Drunk or victimized, Benson has no Bears future
Who hasn't been there, on a boat with beer and bikinied beauties? But when Cedric Benson chose to throw a party on his new motorboat last weekend, at a lake in his native Texas, he had to know trouble could await him. Wasn't Lake Travis a popular drinking spot outside party-daffy Austin? Hadn't he been pulled over for safety checks several times in his boat? Weren't local police concerned about numerous boating-related fatalities, many fueled by alcohol?
And wasn't he the problematic Cedric Myron Benson, the man-child who cried tears of bitterness on draft day, the underachieving running back pummeled by issues and dogged by controversy ever since the Bears selected him with the No. 4 pick in 2005?
(NBC5)
Drunk or victimized, Benson has no Bears future
I'm not suggesting he hide in his house, coil into a ball and not come out until training camp. But sometimes, when life is running you down and the karma isn't fair, the smarter option is to find a means of entertainment that doesn't involve beer, boating and watchful cops. If the Lower Colorado River Authority had been cracking down on boaters of all sorts, why would Benson, with his NFL career at a crossroads and the Bears sending a message with the second-round drafting of Matt Forte, allow beer on his 30-foot boat and turn himself into a target?
How dumb can you be, Ced? Where's your better judgment? Just as you don't run straight ahead into a swarm of five Green Bay Packers, you don't tempt fate in a lively part of the lake -- Devil's Cove -- where you obviously aren't liked and you thought the boat police were picking on you.
It certainly wouldn't surprise me if Benson, a black man in the South, was roughed up by the authorities as he and at least one friend on the boat claim. But that should be neither here nor there in regard to his Bears future. Even if legitimate evidence surfaces to suspect police brutality, it shouldn't be a factor in whether he's retained by Halas Hall. Before his arrest on charges of drunken boating and resisting arrest, Benson was a whiny, soft, insanely overpriced back who did more to sabotage the Bears last season than any combination of bad quarterbacks. Just because a debate is raging over what actually happened last Saturday evening, in the Hill County near Austin, doesn't mean a sympathy party should break out in Chicago and across a football nation.
What I wrote weeks ago unequivocally still stands: The Bears must cut their losses, acknowledge their mistake on Benson and move on. I say this not only because he's a flop on the field -- as general manager/Benson enabler Jerry Angelo finally began to admit after drafting Forte last month -- but because a franchise inundated by criminal behavior and scandals can't afford another without developing a wretched identity as the Cincinnati Bengals of the North. During their safety inspection, the authorities say Benson appeared drunk, had bloodshot eyes, refused a breath test and failed a boater-specific sobriety test with a "cocky," "combative," "insulting," attitude that included profanity. They say he refused to come ashore, forcing them to handcuff him and blast him with pepper spray. If true, Benson would become the latest Bear to face the wrath of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, whose eight-game suspension of Tank Johnson last season led to his eventual departure. Johnson's lawyers-guns-and-money saga was supposed to lead to behavioral reform at Halas Hall, but the hits kept coming -- including the night Lance Briggs fled the scene of his car crash at 3 a.m., followed by his recent admission that he has perfomed only a wee portion of 120 hours of required community service.
Benson would avoid league punishment if he indeed wasn't drunk and didn't resist arrest. "I was not intoxicated. There was alcohol on the boat, and others were enjoying themselves, but I wasn't drunk," he told the Sun-Times earlier this week, adding that he was cooperative throughout the ordeal. His description of how he allegedly was dragged to a car, which hauled him to jail, is chilling.
"They kicked my feet out from under me and slammed my face down," he said. "They had a hose and were running it over my face. They were choking me and stuff, not with their hands but with the hose
in my face. I couldn't breathe. I don't know if they did that because of the pepper spray, but I didn't ask them to put the hose in my face."
Obviously, someone here is lying, either Benson or the arresting officers. If we ever learn the actual truth, it will be inside a courtroom in several weeks, which is about the last soap opera needed by a franchise that is free-falling into the league's lower ranks after a Super Bowl appearance 15 months ago. The Bears can wish Benson well in his court case, but they cannot have this mess in their lives. They've given him too many chances to succeed to watch him fail again. They need a new running back. He needs a new lease on life.
It's interesting that a friend of Benson, 22-year-old Elizabeth Cartwright, is rushing to his defense publicly. In an interview with Channel 5, she said Benson wasn't drunk, would have passed a breathalyzer test and was unfairly targeted by the authorities. "Cedric got off the boat voluntarily, you know, stepped from his boat to the other one and he was fine. He didn't stumble, there was nothing wrong with him," Cartwright said of the field sobriety test. A little while later, she said she heard shrieks of horror.
"We heard Cedric scream like he's in pain, and he screamed for his mom. And it was horrible because I've never heard him scream like that," she said.
But when beer is on the boat during a party that went for hours, Benson will have to prove to his doubters that he had only a beer or two. If his record was clean, maybe he could be granted the benefit of the doubt. But the Bears drafted him with the knowledge of two episodes during his productive University of Texas career: (1) Searching for what he said was a stolen TV set, Benson received an eight-day jail sentence in 2003 for misdemeanor trespassing after forcing himself into a residence; and (2) A year earlier, he was busted for drug and alcohol violations before both charges were dropped.
Are they picking on him in Austin? Maybe. That's his problem, though. The Bears have enough problems to keep taking on his. "Any time we're talking about one of our players getting arrested, you're disappointed in it," said coach Lovie Smith, whose tenure is being marred by a relentless run of incidents.
We talk about the quarterback hex in this town. What about the running back jinx? Turns out Rashaan Salaan was stoned during his bouts with fumbleitis. Turns out Curtis Enis had a screw loose.
Now we have Cedric The Entertainer, party animal, sinking fast on his personal Titanic.
