PHELPS NEEDS LESS IDLE TIME, NOT MORE

They got it backward with Michael Phelps. They suspended him from
competition for three months, which means he now has more time to
wander into parties and hold interesting-looking objects up to his
face and say, "Hey, dude, what's this?"

What USA Swimming, the national federation, should have done was make
him perform community service by competing in swim meets every day of
the week and give him obligatory practices, since this is a lad who
obviously functions better in chlorinated water than on terra firma.

Phelps has also been dropped by one of his sponsors, Kellogg, for
having been photographed putting his amphibian features into a glass
pipe normally used for smoking marijuana, or so people tell me.

He is now paying the price for being a 23-year-old with limited
instincts of danger to his reputation and his fortune. His big
mistake -- gold-medal naivete, if you will -- was not realizing that
somebody might take a photo of him giving the impression of taking a
huge whiff of something or other.

Phelps is so used to cameras going off around him that the normal
instincts of danger did not kick in when he was out in the real
world. Nowadays, everybody from infant to nonagenarian has a
cellphone with a built-in camera. Point and click. There was a house
party at the University of South Carolina and the guy with the eight
gold medals was there, as part of his victory tour. Everybody was
having a cool time, and somebody clicked him. It almost doesn't
matter what he was doing specifically with his pulmonary system. The
important thing was how it looked.

I once heard of a guy who went to college in England where all those
naughty students were inhaling marijuana. He personally never
inhaled, he maintained. People snickered behind his back, and still do.

Phelps has not denied or confirmed anything. He has instead
apologized for setting a bad example, which it most certainly was. No
matter how many people defend marijuana and extol decriminalizing it,
there are studies that say the stuff is bad for important functions
like reasoning, and can lead to worse abuses.

The swimming federation and Kellogg have every right -- in fact, a
responsibility -- to punish Phelps. Other sponsors may follow suit,
which will cut into his endorsement swag, estimated at perhaps $100
million over the course of his life.

Figures like that used to sound like a lot of money, but in these
Madoffian times $100 million sounds like a mere end-of-year bonus for
a captain of industry who has taken his corporation down: a corporate
jet and new plumbing, maybe. But to Phelps it probably seemed like a
lot of money, now somewhat less.

In this plummeting economy, Kellogg could probably do better than
shovel money at a callow swimmer. Maybe Kellogg exercised prudence
because the money was not easy-come-easy-go tax money but real money,
their money.

Companies say endorsements are a sound business practice: branding,
advertising, whatever. For example, the folks from Citigroup, while
accepting my tax money and your tax money, are shoveling $400 million
to the Mets over the next 20 years for naming rights to their new
ballpark. So our money will indirectly help pay the exorbitant
contract of second baseman Luis Castillo and other disasters.

At any rate, Phelps was probably making way too much money. He's
lucky his fingertips had better mojo than the fingertips of that
Serbian-American swimmer who finished second in the 100-meter
butterfly. Wonder if what's-his-name has been to any good parties at
the University of South Carolina lately?

The wonder is why we make so much of Phelps and guys who dunk
basketballs and women who whack tennis balls. Once all the decimal
points were up on the scoreboard in Beijing, and somebody handed
Phelps a towel, he became a rather ordinary gangly American youth.
There was almost no trace of education from the University of
Michigan, where Phelps had spent several years training, and his
instincts seemed to lean more to house parties than to the classroom.

Like it or not, by winning eight gold medals in Beijing, Phelps
automatically became a role model by virtue of being sent out there
as a highly paid spokesman for multinational corporations. We like
our sporting heroes to be perfect, but it's hard to be perfect in the
24-hour electronic buzz where everybody is a blogger and has a
cellphone camera within reach.

Phelps wandered into a party and trusted that nothing bad could
possibly happen to him among his new chums. What's the penalty for
being dopey? Not suspension, that's for sure. The penalty should have
been: Go out there and swim, ya big lug ya. The chlorine is good for you.