America at Large: Bob Ryan's fate was still twisting in the wind on Tuesday night when a Chicago radio station tracked me down in a press box in Kansas City, writes George Kimball.
I'm not in the habit of defending columnists from the Boston Globe, but I did attempt to explain to radio host Dan Jiggetts that in judging Ryan's intemperate remarks there remained a delicate balance between what he blurted out on a Boston television station last Sunday night and what he actually meant to say.
Jiggetts is a former Harvard lineman who went on to an exemplary career with the Chicago Bears, and I've known him nearly as long - at least 30 years - as I've known Bob Ryan. Dan cut to the bone with his next question: "But shouldn't we in this business be held to the same standard by which we judge others in the sporting world?" He was right on that point. Had it been, say, an NBA coach or player who'd said on air he'd like to "smack" Joumana Kidd, we'd have been calling for his head. Which is probably what the bosses at the New York Times, which owns the Globe, were thinking when, an hour after that radio-show conversation, they slapped Ryan with a one-month suspension without pay and barred him from appearing on radio and television for the duration of his penal servitude.
It wasn't a very clever thing to say in the first place, and the fact Mrs Kidd happened to be a poster girl for battered wives made it particularly inflammatory.
It was also Ryan's misfortune his ill-advised remarks were uttered in a week where a pair of scandals involving high-profile college coaches were rocking the land. A few days earlier Mike Price, the newly-hired football coach at the University of Alabama, was fired amid revelations of drunken sexual escapades while he was in Florida for a golf tournament last month, and on the same day Ryan was offered up as a sacrificial lamb by the Globe, Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy was in the process of being canned after a Des Moines newspaper chronicled several instances of his attempting to foist his attention on young college co-eds at drunken all-night parties.
Price cost himself the $10 million, seven-year deal he had negotiated at Alabama. Eustachy had his contract bought out for a reported $960,000.
Sportswriters' salaries being what they are, Ryan's indiscretions won't cost him anything approaching those sums, but by smacking him for saying he'd like to smack Joumana Kidd, his newspaper has effectively drawn a bullseye on his chest.
What I told Dan Jiggetts two nights ago was this: "If Bob had said he'd like to spit on Mrs Kidd, or even if he'd said he'd like to see her burned at the stake, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. It was a stupid thing to say, but the only reason the word set off all the alarm bells it did was that her husband already did smack her."
The bare bones of the Kidd Family domestic squabble have been well chronicled. Two years ago in a tearful call to a police 911 line, Joumana reported her husband was beating her, and not for the first time. The Phoenix police leaked the 911 tape, which was subsequently aired on every radio station in the land. Jason was briefly arrested and had to undergo counselling. The couple subsequently reconciled, and the Suns wisely traded him to New Jersey, where the NBA's best point guard now plies his trade.
The Kidds embarked at a bare-faced attempt to rehabilitate Jason's public image. Not only were they constantly together in public, but they included their four-year old son, TJ, in most of these excursions. The crowd at Boston's FleetCentre taunted Kidd as a "wife beater" throughout the series, which New Jersey won. Mrs Kidd complained she felt "threatened" by the atmosphere, but declined an offer to be relocated to a private box. I covered every game in that series and never heard anyone threaten Kidd's wife, and while it might have been painful to hear her husband described as a wife-beater, the fact of the matter is that he is a wife-beater.
I accused the Kidds at the time of using the little boy as "a prop," a charge which Ryan repeated on the TV show last Sunday night.
This is unarguably true: they have used TJ as a prop, just as Jason has used Joumana as a prop, and that the strategy has paid dividends is evinced by the fact Jason Kidd was the beneficiary of numerous off-season commercial endorsements, unusual for a man so recently removed from a spousal abuse rap.
In other words, everything Ryan said absent the "smack" remark was perfectly defensible, which is undoubtedly what was running through his mind when Bob Lobel, the host of the TV program, offered him a "mulligan" and urged him to back off the remark, and Ryan declined.
Price not only spent hundreds of dollars in a Pensacola strip club where he propositioned at least one of the dancers, but eventually repaired to his hotel room in the company of two ladies. One of these told Sports Illustrated they both had sex with the football coach. Alabama president Robert Witt fired price for failing to live "his personal and professional life in a manner consistent with university policies". The Des Moines Register published photos depicting an inebriated Larry Eustachy, who is nearly 50, kissing and being kissed by young college women, with suggestions more lurid behaviour might have followed. He was relieved of his duties for behaviour "inconsistent with his responsibility to conduct himself in a manner that reflects positively on the school".
"Bob Ryan's comments were a clear and egregious violation of the standards of the Boston Globe," read the newspaper's tersely-worded announcement of his suspension.
Plainly, we've accepted the premise stupidity is a crime. Are we applying the "same standard" to ourselves? Apparently we are.
