Finally, a brutally tough punishment for DUI in professional sports. No, not from the NFL, or the NBA, or Major League Baseball. It came from USA Swimming on Monday when that outfit suspended 22-time Olympic medalist Michael Phelps for six months and decided the world's most decorated swimmer cannot represent the United States in the world championships 10 months from now.
A punishment of this severity is eye-popping and long overdue for the crime of DUI, which doesn't have to hurt anyone to be treated as the abomination it is. And I say that knowing, not officially but still knowing, that I've driven drunk. Probably more than once. In college? Definitely more than once. Never hit anyone, never got pulled over, never got punished, but it happened and it shouldn't have and if it happens again, some judge somewhere should throw the book at me and then when the book settles to the floor my bosses here at CBSSports.com should pick it up and wallop me over the head with it. Suspension, at the least. Because CBSSports.com should stand for something more noble than a vehicular game of Russian Roulette.
You know about that, right? Russian Roulette? Horrible "game" where some idiot puts a single bullet into a six-chamber revolver, spins the cylinder, puts the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Odds are, the idiot will survive in spite of himself. But he might not. And if he does it often enough, or if enough people do it at the same time, someone's going to die.
That's DUI -- do it often enough, and someone's going to die. Only it's so much worse than Russian Roulette, because the person who dies in that scenario is the one holding the gun, pulling the trigger, making the decision to risk everything. In DUI, the person who dies is way too often an innocent victim, whether it's the driver of another car or a passenger riding with the drunk driver. In 2012 there were 239 child passengers under 14 who died because of a DUI, and while 125 of those kids were passengers of the DUI driver, almost as many (114) were in the other car.
And that number, while staggeringly large -- 239 kids dead, 239 families torn apart -- doesn't do DUI justice. Maybe this does: Almost 30 people die each day in America because of a drunk driver. That's one every 51 minutes.
Michael Phelps didn't kill anyone, but not because he's no moron. He's a moron all right. He just didn't kill anyone, himself included, because he was lucky.
And so USA Swimming got it right by punishing the most famous swimmer in the world, one of the few in that sport who move the needle -- quick, name another active swimmer -- so severely he will miss the biggest event on the swimming calendar in 2015. The FINA World Championships? That's as big as it gets in a non-Olympic year, and (for most swimmers) a necessary event to gauge the competition, and themselves, for the 2016 Olympics. It's possible that USA Swimming didn't just remove Michael Phelps from the 2015 World Championships.
It's possible USA Swimming just ended his career.
Would you weep for Phelps? Not me. Weep for the estimated 10,000 people who will die this year in a DUI crash, or the close to 290,000 who will be injured. According to National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics trumpeted by MADD, nearly 67 percent of the U.S. population will be in a DUI crash at some point in their lifetime. I'm writing this story. You're reading it. Think about your favorite person in the world. Of the three of us, two will be involved in a crash with a drunk driver.
Maybe one of us will be the drunk driver. There's no excuse for any of us -- not me in college, not you tonight -- but for a guy like Michael Phelps to make such a selfish choice feels even worse. Is it worse? You decide. But it feels worse to me because Phelps and other highly paid professional athletes -- more than 200 NFL players have been arrested on charges of DUI since 2000 -- have resources that you and I do not. Again, there's no excuse for drunk driving from any of us. But when you're Michael Phelps and your net worth is estimated at $55 million, how on earth do you show up for a dinner or a party or even a night of getting wasted without having a backup plan in place? Cab, private car, whatever. You can afford it, moron!
That's a decision that can't be made while drunk, of course. Again, zero excuse for drunken driving, but the time to have a plan isn't after the fifth beer. It's before the first. We get dumber with every beer we drink, but for lots of us it's worse than just dumb. It's invincible. Too drunk to drive? Me? Hell, I can turn this garbage can upside down -- whoops, didn't realize it was full, haha -- and jump on top of it. Could a drunk person do that? Gimme my keys, weenie. Oh, right. They're in my pocket. Haha. Who's got shotgun? I feel like Waffle House!
If Michael Phelps were an NFL player, he'd be on the field this week. To be fair to the NFL, its flaccid policy on DUI convictions is changing. To be fair to the truth, the NFL has taken way too long to get anything remotely close to serious with an offense so deadly. Starting in November a first-time DUI offender will face a two-game suspension without pay. Not sure that's enough, but it's a whole lot more than what the NBA does to DUI offenders, which is typically a two-game suspension. Two NFL games in a 16-game season? That's the equivalent to 10 NBA games. Major League Baseball routinely hasn't suspended players for DUI at all.
By treating Michael Phelps so severely, USA Swimming made a statement.
Everyone listening?
