Crime without verbs

Sports blotter: Creative grammar edition

March 14, 2007 1:28:52 PM

SAME OLD: Charles Sharon’s unregistered-gun crime may have been cliché, but the Army/Navy store from where it was stolen in thankful for the free PR.

Receiver of stolen goods
It’s getting to the point where you can write these sports-crime stories without verbs. Actually, maybe you can do it without articles, too. Nouns and modifiers only will do the trick. Let’s try.

Jacksonville Jaguars wide receiver seldom-used Charles Dubar Sharon routine traffic stop big-ass SUV. Chevy Tahoe proverbial strong odor marijuana small quantity pot gym bag under seat unregistered handgun actually. Stolen handgun felony charges concealed firearm grand theft firearm weed possession. Jaguars no comment $4000 bail.

The case of Charles Sharon had one non-cliché twist, though. According to police, the handgun found in Sharon’s car was one of 20 stolen out of an Army/Navy store in Sharon’s hometown of Palatka, Florida, last year. Surveillance video captured four kids on tape stealing the guns; later, several juveniles were busted and some of the weapons were recovered. The $20,000 question right now is: how did a bunch of teenagers manage to sell a stolen pistol to an NFL wideout?

The other nonstandard element to this almost-cookie-cutter NFL arrest is a rather humorous quote broadcast on First Coast News by the owner of the Army/Navy store from where the gun came. Apparently Ed Osborn saw the bust as good PR.

“We figured if our guns are good enough for the NFL, they’re good enough for anybody!” he told reporters.

Minus the gun, this is a minor offense — a three-pointer at most. But a stolen gun bumps it up into the low twenty-point range. Osborn is still seventy clicks behind Ron Artest, who returned to game action last week.

Key to the game
You gotta love South Carolina Gamecocks quarterback Steven Garcia. He broke what I’m pretty sure was new ground in the annals of sports crime, when he became the first major college athlete in American history to be arrested for keying his professor’s car last week.

It seems Garcia had a blowout with Adam Briggs, a visiting professor from Claflin University, in Orangeburg. The two had a verbal altercation, after which Garcia pulled out a key and flat-out went to work on Briggs’s 2007 Toyota Corolla. It serves him right for driving a Jap car below the Mason-Dixon line. Anyway, the keying did some $804 in damage. Garcia, incidentally, offered to pay $500 after Briggs threatened to call police. Briggs apparently turned the offer down.

Garcia was arrested for public drunkenness about a month ago, prompting beleaguered Gamecocks coach Steve Spurrier to suspend his quarterback. “Stephen Garcia will be suspended from all football team activities through the end of this semester,” Spurrier said Tuesday. “He will be expected to go to class and study hall but will not participate in any spring practices or team football meetings.”

Spurrier added that he hoped Garcia would make “an all-out effort to get his personal life in line with our other Carolina football players and eventually reach his full potential as a student-athlete.” One wonders if he meant that Garcia should join a laptop-theft ring.

Keying a professor’s car and not getting away with it seems like a pretty stupid move, especially for a quarterback about to start his career. Plus, Garcia has a really stupid-looking head of long hair. I’m giving Garcia nine crime points, but it’s worth noting that he joins Artest as the only major American athlete with two busts already this year.

Harsh tone
University of Idaho safety Tone Taupule became the first athlete this year to be arrested for felony armed robbery and pistol-whipping after he was busted in Moscow, Idaho, last week for an ugly home-invasion incident.

Pistol-whipping is actually more common in college football than you’d expect. Former Washington Huskies linebacker Jeremiah Pharms was arrested for whipping a weed dealer in 2001. And aside from Pharms . . . oh, wait, home-invasion pistol-whipping armed robberies are pretty rare, even for college football players. The Taupale crime sounds like a gnarly one; he waited for a man to come home, waved a semi-automatic weapon at him, demanded $1000 from a safe, then whacked him and fled. Taupale had 34 tackles last year, 24 solo. Incidentally, the assistant police chief in Moscow who announced the details of this crime was named David Duke, all of which makes this a noteworthy moment in 2007 sports offenses. I give it 60-points, at least.

When he’s not googling “cliché NFL arrests” and “pistol-whipping,” Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at M_Taibbi@yahoo.com .