Playing dirty

By DAVID GREEN

Get ready for two weeks of Super Bowls -- the National Football League's version of it this week, and the NASCAR race often compared to it the week following.

Just how the two events stack up against each other is strictly a matter of individual tastes. In this writer's humble opinion, the Great American Race has not yet reached the mainstream iconic status of the football game, and may never do so.

But that's not the subject at hand. Rather, let's discuss an aspect of the game that is comparable to the race with regard to competition and the actual conduct of the contest.

Specifically, let's talk about dirty play.

New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Gregg Williams raised some eyebrows last week by chuckling about how his team had been able to render quarterbacks Brett Favre of the Minnesota Vikings and, the week before, Kurt Warner of the Arizona Cardinals ineffective by knocking them senseless -- and by annoucing they intend to do the same thing to the Indianapolis Colts' Peyton Manning this Sunday.

Colts players, publicly, are downplaying the "threat." Left guard Ryan Lilja told the Associated Press, "The teams in our division go out and draft guys for that reason. You hear rumors about bounties and that kind of stuff, so it's nothing new."

Now, my football bona fides are lacking. I attended a high school (Heath, in West Paducah, Ky.) that, like many small schools in the commonwealth, did not have a football program until 1969, when I was a senior. Many small schools in Kentucky still don't have football. In consolidation-crazy Kentucky, small high schools are an endangered species, but that's an argument for a different forum and another day.

I'm not entirely sans knowledge of the game, however, nor of sports in general. I know all about "goon squads" and "hatchet men" and that sort of thing.

But I'm offended by the blatant acknowledgement of cheap-shot brutality as a part of someone's game plan.

To tie this discussion to racing, I'm offended by the notion that it's perfectly acceptable, if you can't beat someone, to beat them up.

Auto racing -- not so much in the high-dollar professional ranks these days, but historically -- has been a sport where the best drivers want to beat the best. The stories about race teams helping each other with parts, labor, even financial assistance are not myths. I know first-hand about guys working like crazy to help each other before the race, and then racing each other like crazy once the green flag drops.

Sometimes you race each other so hard that one or both of you winds up wrecked. But it has never been generally accepted that deliberately wrecking somebody is acceptable. There's no honor in winning because you wrecked everybody else. That's the essence of the negative side of the legendary Dale Earnhardt and the source of much rejection of Formula One's Michael Schumacher.

But even Earnhardt and Schumacher never bragged about the dirty deeds they were accused of doing, no matter how plain it may have seemed that they were guilty.

I have no problem with the Saints doing their best to get to Manning this Sunday. I have no problem with legitimate hits on the former Tennessee quarterback considered by many to be the best ever. I don't even have any problem with mind games driven by on-the-field trash talk, as long as the hits are clean.

But I hope purposeful, malicious strategies don't ever become widely accepted in any realm other than national defense.