Put up yer Dukes
Class act Elijah Dukes has at least five kids by at least four different women. And the 22-year-old Tampa Bay Devil Rays outfielder has been taken to court by all four women, who are seeking child support (successfully, it turns out). Even more disturbing, he has terrorized at least two of the women, one of whom has the dubious honor of calling him her husband — at least for now. She’s filing for divorce following his latest outburst.
In light of his wife’s request for a restraining order this past week, Dukes has officially landed himself the title of the next great Sports Crime Superstar, a position previously held by the likes of Maurice Clarett, Lawrence Phillips, and Cecil “the Diesel” Collins. Like all three of those men, Dukes is a supremely talented young athlete who’s been repeatedly promoted in spite of serious character transgressions — many of which involved violence against women. Over the years, he’s been accused of throwing a remote control at his wife, making threatening phone calls to his wife, throwing a soda can at his wife, throwing a glass candy bowl at his wife, and ripping a phone out of the wall while his wife tried to call 911; he has also been arrested on an unspecified domestic battery charge and twice been hit with orders of protection, by two different mothers of his children.
His still-brief career is similarly littered by many sports-crime standard offenses: pointless and violent on-field confrontations with minor-league teammates, routine traffic stops gone horribly wrong, ancillary weed charges, and “You can’t arrest me, I play pro ball” comments of the Gilbert Arenas school. (Dukes is much less congenial than the witty Arenas; he’s allegedly said that, because he plays baseball, “No one can fuck with me.”) About the only things missing from that list are a bar fight, a naked coke bust of the Otis Nixon genus, and a Stephen Jackson-esque gun/strip-club arrest. But again, the kid is still young. And unlike Clarett, Phillips, or Collins, Dukes has already proven he can play in The Show. He currently has nine homers, which puts him in the lead among American League rookies.
Still, he may be in serious legal trouble again soon. According to his wife, Dukes threatened her and her kids by sending a photo of his gun to her cell phone (whether it’s true or not, this idea wreaks of a pioneering form of abuse we’ll probably see more of in the near future) and leaving her a message on her cell phone that said, “You dead, dawg. I ain’t even bullshitting. Your kids, too, dawg.”
The rest of that message allegedly went as follows: “It don’t even matter to me who is in the car with you. Nigger, all I know is, nigger, when I see your motherfucking ass riding, dawg, it’s on. As a matter of fact, I’m coming to your motherfucking house.”
Anyone want to bet that this kid won’t be on the cover of the Devil Rays’ media guide next year? I didn’t think so. Give Dukes 81.5 points, which puts him up to 82. He already got a half a point for the weed bust earlier this year.
