Michael Ventre

For a while there, I considered going to law school. I’m glad I didn’t. It wasn’t because of the usual lawyer-bashing reasons, either. It just seemed like most of the people I knew who went into law got buried.

If I tried to call a lawyer pal to say, “Hey, let’s go have a beer after work,” he would reply with something like, “After work?!” Clearly, there’s never any “after work” when you’re an attorney. There’s always work.

The days lead into weeks, which lead into months, then years. But the piles of papers on the desks of lawyers never seem to get smaller. They stay at the office until late at night, eat take-out, getting a few hours of sleep, and then wake up early to return to the office. If they keep it up for 20 or 30 years, they might make partner.

In my law fantasies, I imagined myself as a champion of the downtrodden, not a storage facility for folders and documents. I wanted to debate the law, not argue over which copy machine at Kinko’s is best.

Fortunately, myself and other armchair legal eagles now have a place in which to indulge our enthusiasm for the law without having to deal with the expense and inconvenience of all that study and work:

The world of sports.

At some point in recent years the thin line between Barry Bonds and Nancy Grace got a lot thinner. An episode of “Law and Order” is now almost indistinguishable from “SportsCenter.” Many of the front-office experts in charge of scrutinizing contract extensions are now doing the same for indictments.

It takes a keen legal mind to keep up. In many cases, the average schmoe embedded in his sofa cushions glued to the tube while chomping on a slice of pizza with extra meat and moving only when nature insists is just as capable of providing legal analysis as some of the talking heads who have turned the legal perils of athletes into a cottage industry for themselves.

Seriously.

Think about it. You, the party of the first part, shall be considered an authority on many of the cases that arise because, while you don’t have a law degree, you listen to and absorb the opinions of many who do. These days, you can’t avoid it.

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Take the Michael Vick case. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not brilliant, although I’m perfectly willing to debate anyone who disagrees. Yet I knew exactly what was going to happen. Vick will have to plea bargain, because the feds obviously have him dead to rights.

It wasn’t a difficult case to analyze. The indictment was posted online. Federal prosecutors have a 95 percent success rate. They don’t indict unless they’re sure they can win.

There were three witnesses ready to testify against Vick. And you just knew that Vick’s co-defendants would flip, one by one, as the sobering punishment scenarios were laid out to them. If Sammy “The Bull” Gravano was ready to risk his life to rat on John Gotti, then it wasn’t a stretch to guess that Tony Taylor would turn on Vick.

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With all that working against him, it became a business deal, with the federal government holding all the leverage. Vick has little choice but to give in.

See? That was easy. I didn’t have to deal with a pesky bar exam to assess that situation. There’s just so much legal theory being discussed in the sports forum these days that I could probably get accepted to any law school in the land merely by scribbling across the top of my application, “I follow sports.”

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