EL BARIO, BRONX – One of my favorite hobbies is soccer – or football – as the rest of the world calls it. What fun kicking kicking balls can be! And since I’ve had nearly as much fun kicking NFL commissioner Roger Goodell in the balls for a couple of months now, I thought, ‘Why stop now?’ With that, your righteous Deacon Blaber will be addressing the NFL Pot Law, a little Puck P and the World Series.
NFL Pot Law: According to this article in the USA Today, The NFL has increased its marijuana threshold for testing positive. It use to be 15 nanograms but now it is up to 35 nanograms. Don’t worry sports fans, I have no idea what a nannogram is either. In fact, I’ll misspell it here and there just because. But apparently the difference is enough for Ricky Williams to come out of the smoking closet and say,he never would have tested positive the first time under the new allowances… and avoided all his troubles. His primary sample had him at 15.3ngs but the secondary and back up sample had him at 14.6ngs. According to that positive off-season test you are then in for more random and strenuous in-season testing – that became his problem.
According to Williams, everyone knows about the off-season test and as long as you pass that you are free to smoke for the next year until your next test. How did he get caught, then? It is explained as just a filter process – like for jobs that do pre-employment drug testing to weed out those that are so sloppy they can’t slowdown to pass the test. He thought he did slow down and if his secondary sample would have been the primary, he would have never been in trouble.
A final argument from that article that impress me is that the players are given dangerous and addictive prescription meds – like Vicodin and Percocet – but aren’t allowed a natural drug like weed. All of this cracking down is about the league image more so than player welfare… as usual. The world’s most two-faced league is still on a role. Get ready for a kick in the Jimmy, Roger.
Oh, and Ricky says he no longer smokes and turns weed down all the time. He no longer has the physical aches and mental stress that come with playing so he doesn’t need the herb.
NHL: We begin with the Adams division, In good news for all those that hate the Bruins, which is every hockey fan, Zdeno Chara is out for 4-6 weeks. I know Cheesy Bruin is busy crying in his beer. How the Bruins do without Chara will be interesting because – though I don’t care for him or his team much – Chara is talismanic figure for the Bruins. How they pull together and who step-ups up to lead in clutch moments will be of great interest… In the Norris division, it may still be early days but it looks like the Islanders are finally going to be worth the price of admission. They top the division with 10 points and the Rangers are middle of the pack with 8. After years of being terrible and loads of quality draft picks, it would be so painful if the Isles finally became worth watching again in their final season on The Island.
MLB: I haven’t been paying much attention but it appears the World Series is indeed taking place. For what it is worth, I am backing the Royals because they are the team that has been bad for years and now has the young guns to actually bring that long-starved town a title… In other baseball news, Joe Maddon has opted out of the final year of his contract with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. I would assume he was tired of coaching young talented players and seeing them sold for more picks while no one showed up to the games. The Mets, if they had balls for me to kick, should scoop up Maddon pronto. I know they won’t because Sandy Alderson is the GM and the Wilpons are so inept they couldn’t get beaver in a brothel – but Maddon would be an awesome fit for the Mets.
Come back tomorrow for a man that strikes gold every Sunday with his NFL Picks and state-of-the-art The Gambler’s Source website, Cheesy Bruin.
