This week's Sports at Large script

Here's the script from this week's Sports @ Large, which airs each Monday at 5:30 Eastern time on WYPR in Baltimore, with a re-air Tuesday morning during Maryland Morning. Please do enjoy!

The calendar says that we’ve officially turned the page from summer to autumn, and no one in the American sports culture should be happier to witness the passing of one season into another than Josh Howard. 

Chances are, unless you’re a big fan of Atlantic Coast Conference basketball that you really don’t know Josh Howard, and right about now, that’s not such a bad thing…for Howard. In college, Howard was a first team All-America at Wake Forest. In 2003, he led the Demon Deacons to their first regular season title in 41 years, and Howard became the first player in nearly 30 years to be selected unanimously as Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year. 

The 6-foot-5 forward was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks and by his second season, had moved into the starting lineup. Howard has become one of the most versatile players in the NBA. Last year, his fifth in the league, Howard posted career highs in scoring and rebounding and seemed on the short track to superstardom, or at least widespread adoration. 

Then came this summer, when Howard couldn’t seem to get out of the way of his own two feet. That is, when he wasn’t planting one of them in his mouth. First, Howard had the temerity to decline an invitation to tryout for the United States Olympic team, saying he had other things to do this summer. In hindsight, Howard really should have gone to China. 

If he had, Howard might not have been around to get arrested for drag racing and driving 94 miles an hour in a 55 miles an hour zone. That round of allegedly juvenile and potentially fatal behavior followed Howard’s decision to throw himself a birthday party in April. The problem with the timing of the party was that the Mavericks were in the middle of a playoff series, and had just lost the critical fourth game of said series. 

Of course, Howard’s timing might have been explained by a comment he made earlier in the series, when he told a radio interviewer that he occasionally smokes marijuana, and that pot consumption among NBA players was, shall we say, high. If you want to tell tales on yourself, go ahead, but Howard had no business throwing his fellow players under the bus, even if there were munchies behind the tires. 

Howard’s summer of self-destruction was capped last week, when a video of him slurring the Star Spangled Banner during a charity flag-football game surfaced on You Tube. Apparently unsolicited, Howard turned to a camera during the Allen Iverson sponsored event and proclaimed that he didn’t celebrate the National Anthem because quote I’m black unquote, as well as working in an insult of Barack Obama.

As a black man myself, I’m not sure precisely what to make of Josh Howard’s observations, except this: That anthem that he sneered at is the musical representation of the freedoms this country affords to its citizens. Among them are the rights to make millions of dollars playing a game, to behave boorishly to teammates and the public and to take a swipe at a song that salutes the free and the brave. Josh Howard may be one of those, but he certainly isn’t the other.