Loading ...You’ve probably never heard the name Susan Gutweiler. She was a St. Louis mother of two who lost one of her children in a car crash. Twenty years later, she lost her own life when a man ran a red light after a drunken night of celebrating his 24th birthday. Newsroom legend has it that when the crash happened, the man jumped out of his much more expensive ride and screamed “look what the bitch did to my car!”
That man served 90 days in jail plus community service for manslaughter. He said he was sorry. So sorry that just a few years later, police say they caught him going 23 miles per hour over the speed limit. He flunked the sobriety test and admitted he’d been drinking booze. And yet St. Louis Rams defensive end Leonard Little was found not guilty this time. He didn’t miss a snap in either case.
You’ve also probably never heard of Mario Reyes. He wasn’t one of the flashy club goers in Miami Beach. He was running to catch a bus after finishing an overnight shift as a crane operator. Reyes’ mistake is that he wasn’t in a crosswalk. Not that it would have made much of a difference to the drunk guy in the Bentley who plowed into him.
Donte Stallworth spent 30 days in jail and lost a year of football for killing that man. He is now reinstated in the game.
Drunk drivers are not unique to professional sports. Just look around and you’ll see one of those yellow Ohio license plates to tip you off about who has put lives at risk by getting drunk and getting behind the wheel of a car. The difference is that they got caught. For every one of those yellow plated cars, there are probably three or four more that should have them but don’t.
Rey Maualuga Apologized and Pleaded Guilty to DUI. He got a seven day suspended sentence, probation, and a $350 fine.
It was funny that Bengals linebacker Rey Maualuga was driving a 2003 Pontiac Sunfire the night he got busted for DUI last month. But the rest of the story is pathetic. Drunk drivers do not deserve sympathy. They can all afford a cab ride home. Especially when they earn several million dollars a year playing a game.
So many fans have wondered when elite athletes who get into trouble like this will start taking things seriously. Maualuga would appear to be listening. ESPN reports Maualuga will go into rehab later this month and spend at least 30 days at the Betty Ford clinic. Maybe he recognizes he got lucky hitting two parked cars and a parking meter in Covington last month instead of hitting another person. Maybe he recognizes he really has a problem after doing AA meetings his freshman year at USC. And maybe he doesn’t want to be like so many other Bengals players of the past few years who just couldn’t stay out of trouble.
Or maybe he recognizes that being a real man isn’t showing off how much you can drink. It’s knowing when you’ve had too much and need to stop before it kills you or someone else. This is Maualuga’s chance to make things right and to make sure his incredible talent doesn’t go to waste. Let’s hope it works. If it does, it will be his most important statistic.
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Or, he realizes that if he makes a good show of things, more people will forget about it and buy his jerseys. Drunk driving is usually caused by stupidity, not alcoholism. Yes, alcoholics drive drunk, but the majority of drunk drivers are just morons who drank too much, not people with an actual problem.
Checking himself into an expensive, luxury rehab like Betty Ford won’t help his stupidity. It will make him look better in the press and give him a nice luxury vacation though.