After a year of Men Behaving Badly (and one too-fast-to-be-true woman), Spygate barely made the list of most notable transgressions in sports. Compared with serial dopers, point shavers, dog killers, vandals, sexual harassers, and stripper-slammers, the Patriots' playing at Candid Camera was a mere naughty-naughty.
Rarely, if ever, have so many big names been arrested, indicted, or imprisoned, had their titles revoked, their medals stripped, their records expunged. The Cincinnati Bengals had more players posing for mug shots in 18 months than they've had in the Pro Bowl in the present millennium.
Pacman Jones, the Titans' walking police blotter, had so many run-ins with the law (five arrests and numerous questionings in two years) that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suspended him for the season.
But the most egregious criminal was Falcons quarterback Michael Vick, who was sentenced to 23 months in jail for running a dogfighting operation and killing unproductive animals.
"You need to apologize to the millions of young people who looked up to you," the judge told Vick, who insisted he's not "the bad person or beast I've been made out to be."
Unblemished role models were particularly hard to find this year. Barry Bonds broke Hank Aaron's career home run record with his 756th dinger, but his summer-long pursuit was joyless for all. The fashion designer who bought the magic ball for more than $750,000 in an online auction said he would send it to the Hall of Fame imprinted with an asterisk.
Bonds, who since has been indicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, has received no endorsements for his feat, not even from flaxseed oil peddlers. The Giants, his employers for 15 years, don't want him back and no other clubs have stepped up.
It's been an ugly year for baseball, culminating in the Mitchell Report, which linked 88 current or former players to banned drugs - including new names Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Mo Vaughn - and concluded that everybody but the batboys was responsible.
"There was a collective failure to recognize the problem as it emerged," Mitchell said, "and to deal with it early on."
Only cycling had as bad a year as baseball. Floyd Landis, last year's feel-good story, had his Tour de France title taken away and was banned for two years for using synthetic testosterone before his incredible eight-minute comeback. Michael Rasmussen, who led this year's Tour commandingly with four days to go, was yanked off his bike by his club for ducking a doping test in June. And Bjarne Riis, owner of the model anti-doping Team CSC, admitted that he was drugged when he won the Tour 11 years ago.
Track and field, which finally seemed to be coming out from under its own doping cloud, was rocked by a nasty blast from the past from "Typhoid Marion," whose case has affected more than three dozen teammates and rivals.
Marion Jones, who's facing jail time for lying to investigators, tearfully confessed that she was doped at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, prompting the international federation to wipe out all of her results for seven years and the Lords of the Rings to take back her three gold and two bronze medals.
Few sports came out clean this year. NBA referee Tim Donaghy quit after being accused of shaving points and betting on games he worked and is facing jail time next month on conspiracy charges. And Knicks coach Isiah Thomas was found liable for harassing a female club executive, whom his employers reluctantly agreed to pay more than $11 million in damages.
In auto racing, the McLaren Formula One team was fined $100 million for using technical documents filched from rival Ferrari, and eight NASCAR crew chiefs were suspended for cheating. And after suspicious betting on a tennis match in Poland involving top Russian player Nikolay Davydenko raised eyebrows, officials began probing whether the age-old practice of "tanking" matches had turned into dumping them for gamblers.
Nobody accused the Patriots of tanking. Quite the contrary. Except for an unauthorized video and a certain safety who dabbled in growth hormones even though he was fully grown, Bill Belichick's surrogate sons behaved themselves. On this year's naughty-nice scale, that qualifies them for the Palace of Sweets.
