"Joey Porter put his body through a workout Monday on Day 1 of the Cardinals' off-season program but gave his mouth a rest.

That's a good thing. Not for those of us who value colorful characters but for an organization hungry to justify signing one of the NFL's bigger headline-grabbers.

Eight days after coming to terms with the Cardinals, Porter was arrested for allegedly driving drunk and resisting arrest in his hometown of Bakersfield, Calif. He deserves the presumption of innocence but will find the benefit of the doubt harder to come by. That's the price of testing the realm of good decision-making too many times.

At the least, in exchange for a nice contract, he owes the Cardinals a good work ethic and an effort to avoid bad publicity. This is what the four-time All-Pro linebacker

needs to remember. Everything he does, good and bad, reflects on the organization, and right now the team is being attacked as much as Porter.

The NFL, like the real world, has its share of slimy bad guys. Porter, 33, isn't one of them.

He runs at the mouth too much, and it costs him. Start with the bad publicity that followed the homosexual slur directed at Kellen Winslow in 2006. Then came the arrest following a fight in Las Vegas in 2007 with former ASU lineman Levi Jones that Jones said was triggered by their arguments on the field. Add to it the endless bulletin-board fodder.

His story is complicated by an honesty that, frankly, is refreshing.

He told Sports Illustrated four years ago that "If you don't want me talking, tell the media not to even come near me, because you're asking me to tuck my tail, and I don't get down like that. I'm through doing the pat-on-the-back interviews: 'He's great; we'll have our hands full.' I mean, when we say that (expletive), who are we really doing it for? The coaches? Do they all have a pact: 'Don't bash my players, and I won't bash yours'? Who are we trying to protect? People try to make it like, if you speak your mind, you're a bad guy."

He has a point.

The problem is, honesty and controversy don't have to go hand in hand. An occasional side dish of discretion might be in order.

The problem with being a headline-grabbing figure in an era with so much media scrutiny is that people tend to remember only the peripheral stuff.

They remember that Porter was the victim of a gunshot wound to his backside in 2003, for example, but forget that he was an innocent bystander.

And it overshadows the good. Not only his athletic brilliance but the fact that teammates love him. Even quarterbacks who have experienced his on-field wrath have endless praise for him, from Tom Brady to Peyton Manning. "