PLAYING THE HYPOCRISY GAME

The Toronto Raptors play-by-play man, the guy who barely blinked when
former Raptor Charles Oakley speculated that 60% of the NBA's players
smoke marijuana, uses his afternoon call-in show to proclaim that the
city doesn't need an athlete like Ricky Williams.

The Vancouver Province reports that the head coach of the B.C. Lions,
working in a city where smoking a joint is as socially acceptable as
swigging a beer, thinks bringing Williams to the CFL would bring too
much "negative" attention to the league.

Hamilton Ticats legend Angelo Mosca, a former bar brawler considered
in his heyday to be the most vicious player in Canadian football,
announces that he "will not be going to a football game" with
Williams in it, because guys like him are turning the CFL into a
"dumping ground." It's as though the sports world exists in some
alternate universe, disconnected from all sense of perspective. Or
maybe, there are just a lot of hypocrites out there.

Williams, for those who wisely manage to avoid sports talk radio, is
the Miami Dolphins running back -- currently serving out a suspension
for drug use -- who is being actively pursued by the Toronto
Argonauts. To listen to the talking heads, he's the latest gridiron
degenerate to come skulking up to Canada -- one and the same with the
wife-beaters, cocaine addicts and convicted criminals who make up
football's rogues' gallery.

Even the team that's seeking to bring him north feels compelled to do
some finger-wagging. Williams, the Argos have suggested, deserves a
chance to rehabilitate himself. To play for them he will need to
prove he's a changed man and go talk to kids about the error of his
ways. He might even be subjected to regular drug tests.

That, of course, is what happens in the NFL -- just as it does in
many American workplaces. We like to think we're more sophisticated,
up here north of the border. But based on the uproar over Williams,
some of us have a ways to go.

Unlike several other players currently on the Argos, Williams has
never been convicted of a crime, never had a problem with hard drugs,
never come to blows with his teammates. His big transgression, aside
from having a personality disorder that makes him unusually shy, is
that -- like many of his fellow athletes, and the people who pay to
watch them -- he likes to smoke pot.

Granted, Ricky likes it more than most -- enough to skip out on the
2004 NFL season rather than give up his recreational drugs. But it's
hard to imagine anyone can deliver all the faux shock at his habits
with a straight face.

Last weekend, thousands of Torontonians marked the city's annual
Marijuana March by setting up camp outside the provincial legislature
at Queen's Park. From what I could see driving by, it was less a
march than a bunch of potheads hanging around a lawn getting high.
And as they did so, police officers stood beside them -- worried only
about crowd control, and happily turning a blind eye to the endless
supply of pot.

It captured perfectly the modern attitude toward soft drugs. The
federal government may have declined to legalize or decriminalize
marijuana, but social acceptance of the drug is so widespread that
even cops don't much care about possession for personal use.

The radio hosts, the pundits, the fellow players and coaches -- they
all know this. If they haven't smoked pot themselves, it's a fair bet
their friends, family members or coworkers have. Tell Chuck Swirsky,
the aforementioned Raptors radio voice, that one of his colleagues at
Toronto's sports radio station smokes, and it's hard to imagine he'd
go running from the building screaming in horror. But give him a
chance to rail on Ricky Williams, and it'll fill a half-hour of airtime.

To arbitrarily attack one person for something millions of Canadians
do isn't just disingenuous -- it's cowardly. If these people really
think marijuana is dangerous -- a shaky argument, but one that can
still be put forward -- then they should be consistently fighting
prevailing attitudes toward it. Swirsky should be campaigning daily
against the plethora of NBA players who smoke pot, exposing them as
the poor role models he supposedly thinks Williams is. Other coaches
should impose mandatory drug tests on their players, even if it means
losing a bunch of them. The Toronto Star, which used its editorial
column to slam the Argos for wooing Williams, should do likewise with
its own employees.

They won't, of course, because all the outrage is just a nasty little
charade. If they're really worried about the lessons being taught to
kids, they'd do best to stop teaching them to be judgmental hypocrites.