OTIS MY MAN

There was quite a lot of activity on the sportscrime wire this week—from institutional rape at CU (will NATO invade, as it did with the Serbs?) to tears at the Jayson Williams trial to the Clark Haggans extreme DUI—but from the point of view of The BEAST, the matter that first commands our solemn sympathy is the fate of Otis Nixon. The ex-speedster of Atlanta Braves fame has been arrested again; he is beginning to become one of the country's foremost public reminders that rehab does not always work.

Otis Nixon is, in a tragic way, a national sportscrime treasure. He is like the very old man in the tribe who has survived it all, from Little Bighorn to the Depression, and hands down the history of the clan through tales whispered at night by the fireside.

Consider this: way back in 1986, Otis Nixon lived in the same Cleveland condominium complex as Cleveland Browns safety Don Rogers, the NFL's defensive Rookie of the Year in 1984. In 1986, Rogers died of a cocaine overdose. Along with Lenny Bias, his death marked the beginning of the end for the Dave Parker/Keith Hernandez/Pirate Parrot golden era of sports cocaine use, when everybody was doing it and nobody worried about dying. The deaths of Bias and Rogers were cocaine's "Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia"—it has been a stigma and a "problem" ever since. And Otis Nixon was right there the day Rogers died, almost certainly lying through his teeth when he told reporters:

"I've always known him as straight," Nixon said. "I would have no idea of him doing drugs…if it was drugs, I would think it was a first-time thing, like Lenny Bias."

A year later, Nixon himself was busted for cocaine use while playing for the Indians' triple-A club, the Buffalo Bisons. Apparently he was acting crazy at a nightclub. He went into a 28-day program and spent the next three years in and out of rehab centers in Buffalo, Toronto and Cleveland. His approach to rehab was to limit his partying to heavy drinking at the same clubs where he was doing coke. It didn't work. Eventually, in a move that would have fateful repercussions, Nixon was traded to the Braves, where he became a star centerfielder. But in 1992, toward the end of the best season of his career, Nixon went on a coke binge, completely losing his head ("I didn't have control over anything, even what I was wearing," he would later say), and ended up becoming the first major-sports athlete to miss a championship (the '92 series) due to a drug suspension.

Nixon's cruel misfortune was to play in the city that was the home of Coca-Cola. After '92, fans flashed Coke signs at him everywhere he went. From the stands he would hear people shouting at him not to sniff up the foul lines. Worse still, he was fighting off an immensely popular local athlete behind him in centerfield—Deion Sanders. Nixon's lapses were ultimately what would allow Sanders to become the first athlete to win a Super Bowl and a World Series.

After '92, stories about the "new," clean Nixon became popular in the sporting press. He would tell reporters about his Woody-in-Annie Hall experience the first time he tried cocaine as a college freshman in tiny Evergreen, NC ( "I blew all of it off the table," he said. "The people around me went berserk") and plug the anti-drug movie he'd made as a condition of his sentence, Strikeout.

Meanwhile he began bouncing from team to team around the league, with "chemistry" questions always trailing him in his wake. At one point, in the kind of poetic detail that would escape all but the most accomplished fiction artist, he was traded from Boston to Texas for Jose Canseco—the two great baseball pioneers of two different illicit drugs passing like ships in the night.

Eventually his career petered out quietly, reaching one more milestone when at the age of 39 in 1998 he became the oldest everyday center fielder in the modern era. By the time he retired, Nixon—who even as a young man had looked ancient—appeared to be about 90 years-old. We didn't hear much from him in the intervening years; he would pop up in Greenville, SC, coaching baserunning to Braves' minor leaguers, and would appear in the pages of Boston newspapers five times each April as Red Sox writers noted that they had not had a baserunning threat since Otis in 1994. But that was about it.

Until recently. This past January, Nixon was arrested for threatening his bodyguard, Kevin Brown, with a knife while standing naked in his motel room in a state of obvious derangement. When police arrived, Nixon was still naked. His explanation for why he was naked was that he was waiting for a girlfriend. And now... this week, Nixon was arrested for misdemeanor sexual battery after a woman visiting a "gathering" at his Atlanta home at 3:30 in the afternoon told police that she had been improperly fondled. The former center fielder was arrested and freed on $1000 bond.

LOOSE ENDS

The NFL offseason is getting shorter and shorter every year. It's actually almost nonexistent. Think about it: you have the inevitable Indianapolis Colts collapse in January, the Super Bowl nightclub-brawl indictments in early February, and then in the first week of March, you have free agency already. In the interim period, you have all those past arrests of all of those high-profile college players at the combine to sift through (Lee Evans? Cedric Cobbs?)—as well as the related debate as to the relationship between a college athlete's 40 time and his criminal history. Does a 4.37 cancel out forcible sodomy? What does a 4.55 do for three counts of false imprisonment and a DUI? Do 41 reps on the bench press count as community service? This debate will likely rage for decades, with no clear resolution.

In any case, the constant hullabaloo leaves little time for the tying up of the judicial loose ends from cases filed during the season. The deadest that the NFL gets is actually right now, in the few short weeks between the combine in Indianapolis and free agency. (There are some that believe the true dead season is the six weeks or so between mini-camp and training camp, but this period—in which rookies get to test drive their new money for the first time—is generally the densest arrest period in the season). Therefore this is usually the time for ugly court incidents to be quietly disposed of.

Two players with nasty issues hanging over their heads took steps toward cleaning their judicial slates last week: Atlanta Falcons cornerback Juran Bolden, and Cleveland Browns running back William Green. Green served his three-day jail sentence for a DUI from last fall. Cleveland police captain Guy Turner said that Green would be treated like any other prisoner, "except that we're going to be real careful about who his cellmate is."

Bolden, meanwhile, was formally indicted on marijuana and stolen car charges. The stolen car business, which NYSX readers may recall from the late fall, still remains a mystery. Bolden was pulled over by police and found to be driving a stolen Denali. Bolden claims he "paid $10,000 down" for the car and had no idea it was stolen. He also claims the marijuana they found in the car wasn't his. We're inclined to believe him. "I'm just going to let everything go through my lawyer," Bolden said. "I'm not going to let it get me down."

Bolden, like Pittsburgh linebacker Clark Haggans (who scored an impressive .024 blood alcohol rating in a DUI this week), becomes a free agent in a few weeks. The good press should really help him out. Bolden, incidentally, is one of the biggest corners in football, and had a great close to the season.