The NBA season starts tonight. The soap opera that is the Lake Show is, of course, the number one topic on L.A. sports radio shows. Is Kobe a good guy or a bad guy? A caller on a recent show argued that we should judge athletes by their on court behaviour, not their off court behaviour. I contend that they are one and the same thing.

Lest you think I am an angry feminist still unhappy that the rape charges were dropped, the only thing I fault Kobe for is having forceful sex without reading the S&M 101 Manual. If you’re going to have forceful sex, you negotiate before the act, not in the heat of the moment. If you are a multimegamillionaire and you make that kind of mistake, you can expect a lot of trouble.

Before he was accused of rape, Kobe cultivated a squeaky clean image. If a reporter broached the subject, he made it clear that he would never cheat on his wife. He did cheat on his wife and he had an ongoing two year sexual relationship with another woman. Michael Jordan had some legal difficulties from a two year affair that started around the time of his marriage. Isn’t that taking the Michael Jordan emulation thing a bit too far?

After he signed a new contract with the Lakers, Jim Gray interviewed Kobe on television. Kobe said he liked playing with Shaquille O’Neal. In Phil Jackson’s new book, The Last Season: A Team in Search of Its Soul, he quotes Kobe as saying that he was not going to be Shaq’s sidekick any more and that Shaq’s presence on the team would affect his decision about where he was going to play. Kobe has also said that he liked playing for Phil Jackson even if they were unlikely to have lunch together any time soon. Last April, Kobe took one shot in the first half in a game against Sacramento as if to say, “You think I shoot too much, I’ll show you, I won’t shoot at all”. One of his teammates anonymously said to a reporter, “I don’t know how we can forgive him,” and Phil Jackson later admitted that he didn’t have control of Kobe’s game.

You may think that Keyshawn Johnson is a jerk, you may think that Terrell Owens is a jerk, but at least you know where they stand. Kobe knows that if he had said publicly that Shaq’s presence on the team and Jackson remaining as coach would affect his decision to re-sign with the Lakers, he would have been heartily attacked for selfishness. He says one thing publicly and another in private because he’s not strong enough to say how he really feels.

This kind of behavior will bring a lot of hate your way. People will slam you in print and savage you in rap songs. Shaquille is acting like an adolescent with his silly rap songs and I doubt that any NBA player looks forward to playing for a coach who rats out his own players but that doesn’t mean I have a lot of sympathy for Kobe.

I am passionate about sports and passionate about the Lakers but their main guy doesn’t have a lot of heart and soul and that hurts.

Doug Blevins has cerebral palsy and lives in a wheelchair. Doug Blevins is a coach in the NFL. His goal was always to work in football and he found a way to do it. When he was growing up he started paying close attention to kickers and realized that quarterbacks have coaches, defensive ends have coaches, linemen have coaches, hey, even the long snapper has coaching. But not the kicker. He’s on his own. So Doug started studying kicking in excruciating detail and became an expert at it. Kickers turned up at his house for individual coaching and he would ride his electric wheelchair around and around them suggesting a six inch adjustment here and a slightly different step there hoping that they could take his teaching into the last few minutes of a Super Bown and kick the winning field goal. At least one of them has, twice: Adam Vinatieri of the New England Patriots. Doug now coaches kickers for the Minnesota Vikings and coaches privately.

Two things come to mind about Doug Blevins. I told you before, I’m only an E level tennis player and it’s obnoxious of me to tell you how I think you should play your game but if Doug Blevins can tell kickers how to kick, then I feel better about the possibility that you could learn something from me.

The other thing that comes to mind is the contrast in lives between Doug Blevins and Ken Caminiti. Ken had a distinguished career in Major League Baseball including an MVP year by unanimous vote in 1996. He battled alcoholism and cocaine addiction for much of his life and died at age 41 of a drug overdose two days ago. One man can’t even take a shower by himself and the other was one of the most physically talented athletes on earth. Everybody has their own way of getting through life, their own way of dealing with the bruising kicks life throws at you, the strings of disappointments that come your way.

I remember a Phil Donahue show long ago with couples as guests where one member of each couple was a transexual. One guest received a fair amount of fury from the audience because she had abandoned her son from a previous marriage. It was interesting to see that the members of the audience who were older and had suffered the most adversity in their life were the most accepting. Some of the younger audience members were outrageously angry and intolerant.

I’m sad about Ken Caminiti, I’m also angry about the endless number of people with addictive problems with far fewer resources that our country fails every day, but how can I judge any of them? I’m even struggling with great disappointment in myself at the moment so I can hardly say what Ken Caminiti or anyone else should have done with their life. I’m just sad, that’s all.

A few weeks after Texas Ranger baseball player Frank Francisco threw a chair into a heckling crowd and a few days after Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley retaliated when a fan threw a bottle near him on the field, a local radio station invited listeners to call in and tell them what they would say to heckle Barry Bonds during this weekend’s Dodgers-Giants series. By the time I turned to the Presidential candidates debate, there were three references to Bonds being gay, two references to his genitalia and one caller who said he would yell, “Hey Barry, can I have your autograph? You’re the best baseball player who ever lived.”

Thank heavens, a sign of intelligence in the universe.

Here are some sports events I attended that have great meaning to me. Feel free to add your own events.

• June, 1974: at the old Boston Garden, sixth game NBA finals, nosebleed seats, Kareem Abdul Jabbar hits a sky hook in the second overtime against the Celtics to send the series back to Milwaukee.
• June 14, 1976: at the old Boston Garden, fifth game NBA finals, nosebleed seats, after the crowd had poured onto the court thinking the game over and Paul Westphal called a timeout he knew his team didn’t have resulting in a technical foul but insuring that the ball would be inbound at midcourt, Garfield Heard hits a 22 foot turnaround jumper with one second on the clock to send the game into triple overtime before Boston finally wins it 128-126.
• September 12, 1979: at Fenway Park, seats along the first-base line, Carl Yastrzemski get his 3000th hit. I still have the ticket.
• 1975 World Series: front row seats along the third-base line, every game except the memorable sixth game – I had a meeting that night!