Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Leon Lett has been suspended for a year without pay, after testing positive for cocaine in the last week of November. Lett is best remembered for fumbling his own fumble recovery while strutting into the end zone in the fourth quarter of Dallas’s blowout of Buffalo in the 1993 Super Bowl. In a similar fit of ostentation, he took a page out of the O. J. Simpson defense the garbage-in-garbage-out, cesspool-of-contamination, if- it-doesn’t-fit-you-must-acquit page. He argued that he shouldn’t be suspended because NFL examiners had broken the “chain of custody” (a Johnnie Cochran- esque defense-lawyering turn of phrase) during the tests of Lett’s urine sample. With a straight face, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones denied for days that Lett had tested positive and supported Lett in his complaint. NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue has wisely rejected the appeal.
Let’s see if we get this straight. Lett, Jones, and the Cowboys think that the NFL, like Cochran’s LAPD, is little more than a nest of white supremacists on a mission to frame innocent football stars? We look forward to seeing this one in court.
