Forget peanut butter and banana, Laurel and Hardy, Tango and Cash: almost nothing goes together quite like vehicular violence and football. There’s just something about the gridiron and automotive felonies — they’re one of the all-time great matches made in hell. While the chosen weapon of the deranged NBA star tends toward the unregistered Glock in the glove box (injudiciously pulled out when the “parking-lot incident” gets out of hand), and the baseball player prefers the balled fist in the wifely face, the football jock likes to actually climb behind the seat of a car (preferably a big-ass, pimped-out SUV) and leave grille marks on his victim’s forehead.
The cases are almost too numerous to list. The classic version is the ramming incident, in which the football player — usually an offensive tackle, receiver, or running back, for some reason — revs up his 18-cylinder Hummer engine, looses the clutch, and mashes a car full of women and children. The Michael Pittman and Victor Riley cases are the standard setters here. There are, additionally, a whole mess of incidents involving football players who’ve hit pedestrians, ranging in severity from the comic (the Randy Moss meter-maid incident) to the monstrous, insane, and utterly homicidal (the Lawrence Phillips “pickup football game” Honda attack). Beyond that, almost every time a football player steps into a car, something bad happens: he may end up punching out the window of another driver’s vehicle in a road-rage incident (ex–hometown hero Adrian Klemm), he may get baked and drive into a home full of elderly folk (Jerramy Stevens), or he may just be so hyped up from a night at the strip club that he clips a bunch of highway-crash victims at 200 clicks (Dwayne Goodrich). He may saw a car in half (the immortal Hacksaw Reynolds), or he may leave in a car at the half (Irving Fryar), subsequently wrapping it around a tree. When it comes to football, you’re better off taking the bus (no pun intended, Jerome).
For all that, however, the football player who actually runs over another live human being is relatively rare. As far as our research can determine, it’s only happened once prior to this year — a mysterious incident last year in which Kansas State standout running back Thomas Clayton allegedly tried to run over a parking-lot attendant named James Seymour. Clayton did not succeed in the alleged attempt, and the highly touted back soon returned to the field.
Things won’t end quite so neatly for four students of Missouri’s Southwest Baptist University, all football players, who were arrested last week for allegedly beating a 22-year-old named Joshua Mincks. The incident appears to be a classic parking-lot deal, with witnesses claiming that upward of 15 people were involved in what may have been a racially motivated fracas (Mincks is white; his alleged assailants are black). What is unusual is that Mincks was apparently run over by a car, perhaps more than once, before being severely beaten and kicked in the head. The arrested students include Henry Patton, Rony Saintil, Korey Molson, and Charles Rainey; more charges are expected to be filed. Details about the incident are sketchy as yet. The football players are charged with first-degree assault. Mincks is apparently in good condition.
Yet another college rape case
While all of America follows the Duke lacrosse-stripper case, a lesser-known college quarterback was hit last week with a first-degree-felony rape charge.
Jerod Walker, a 19-year-old freshman quarterback for the Aggies, was arrested last Thursday after a 20-year-old student filed a rape complaint against him, claiming that he had raped her in her dorm room. This is the second football rape case to hit the state of Utah in the past year; last season, two Brigham Young footballers were charged with rape following a similar accusation. The Brigham Young players were recently acquitted.
Meanwhile, in the Duke fiasco — fast becoming this decade’s very own sporting version of the Tawana Brawley case — two unnamed Dukies were charged with assaulting a black exotic dancer in a bathroom during a party held by the lacrosse team. Attorney Robert Ekstrand, who represents the two nameless players, went public with his version of the case last week, calling the charges a “tragedy.” “Two young men have been charged with a crime they did not commit,” he said.
The white-on-black nature of this crime, coupled with the absence of DNA evidence, and its seemingly inevitable “her word versus ours” legal denouement, threatens to make this case into an explosively divisive national-media rat’s nest. Get ready for lots of lacrosse-themed malapropisms from the mouth of Sean Hannity, and stay tuned to this space . . .
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Matt Taibbi: m_taibbi@yahoo.com