Just color Josh Hamilton a hypocrite ...

Not sure how many people read Richie Whitt's piece in The Dallas Observer News. 

Take a minute to do so. 

I don't know Whitt, and I'm as unfamiliar with his journalist pedigree as I am with the publication he writes for. I do know this, however: Richie Whitt's unafraid to walk through minefields.

For that's where he surely has found himself today for having the testicular fortitude to say that Josh Hamilton, the Texas Rangers star, has gotten a free pass because he's "white."

What baseball fan doesn't know Josh Hamilton's story? The good-looking crackhead, the tattooed drunk and the fallen prospect who seemingly had squandered the athletic gifts God blessed him with. Hamilton found himself a deep hit on a stranger’s crack pipe from being the late Josh Hamilton.

But his story wouldn't end so horribly. Hamilton would find salvation in places we hope people in his circumstances will turn to. He cleansed his life with the harsh scrubbing needed when dirt and filth and drugs and dames conspire to rob a man of his money -- and his dignity.

Hamilton turned to God for His help -- for a hand to fight the demons that would be in places we don't dare talk about. As part of his recovery, Hamilton went around preaching about how he's a different man than he was in those dark days of living on the precipice. He's scared straight these days.

Or so he preached.

His would be an inspirational story; his was the ultimate success story, if only it were a true story.

Now, everybody else knows its fiction, and everybody knows that Hamilton isn't someone we should be applauding. He's just like too many others who ask us to believe in them and then betray that trust when we do. He's a hypocrite -- an unrepentant hypocrite, too.

But in injecting race into the story, Whitt put a different spin on the Hamilton tall tale, which has now become a YouTube classic of him loving and drinking and ... doing whatever else he was doing this offseason with women who aren’t his wife. Yet even as people who aren't overly polite about hypocrisy talk about Hamilton’s excesses, the public has been silent.  So has much of the media.

To them, Hamilton is a warmer -- and whiter -- story than Michael Beasley or Josh Howard or one of the handful of NBA or NFL stars in rehab who were caught with alcohol or marijuana.  

For whatever reason, you won't see Hamilton's craziness picked over like a zebra's carcass on the Kalahari Desert. He's earned people’s sympathy again, even though he has a past so checkered that he should have used up all the goodwill others might have for him.

Forgiveness is a virtue; foolishness is not. We are fools to believe Hamilton's coverboy looks should lessen the scrutiny of his public misconduct.

His relapse is like Doc Gooden’s or Daryl Strawberry’s or like any of the number of contemporary athletes of color who have found the road to forgiveness takes years to transverse. They carry those miles of hard living into old age, if they live to see old age.

Josh Hamilton is lucky, because he won’t have the burden of color to slow his journey to salvation. But he hasn’t earned this carefree trek -- not this time, and not in the face of all he says that contradicts all he has done.

He is a “hypocrite,” and as Richie Whitt wrote, fans should not shy away from applying the word to Hamilton. It is, after all, more accurate than calling him a "star."