From the July 26, 2010, edition of Sports Illustrated comes the following. The writer, Thomas Lake, is often featured in the final third of the magazine where long form stories not right out of the headlines are featured. His style is one of breathless action, sports figures working madly to get to the top, doing a hundred things a day on two hours sleep is rather the tone. Anyway, I turn this over to him in an article about "successful" and often ejected baseball manager Bobby Cox:

Cox could not leave the game at the ball park. And while it seemed as though he had mastered his anger---confined it to the one place where he could churn it into loyalty and turn it into success---the notion came into question the night his wife called to have him arrested. It was May 7, 1995. He had been drinking, and he spilled a drink on the carpet. She made a comment he didn't appreciate. The police report said she told an officer that her husband grabbed her by the hair and hit her in the face.

"I asked Pamela Cox if this kind of incident had ever occurred before," Officer Sonya Lee wrote. "[She] told me that this was the first time the police had been called but that there had been 6-7 previous incidents involving physical abuse in their 18-year marriage. When asked, Pamela Cox stated she has sustained blackened eyes and a broken hand, injuries inflicted by her husband."

There was a media firestorm when the news broke, but Cox and the [Atlanta] Braves quickly contained it. He held a press conference the next day to deny hitting his wife. The battery charge disappeared when he agreed to anger-management counseling.

Loyalty is a powerful thing. Pam Cox stood by her husband, and she saved him. "He didn't hit me," she said. You were wrong if you thought [Bobby] would stay home with his wife that night. The Phillies were in town, and he was needed in the dugout.

(Passage completed, my turn next)