It's good to be a Viking these days.
The football team might be going nowhere this season, but apparently that didn't stop roughly 17 Minnesota players from chartering two boats on Lake Minnetonka that were loaded to the gills with liquor and prostitutes.
The team and state officials are now embroiled in a scandal that threatens their season as well as the very morals of Minnesota after boat crew members complained to the local authorities concerning prostitution and lewd behavior aboard the floating party barges.
The boats were scheduled to take a leisurely 2 1/2 hour cruise on the lake, but the captains returned the Vikings to the dock after less than an hour.
There were reports of open acts of sex, heavy drinking, aggresive propositioning of female boat crew members, and urinating on private property among other lascivious behavior.
The truly fightening thing is that they were able to accomplish all this in less than an hour. I can only imagine in vivid detail over and over again what might have transpired had the entire cruise taken place as scheduled.
State officals were suitably outraged as Gov. Tim Pawlenty declared "If the allegations are true, it's awful. We understand that athletes aren't necessarily role models, but we at least expect them to abide by the basic laws of the state."
And of human decency he might have added.
That kind of morally corrupt behavior is not generally tolerated in public even if you are a rich athlete. The players should have taken a page from the Stanley Kubrick film "Eyes Wide Shut" and realized that the wealthy have been conducting themselves like pure animals for centuries, but they must do it behind closed doors.
And wearing elaborate animal masks might help to disguise the participants.
As it stands, this is a scandal that will hound the team for the rest of the season and beyond. You can already write the Vikings out of the play-offs, although they probably won't care because the off-season will come sooner and there's always a party somewhere.
My recommendation would be to try South Beach the next time they're up for a little debauchery.
-BDS
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