Dave Checketts is a smart man. He has built successful sports empires in Utah and New York, and he is at it again here, where he’s turned a once-moribund hockey team into one of the NHL’s most promising young clubs. Now this very smart man is trying to build on his already impressive résumé, attempting to put together a group to buy the Rams and keep them in St. Louis.

But this very smart man is stuck smack dab in the middle of an old-fashioned storm of controversy as stories have come out that as part of his efforts to assemble an ownership group, he brought in Rush Limbaugh.

Within days of the news leaking out, Limbaugh’s involvement has been assailed by NFL players, the head of the players association and at least two owners. Even NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell has expressed a few reservations about Limbaugh and his polarizing demagoguery.

"I, myself, couldn't even consider voting for him," Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay told The Associated Press. "When there are comments that have been made that are inappropriate, incendiary and insensitive ... our words do damage, and it's something that we don't need."

Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank told the AP that even if the Limbaugh-Checketts group was approved by the owners, he wouldn’t expect Limbaugh to tone down his rhetoric on his nationally syndicated radio show to avoid trouble with the league.
"I find that highly unlikely," Blank said.

So now the man who for the last 20 years has used the words of others like a mallet, is finding that the world is a little less comfortable when he ends up on the business end of that same swinging cudgel. Limbaugh is being damned by his own words. His many critics — and I happen to be one of them — have collected some of his greatest hits and thrown them back in his face for scrutiny.

There is a huge pile of polarizing, bigoted debris stacked up on the deck of the good ship Limbaugh that he can’t deny or even remotely distance himself from.

"Look, let me put it to you this way: The NFL all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips without any weapons. There, I said it." He does not deny saying this, because it’s on his own website’s audio archives.

He also does not distance himself from his remarks that characterized life in "Obama’s America" as a place where "white kids" get beat up on school buses and black kids cheer about it. There is plenty of tape of that, too.

The bigoted nonsense is hard to ignore, which is why at Tuesday’s NFL owners meetings in Boston, people like Goodell, Irsay and Blank voiced reservations about someone with Limbaugh’s inflammatory point of view joining their select club.

I must admit, though, it would be somewhat of a hoot if he did become an NFL owner and signed on to the NFL’s "share the wealth" concepts that offend him and Joe the Plumber in his political life. It would also be interesting to see how much he would sanction the use of public funds that are being used to refurbish the Edward Jones Dome, where his beloved Rams play.

This story is a long way from over. The details of the potential sale, and whether the Limbaugh-Checketts group actually has the financial clout to pull this off, haven’t been determined yet. The NFL owners have a rather daunting vetting process that Limbaugh will have to go through before we truly have to concern ourselves with whether they let him into the club.

In the meantime, I will use Limbaugh’s own words to express how I hope the process goes.

I hope he fails.