Balloon wars

Sports blotter: "Glory of Love" edition

April 11, 2007 1:09:29 PM

Naughty naughty naughty
A wonderful, uplifting story is coming out of Utah, near the otherwise staid home of our own Danny (may Allah curse his name) Ainge’s Brigham Young University. It’s a beautiful snapshot of college life today in America.

Scene: a student dance in a parking lot outside an apartment complex late last Friday night. As the dance is breaking up, two knuckleheads — 22-year-olds Lacey Quigley and Jason Hancock — start lobbing water balloons at the retreating revelers below. It’s all fun and games until they hit 19-year-old Natalie Dew on the leg. Dew screams that she’s going to get her boyfriend. Quigley and Hancock laugh. They stop laughing when Dew returns shortly with BUY inside linebacker Terrance Deshawn Hooks and tight end Vitale TaAaga Magauli So’oto. The two monsters then race up the stairs of the building and start pounding on what they think is the right door. No answer. They’re not buying it, so they kick in the door and enter, ready to kick some ass.

Wrong apartment. The innocent residents inside plead for their lives and ultimately convince the football players to spare them. Now correctly directed, they kick in another door, where they find Quigley and Hancock cowering in the bathroom. Sadly, the story ends when security arrives just in time to prevent the accidental deaths of the balloon-throwers.

The two football players were charged with burglary and have been suspended from the Cougars until further notice, which means they’ll miss spring practices. The balloon-throwers got popped for criminal mischief.

Another NFL car-punching
I left this one out a few weeks ago, but it’s worth a quick note. About once a year we get a report of an NFL player punching a car. It’s a phenomenon we hold dear here in New England because one of our own was among the guilty a few years ago: former sucky Patriot tackle Adrian Klemm was arrested for chasing down a motorist who cut him off and punching in his windshield. Matt O’Dwyer, the former Jets lineman, was another member of that club, kicking out the window of a police car in a legendary nightclub brawl on Long Island in 1999.

We’ve apparently got another one, as Denver Bronco wideout Brandon Marshall was involved in two apparent domestic-violence incidents at the end of March with his girlfriend, Jameelah Watley. This is a sordid and bizarre tale that involves Marshall picking up a lead pipe at a Florida restaurant and banging it on asphalt to scare Watley. Her crime? She reportedly complained that Marshall had not asked her to marry him.

In the second tussle, at his apartment in Highlands Ranch, Florida, Watley screamed for help, alerting the neighbors, then tried to flee in a taxi she has called to the scene. Marshall, thinking quickly, blocked the taxi’s exit with his car, then started punching the taxi — because, he later said, he wanted his Blackberry back.

The scene is reminiscent of a number of driveway fiascoes involving NFL players in recent years, including the notorious Michael Pittman and Victor Riley incidents. Police say no actual violence took place in either incident, but Marshall still faces charges of suspicion of domestic violence and false imprisonment. Interestingly, Marshall and Watley have reportedly been “boyfriend and girlfriend” since eighth grade.

DUI defeats Truman
Rounding up the week in sports busts: this was an active seven days, with several high-profile DUIs. Miami Heat forward James Posey was nabbed after he stopped his car in the middle of a double-lane Miami street and began talking drunkenly to various pedestrians and “occupants of other vehicles.” Posey released a neat agent-crafted statement noting that he was neither “driving nor intoxicated” at the time of the arrest, but police think otherwise. This is the second Heat DUI this year, as little-known rookie Robert Hite was nailed earlier this season before being released and exiled to a South Dakota D-league team.

Also caught this week was Warren Moon, the former perennial all-moustache team selection and all-pro quarterback who also happened to be a poster child for the NFL’s domestic-violence problem. Moon was nailed in Kirkland, Washington, for drunken driving and speeding.

Last but not least, there was the arrest of erstwhile world’s fastest man and shorter-than-usual Marion Jones’s love interest Tim Montgomery, who was brought in on bank-fraud charges in what remains one of the weirdest sports scandals of all time. This is a complex case, so I’m going to save it for the special BALCO edition coming later this spring, after the Feds’ inevitable decision to round up Barry Bonds one shy of 755.

When he’s not googling “water-balloon warfare” and “NFL car punch,” Matt Taibbi writes for Rolling Stone. He can be reached at M_Taibbi@yahoo.com .