THE HALL OF SHAME

Mirror mirror on the wall… Who's the biggest cheater of them all?

BY: Michael A. Aun, CSP, CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame

Good question and I doubt there's enough room to even begin listing them all. But let's have some fun and see if we can zero in on a top ten list.

1- Here in Florida, the Grapefruit league is cranking up and that means we get to speculate on Who's Who in the steroid lineup. You have to put Barry Bonds right in there, thanks in part to the latest speculation aimed at the home run star. Commissioner Bud Selig takes the hit on this one. He's the guy who should have monitored Bond's drug use. He was certainly the guy who benefited from all the headlines that Bonds, Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa helped generated as they chased Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth's home run records. He was the decision-maker when all this was going on. It was his call to fix it; now he gets to pay for it.

2- Don't pick on baseball, you say! Okay. Boogity, boogity, boogity… let's go racin' boys! One of the good old boys who's head of the Hall of Shame Racing Cheaters List has to be Chad Knaus, the crew chief for the Lowe's 48 team of Jimmie Johnson, who has been busted no fewer than seven times. I wonder if Hank Aaron had used a corked bat and was caught seven times how long his records would stand? Maybe NASCAR, who makes up its own rules as it goes along, should have sat Jimmie down along with Knaus instead of allowing him to go on to win the Daytona 500 in 2006. Or at least bust him for the same 25-point penalty they handed out to the Hall of Fame Racing Team of Troy Aikman and Roger Staubach. Again, let's put the blame where it belongs with Brian France and Mike Helton, the NASCAR gurus who allow cheaters to continue to cheat. I wonder how long Lowes would remain a sponsor of NASCAR and the "48" team if the word "cheater" was attached to enough headlines after their name. The "CHEATING LOWES TEAM CAPTURES DAYTONA 500!" My guess is that Lowe's would pass out some penalties of their own, not to mention withdrawal of sponsorship. Leave them good-ole-boys alone, you say. They all cheat; only a few get caught. Probably the only one not cheating is Kyle Petty who last won a race in late 1700's.

3- Okay, how about quarterback Ryan Leaf, who scored a very respectable 27 out of 50 of the Worderlic test, which the NFL uses to measure intelligence of its prospects. If he got all 27, Commissioner Paul Tagliabue's pet snake should have gotten a 94.

4- And then there's golf's Vijay Singh, who allegedly altered his scorecard in 1985 in the Indonesian Open. Singh said he was the victim of a mysterious plot. He also claimed that the Indonesian word for "bogey" was actually "hole-in-one."

5- Another member of the Anabolic Steroid Hall of Shame has to be Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who won the 100 meter gold medal in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul and was later stripped of his victory after testing positive, having beat another drug suspect, Carl Lewis. At least Johnson never attempted to sing the national anthem before a New Jersey Nets game.

6- Speaking of the hardwood, where cheating goes on in a number of basketball venues, we find the likes of Kevin McHale, who signed Joe Smith to a secret $86 million deal to skirt the NBA salary cap. As a penalty, the league took away five first-round draft picks and forced Minnesota to actually use Smith in the starting lineup.

7- Wilt Chamberlain may have slept with 19,999 more women but Kobe Bryant gets the nod for the most famous cheating episode in NBA history and his darling wife has a $4 million ring to prove it.

8- You say this goes on only in pro sports. How about Little Leaguer Danny Almonte, the 12 year old kid who could throw harder than Pedro Martinez. You remember him. He's the kid with the mustache, who drives the Mercedes. He pitched in the 2001 Little League World Series but had to shave between innings.

9- Let us not forget Rosie Ruiz, the first "chubette" woman to win the Boston Marathon. The only legitimate marathon she has been in is a barbeque-eating contest.

10- And how about those Spanish Paralympians, who competed in the 2000 Paralympics. Spain beat Russia in the basketball disability tournament. Turns out that 10 of Spain's players hand no mental handicaps, other than being devoid of a conscience.

Blah, blah, blah, all sports, you say! Maybe you did not own Enron stock. They don't need more laws; all they need to do is make stealing illegal again.