The details on this one are so strange and so contradictory depending on the source that it's tough to tell what really happened. Here's the story as we know it: Starks was driving a Freightliner semi-tractor (hey, he's a big guy) through heavy traffic with nine (or 13, say police) passengers, including a girl on his lap (or not, says Starks), when a traffic cop knocked on his door and asked him to pull over. The police claim Starks intentionally accelerated and pinned the officer against another car. Starks says that it's profiling: he never touched the cop and was only cited because he was in a big vehicle with a lot of black people in it.
The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. So no points here until there are more facts.
Matt Taibbi can be reached at m_taibbi@yahoo.com.
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College football is stupid. Everybody knows it.
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Normally, this is the time of year when a lot of pro football players get arrested — the weeks after the draft and before training camp, when new rookies get their first checks and end up blowing them at fancy nightclubs on eight-balls and escorts before driving home with bellies full of Courvoisier.
- Wideouts gone wild
Late February is a heavy-arrest period in American sports, for the simple reason that the college-football season is over, spring practices have not yet begun, and they have not yet deployed armed alcohol-sniffing police robots on college campuses around the nation.
- Taser bait
The clock keeps ticking down toward the inevitable first Tasered-athlete fatality. The fact that it hasn't happened yet is just a statistical anomaly, because two things continue to occur with regularity: major-college and pro jocks keep getting Tasered in late-night incidents, while an unluckier group of ordinary non-jocks keep dying from police Taserings.
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Like Bob Beamon's long-jump record or Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak, it was once thought that no organized sports team would ever approach the string of arrests racked up by the infamous Portland Jail Blazers club of the early 2000s.
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The burgeoning crime wave wracking the University of Oregon Ducks football team — reporters out there are calling it the "bird flu" — has now spread in an unexpectedly hilarious direction.
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As we approach NFL draft season, it’s fun to look back at those great draft prospects of yore, the workout warriors and combine heroes who titillated coordinators, coaches, and fans leading up to the big selection day in New York.
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The Florida International University football program was rocked recently when running back Kendall Berry was stabbed to death in front of eight witnesses — allegedly by an ex–FIU teammate.
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Sooner or later, Facebook had to figure into the sports-crime scene. There are at least two cases now of pro football players getting arrested for assault in fights resulting from their wives looking at their Facebook friends lists.
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Last month, we announced the triumphant return of the Florida State football program to the summit of the sports-crime world.
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Remember Timmy Chang? You do if you're a college-football junkie — he was the quarterback for June Jones's University of Hawaii team, and ended his career as the NCAA's all-time leading passer.
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Topics:
Sports
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, Sports, Football, Richard Goodman, Football, Police, National Collegiate Athletic Association, Peter Warrick, College Athletics, College Football, Sebastian Janikowski, Less
