It’s been an all-too-typical month in the world of play-for-pay athletics. The only person benefiting from the most recent spate of narcissism, greed, arrogance, and bad decisions on the part of high-visibility sports figures is the individual who’s most likely earned more money through professional sports than anyone else in the industry. Thanks to a pistol-packing National Basketball Association star, a carpet-bagging college football coach, and a crocodile tear-shedding former home run hitter, Tiger Woods finally saw his name disappear from the tabloid headlines for the first time since a car accident on Thanksgiving night ultimately exposed the fact that the planet’s best golfer is also a libidinous, world-class hypocrite.

Gilbert Arenas is employed by the Washington Wizards of the National Basketball Association. Last year he signed a contract with the team worth $111 million over six years. However, both his exorbitant salary and his freedom are currently at risk after he pleaded guilty to felony gun possession last week in D.C. Superior Court. The charges stemmed from a locker room disagreement between Arenas and a teammate which culminated with a display of firearms. Arenas’ original reaction to the affair was to joke about it via Twitter, but it’s no laughing matter to the authorities in the nation’s capital, to say nothing of the NBA flacks who’ve been working for years trying to sanitize the image of a league that’s too widely viewed as unsavory.

Arenas may be guilty of bad judgment, but if greed, hypocrisy, and treachery were crimes numerous Division I college football coaches would be doing life without parole. The latest example is Lane Kiffin, who 13 months ago was signed to a six-year contract worth over $13 million by the University of Tennessee to turn their underperforming grid program around. It was quite a coup for a young (34) and brash mentor whose only previous head coaching experience had been an underwhelming (five wins in 20 games) stint with the NFL’s Oakland Raiders. Last week Kiffin rewarded Tennessee’s faith in him by bolting for the head coaching position at the University of Southern California. Two of his assistant coaches left for USC with him, but not before calling several of the athletically gifted recruits they’d lured to Tennessee to let them know they’d be welcome to follow the new USC coaching staff out to Los Angeles. Kiffin’s lack of loyalty was bitterly decried by Tennessee’s athletic department, not to mention the assistant coaches (including Kiffin’s brother-in-law) who aren’t going with him, and who he didn’t contact before hurriedly leaving town. However, the Tennessee athletic department’s justifiable outrage about another school’s stealing their head football coach didn’t stop them from hiring a new one three days later, one they lured away from Louisiana Tech in the same clandestine, whirlwind manner that USC had enticed Kiffin.

And then there was Mark McGwire, whose 70 home runs broke Major League Baseball’s single-season record in 1998 (though it was re-broken three years later by another player whose cartoonish physique was most likely synthetic). After years of denials McGwire finally admitted last week that he had indeed used performance-enhancing substances during most of his career. His admission was about as surprising as a retired professional wrestler confessing that most of what he did was staged. Is the former slugger truly sorry? Probably, if the tears he shed while being interviewed on The Baseball Network are to be believed. But he’s also deceiving himself if he really thinks, as he professes, that using banned substances which transformed him into a 6-foot-5-inch Charles Atlas had nothing to do with his shattering of Roger Maris’ 37-year-old single-season record of 61 home runs. That’s the equivalent of Donald Trump claiming he’d have starred in a hit TV show even if he didn’t have a famous name and a gazillion dollars first, or Rush Limbaugh maintaining he’d still be the king of talk radio even if he limited himself to quietly saying things that were true.

So how much of the approximately $74 million the allegedly contrite Mr. McGwire earned in salary from 1990-2001 is he planning on turning over to the relief effort in Haiti, or to soup kitchens in St. Louis, or to cancer research? Probably about the same amount as baseball’s team owners and executives who profited immensely from all the chemically aided home runs swatted by previously pedestrian big leaguers during the same time period in which McGwire acquired his synthetic muscles will.

Yet despite all this many who witnessed McGwire’s long-overdue acknowledgment of his deception were sympathetic, which proves that the people who orchestrated the delusional, self-worshipping former slugger’s lachrymose, choreographed mea culpa did a brilliant job.

Tiger Woods ought to give them a call.

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