Basketball Star Wanted: Moral Code Not Required

Where was our vice president last week when the Lakers drafted Anthony Peeler, the University of Missouri guard who has been arrested twice in the last month on charges of assaulting women?

Last month, Dan Quayle said Murphy Brown’s decision to have a baby out of wedlock reflected a “poverty of values.”

But when it comes to a morality gap, prime time television can’t begin to compete with professional sports. In this country, we can forgive an athlete almost any transgression--especially violence against women--just as long as he keeps on winning. And as long as he keeps on winning, he can treat women like trash, because he’s a star. As soon as he stops generating dollars, though, he can take a flying leap.

That’s the bargain.

That’s the pity.

The Lakers may say they agonized over the decision to draft Peeler, but their actions speak volumes about what they expect from their players.

In the end, the Lakers picked Peeler in the first round despite the fact that he had been arrested May 30 and accused by a 20-year-old female acquaintance of biting her shoulder, her face, her lower lip and her abdomen before holding a gun to her head and refusing to let her move.

It does not seem to bother them that, after he was arrested, he protested his innocence: “I’ve been raised well enough not to do anything stupid like they said I did,” Peeler said. “I wouldn’t do it right before the draft. Anybody’s smart enough to know that.”

Nor was it a problem when, two weeks later, Peeler pleaded guilty to reduced charges in the case--one felony weapons charge and two misdemeanors related to the assault--and ended up with five years’ probation.

“Obviously, all those things concern you when you hear them like that,” said Lakers General Manager Jerry West. “We’re going to view him as a player whose future is ahead of him and whose past is behind him.”

That’s nice, except life doesn’t usually work out that way. Better they should look at Peeler as a confused but talented youngster who needs help learning how to deal with life before he can be expected to deal with the intense demands of stardom.

In the end, it doesn’t seem to matter to the teams how an accomplished player misbehaves in his spare time just as long as he doesn’t end up doing jail time.

After all, immoral television characters are ruining this country, not wayward Big Eight Players of the Year.

At 22, Peeler is the kind of young man you’d like to root for. Or at least, you would have liked to before his recent scrapes with the law. A high school star, he was treated for an alcohol problem after his freshman season at Missouri. Then he came back. He missed the 1990 season for academic reasons. Then he came back and had a stellar senior year--on the basketball court, anyway.

But two weeks after he was arrested on the weapons and assault charges, he was arrested again after scuffling with an old girlfriend. Misdemeanor assault charges were dropped, however, after the woman admitted she slapped him twice before he punched her. Somehow, I don’t find that extremely comforting.

Apparently, though, this was a huge relief to both Peeler and the NBA. After all, a jailed basketball player is not a draftable basketball player.

The Lakers claim drafting Peeler was not an easy decision. They interviewed him after the May 30 arrest. They flew him to Los Angeles for another chat after he was arrested June 21 in the second altercation.

When team officials spoke to him during his last visit, The Times reported, Peeler was “soft-spoken” and “quick to smile.”

They were expecting him to come out snarling, perhaps?

“A lot of people think we’re probably crazy, but we think this kid has a great future ahead of him,” said West. “From a playing standpoint, there’s no question on this kid.”

That’s right. From a playing standpoint, the kid is hot. And it would be supremely naive to expect a team like the Lakers, whose players’ peccadilloes are widely known, to look at the issue from a moral standpoint. Business is business.

After all, it’s not like Peeler has a drug problem or something that could really interfere with the team’s investment in him. Now that would really be unforgivable.

Nowhere was the cynicism of Big Bucks Sports more apparent than in a quote that appeared recently in the Kansas City Star, Peeler’s hometown paper.

Former Phoenix Suns coach Cotton Fitzsimmons said he told new Suns coach Paul Westphal that if he drafted Peeler, he shouldn’t make the player an indispensable part of the team.

“Write him in with pencil,” said Fitzsimmons. “That way you can erase him.”

Talk about your poverty of values.