Sports a haven for crudity?

As we noted last week in our discussion of the thick-headedness of the baseball executive who concluded a discussion of possible drug use in his sport by slandering his own team, leadership in sports is no guarantee of intelligence.

Nor, it has since developed, of either maturity or good taste.

We have two fresh examples of the latter characteristics, one in basketball and one in baseball. You have one guess apiece as to who we are talking about.

Right you are. The flamboyant owner of the Dallas Mavericks, whose ego is even larger than his bank account, Mark Cuban. And the obnoxious manager of the Chicago White Sox, whose mouth is foul even by the extreme standards of his sport, Ozzie Guillen.

Each has been hit with a hefty fine (well, presumably hefty in Guillen’s case, since the amount was not announced), which fines have been greeted with contempt by both men, suggesting that other remedies might be in order.

Cuban succeeded in becoming a gaudy sideshow to the National Basketball Association’s most glamorous presentation, its championship series. His Mavericks came within a game of winning their first title, but the fact that they did not offered their owner the opportunity to make more of a fool of himself than the most rabid of his team’s fans.

He ran on to the court to berate an official, and shouted obscenities in the direction of Commissioner David Stern. When one of his players was suspended for a brutal foul, he donned the player’s jersey in a show of defiance. When Stern fined him – a quarter of a million dollars, which would catch the attention of anyone but a billionaire – Cuban smirked in his blog (yes, he has one) that he regarded it as nothing more than “just a business expense.”

Cuban isn’t Cuban, but Guillen is Hispanic, which he sought to use as an excuse for some of the most egregious assaults on the language in recent years. Examples? We have to do this chronologically.

It started with a non-beanball, of all things. A rookie pitcher named Sean Tracey failed to follow Guillen’s orders to hit an opposing player with a retaliatory pitch. Guillen exploded in anger at the pitcher’s failure to attack, when the pitcher returned to the dugout (with television cameras following the incident as eagerly as they had earlier followed Cuban). The next day Tracey was shipped back to the minor leagues.

A sportswriter named Jay Mariotti then wrote a column critical of the manager; Guillen responded with a graphic reference to the writer’s sexual preferences, with a few &@#$#@@%#’s thrown in. The fine followed, along with orders for Guillen to attend a course in sensitivity training.

Guillen responded in character. “I don’t think I’ll be going; I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “I would have to learn English.” And of the slur, he added, “People have to know that I grew up in a different country. I wasn’t calling people that. I was calling him that.”

Obviously, fines are sometimes not enough. Sports commissioners, if not owners and managers, owe their fans a higher standard. Perhaps suspensions are worth a try.

Terry Bledsoe, a former Milwaukee Journal sports columnist and executive in the National Football League, is now a freelance writer whose columns appear each week.