It's guilt by Association

SUnday stew | With disgraced Donaghy ready to provide info about other refs to the Feds, Stern's NBA finds itself in a PR nightmare

How about the ones screeching all summer that the Cubs never would re-sign Carlos Zambrano and therefore the Earth would collapse into a black hole and disappear?

Gee, Big Z signed Friday with the Cubs for five years, $91.5 million.

Earth saved.

Are sports fans really so volatile, so irrational, so giddy that they enjoy invented trauma?

Do they really like shrieking and breath-holding and fainting and tight-bodiced maidens swooning over inflated nonsense that is resolved in due time?

I wonder. I have long wondered.

•  •  NBA commissioner David Stern is now reaching that point to which arrogance almost always leads: stunned embarrassment.

Stern did some wonderful hand-wringing and brow-furrowing and somber-speaking after referee Tim Donaghy was arrested by the Feds for gambling on league games, but he told us it was an unforeseeable tragedy.

Donaghy, Stern said with authority, was a ''rogue, isolated criminal.'' Like he knew.

Unfortunately, Donaghy, who pleaded guilty Thursday to gambling charges and faces up to 25 years in prison, reportedly will tell prosecutors about 20 other NBA refs who are involved in some kind of gambling.

Stern, who is glib, scholarly, jovial and approachable -- as well as autocratic and thin-skinned -- never has tolerated well those who criticize his product or suggest any form of nearsightedness or corruption within his realm.

But 20 refs who gamble -- on anything?

How can that be allowed?

How has it been allowed?

It makes one wonder if Stern has received great benefit through the years -- just like his compatriot Bud Selig in baseball -- from being conveniently naive and angrily defensive.

Steroids? What steroids?

Gambling? What gambling?

It's interesting to recall that Donaghy was only uncovered because of an FBI investigation into the Gambino crime family, not because of any league scrutiny.

I told readers a couple of weeks ago about one active NBA ref (not Donaghy) whom I personally wouldn't allow anywhere near a billion-dollar sports league.

Based on what I know.

How can a commissioner not know as much as a dumb writer?

And while I'm at it -- I would still like to see the votes from the two ties for NBA Rookie of the Year honors in 1995 and 2000. The votes were never published, and I was told to shut up with my queries.

Funny, votes now are published.

And how about some polygraphed, on-the-record facts about Michael Jordan's sudden retirement from hoops in 1993?

Maybe there's nothing to any of this. Maybe Donaghy is the lone bad seed.

But trust, Mr. Stern, is a hell of a thing to lose.

And arrogance sets it free.

•  •  The extra problem with Donaghy's gambling is that the ripple effect is huge.

Every game -- each and every one in which he reffed over at least the latter part of his 13-year career -- is now suspect.

On some games he laid down bets or got paid off by bookies.

Those are no-brainers.

But others, who knows?

How about the technicals he called, the injuries he reported to mobsters, the fights he allowed, the vindictiveness he might have spewed just by being on the court?

How much of the horrifying brawl at the Palace of Auburn Hills -- during a game he was working -- did he incite or subliminally instigate?

No, this mess is just beginning.

And we cannot let the overseer wash his hands and shrug.

In the business world, since the Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and other assorted executive scandals, there is now the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which says CEOs can no longer plead ignorance to their own business workings or accounting reports.

How about something comparable for our sports leagues and their emperors?

Something that says ignorance is no longer bliss.

•  •   And don't you just love that Selig has pardoned the Yankees' admitted steroid user, Jason Giambi, giving him no punishment after Giambi's chat with investigator George Mitchell last month because Giambi was ''very frank and candid,'' and ''he's doing a lot of public-service work, and I think that's terribly important.''

So Giambi's 163 home runs and 486 RBI from 2000 to 2003 and his $120 million contract are free.

There's justice.

There's a message for American kids.

Public-service work, children.

Shoot it up.

•  •  Since we're getting nasty here, let's talk golden boy Tom Brady, quarterback for the New England Patriots.

His baby with former girlfriend Bridget Moynahan, an actress, they say, was due just about on current girlfriend and lingerie model Gisele Bundchen's birthday, July 20.

''Sunday Stew'' hears Bundchen -- a supermodel, not a mere model, of course, pardon us -- was not too pleased about the timing.

But the latest we know -- and we really don't follow this stuff too closely or well -- is that Moynahan hadn't dropped as recently as a week ago.

So what we really want to say is: Tom, when the birthing is resolved, call up fellow alleged golden boy Matt Leinart and ask him about his own absentee child and current parenting-by-phone rules.

Actually, you can call half the guys in the league for advice.

•  •  And, finally, a tip of the ''Stew'' fedora to disgraced Olympic gold-medalist sprinter Justin Gatlin and accused mob hit man Frank Calabrese Sr.

For verbal courage.

Gatlin said he thought the steroids he was taking and then tested positive for were vitamin B12 supplements.

And Calabrese, accused of 13 whack jobs for the Chicago Outfit and now on trial for all of them, told jurors he was too busy making money to do such things as blow guys' heads off.

''How would I have time to do it?'' he implored the court Thursday.

Thanks, both.

Have you ever considered work in a pro sports league?