Angeles Dodgers. But sports betting is illegal in California, and it makes the player vulnerable to shady characters.

 

The incident brings back memories of so many scandals of the past:

 

—Lance Armstrong secretly took performance-enhancing drugs to win seven Tour de France championships. I felt cheated.

 

—All-time great Pete Rose bet on baseball, including wagers on his own team. Rose never admitted it—until he wrote his own book. That inflamed Hall of Fame voters, who still won’t let him in.

 

—In the “Black Sox” scandal, Chicago White Sox players were paid to blow the 1919 World Series. “Say it ain’t so, Joe” is a famous quote. Well, he couldn’t.

 

—Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Mark McGwire used steroids in setting records for home runs. I was sickened by McGwire’s congressional testimony: “I’m not here to talk about the past.” Really? Why else are you there?

 

—The New England Patriots stole the other teams’ signals. Sorry! I have never seen anything wrong with that. If your signs are being stolen, you need to come up with a better way of hiding them.

 

—The NFL suspended Tom Brady for getting the Patriots to partially deflate footballs used on offense to make them easier to grip. I’m not shocked, shocked, shocked.

 

—The New Orleans Saints paid players a bounty for injuring opponents. That sounds criminal.

 

—Gaylord Perry and others moistened the baseball with saliva or jell to make it do weird things. Though he admitted it, Perry made it to the Hall of Fame anyway.

 

With sports betting now legal online and, in most states, look for more scandals to come.

 

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Subhead: New Info About an Old War

 

I really enjoyed local author William Guerrant’s book: “Let a Pillar Arise: A Novel of the Revolutionary War,” published in 2022. We talked about his book recently at the Halifax book club.

 

The book covers the war in North Carolina and the Crossing of the Dan, in which Patriots were able to keep the British from marching into Virginia. Besides battles, it tells fictional stories of local people who took both sides in the war. One was a British spy in Halifax County who pretended to be a Patriot. One true story in the book I had never heard before: A militia formed by pro-British men in this country thought they were reporting for duty to a British commander. But it was really a Patriot colonel, Henry “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, who welcomed them. Completely fooled, they were about to be captured, but a melee broke out and many of them were killed.

 

Guerrant lives in Keeling, (Pittsylvania County), where he grew up on the family farm. After a life of practicing law, he returned to the farm in 2010. I asked him what prompted him to write this book: “I’ve been interested in the Revolutionary War events that occurred near here (the Race to the Dan and the Battle of Guilford Courthouse) for a long time. I started out researching a possible history of the Cowpens.”

The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was a turning point in the war. Though neither side won the battle, the British were so badly crippled that it wasn’t long until they surrendered at Yorktown. I have rarely read a war book that makes the battle plan and logistics of the fighting so clear.

 

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