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For all of the talk of character and chemistry and intangibles, there's a dirty little secret that applies to all professional sports — and especially to professional football.
Talented players with side issues, bad/confused/damaged people who also happen to be good athletes, will be tolerated precisely until they're more trouble than they're worth.
When someone has marketable abilities, you can bet they will be given every opportunity to succeed, even if those abilities come with baggage, with a checkered past or present.
And when someone with clear, world-class skills completely falls through the cracks, when there's no one interested any more, you can be pretty sure either that those skills have started to fade or more likely that the baggage has become just too heavy to bear.
In that light, consider the newest member of the Toronto Argonauts, David Boston.
The wide receiver is a former first-round draft choice who once led the NFL in receiving yards. He is 29, which might be slightly on the downside for someone playing his position, but certainly wouldn't indicate in itself that he's over the hill.
Boston also comes with a rather colourful history linking him to both performance-enhancing and recreational drugs and most recently to criminal charges arising from a domestic dispute (somehow, in their extensive background checks before signing him, the Argos missed that last part).
Even a cursory scan of his biography reveals that the team that drafted him and with which he starred, the Arizona Cardinals, started to get cold feet very early in the relationship.
The fact that he never really found another comfortable NFL home, that he went to the San Diego Chargers, bounced in and out of camps and wound up headed for Canada this spring tells you that though there were clubs willing to take a look, upon doing risk-and-reward analysis, none liked the answer.
Extenuating circumstances? No doubt. Injuries? Clubs unwilling to pay his veteran minimum salary? Had to be a factor. But Boston was a star, not a role player, and now he can't get a sniff. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
The CFL benefits as the next step down the football food chain. Toronto can take a look at a guy who may well still have the physical talent to be starting for an NFL team, and Boston gets paid (though a whole lot less than he once did) to play the game.
Throughout its history, the CFL has been a league of last resorts for players who had problems not just in the NFL, but also in college. Some of them never panned out. Some of them stuck, got their act together and had very nice careers here.
And some — Lawrence Phillips, for example — became more trouble than they were worth here, just as they became more trouble than they were worth there.
Football-wise, there's nothing wrong with any of that. The CFL and the Argos are doing business, just as everybody else does.
But optics-wise? Well, you be the judge.
The Argos, at least as long as Michael Clemons has been involved in the administration of the club, have made a big point of being good citizens and have been, though their roster was at times peppered with players who had run into problems elsewhere.
The most famous of those was, of course, Ricky Williams (a slightly different case, since he was under NFL suspension at the time), who didn't do much on the field, but who was otherwise a fine chap all round during his brief time in Toronto. Williams's issue was drugs — specifically marijuana, the use of which is widely tolerated in this country.
One of Boston's issues is drugs, of several sorts. And the CFL, purely because its club owners don't want to incur the expense, has no drug-testing program whatsoever. No matter who is willing to vouch for them or who is willing to guarantee that their guys aren't using, the truth is, no one knows for sure.
So it's the CFL, a haven for NFL drug users. That's going to be the perception. (Check out the stories from the United States this week about the Boston signing. Look at how many link him with Williams.)
Barring someone in ownership, or in the CFL commissioner's office, brave enough to stand up and argue that the current anti-drug hysteria in American sports is an opportunistic, politically driven, massively hypocritical moral panic, what's the counterpoint?
