{image1} Lately, it's been kind of hard to be a sports fan.

The unending drumbeat of negative stories, from the unsavory to the merely selfish, shows no sign of letting up.

If it wasn't guys like Sammy Sosa not showing up for his $70,000-a-day job playing baseball (and then complaining that he didn't get PAID for that day of non-work), it was guys like 23-year-old Qyntal Woods of the now infamous "Jailblazers." Woods was accused of throwing a wounded pit bull onto the streets of Portland, Ore. after he was done fighting it to the death for his own purely sadistic and mindless entertainment.

Not that guys in the Mickey Mantle/Wilt Chamberlain/Dick Butkus era of sports were choirboys, but they at least lived in roughly the same world as most of the fans in the seats. So they might have been drunks and womanizers and somewhat mentally unhinged as players. But they showed up for work, did not take their super-sized salaries as an entitlement, and they kept the rabid pit bulls off the streets -- if they kept any at all.

I constantly try to "check myself" when doing shows that dwell on these stories. I understand how easy it is for sports talk radio to become the "angry white male" in any debate. You know, "playa hatin'" and all that. I try not to "hate the player" as the saying goes, but to "hate the game" (even though I still haven't quite figured that out). But sometimes you just can't ignore reality.

So now my "moral outrage compass" has to be re-adjusted to properly calibrate for what really makes me hate modern professional (and big-time college) sports. And I believe I have come up with a four-tiered scale of what makes for a modern "sports jerk" -- for lack of a more appropriate all-encompassing term.

Low Level Sports Jerks: The Selfish and Petty

These are guys who, for the most part, stay out of real trouble. They don't beat their wives, they don't smoke pot, they don't get DUIs, they just rub you the wrong way 50 percent of the time (or more). In fact, these guys are basically the real life incarnation of Budweiser's "Leon" character. You would probably like them on your team, if they were kicking ass, but hate them on anybody else's roster. Examples: Terrell Owens, Keyshawn Johnson, Corey Dillon, Eli Manning, Jerry Rice and Jeremy Shockey.

The Mid-Level Sports Jerks: The Greedy, Dishonest and Ignorant

These are guys one step above just being a Leon. These are guys who ONLY keep score by how much money they make. Dan Snyder is a good example of this. He claims to want to win a Super Bowl, but I bet the title he's most proud of is the Forbes "Most Valuable Franchise" ranking he's won for five years running. Marketing genius? Maybe. Or maybe he's just milking every last ounce of civic goodwill toward the Redskins that was built up over the last 50 years. The dishonest are guys like Bud Selig. He'll screw his face up into a knot, wring his hands, raise his voice several strained octaves trying to sell you whatever line of nonsense baseball is pushing that day. The whole Expos relocation process was comedy of disinformation. The ignorant are athletes who just say really stupid stuff, and have no idea why it's stupid. It's Gary Sheffield denying he uses steroids and then hinting that he thinks Roger Clemens is on the juice, so go test him. Or Barry Bonds saying that he would never play for Boston because he thinks the city is "too racist." Admitting of course, that he's never actually been to Boston. Excellent.

The Upper Level Sports Jerks: The Drug Addicts

You could argue that drug users in sports should bother us fans the least, right? After all, some call drug use a "victimless crime." Hell, some even call drug addiction a "disease." I prefer to call it a bad habit and a weakness. But here's why the drug users in sports are on a higher scale of offensiveness to me as a fan. Success in sports is supposed to be a ticket OUT of that kind of destructive lifestyle. It is supposed to be a natural "drug" in and of itself. The image of highly successful sports stars, sitting around doing lines of coke or bong hits, is a serious buzzkill when it comes to rooting for a guy. And then, every now and then, along comes a guy like Ricky Williams. Willing to throw his millions, his mansions and his career away so he can travel with Lenny Kravitz. Pathetic.

The A-List Level Sports Jerks: The Hardcore Criminals

Here's a short list. Kobe Bryant, NBA poster child, narrowly escapes facing rape charges this summer. Kobe's tape-recorded account of the incident to police is shocking and graphic. While it alone might not have convicted him in a court of law, it did major damage in the court of public opinion. Ray Lewis, NFL poster child, pleads guilty to obstructing justice in a double murder case. Ray's quick thinking to dispose of a bloody fur coat, and to tell everyone else to shut up about what happened that night, allows his two thug buddies with long rap sheets, to walk. Lewis then quietly pays off the families of the victims instead of facing a more damaging civil trial. Jayson Williams blows a mudhole in a limo driver's chest while "showing off" with a shotgun. Walks on manslaughter charges. The list from here is less spectacular, but long. Leonard Little kills a woman in a DUI, gets another one last summer, but is still playing. Jamal Lewis, helps negotiate a major coke buy, pleads down, he'll serve six months after the football season. Mike Danton, St. Louis Blues, murder for hire. In jail. Ditto Rae Carruth. Michael Pittman. Najeh Davenport. Mark Chmura. Ruben Patterson. OK. Point made. I'll stop here. You'll notice that I didn't even bother to include Mike Tyson.

Given all of that in sports, it's amazing that we can still summon the enthusiasm to root, to care, to pay the prices that support it all. Yet we do. Somehow, things like the Red Sox-Yankees series come along to remind us why. Why do we root? Why do we care? Thankfully, it is because at the end of the police report on SportsCenter, the games still matter. And sometimes, the games are so good you forget everything else.