Marinovich has been busted almost as many times as Lawrence Phillips — and in some of the same parts of the world, ringing up a 1997 charge for growing weed, as well as several heroin-possession busts, usually in the LA area. He’s also been arrested for sexual assault and has been caught in a public restroom in possession of child pornography. In that latter incident, incidentally, he was only caught after fleeing the scene on a child’s bicycle. Humorously, I guess, he has variously listed his occupation in police reports as “unemployed artist” and “anarchist.” Marinovich was also arrested for rape while still at USC, and was sufficiently chastened by that experience to brag upon graduation about being the Trojan who’d used the most Trojans. Not even fellow alum O.J. Simpson ever sank that low.
Now that he’s in treatment, it’s time to set the over/under on the number of months before his next arrest. I’m putting it at two and a half and taking action. Send your bets to my e-mail address.
Flat-out gross
Take your pick, if you’re deciding which was the most loathsome sports arrest of the past week. You can’t lose if you chose “Stormin’ ” Norman Bounds, a 58-year-old former Buffalo Braves draftee and Continental Basketball Association player who showed up at his arraignment with an aluminum walker. He was arrested for abducting his former girlfriend and threatening her so that she wouldn’t go to the police. Bounds, who played for the Rochester Zeniths of the CBA in the ’70s, once did two-to-six after raping an ex-girlfriend and holding their two-year-old son at gunpoint for three hours before surrendering to police. Guess they don’t hand out very long sentences for that sort of thing in upstate New York.
The other vile charge this week belongs to former University of Georgia baseball pitcher Joseph Carroll, 22, who recently thought he was making a date with a 15-year-old girl on the Internet. When he drove 110 miles to Peachtree City, Georgia, to meet his intended date, he swept the parking lot several times in search of cops before finally parking. That’s when the Georgia Bureau of Investigation stepped in and gave Carroll the bad news that he wasn’t going to get laid. Police found Levitra and Viagra in the car, plus some Google Maps directions to the agreed-upon site.
Carroll turned down a $500,000 bonus from the Tampa Bay D-Rays in 2003, choosing to go to Georgia instead. He can bend over and kiss his baseball career goodbye, as prosecutors in Peachtree City bragged after his arrest that no child-sex predator has ever been sentenced to less than 10 years in prison there.
When he’s not googling “Iowa City idiots” and “Stormin’ moron,” Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone. He can be reached atM_Taibbi@yahoo.com.
