New York Daily News
Sunday, May 18th 2008, 8:28 AM
Elsa/Getty
Bill Belichick
Bill Belichick talking about an old video assistant of his named Matt Walsh suddenly sounds like Roger Clemens talking about an old trainer of his named Brian McNamee. And Sen. Arlen Specter, a tough guy and a smart guy, occasionally sounds like an old crank and an Eagles fan calling the radio when he gets going on the subject of Spygate. Specter still makes a lot more sense on this subject than most football people. It is why this idea that the world will suddenly stop spinning properly if Specter does ever hold Congressional hearings about cheating in pro football is silly.
Maybe it will never come to that. Maybe Specter will calm down. Or maybe he will follow through and Spygate will keep going. Guess what? If it does the country will survive and pro football will survive and so will the NFL media. For all the posturing and grandstanding that we have gotten from Congress in its hearings about drug cheats in baseball, in the end more good came out of them than bad, starting with the fact that baseball's drug-testing policy, with all its flaws, is now the most rigorous in sports. And Congress, as much as any book or article, put more of a spotlight on drug use in baseball than we'd ever had before.
Nobody knows what happens if Specter ever shines his big Congressional light on whatever Bill Belichick thought he was doing and whatever he thought he was getting away with; and how many other teams thought they were getting away with the same thing. But Specter has a right to keep talking about this, whether he's a disgruntled Eagles fan or not. Professional sports is a billion-dollar industry in this country and pro football, with that same sweet anti-trust exemption that baseball has, is the richest sport of all. So Specter happens to be right when he says that the integrity of the sport is still supposed to matter.
And whether or not you think what Belichick and the Patriots did is a felony or a misdemeanor, the integrity of the sport has been called into question here, with the best team of its time in pro football and the best coach of his time.
Matt Walsh may not be one of nature's noblemen. Neither was Jose Canseco. But Walsh said something pretty smart the other day when he said that if what Belichick was doing filming other team's signals, in violation of league rules, wasn't working for him he wouldn't have kept doing it. You wanted to give him the game ball right there.
Now Belichick goes after Walsh the way Clemens went after McNamee, the way Clemens is still after McNamee. Belichick says he made a mistake, that he was wrong, wrong, wrong about league rules, this coming from someone who you assume could recite league rules in a couple of languages. He has to be kidding now if he thinks anybody believes he forgot to read the warning labels.
No one is suggesting that this kind of cheating is as systemic as drug cheating became in baseball over the last 15 years. Belichick and the Patriots really want us to believe that they didn't think they were doing anything wrong, and one of the defenses of them all along is that they weren't doing anything different than anybody else was doing. At that point they do start to sound like baseball players explaining why they started using baseball drugs in the first place.
And just for the sheer entertainment value alone, it would be some show to watch Belichick have to answer questions from somebody like Arlen Specter.
The drug hearings in baseball were bad reality television so much of the time. And some of it was a waste of time. There were moments when you expected some of those Republican Congressmen and Congresswomen who didn't already have Roger Clemens' autograph to jump over the desk and ask him for one. But those hearings were dramatic and important, too, and not just to Mark McGwire's Hall of Fame chances.
Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, is a smart guy and a tough guy himself. I believe he has, when you add it all up now, been thorough in his investigation of Belichick and Walsh and the tapes and all the rest of it. But he never should have destroyed any of the evidence, whatever his best intentions were there. And when it is all said and done on this matter, he is the same as Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, and the rest of his owners, in that he wants this to go away.
It still hasn't, even as Goodell and Specter have agreed to disagree. So Specter talks about hearings and a Mitchell Report for football and he does get labeled a crank. And Walsh keeps saying that if the cheating the Patriots did hadn't been working, they would've stopped. When he does he sound exactly like a baseball executive I know, who once tried to explain to me what baseball was up against with steroids:
"They do it because it works," the guy said.
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