King Kaufman's Sports Daily

NBA ref scandal, Michael Vick, dope-crazy Tour de France. That'll teach this column to leave the keyboard for a month.

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July 30, 2007 | I had to come back from vacation before Barry Bonds hit five home runs in a game to break the career record, then pulled the skin off his face to reveal that he's really D.B. Cooper -- and by the way Rich Aurilia is Amelia Earhart.

That seemed about due to happen after a year's worth of sports blockbusters that broke during the four weeks while I was trying to figure out where I'd packed the nose-hair clippers before moving the family 2,054 miles west.

The NBA was hit with the biggest officiating scandal in its history and perhaps the biggest gambling fiasco in American sports since the City College point-shaving affair in 1951. Details emerged about the alleged dogfight ring on Michael Vick's property in Virginia and Vick was indicted on federal charges. The Tour de France toppled into complete irrelevance when the latest spate of drug revelations included the leader and apparent eventual winner being kicked out of the race by his own team.

The psychodrama of the widely reviled Bonds, poster child for all that's crooked and wrong about sports these days, approaching the sainted Hank Aaron's career home run record -- he stood one shy Sunday night as I finally located my box of cherished RuPaul memorabilia -- managed to seem like a quiet, almost quaint sort of thing.

Remember those innocent days when we were capable of being shocked by revelations about ballplayers using steroids? Twenty-three skiddoo.

Though the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal is a few months old now, the sickening details of what investigators allegedly turned up on his property came out this month, and Vick showed up in court and pleaded not guilty to federal conspiracy charges involving competitive dogfights.

That set off a national public discussion about dogfighting, one that didn't seem to get much further than most people agreeing that the practice is barbaric and wrong, though, as Yahoo Sports' Dan Wetzel pointed out, there's an interesting racial divide on the issue of Vick's guilt or innocence.

Outside Vick's arraignment hearing, Wetzel noted that animal-rights protesters calling for Vick's hide were almost unanimously white, while counterprotesters arguing that Vick, who is black, deserves due process were mostly black.

If only I could have remembered that my computer was in that box with the stuffed animals, steak knives and Ace bandages, I might have written that I'd like to come down on both sides. That people who breed and train and watch and bet on fighting dogs are scum, but Vick deserves his day in court without first being crucified.

Next page: Tour de France: "Complete and truly farcical ignominy." Plus: The big NBA scandal