Casino escapades have been quite the norm these days for athletes. Baltimore Raves tailback Ray Rice has found himself in some trouble after fixing into an altercation with his fiancé at Revel Casino in Atlantic City.
Now, another high-profile athlete has made the news for his shirtless wandering around Crown casino in Melbourne, Australia, all because he went searching for his four-year old son.
This time around, the athlete in question is Grant Hackett, a former Olympian who won medals for Australia in the 2000 and the 2004 Olympics in swimming. Unfortunately, the pride he brought for his country during those Olympics wasn’t on full-display recently when he went searching for his four-year old son, Jagger, barefoot and shirtless in the premises of the hotel.
“Unfortunately, my adventurous son decided to go wandering in the early hours and when I discovered him missing, I went in hasty pursuit,” Hackett told the Herald Sun. “Obviously I am embarrassed but tremendously grateful to the Crown for their professionalism and poise.”
The troubling, if not ultimately amusing, ordeal eventually came to a happy ending after Jagger was found by Crown Security in the casino complex, but all that happened after Grant frantically searched for his missing boy in nothing more than boxers and flip-flops. All’s well that end’s well for the Australian swimmer, though. At least this episode will be nothing more than an embarrassing blip on his resume, something that we unfortunately can’t say the same for the beleaguered Ray Rice.
Speaking of the Ravens running back, recent developments from his altercation with his fiancé have painted a more serious picture into the details of their fight, which included footage of Rice dragging an unconscious Janay Palmer out of an elevator at Revel in Atlantic City before dropping her to the ground like a piece of trash.
The whole episode has left Rice’s employer, the Baltimore Ravens, in a pretty tight predicament, something general manager Ozzie Newsome acknowledged to the Associated Press when he got wind of and saw the video. While he did say that he was withholding judgment on Rice until the team collects more information about the incident, he also made it clear that the video of Rice dragging Palmer out of a casino “doesn’t look good”.
That statement could be interpreted in so many different ways, but as far as we’re concerned, it appears that you can add “Ray Rice has played his last game as a Baltimore Raven” on top of that list.
