DAVID WHITLEY: Gators’ Smith gets $1,450 in parking fines.
Like the weather, everybody complains about parking tickets but nobody does anything about them.
Florida football player Jordan Smith decided to do something. Specifically, nothing. He staged a one-man protest and refused to pay up. I’d say kudos to him for sticking it to the system — if it weren’t for the rest of the story.
Smith is one of nine Gators charged with credit card fraud. There was nothing good about the 62 felony complaints recommended Monday by UF’s police department.
Eighteen of them belong to Smith, and the Gainesville Police Department added four more on Wednesday.
Buried in the pages of complaints, however, there is something perversely amusing. Actually, there are two things.
Smith is listed as being
6-foot, 210 pounds. That would make him the smallest UF defensive lineman since Bob Woodruff was the coach.
More intriguing, Smith allegedly used stolen cards to pay $1,450 in traffic and parking fines. $1,450?
As someone whose diploma was almost torpedoed by overdue tickets, I’ve got to say that racking up almost $1,500 in fines is rather impressive.
What makes it more amazing is Smith is a redshirt freshman. That means he accomplished all this in far less than two years.
Sadly, the Elias Sports Bureau doesn’t track such things, but I’d bet Smith set the NCAA single-season record for most parking tickets.
The university does not release the records of individual students, but fines range from illegally parking your bike ($10) to parking in a handicapped spot ($250). Most fines are in the $20-$40 range, and that’s the maximum.
They can be reduced at the discretion of the University Traffic Authority. Not that a football player would ever be cut a break like that, of course.
Assuming Smith was guilty of garden-variety violations like parking out of assigned area ($35) and overtime parking ($20), he must have gotten 40 to 50 citations.
This kid is a proverbial freshman phenom when it comes to parking tickets.
No doubt, Smith displayed a callous disregard for regulations. But who among us has found a ticket on their windshield and did not want to deliver the payment in rusty pennies to the mayor’s desk?
Smith is also following the storied tradition of Entitled Jocks vs. Parking Authorities. Remember former FSU quarterback Chris Rix using an unauthorized handicap parking tag?
UCLA had 19 players plead guilty to the same offense in 1999. The current NCAA investigation into North Carolina found the school paid $1,789 worth of fines for an unidentified player.
That’s a big number, but I bet it took him a lot longer than Smith to get there.
Texas Tech coach Kliff Kingsbury said he piled up about $1,500 in parking tickets during his five years as a quarterback at the school. Presumably he now has his own parking space.
But talk about Ticket Masters, jocks are pikers compared to diplomats.
An investigation last week found that North Korea’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations has accumulated more than 1,300 unpaid New York City parking tickets over the past 20 years.
The running tab is $156,000. For some reason I don’t expect to Kim Jong Un will be writing Donald Trump that check anytime soon.
As for Smith, I expect he’ll eventually pay this bill without using someone else’s money. Police say he was identified as the ringleader of the entire credit-card scam, so it’s hard to feel much sympathy for the guy.
But he’s only 19. Maybe he’ll show contrition, put on a few pounds, learn from his mistakes, graduate from college and become a productive member of society.
Failing that, he can always get a job as a Korean diplomat.