Not ready to forgive and forget

Marion Jones cried, and no one seemed to care. Certainly not the judge who gave her six months behind bars, or her former Olympic teammates who may lose their gold medals because of what she did.

Roger Clemens wants everyone to be outraged because, well, he’s Roger Clemens. We just want him to go away.

Michael Vick is away, serving a prison term that a lot of dog lovers think isn’t nearly long enough.

Barry Bonds could go away to prison tomorrow and few will be on the courthouse steps rallying in his support.

We’re just not in a forgiving mood these days, and it’s not hard to figure out why.

We’re sick of cheats. We’re sick of liars. We’re sick of arrogant millionaires who think that just because they were born with good genes they are somehow better than the people who go to work eight hours a day and hope they can earn enough money to watch them play.

We’re sick of it all because it all never seems to end.

This was supposed to be one of those weeks in sports that make us remember why we love the games so much. There was a bit of everything, from the college football championship to the Hall of Fame vote, bookended by some enticing and potentially historic NFL playoff games.

But when sports historians go back to the second week of January 2008 what will they find? Shame and hypocrisy, not to mention another O.J. jailing.

Clemens and his bizarre news conference put a damper on the BCS championship game, then overshadowed Goose Gossage and the Hall of Fame vote the next day. The news that Vick was entering a drug program that might lead to his early release competed with the attention focused on the NFL playoffs.

Then Jones went before a federal judge and begged that she be kept out of prison for lying about steroids and being involved in a check-fraud scheme. The same superstar who was so convincing in her denials of steroid use was now trying to convince a judge to go easy on her.

It worked before. But it wasn’t going to work now.

“I ask you to be a merciful as a human being can be,” said Jones, who gave new meaning to throwing herself on the mercy of the court.

Give Jones some credit. She stood outside the courthouse afterward, said she respected the judge’s decision and allowed as how she hoped others would learn from her multitude of mistakes.

It was the same kind of performance Vick gave when he, too, was finally cornered, though with Jones you got the feeling that it was a bit more sincere.

And it was certainly far more than anything you’ll hear from Bonds or Clemens, regardless of how much evidence piles up against them. They’re the privileged class, having learned from many years in baseball that they can do anything or say anything they want and fans will still love them for what they do on the field.

That might be changing, if only because we’ve had it with so many athletes being busted that Nike may soon be making uniforms for entire prisons. We’re tired of the messes they get themselves in, tired of the excuses they make, tired of the lies they weave.

Watching Clemens this week stomping out of a news conference when the questioning started to get tough reminded me not just of Bonds, but of Pete Rose, whose arrogance was such that he thought he could not only lie his way back into baseball but into the Hall of Fame.

The game’s most prolific hitter will probably never get to the hall, and now neither might Clemens, one of baseball’s greatest pitchers. Mark McGwire broke the single-season home run record and has no chance of induction, and it’s hard to make a case for the career home run leader, especially if he goes to prison.

So now it becomes not just a case of athletes letting us down. They’re damaging the sports we once held sacred.

The Hall of Fame as an institution has been diminished by liars and cheats, just as the Olympics get more suspect with the news that the star of the 2000 Sydney Games was just as juiced as Ben Johnson when he won the 100 in Seoul. Tennis is fighting rumors that the fix is sometimes in, and even gentleman – and lady – golfers will soon have to undergo the indignity of drug testing.

There’s a cheater coaching the best team in the NFL, a cheating referee going to prison for what he did in the NBA, and a whole bunch of cheaters playing football for Florida State.

As Jones and Clemens found out this week, our reservoir of forgiveness has dried up. No one gets the benefit of the doubt anymore, and we just presume guilt.

After yet another sordid week in sports, can you really blame us?