Mike Celizic

Getting old stinks, and I highly advise any of you reading this who are considering aging to put the thought out of your minds. If you’re 21, you’re old enough. Just do yourself a favor and stay there.

If you don’t take this simple advice, you’re going to wake up one day all confused because something that used to be one thing is now another. Like Pluto won’t be a planet anymore. And making fuel out of corn isn’t as good idea as they told you it was in school.

Take the concept of a posse. When I was a kid, a posse was a group of guys who helped the sheriff catch the bad guys. So when I heard that Pacman Jones had been out with his posse again, I was shocked to learn that they weren’t out chasing bad guys. They were the bad guys.

This is unfortunate, and I wish he’d call the gang he hangs with something else that’s a little more descriptive of what their function actually is.

I’d suggest mafia, but that’s already taken, and calling them thugs gives a bad name to thugs.

Their main purpose seems to be to go to strip clubs with Jones, get into an argument with somebody at around 3 or 4 in the morning, then shoot them. It happened in Las Vegas during the NBA All-Star break. It happened again a couple of days ago in Atlanta. It’s too bad we no longer have a military draft, because these guys would be great in Baghdad or Afghanistan.

But I digress. The problem here is that Pacman has a serious strip club problem that he needs to address. Although he wasn’t involved in the shooting, which was a car-to-car exchange, his posse was. And, for the 11th time in about a year, he’s been called in for questioning by the police. Added to his five arrests — he hasn’t been convicted — and he’s spending more time with the nation’s law-enforcement officials than he is with his NFL team, the Titans.

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NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has already suspended Pacman for a year for his accumulated sins against civilized behavior. And the defensive back has promised to mend his ways and be a good citizen and try to avoid his regular meetings with the gendarmerie. He’s not being charged in the Atlanta shooting, but the whole thing started with his posse in a strip club.

He’s not the only athlete who’s had similar problems. And somebody suggested to me that Goodell ought to ban players from going to strip clubs — or any clubs, for that matter. It would be sort of like a contractual ban on riding a motorcycle or sky-diving or alligator-wrestling, designed to keep players from doing dangerous things.

That seemed unreasonable to me. After all, a lot of players go clubbing, and only a few end up on a police report. Besides, how are you going to define a club? Does that mean you can’t go to the Elks? Or your neighborhood bar?

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Does it mean that some social establishments are OK and others aren’t?

And if you ban clubs, what else do you have to ban? Women? Beer?

Motorcycles? No dog fights? That would seem to be obvious, but we’ve seen that it’s harder for some to get a handle on than others.

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