Former Giants/Cubs/Red Sox reliever Rod Beck passed away some 6 weeks ago, and while the circumstances surrounding his death have received some coverage the past few days, for the Starting Five’s dwil, it’s not nearly enough.
I don™t get the fact that Beck had been separated from his wife and children for three years, yet this fact remains little discussed in the context of his death. I also don™t get the relative silence that ensued for over a month after Beck™s death. I don™t get the tribute to Beck and his family at AT&T Park in San Francisco.I don™t get any of that because just two days ago, a scant five days after the AT&T Park tribute to the deceased reliever, the news finally came out in an Associated Press article that cocaine and cocaine paraphernalia were found in multiple rooms in Beck™s home.
Glass bowl pipes and torch lighters for¦. what? The AP writer couldn™t inform the public that these are œtools used for freebasing cocaine? And where is the follow-up story by national writers describing Beck as a casualty, as another in a long line of athletes who wasted away their talents in a haze of drug abuse? where is the œcautionary tale that was Rob Beck?
So, I turned to sports blogs. There are some linked to major news and sports media outlets that are fabled – by now – for their questionable ethics and the liberties they take with facts when it comes to reportage. They are all-too quick to demonize certain athletes and protect others. One of these sports blog spots site in particular also constantly plays the œbeat ESPN to the breaking news game. But, other than one report, they are tellingly silent in their apparent refusal to provide their usual scathing appraisal of Beck™s actions.
I don™t get that.
What I do get, though, is that Rod Beck, for whatever reason, has been afforded a pass relative to his athlete counterparts.
Though I kinda see where dwil is going with this — and I don’t think he’s out of line in the slightest — I do recall, very recently, the drunk driving fatality of Josh Hancock receiving plenty of play in the blogosphere.
I’ve not researched the matter nearly as heavily as dwil — more out of laziness than trying to cover up for Beck — but the only bloggy item on rock-loving Rod’s troubles that I’ve seen in the past few days came from Mr. Irrelevant’s Chris Mottram. That’s the same Chris who claims he’s been told that “liking Sushi makes me gayer than if I listened to Coldplay”, however, so perhaps I should look a little harder. Sushi loving straights and Coldplay hating homosexuals alike, I encourage you to ignore these hurtful words and join me in taking up a collection to purchase one of these for Chris. David Samson says it’s a top of the line device.