Courtesy the Wall Street Journal

(August 25, 2010) In the history of arrested sportswriters, this weekend’s brief incarceration of Jay Mariotti brought with it an incredible amount of grave dancing. To say that Mariotti — a writer for AOL’s Fanhouse and a talking head on ESPN — has detractors would be an understatement. There is pure hate involved here. Everyone from White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen to movie critic Roger Ebert has spit vinegar in Mariotti’s direction at some point, and his Saturday morning arrest for an alleged domestic abuse incident served as a schadenfreude fest for sports fans tired of seeing Mariotti cultivate a persona as a holier-than-thou scold on ESPN’s “Around the Horn.”

Here is what is known: Mariotti was arguing with his girlfriend at a club in California early on Saturday morning. The two continued home, and cops were called to the scene, where Mariotti’s girlfriend—who has not been identified—was discovered to allegedly have cuts and bruises from a physical altercation with Mariotti. He was arrested on felony domestic abuse charges and released on $50,000 bail. Both ESPN and Fanhouse said they would be looking into the incident before making any decision on Mariotti’s future. The rest of the world, however, didn’t feel like waiting. (And at times, Mariotti’s haters seemed to forget in their glee that a woman had been hurt in all this.)

“Pop some champagne and kiss a stranger on the street,” With Leather’s Matt Ufford writes of the news.

Blogger Brooks of Sports by Brooks absolutely eviscerates Mariotti … by using the man’s own words. He gathered old Chicago Sun-Times columns in which Mariotti decried acts of violence and called for strict punishment. On one occasion in 1998 he argued for the Bears to not draft Randy Moss, somehow tying it back to the White Sox’s signing of Wilfredo Cordero, who was arrested on domestic abuse charges days earlier.

Even professional athletes got into the mix. Chad Ochocinco tweeted the news to Terrell Owens that Mariotti had been arrested, adding, “Lets see if they crucify their own like they do us.”

Its not just Mariotti’s old columns being used against him. Film critic Ebert penned an acidic piece entitled “Jay the Rat” in 2008 after Mariotti, complaining that newspapers were dead, e-mailed his resignation to his bosses at the Sun-Times, where Ebert also worked. Ebert tweeted the link to the column on Saturday afternoon. “I think you owed us more than that,” Ebert wrote in chiding Mariotti for his departure. “You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.”

Defense of Mariotti was nearly impossible to find, and most ESPN personalities have been silent on the issue so far. But one who is chiming in on the case is the Miami Herald’s Dan LeBatard, a fill-in host of “Pardon the Interruption” who neither criticizes nor defends Mariotti, but spills the beans on the state of sports writing today. Because sportswriters looking to make a name for themselves often trade in sensational stories and pass trigger-happy judgment, the same process can backfire on them when a crack in the armor shows. “Mariotti can’t beg and plead for fairness and due process and compassion and expect to get it when he is so often reluctant to extend it himself,” LeBatard, in a special The Big Lead column, writes. He later adds, “I don’t know Mariotti beyond a few cordial meetings. I have no earthly idea if he’s capable of violence against a woman. Nor do I know if there is nuance and perspective that can be added to his incident that would make it more understandable or sympathetic. He’s getting sliced up now by the same knife that he has made a profitable career out of wielding.”

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