The Worst Week in Sports ever?

Jokes about Alexi Yashin returning to Russia aside, this really was a horrible week for sports - perhaps the worst in history.

A look at the headlines will make you absolutely cringe. If you turned on SportsCenter last week, you would have been lucky to find any talk of actual sports.

For a while there it seemed impossible that a story could possibly upstage the Michael Vick indictment, but by last Friday a story emerged from the NBA that may well end up being the biggest sports gambling scandal since the Black Sox in 1919. In case you haven't yet heard, the FBI is currently investigating allegations that NBA referree Tim Donaghy bet on games (including those he officiated) over the past two seasons. Donaghy allegedly was approached by "low-level mob associates" after getting into some gambling-related financial problems. This story is about as bad as it gets for the NBA. For any of you hockey sports fans, think back to the Rick Tocchet saga and multiply it by about a thousand. The whole integrity of the NBA is now question and this will be extremely difficult to recover from.

Then we have Michael Vick, one of the biggest faces of the NFL. He represented the Falcons and the league not only on the field but also in commercials for some of the most prominent brand names in the world - Nike, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc. And now on the day that his team starts training camp, Vick will be appearing in court to answer to multiple dog fighting charges. Yet to just call this a dog fighting case is to completely understate what really happened -- on top of the dog fighting and cross state illegal gambling, a multitude of dogs were allegedly brutally killed by Vick and his associates.

Moving to Major League Baseball we have Barry Bonds, a player who is just two home runs away from the all time home run record -- one of the greatest records in sports history. And while he sits two shy of 755, the FBI has extended the grand jury for another six months on the charges of perjury stemming from the 2003 BALCO case. On top of that, baseball's commissioner is doing everything he can to distance himself from Bonds, mostly because Bonds is about to top this hallowed record as a result of pumping himself full of steroids to do so.

The NHL hasn't escaped unscathed either. Jim Balsillie, one of the founders of RIM, the company that invented the Blackberry is accusing commissioner Gary Bettman of interfering with their dealings with Craig Leipold, the owner of the Nashville Predators regarding the sale of the team. Jim would plan to move the team to Hamilton, Ontario which goes against Bettman's plans of expanding the league throughout the US, including teams in Kansas City and Las Vegas. So Bettman is blocking him. Can you say collusion?

There were other scandals as well that normally would have gotten a whole lot more play but simply got buried. Those include possible steroid abuse in the PGA of all places, further reports on the Chris Benoit murder/suicide deal showing he drugged his kid before he killed him, more positive doping results in the Tour de France, reports that McLaren has stolen the plans from Ferrari on their Formula One race cars, and Chile's under-20 National soccer team got into a post-game brawl with Toronto police.

This all makes it so I can't wait for my daughter's soccer season starts up next week. At least the biggest issue there is whether the halftime snack is going to be oranges or bananas...