A baseball legend once said that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. That's probably true, and it might be said with equal certainty that Commissioner of Major League Baseball Bud Selig, and the whole lot of his franchise owners are to be commended for the way in which they have handled the whole ball of wax regarding steroids and performance enhancing drugs in the major leagues, or at least as well as anyone could be given the hand they were dealt with, I suppose.

It's Your Business

In any event, and for the moment at least, while there are always present and pressing issues of national and international importance, for those of us who regularly find ourselves out in front of our television sets on summer evenings in July and August, all's right with the world when baseball is on the tube.

However, as we sit out in front of our television sets and wait for the next regular season Major League Baseball regular season games, news emanating from the National Basketball Association points to the very real and pressing possibility that some of the people who run the game of basketball have lost their minds completely. To wit: the Tim Donaghy scandal.

David Stern, the Commissioner of the NBA, has, seemingly singlehandedly, largely through the force of his own will and vision, grown basketball and the NBA into one of the world's most popular sports. David Stern helped spread the word of Michael, Larry and Magic more widely and more diversely than anyone ever had any right to expect. He was to basketball what Paul was to the Gospel. He took a moribund league, a whole league, mind you, not just one team, and translated it into the only single sport native to the United States that has translated with any real success to entire regions of the rest of the world.

Over the past several years at home, however, basketball's popularity was waned, with ratings sagging, no one stepping up and filling Mike's empty Air Jordans, and large-market teams either imploding during the playoffs or just missing them entirely. On top of that has been a growing chorus of complaints from fans, players and, more recently, owners about the quality of the officiating, complaints that certain star players get special treatment, complaints that certain games were so unevenly called as to be beyond simply forehead-smacking and bordering rather more on the statistically inconceivable.

Tim Donaghy, the 13-year NBA referee now at the center of a point-shaving, game-fixing scandal changes all that. Law enforcement sources cited by several media outlets have indicated that not only did Donaghy bet on NBA games, not only did he bet on NBA games in which he refereed, but that he used mob bookies to facilitate those bets. The really interesting turning point will be when and if Donaghy decides to turn state's evidence and start pointing fingers and naming names.

Dogfighting

Meanwhile, at the NFL, the new sheriff in town, tough-on-scofflaws Commissioner Roger Goodell, who managed to send Pacman Jones, Chris Henry and Tank Johnson to player purgatory for as long as an entire season without so much as a blink from the normally recalcitrant players' union, was just done patting himself on the back for a job well done when the Michael Vick, Bad Newz Kennels, dogfighting quagmire got even dirtier, smellier and nastier than previously imagined.

Vick, the Atlanta Falcons star quarterback with jitterbug moves and a million-watt smile, may very well have been involved in not only facilitating dogfights and betting on those fights, but also in the quite horrifying murder of animals that lost fights, had been too badly injured to provide additional revenues or simply had not performed to the levels that were expected. These methods allegedly included, but were not limited to, electrocuting dogs, hanging dogs and slamming them repeatedly to the ground until dead.

Dogfighting, like cockfighting, bearbaiting and any other sport in which two animals attempt to kill each other for the "sport" and wagering of human beings, is a despicable undertaking that has no place in civilized society. None. The fact that more than a few of Vick's peers, Clinton Portis and Emmitt Smith among them, have tried to rationalize what happened only further forces us to ask what kind of law and order Roger Goodell is really bringing to the table.

If Vick is found guilty of committing the crimes he has been charged with he faces up to six years in jail and up to $350,000 in fines. In my humble opinion, his time might be better served in a smaller pen, for a shorter period of time, with only one of his four-legged, trained death-dealers as a cellmate. We could all place bets on the outcome and see how "real" Mr. Vick thought he had kept it afterwards.