On the other hand, a lot of us can sympathize, at least on some level, with what Paul Pierce experienced over the weekend, when the car he was driving was pulled over by police in Las Vegas.

The Celtic forward, who recently proclaimed himself the best basketball player in the world, was halted on that traffic stop early Sunday morning along the Vegas Strip. During the stop, police described Pierce as "a little agitated," so they cuffed him and checked him over.

He was not arrested.

Just royally ticked off.

We've all been pulled over at some point or another, haven't we? And some of those stops haven't always been warranted - OK, granted, most of them have - or all that pleasant.

When I was in high school, one of my knuckleheaded friends - a kid named Bucky Johnson - informed me that the best way to handle getting pulled over while driving was to get out of the car and start walking toward the officer.

Next time around, I gave it a try.

Bad idea.

As I popped my door open and started walking toward the police cruiser, two officers pulled their weapons and told me to freeze.

I hated Bucky Johnson. He darn near got me shot, all because the taillights on my dad's Pontiac weren't operating properly.

On another occasion about 25 years ago, while driving with my wife through Nevada, I was pulled over for righteously lead-footing it on Interstate 80 through Winnemucca.

The officer, an old veteran of the highways and byways, was extremely gracious, issuing nothing more than a warning to slow it down a bit. A few hours later, while my wife was driving outside of Elko, we rolled up on a cop car that was traveling in the slow lane about five miles an hour below the limit.

"Let's pass him," I said. Highway patrolmen probably get tired of cars stacking up behind them on the freeway. As she moved into the left lane and respectfully edged in front of him, he sped up.

Wanting to get back over into the right lane, my wife sped up and then switched lanes. The officer turned on his lights.

He was a young guy, who told us we were going something like three miles an hour over the speed limit, requiring him to issue a ticket for a violation he called "wasting natural resources."

I told him the car's speedometer probably wasn't accurate enough to measure such a minute difference in speed. He gave me one of those you're-a-pitiful-dirtbag looks and threw the ticket in the window at my wife's face.

Like Pierce, I was a little agitated. I said, "We'll see if that gets paid."

In return, he grinned a toothy grin and said, "Why don't you follow me into the station?"

It wasn't a question.

It sounded like a line from one of those creepy movies in which a traveler in a foreign place gets his unsuspecting arse hauled into a backwoods jail cell, and emerges a couple of scenes later with a hatchet buried in his head.

Wondering what Bucky's advice would have been there and then, I acquiesced to the peace officer, meekly saying, "We'll pay it, sir."

Speaking of toothy grins, I had another encounter with the law when I was a kid, and while I was not driving when it happened, I ended up in the back of a K-9 officer's Jeep - with a fanged German shepherd drooling on me. The dog cop caught two of my friends and me having a dirt bomb fight on the front steps of our school. He ordered us into the back compartment and took us home.

As my dad sternly heard what happened, the officer made it sound as though we had defoliated and scorched the flowerbeds on each side of the school entrance. My mom, meanwhile, was in the next room, busting a gut: "All the things I did when I was young," she laughed, "and you get busted for a dirt bomb fight?"

It was better than what happened to Jon Markman, a colleague in L.A., who was pulled over by police on a routine stop - he thought - and, next thing, they had him cuffed and sprawled over the hood of his new Alfa Romeo because he matched the description of a fugitive bank robber. It was a case of mistaken identity.

One of the most memorable stories I've heard about highway cops happened to a good friend of mine, a great guy named Shelton Till. While motoring in a van through Nebraska in the middle of the night with his family on a cross-country vacation, his wife, who was driving, told him she was tired, that he should take over behind the wheel. When she pulled over, he walked in front of the van and jumped into the driver's seat, presuming she got in the back door, and took off.

An hour later, he ran out of gas. As he walked in the opposite direction along the interstate, back toward the nearest town, desperately looking for help, a highway patrolman rolled up. My friend climbed in, sheepishly informing the officer how foolish he felt, running out of gas like that. The patrolman said, "If you think that's bad, get a load of this: Some dumb schmuck left his wife on the side of the road 60 miles back."

Shelton should have been cuffed and hauled in for stupidity.

His fate, though, was much worse: He had to face his wife, who was more than a little agitated.

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* GORDON MONSON hosts "The Big Show" weekdays from 2-6 p.m. on 1280 AM The Zone. He can be reached at gmonson@sltrib.com.