Please Help Find a Cure for Stupidity

We should all go to the doctor’s office and get our shots because there’s an epidemic of dumb in the land.

A dozen world-class athletes have testified to a grand jury investigating the creation and sale of illegal steroids. Their defense against suspicion that they juiced up seems to be, “All I know is, they told me to use it, it was OK.” Dumb.

Tampa Bay defensive tackle Warren Sapp, clearly suffering from the dumb bug, described the NFL as a 21st century plantation system. Dumber.

Though no one knows where the outbreak originated -- one suspects the bug was hatched in ESPN headquarters and sent over the airwaves during a Cold Pizza segment -- its effects have been felt nationwide.

As the Raiders’ coach, Bill Callahan, faced the press to explain one more in the series of Oakland calamities, this one a 22-8 loss to the Broncos, he first honored the rules of CoachSpeak. He gave credit to the opposition, a fine, fine football team.

But circumspection and tact can survive only so long in the bitter acid of continuing defeat. The more Callahan spoke of his team’s mistakes, two of which kept alive Broncos’ touchdown drives, the angrier he became. “If we don’t learn how to not beat ourselves,” he said, “we won’t win again. We won’t win for a long time.” Pause, then: “We’ve got to be the dumbest team in America, in terms of playing the game.” Dumb team, maybe. Many are.

Dumb thing to say, certainly -- unless you have a limousine and private jet with the engines idling, waiting to take you far, far away from the throat-throttling grasp of Raider owner Al Davis, a man who is many things, none of them dumb.

Later, evidence of the dumb bug’s ubiquity came in The Oregonian, a newspaper published thousands of miles from Warren Sapp, hundreds of miles north of Oakland.

In Portland, the Blazers’ world-class underachiever and power forward Rasheed Wallace sat for an interview with his hometown newspaper. He told Oregonian reporter Geoffrey C. Arnold, that he, Wallace, a wise man, sees through the economic strategy employed by the NBA’s owners, general managers and commissioner.

Using words normally counted as racial epithets and here rephrased inside parentheses, Wallace told Arnold, “I ain’t no (unknowing African-American) out here. I’m not like a whole bunch of these young boys out here who get caught up and captivated into the league. No. I see behind the lines. I see behind the false screens. I know what this business is all about. I know the commissioner of this league makes more than three-quarters of the players in this league.” Yes, Wallace, 29 and a wise man, understands and deplores the NBA’s strategy of exploitation.

“In my opinion, they just want to draft (African-Americans) who are dumb and dumber -- straight out of high school. That’s why they’re drafting all these high school cats, because they come into the league and they don’t know no better.”

There is, apparently, much to learn from Rasheed Wallace. Earlier this season, he said he paid no attention to trade rumors. “As long as somebody ‘CTC,’ at the end of the day I’m with them,” he said.

Pause, then: “For all you that don’t know what CTC means, that’s ‘Cut the Check.’ ”

Here it’s time to say that I, too, must have been bitten by the dumb bug.

Because I just don’t understand the wise man’s thinking.

Most financial accountings show that folks who have CTC for Rasheed Wallace will have CTC for $17 million this season and $80 million over the last six. In that time, he has devolved from a possible superstar to a veritable pariah. He has helped his team win nothing. His famously outrageous on-court conduct has been at best a dispiriting distraction and at worst self-indulgence running to self-destruction.

If $80 million for that is exploitation, there’s only one thing to say: Exploit me, please.

Incidentally, Sapp, Callahan and Wallace are only the latest victims of dumb, nowhere near the greatest, my own favorite being a college sophomore of a few years ago, an ACC basketball star to be.

His academic adviser told how she tried to prepare him for a geography test. “I said, ‘With what country do we share a border to the south?’ “He didn’t say a word. He just sat there, staring at me. I thought he was joking. I repeated, ‘With what country do we share a border to the south?’ “He said, ‘Spain?’ “I said, ‘No, Spain’s in Europe. But Spain does share a common language with the country to our south. Try again.’

“This time he said, ‘Cuba?’ I said, ‘No, but you’re getting closer.’ I could not drag Mexico out of him. I finally said, ‘Does Mexico sound familiar to you?’ He said no.

“Then I went for Canada, ‘a country to our north.’ He said France. I went for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. He didn’t know where either of them was.”

She sighed. “Here was a college student who couldn’t place his continent on the globe.” The poor guy played two NBA seasons. Wasn’t exploited for a dime, let alone $80 million.