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No more second chances

Got a rap sheet, a pending murder trial, or been caught smoking crack with a hooker?

If so, then how about a job playing football, basketball, hockey or baseball?

The actions of professional athletes during the past year is down right embarrassing to anyone who listens to Dan Patrick and Kenny Mayne more than their professors.

It seems a prerequisite for being drafted nowadays is that you must have a drug habit, committed a felony or are close personal friends with a killer.

The classic example of an athlete's fall from grace is Kevin Stevens of the New York Rangers. Two weeks ago, Stevens was arrested for smoking crack with a prostitute in a St. Louis hotel room.

While Stevens was sucking the glass pipe, his wife was struggling through the final month of her pregnancy, the couple's third child.

Stevens might be a tough guy on the ice but he is the most despicable excuse for a human being off it that could ever be conceived.

His prostitute, Pamela Velia, described Stevens as a "crack monster." She told Sports Illustrated that Stevens was taking seven to eight hits of crack to Velia's one.

A "crack monster" is probably the most fitting description Stevens has ever gotten.

Yes, Stevens is a crack head, but more than anything, he is an athlete who doesn't deserve a second chance.

Instead of sending him to some elegant rehabilitation center for the rich, the NHL should drop him off in Siberia and tell him to have a nice life.

Some will say Stevens deserves a second chance. That is fine, but make him get a real job making 10 bucks-an-hour like a normal person. How does that sound for a second chance? Why is it that high profile athletes get second, third and fourth chances?

How is it that Lawrence Taylor can get caught with cocaine and crack numerous times but never serve time?

Should Leonard Little of the St. Louis Rams have received a Super Bowl ring this year after killing a woman in a DWI accident in 1998?

No, he should be in jail, along with Carolina Panthers wide receiver Rae Carruth and Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis.

Both Carruth and Lewis have done wonders to the NFL's image during the last two months by both being charged with murder. Lewis has been charged with the stabbing of two men after the Super Bowl and fleeing the scene in a stretch Lincoln Navigator limousine.

Though Lewis may be innocent, he was still with the killers and that makes him an accomplice. You would think that their free college education would teach them something.

Carruth's case is much worse though, as he was the mastermind behind the crime in which two of his associates shot and killed his pregnant girlfriend. Carruth faces the death penalty if convicted.

People like Carruth and Lewis do not deserve second chances in the athletic realm.

League commissioners should no longer tolerate this kind of behavior and need to start banishing players like this.

How many Steve Howes or Orenthal Simpsons are out there?

There is no need to find out.