Sporting News, The: So you want a little intrigue? Maybe Deep Throat can tell us what Michael Jordan

The current Deep Throat talk about low doings in high places has interrupted my study of the day's greatest mystery, which is what in heaven's name does Angelina Jolie see in Brad Pitt when there are so many fine sportswriters available?

It also has reminded me that SportsWorld has its own conspiracy theory puzzlers, such as:

1. What did T. Oscar Smith have against Muhammad Ali?

2. Did David Stern come between Michael Jordan and his golfing buddies?

3. How did Bobby Layne get away with it and Paul Hornung didn't?

4. Are those Bud Selig's fingerprints we see on Barry Bonds' knee?

1 T. Oscar Smith was an obscure player in the Ali saga. He was the Department of Justice official who in 1966 wrote a letter advising Ali's draft board that the heavyweight champion did not qualify for exemption from military service as a conscientious objector.

The Louisville draft board's agreement with Smith led to Ali's refusing the draft, his arrest and conviction, the unlawful stripping of his title and the prospect of five years in federal prison.

All that, and history has no clue as to T. Oscar Smith's thinking. Maybe he decided the whole thing himself. Or maybe he was only a Justice functionary who signed a letter under pressure from J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI obsessive who saw evil in every black face from Martin Luther King Jr.'s to Eldridge Cleaver's to Ali's.

2T. Oscar Smith, we hardly knew ye.

2 In March of 1992, Michael Jordan said, "I'm no Pete Rose." He defined his gambling persona after giving cocaine dealer James "Slim" Bouler a check for $57,000. He called it a loan. Only later, at Bouler's trial on drug and money laundering charges, did Jordan admit that the 57 grand covered golf gambling losses.

No. he's no Pete Rose. Pete didn't play golf.

Another Jordan golf gambling buddy wound up murdered. Then Richard Esquinas wrote a book claiming he had won $1.3 million from Jordan on the golf course. Jordan's casino gambling came into view, followed by his father's murder alongside a North Carolina highway.

On October 6, 1993, Jordan "retired" from basketball. Three days later, the NBA announced the end of its "investigation" of Jordan's gambling and found he had violated no league rules. The league also admitted that its "investigation" did not include anything so bothersome as an interview of Michael Jordan.

Conspiracy theorists went on high alert. Was there a trade-off? Hey, MJ, you "retire," we drop the "investigation." Was Jordan advised/ordered by NBA commissioner David Stern to go away--go play baseball or something--and let the gambling stories die?

Most intriguing to conspiracy theorists was one phrase uttered at Jordan's "retirement" news conference. He said he might play again. "Five years down the road," he said, "if the urge comes back, if the Bulls will have me, if David Stern lets me back in the league, I may come back."

Maybe he was having fun with Stern's image as the ultimate power in basketball. Or maybe it truly was a matter of Stern being satisfied that Jordan had kicked his gambling habit and disassociated himself from high-stakes gamblers who dealt drugs, got murdered and likely knew where they could dig up Jordan skeletons if they needed to blackmail him.

In any case, 17 months later, Jordan came back to play for the Bulls.

Slim Bouler, meanwhile, went to prison for nine years.

3 Bobby Layne was the rapscallion Texan who quarterbacked the Lions during the 1950s, sometimes with a hangover.

He gets a call in Paul Hornung's new book, Golden Boy, in a chapter dealing with Hornung's 1963 suspension from the NFL for gambling on games. Seven or eight games a year, Hornung said, no more than $800 a game, always on his Packers to win.

Somehow the NFL had wiretapped Hornung's phone. So he confessed to commissioner Pete Rozelle. He also said football gambling was commonplace.

"One of the legendary gamblers was Bobby Layne," Hornung wrote. "Bobby gambled more than anybody who ever played football, period. How did the league go all those years without ever getting him?"

4 As Stern might have persuaded Jordan to go on sabbatical, conspiracy theorists wonder whether Bud Selig had a word with Barry Bonds this spring, perhaps saying:

"Barry, your knees. Never been hurt. Strong as steel. But, really. This BALCO thing. The grand jury. That's gotta be hard, even on a guy with great knees. The longer it goes on, it's gotta make your knees hurt. A little, anyway. Like you'd like to take some time off."

"Till after the All-Star break," Bonds might have said.

"Deal."