What in the wide, wide world of sports is happening?

Hey folks.

Seems like a simple enough greeting. I’ll try to keep my down-home charm to a minimum this year, but no promises.

As my good friend Chris Engel announced last night on the Basketblog, I will be taking the reigns from the irreplaceable Jon Hines this year as the men’s basketball columnist. The words will come as often as the news this winter, this I guarantee, but for now, you can find my musings in this space every Tuesday, rain or shine.

Today’s topic: Bud Mackey, man of the socks of legend and the shoes of crime.
The former IU recruit, highly touted after a state tournament run his junior year that saw the Scott County (Ky.) High School combo guard bring home a title and thrust himself onto the major college recruiting scene, pled guilty to first-degree possession of a controlled substance. Mackey, you’ll remember, was arrested last fall after tardiness from English class prompted school administrators to search for – and find – their roundball star with crack cocaine in his shoe (makes you think twice about skipping out on Shakespeare).

At the time, Mackey’s arrest was a black mark on the program, a small but colorful feather in the cap of those wishing to depose the sideline artist formerly known as Kelvin Sampson. His scholarship was soon withdrawn and his transgressions soon forgotten in the wave of phone records and firings that launched IU basketball back to the Stone Age.

Mackey’s story is awfully strange to consider now – serious though it may be – an afterthought in the mess of Sampson’s departure. And regardless of whatever camp in which you choose to align yourself regarding Mackey, it’s hard not to feel slightly sorry for the young man whose recommended sentence for his crimes was five years in jail with a minimum service of six months.

I’m not in any way condoning Mackey’s crimes. Crack cocaine is one of the most addictive and heinous drugs on the market, and while I do not agree with mandatory minimums – and that’s an argument for a different place in time – anyone who deals in its distribution in one way or another deserves swift punishment.

But it makes me sad to see someone with such potential fall from grace in such a grand way, and it’s even worse to see a teenager so soundly thrown from the wagon by a world that really never gave him a chance.

Call me a Mackey apologist, I don’t care. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, it is despicable the way we as a society treat high school and college athletes in money-driven sports like basketball and football. We use them, lose them and occasionally abuse them, all the while being careful never to see them through our fan-filtered lenses as anything more than statistics in uniform.

Bud Mackey will go to jail. Bud Mackey should go to jail. But Bud Mackey’s story will never be anything more than a cautionary tale of what not to do when you’re about to be given the world based purely on your skill with a basketball, and that makes me sad.

See you next Tuesday.