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| About the Author | ||
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I grew up as a fan of the New York Yankees. I always hoped that maybe one day I would be playing second base for the Yankees. And if I couldn't play second base for them, I would gladly have ridden the Yankee bench. Unfortunately, neither circumstance developed. Besides not being able to hit a curveball, there was another glaring weakness in my game: I wasn't much of a fielder either. Forced to look for other career options, I thought that maybe being a lawyer was the answer. Unfortunately, after three weeks of law school, I found myself foundering. I was struggling with the typical basic cases in contract law, the ones where "A offers to sell Blackacre to B for $100, but only if B accepts the offer within 72 hours and, at the 72nd hour, B drops a letter in the mailbox to A accepting the offer." I had a difficult time relating to scenarios in which people were buying and selling Blackacre. One day, I stumbled upon a case in my Law of Contracts textbook involving former Louisiana State University All-American halfback Billy Cannon. Coming out of college, Billy made the mistake of signing professional contracts with both the Los Angeles Rams of the National Football League and the Houston Oilers of the American Football League. When the professors started expressing the principles of contract law in terms of sports cases, I found the law became easy for me. I was hooked. Ever since, I have kept an eye out for interesting sports cases. |
Legal cases in the world of sports are often fascinating. Some are simply bizarre. Rube Waddell was a pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics and a few other major league teams in the early 1900s. He ended up winning 191 games in the major leagues -- good enough to be elected to the Hall of Fame. In his book, Bunts, George Will mentions a story about Rube. Waddell liked to eat crackers in bed before he went to sleep at night, and he always seemed to leave cracker crumbs in his bed. At the time, it was the custom for teams who were traveling to sleep two players to a bed. Unfortunately, Waddell's roommate and bedmate had little tolerance for cracker crumbs in the bed. So the roommate complained to Athletics owner Connie Mack. Forced to choose between paying for a separate bed for Waddell or prohibiting him from eating crackers in bed, Connie Mack chose the latter. So, the next time that Waddell went to sign his player contract, he found there was an anti-cracker clause in the fine print.
Author Fred Day, pictured with future basketball player Nicholas Sibeck
This website features some of the more interesting anecdotes involving sports and the law that I have found over the past decade. The purpose of the website is: (1) to demonstrate some of the legal principles that apply to the world of sports; and (2) to stimulate readers who are interested in a more comprehensive, fan-friendly coverage of sports and the law to look into a book I have written on the topic, titled Clubhouse Lawyer: Law in the World of Sports..
| LINK TO A WEBSITE that I have enjoyed and which served as a source for some of the material contained in "Clubhouse Lawyer": www.cjbaseball.com. This website provides an interesting account by pitcher C.J. Nitkowski of his experiences in major league baseball. Read C.J.'s recollection of the sequence of events in 1994 that culminated in his being selected by the Cincinnati Reds as the ninth overall pick in the first round of the major league draft ["Archives / Experiencing the Draft"] and his compelling account of the events during spring training of 2002 that prompted him to re-examine his relationship with God ["Christianity / My Testimony / Jesus Christ Was In The Minor Leagues"]. |