Mark Whicker of the OC Register went into the Sports Columnist Meltdown Hall of Fame yesterday.  What got him inducted was a column that was based around Jaycee Dugard’s 18 years in captivity at the hands of Phillip Garrido.  The man repeated raped Dugard, impregnated her twice as a result, kept her outside in low-grade quarters, and psychologically damaged the woman for the rest of her life.

Whicker saw that horrible story as an opportunity to frame what has happened in the eighteen years during which Dugard was dead to the world, but terrifyingly alive.

He made horrible puns, including referencing Dugard’s prison sentence in Garrido’s yard.  Whicker claimed that Dugard’s predicament was made worse by the fact that she did not have access to sports - either playing or watching.  He kind of just glossed over that whole lost innocence and mutilated lifetime thing.

Rightly so, readers and fellow writers panned the column as insensitive, pathetic, and simply inappropriate.  How this ink blot of a column ever got past the inner reaches of Whicker’s mind is flabbergasting.  Even more incredible is that Whicker’s editors did not stop this column from making its way to anywhere other than the nearest shredder.  The OC Register sports staff should feel embarrassed about the damage done to their collective reputation yesterday.

Look, I try to make connections between social and political events with the sport that I cover.  It’s natural to try to use sports to put things into context, and vice versa when the tone of sport needs to be reset.  But nearly two decades of personal hell and painful captivity at the hands of a deranged freak of society is no context for an escape like sport is for many people. 

Whicker may as well have used the Holocaust to talk about how 6 million Jews really lost out on some great World Cup action after World War II ended.  It is that bad.

Clearly, Whicker did not have any kind of empathy for Jaycee Dugard or her family.  Using their ordeal - and that’s putting it mildly - as a basis for a lame column defining a sports time capsule screams of someone who simply does not get what has been happening to Dugard without his knowledge until just a few weeks ago.

Every writer makes a big mistake like this at least once in their career.  Perhaps most notoriously, golf has Ben Wright.

In 1995, he told a reporter at the Wilmington News Journal, “Lesbians in the sport hurts women’s golf. Lesbianism helps make it difficult to get endorsements and televised coverage of LPGA events.”  Amid the controversy, Wright’s career as a broadcaster in the States was essentially finished.  And, by comparison to what Whicker wrote, Wright almost looks humane.  Hell, Tahoe Daily News sports editor Steve Yingling did a piece on Wright earlier this year that included just one sentence about his snafu regarding the LPGA Tour.

Mark Whicker probably shouldn’t get fired for what he wrote.  Far worse is said in all corners of the Internet everyday about a host of people.  What Whicker needs, though, is a serious adjustment in his perspective about the connection between life and sport.

Sport, yes, is an escape and Whicker’s sentiment in that regard is correct.  Sport could never be used to explain something like what happened to Jaycee Dugard.  To even try to make the connection is just rubbing salt in the many deep wounds that Dugard has because of what Phillip Garrido has done.