WHY ME? WHY ANYONE?: Tonya Harding would have been proud of Mitch Cozad, the University of Wyoming back-up punter who allegedly stabbed the starting punter in the leg.

There were a few big trends in sports crime last year, the leaders being laptop theft and the Dwight Gooden Jr. genre of sports bust, i.e. the arrest of children of famous sports offenders. Both categories were constants in sports sections throughout the year, with laptop theft in particular seeming to graduate into a permanent cliché of the collegiate-athletics experience.

But neither of those trends came close to matching the epidemic-level outbreak of this year’s trendy sports bust — the Probert. This year has seen a veritable explosion of incidents involving major college or pro athletes being zapped by Tasers in the middle of troublesome arrests. It’s hard to say whether the constant here is pumped-up jocks choosing to resist or racist cops choosing to overreact; it’s probably a mixture of both. But after a whole summer of Taser incidents — from Pistons center Dale Davis and disgraced OSU tailback Mau Clarett to Cincinnati Bengals DT Matthias Askew — we once again have a number of Taser arrests to sift through.

In the wee ours of last Sunday morning, cornerback Travonti Johnson of the University of Central Florida (the onetime home of our own Assante Samuel) was busted at a Denny’s in Orlando in a suspicious-sounding incident. Apparently Johnson entered the Denny’s with two friends and was subsequently approached by an Orlando sheriff’s deputy, who told the young men that the Denny’s manager wanted them to leave. Johnson’s friends complied, but Johnson allegedly freaked out and started shouting obscenities and other remarks, among them “statements about Orlando being racist.” Eventually the deputy escorted the three men outside; when Johnson refused to stop yelling at the officer, he was allegedly told he was about to be arrested, at which point he took off running. Johnson reportedly made it about 20 feet before being dropped like a sack of cats with a Taser shot. Again, this arrest featured the three Probert constants: Florida, black athlete, Taser shot.

Meanwhile, the arrest of two University of Texas defensive backs previously mentioned in this space turns out also to have included Taser shots fired by police officers. According to the players’ lawyer, UT’s Tarell Brown and Tyrell Gatewood were each shot by Travis County sheriff’s deputies during their arrest on weapon and drug charges on September 4. The lawyer, Jamie Balagia, claims the players were not resisting (they were not charged with resisting, incidentally) and that the Taser shots were “sour grapes.” Neither player was seriously injured, but legal action may ensue. Stay tuned for more updates on this one.

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Even a pig
Apropos of nothing, police on US 41 outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, last week unsuccessfully attempted to subdue an escaped pig by shooting it with a Taser gun. According to the Associated Press, police fired two shots at the animal, which had wandered into traffic, but it “fled both times after pulling out the Taser probes.” A civilian passerby who claimed to have been a pig farmer then tried to wrestle the pig, but was defeated by the beast. Ultimately cops tranquilized the animal with dart guns and — this is the best part — carried it away after it was “placed in a blanket.” Meanwhile, the Packers lost their first two home games.

Mitch being Mitch
I’ll get more in-depth on the Mitch Cozad scandal at a later date, but here’s a quick update on the second coming of Tonya Harding: the University of Wyoming back-up punter allegedly stabbed the starter in the leg last week. Cozad apparently had an accomplice who aided him in his getaway (the punter was busted after a liquor-store owner caught him removing tape from his vanity license plate, which idiotically read “8-KIKR”). That accomplice remains at large. Details are emerging of a Tony Hopkins–esque lunatic who may have been pushed into his crime by an overbearing mother who filmed all his high-school punts and imbued him with college-punting dreams. Said a former high-school teammate, Matt Carberry: “He’s always been different. Not stabbing-people different, but different.”

When he’s not googling “Tonya Harding” and “sports legends,” Matt Taibbi is writing for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at M_Taibbi@yahoo.com .