FUMBLE!!!

Okay, I try to be open-minded. I really, really try. But then I come across something like this, and it's so far outside my sphere of comprehension that my mind just boggles.

No, more than that. It mega-boggles.

As he celebrates his 28th birthday today New York Jets cornerback, Antonio Cromartie, has another reason to raise a glass – he now fathers 10 children.

The football star recently had his second child with his wife to add to his brood of nine children from a total of eight women across the country.

TEN kids!?!

EIGHT different mothers?!?

By age 28???

Hasn't he figured out what causes children by now?

Cromartie, who signed a four-year, $32 million contract with the Jets last fall, has to pay more than $3,500 in child maintenance each month to six of the women he has fathered children with.

Last March the Jets had to pay the player an $500,000 advance so that he could pay outstanding child support.

And what happens after he's not playing football any longer? How is he going to pay for all this off-the-field activity?

And now the ex-girlfriends who Cromartie has fathered children with are hoping to cash in with a new reality TV programme about their extensive brood.

Ahhh ... reality TV ... the answer to a bunch of ignorant rednecks' prayers (rednecks come in all colors - it's a mindset, not a skin tone).

Ryan Ross, who works in a hotel in Los Angeles, is the mother of Cromartie’s fifth child, son Tyler Jae, 4.  They dated for about six months after meeting in a nightclub.

Ross is keen for the show to go ahead: ‘Our kids need to know who their siblings are. It’s bigger than our past with Antonio. It’s about our children,’ she told the New York Post.  

And she described the relationship between the other mothers as a ‘close tight-knit friendship’ where they understand exactly what each is going through and can 'vent' to one another.

Former beauty queen Rhonda Patterson, who has a three-year-old daughter called London with Cromartie, wrote a book about her relationship with the footballer.

In the memoir, "Love, Intercepted", Patterson described how Cromartie cancelled their wedding a week before it was scheduled and ended their relationship when she was six-months pregnant.

"Love, Intercepted" - really? That's the best the ghostwriter could come up with? How about "Unsportsmanlike Conduct?" Or "It's a Loose Ball?" Or something incorporating the terms "tight end" and "wide receiver?"

Shortly after dumping Patterson the footballer wed his current wife, Terricka Cason, who starred in Candy Girls – a reality TV show about scouting models. Cromartie is step-father to her child from a former relationship.

The Jets cornerback also has custody of his first child, Alonzo, now 7, who he had with Rosemita Pierre.

Pierre told the New York Post that the footballer star defies a court order that allows her to speak to her son three times a week.

'He’s supposedly a role model, but he’s not doing what he should be doing as a father, or as a man,' she told the paper.

Really...?

I could get all serious and social-sciencey here, and talk about all the research that indicates how children that grow up without fathers are much more likely to be "at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, suicide, poor educational performance, teen pregnancy, and criminality".

But it's late and I'm tired, so I'm just going to shake my head disgustedly, go "tsk-tsk," and wobble over to the fridge for another frosty bottle of God's elixir.