JOE THEISMANN: THE WORLD'S OLDEST AGING ADOLESCENT

It's safe to say that Ricky Williams hasn't disgraced the game of football any more than Joe Theismann has disgraced the whole of Western Civilization over, lo, these past 56 years. Take your pick:

• When he changed the pronunciation of his name in his senior year at Notre Dame so it rhymed with "Heisman" -- which by the way, he didn't win that year.
• His entire football career, which was basically a 15-year audition for a broadcasting career;
• Named his son after him and then had the chickens come home to roost when the chip off the ol' block became a druggie;
• His "acting" in Cannonball Run II;
• The time he said, "A genius doesn't exist in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."
• Well, come to think of it, pretty much any time he's opened his mouth in the last 35 years.

Theismann, whose broadcasting persona makes him a perennial candidate for "World's Oldest Aging Adolescent, Non-Hugh Hefner/George W. Bush Category," ripped into the Toronto Argonauts today for signing Ricky Williams.

There's a pretty good explanation for why Argos signing Williams, with his accompanying baggage of positive drug tests, apparently stuck in Theismann's craw.

As Deadspin noted, in 2003, Theismann's son, also named Joe, was convicted of dealing cocaine and possessing drug paraphernalia. At the risk of piling on, this smacks of 1) lousy parenting by the World's Oldest Aging Adolescent and 2) Daddy using his money and fame to keep his screw-up of a son out of jail; knowing what we do about jurisprudence in North America, it's obvious tht race, class and privilege probably helped Joe Jr. get off with only a 10-year suspended sentence, five years' probation and a $2,500 US fine.

Theismann Sr.'s style of coping is to take it out on Williams and his former team in interviews with ESPN Radio and The Fan 590 in Toronto: "Listen, we have rules in the National Football League. It's real simple. Don't do drugs and you can play."

Don't do drugs? Bollocks. Williams smoked marijuana. Thirty-three years after North Dallas Forty was published, does anyone really buy that marijuana is the most insidious drug plaguing the NFL? Over-the-counter painkillers such as Demerol -- coincidentally legal drugs, taxed drugs -- are rampant in the NFL, and all of them have probably have more potential to ruin someone's life than marijuana. Yet no team leaves home without them -- someone once said that if it weren't for painkillers, a team would probably need a 150-player roster to get through a season.

Last December, Theismann broadcast a Sunday-night game between my Vikings and the Baltimore Ravens, who have a running back, Jamal Lewis, who spent four months in jail after being convicted of taking part in a drug deal. (Lewis' subsequent punishment by the NFL: A two-game suspension.)

Did Theismann say anything that night about how Lewis "didn't deserve to play football"? Not that I recall. Not only would he have looked like a massive hypocrite for doing so considering his own son's problems, but he was probably far too busy verbally fellating Kyle Boller.

As for booze, there is a player on the St. Louis Rams, Leonard Little, who lives with the reality that one night eight years ago, he got drunk, made a horrible decision to drive and plowed into another driver, killing her and landing himself a jail sentence.

Little was allowed to return to the NFL as he put his life back together, as well he should have. Still, if Theismann believes what he apparently does about Ricky Williams, he should have spoken up and taken a stand against Little's return to the fold, saying, as he did today of Williams, "To me, it's the wrong message to send to kids."

Joe Theismann is 56 going on 15 and needs to drink a big, tall glass of shut-the-hell-up.

In fairness, it's not Theismann's fault that all the cool nicknames for quarterbacks named Joe -- Namath was Joe Willie and then became Broadway Joe, while Montana was Joe Cool and Super Joe -- got pinned on far savvier players, leaving Theismann with the far less splendid sobriquet of Stupid Joe.

Some people could get past that, but it's apparently too much for the World's Oldest Aging Adolescent. You'd think having a Super Bowl ring, an ESPN gig and an eternal shelf life as a hilarious Simpsons reference would be enough for Theismann to achieve inner peace and not go around making an ass of himself, but hey, that's the World Oldest Aging Adolescent for ya.

Stupid Joe even said he was "embarrassed to have worn that 'A' on my helmet."

He shouldn't be. It was fitting, since in his case the 'A' stood for what he is as a person.

Here's a hint: it has seven letters.

OTHER BUSINESS

• I'm fully aware I come off as an Aging Adolescent there, but it doesn't count when you do it for comic and rhetorical effect. I was doing schtick! Schtick, I tell you!
• Within the past few days Damien Cox of the Toronto Star and Paul Friesen of the Winnipeg Sun have referred to Ricky Williams appearing in on the cover of Sports Illustrated wearing a wedding dress. Sorry, guys. Never happened. Williams has been an S.I. cover boy twice, once apiece as a Texas Longhorn and a New Orleans Saint, and each time he was wearing a football uniform. That wedding dress cover was for ESPN: The Magazine. Here's the picture right here. And here it is again, gracing this space on May 18.
• I wish I had a firm answer for how the Jays should have handled the middle-infield situation, which Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star believes was handled badly in the short term. This space noted last week that hindsight being 20/20, maybe it should have been Aaron Hill at shortstop and Adams at second base all along. Of course, I don't recall anyone -- certainly no newspaper columnists, anyway -- suggesting that in the off-season, even after Adams made 26 errors in his first full season last year.
  
  Bottom line, Adams was pressing, and needs to get straightened out in front of small, presumably more forgiving minor-league crowds. As for Hill, like I said before, putting him at shortstop beats whoever else the Jays have, save for letting Troy Glaus make the occasional start and then switching him back to third base in the late innings of close games.
• Batter's Box beat me to this but the nights Adams and Josh Towers had in Triple-A yesterday are interesting, to say the least. Towers allowed only two earned runs over seven innings, walking just one and allowing no home runs. Now the bad news: he gave up 11 hits, six runs in total, and took the loss in Syracuse's 8-4 setback against Indianapolis. Adams made his second error at his new position, second base, although he did go 3-for-5 with two triples.

That's all for now. Say a prayer for the Buffalo Sabres -- they're gonna need it.