It has come to this: when writer Jim Brosnan, a former major-league pitcher, suggests a sports figure as a story idea for Boys’ Life, the magazine’s editors ask Brosnan about the possibility that the subject will get into trouble after the story is published.
“Or else,” says Bob Hood, the recently retired editor of Boys’ Life, “Parents will write us, ‘How could you put an improper role model in the limelight?’ “
Both the question the magazine must ask and the one it must answer are, sad to say, not without justification–especially for a publication like Boys’ Life, which is aimed at boys, especially Boy Scouts, of ages 8 and older. In the past five years, Brosnan has authored cover stories on Keith Hernandez and Dwight Gooden, both of whom later got into trouble.
Their allegedly criminal behavior also got the two New York Mets stars a listing among several dozen other athletes, past and present, on what could be called the sports police blotter for 1986. The list, which does not cover violations of NCAA rules, could also be called depressing for both its length and variety.
In the past calendar year, sports figures were cited in The Tribune’s pages for wrongdoings from Jan. 8 through the beginning of this week. The miscreants included Heisman Trophy winners, Cy Young Award winners, modern pentathlon and boxing champions, Rookies of the Year, All-Pros, All-Americas, first-round draft picks, coaches, athletic directors and a former finalist for the National Football League’s good citizen award, the Man of the Year.
The crimes of which these people were accused and–in nearly all the cases, found guilty–run from speeding to reckless drunken driving, from purse-snatching to burglary, from wife-beating to sexual assault, from threatening with a gun to fatally stabbing. The punishments run from hours of community service to 82 years-to-life imprisonment.
On this list, the sportsman of the year is Len Bias, the University of Maryland basketball star who died of a cocaine overdose only two days after the Boston Celtics had made him their first-round pick in the National Basketball Association draft. Such a place of dishonor reflects the cruel truth of a society in which drug use is widespread but only noteworthy when it affects those who play games in which abuse of the body is presumably fatal to performance, if nothing else.
“We’re probably three or four corpses away from being really serious about the relationship between drugs and athletics,” says Dr. Harry Edwards, the University of California sociologist whose specialty is sports.
The relationship between sports heroes and crime in general is equally serious if problematical. When athletes are criminals, sport is among the victims. So is a society in which sportsmen have come to be recognized among the best and brightest.
“We need heroes,” Edwards says. “Athletes celebrate the ideology of a country. There is something basic about human beings winning a battle that is eternal–against themselves, other human beings or circumstances.”
That America’s ideals are tied inextricably with sports was apparent in the reaction to Bias’ death. Not only did it lead the University of Maryland through an ordeal of soul-searching that brought down a coach and athletic director, it was also among the direct causes for the sending of U.S. soldiers and helicopters to help fight the drug war in Bolivia. Remember Len Bias became a battle cry not unlike “Remember the Maine” or “Remember the Alamo.”
“We live in a society where everything is based on sports,” says Dave Duerson, the Bears’ All-Pro safety. “People look to us (athletes) to be the good guys, like Superman, Batman, the Green Hornet. When we do something wrong, it’s like seeing Superman go bad.”
That athletes should be compared to comic book superheroes is not surprising. After all, a former Yale quarterback, Brian Dowling, has been immortalized as the exemplar of macho in the comic strip, Doonesbury, which has become a source of commentary on social and political issues. The American perception of athletes is a purposeful confusion of fact and fiction, because that is the way we want it.
“If Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, if sport and society share important values, something more is at stake when athletes get in trouble than the loss of one athlete or even the credibility or viability of college athetics,” Edwards says. “What is at stake is the future of our nation and our view of ourselves.”
The portrait of sportsmen as criminals, although it may not differ much from the picture of Americans as a whole, is nevertheless not reassuring. The meaning of how and why athletes painted themselves into such a corner is a matter of perception, for quantifiable answers are lacking.
Even when statistics are available, they only show how much the public view of athletes is less rational than emotional. The death of one Len Bias far outweighs those of the other 10,000 Americans whom Edwards estimates will be killed this year by cocaine-related causes. So it is that an athlete’s mistakes, however tragic, are more unforgivable.
Irving Fryar, the New England Patriots’ troubled wide receiver, recognized that when he denied in late May that he had gambled on football games. In the previous few months, Fryar had been involved in an altercation with his wife that resulted in his cutting tendons in his hand and was, after the Super Bowl, one of the six players reportedly named by the Patriots as having admitted to drug use.
“My credibility is shot,” Fryar said. “Half the people who saw the paper are going to believe I’m a drug addict, a wife beater and a gambler–the trifecta.”
A Miami Herald poll taken in late 1984 showed just how accurate Fryar’s analysis is. Ninety-eight percent of those polled said drug use is a problem in sports; 75 percent said it is a serious problem. Almost 90 percent said pro athletes have a special responsibility to serve as a good example for children, yet 50 percent said today’s athletes were worse role models than athletes in the past.
“I don’t think they should be role models, but they get so much publicity they are,” says Joe Garsee, a Chicago schoolteacher and long-time De Paul basketball season ticket-holder. “They have a responsibility whether they like it or not.”
Are they really worse? Or, as Fryar’s mention of those “who saw the paper” indicates, do we simply know more about athletes’ peccadillos and more serious sins?
There is no question that media coverage of athletes’ troubles–and everything else about athletes–has changed in both scope and intent. Both the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal also had an effect on sportswriters, who began to view the men and women they wrote about with a critical and jaundiced eye.
Earl Warren, the former chief justice of the United States, once said he turned to the sports pages first because man’s successes were recorded there while man’s failures made the front page. The reader of today’s sports pages would not be so insulated from reality.
“Journalism reflects the public,” says Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale who is now president of baseball’s National League, “and there is some sense that since Watergate, the public has become disenchanted with not just sports figures but any public figure.”
Says Calvin Hill, the former All-Pro running back: “There is some voyeur in all of us.”
Ernie Accorsi, the former Baltimore and Philadelphia sportswriter who is now general manager of the Cleveland Browns, remembers being advised by journalistic elders not to write things that would get a coach in trouble. Even when honesty became recommended, writers often felt more loyalty to the teams they covered than the editors for whom they worked.
So it was not generally known until years later that Babe Ruth was a notorious womanizer and drunkard or Ty Cobb was a racist and misogynist. Reporters of that era simply chose not to see what they saw, which only added to the eventual problems athletes would have in maintaining their images.
“When things were kept out of the press, there was always a perception athletes were different in not having the trials and tribulations everyone else has,” says Bears’ safety Gary Fencik.
Of course, the questionable behavior of a Ruth or a Cobb or many other athletes in the first six decades of this century was usually not the kind to make a police blotter. And even if it had, the public might never have known. “There was a time when the local law and newspaper guys would say, ‘Let’s not get a guy or a school in trouble,’ ” says University of Michigan athletic director Don Canham. “Now, when a crime gets reported in one place, other law enforcement agencies and newspapers think, ‘We have an obligation to report it here.'”
There is, therefore, no question that heightened media and public awareness have contributed to the changed perception of athletes. That was apparent in the death from a lethal cocaine dose of Cleveland defensive back Don Rogers, which occurred on the eve of his wedding and barely 10 days after Bias’ death.
“There was a lot of adverse reaction when the cocaine evidence began to surface,” Accorsi says. “It was no longer just a tragedy.”
But the media neither arrests nor indicts nor tries nor convicts the athletes whose offenses it is no longer loath to report. Although lack of data makes it hard to determine whether the crime rate among athletes has increased, one thing is certain: there are enough athletes in trouble, as the list compiled from only The Tribune attests, that even a magazine as innocent as Boys’ Life has to be careful about whom it chooses to portray as role models.
“The sad thing is that kids today are sophisticated enough that they are resigned to say, ‘That’s the way it is,’ instead of, ‘Say it ain’t so, Joe,'” says Hood, referring to the famous if apocryphal Chicago boy’s reaction to having a hero destroyed in the 1919 Black Sox scandal, which involved throwing the World Series for money.
Instead, many athletes are left to tell it to the judge and then wind up with a uniform number that runs to the six digits commonly used to identify prisoners.
So basketball standout Scott Skiles (violating probation on guilty plea of marijuana possession) and football star Mark Ingram (breaking and entering) have both served time this year for crimes committed while student-athletes at Michigan State.
And Illinois football player Jeff Markland was sentenced to a year’s probation, 80 hours of community service and six weekends in the county correctional center after pleading guilty to a battery charge resulting from a fraternity fight.
And football players from Tennessee and Virginia, including 1985 Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year Barry Word, are doing time for selling cocaine.
And basketball players Todd Ziegler of Kentucky and Olden Polynice, formerly of Virginia, were convicted of shoplifting.
And 11 major-league baseball players, including Hernandez, were suspended by commissioner Peter Ueberroth for testifying (with criminal immunity) to past drug use in the trial of a dealer; the suspensions were waived in lieu of salary tithes, community service and random drug testing.
And two Green Bay Packers, Mossy Cade and James Lofton–the former NFL Man of the Year candidate–face trials on sexual assault charges.
And two New York Mets, Tim Teufel and Ron Darling, have a January trial date on charges of assaulting off-duty Houston policemen.
All that happened in 1986. And it is only among the highlights–or lowlights–of the sports police blotter.
“You’re seeing a greater number of athletes charged and prosecuted than 10 years ago,” says Martin Shapiro, a Chicago criminal attorney who has represented several high school athletes charged with crimes from assault to burglary.
“There’s a question of whether the actual number of incidents has increased or whether in the past the athlete simply got a pass. Today, no one is going to give a pass to a person on a pedestal, whether in sports or politics.
“I never want to go to a judge or prosecutor with my trump card being,
‘He’s not a bad kid and he’s a star athlete.’ Being a star athlete is not only not a recommendation, but it can be a condemnation.”
Says Giamatti: “Society has now decided athletes can be worshipped, but not privileged.”
Yet athletes still live in what Bears’ president Michael McCaskey calls,
“a privileged class created when young men get a lot of money and attention.” With the privileges come responsibilities, by virtue of the attention, that the athletes too often are incapable of handling, for reasons of immaturity or lack of education or both.
“We have responsibilities, no question, but most of us are still immature,” Duerson says. “For a lot, like a Mercury Morris, it takes a smack in the face to get back on track.”
The problems begin when athletes get special treatment because of their ability. They are usually patted on the back, and their mistakes often get no more than a slap on the wrist. From pat to slap to smack is a progression many athletes make without realizing it is happening.
So it was with Morris, a Super Bowl star with the Miami Dolphins who was recently released from prison after serving less than one-fifth of a 20-year sentence for drug dealing. The public was unaware that Morris was a freebasing cocaine addict until he was arrested for conspiracy to sell the drug.
“I don’t know if an athlete can even measure what one step too far is,” says Kathleen Sheridan, a Northwestern clinical psychologist with an interest in sports. “Take the Illinois kids, (football) players who beat up other kids at a fraternity. Who gave them the license to do that?”
It comes, in part, from growing up in a world where athletic skills are so prized that athletes become separate and unequal from society at large.
“Being a top athlete is, figuratively, a license to kill; you’re allowed to get away with murder.” says Dr. James McGee, chief of psychology at Baltimore’s Sheppard-Pratt Hospital and a consultant to the Baltimore Orioles and several other teams.
“Athletes get a false sense of invulnerability, including the feeling that drugs won’t have the same effect on them because of conditioning.”
Many universities where athletic success has a high priority unwittingly condition athletes to that false sense of security. Some are often given illegal recruiting inducements; others learn that cutting classes or even academic cheating to stay eligible is not punished; some are not even taken to task for fighting with other students, although the battery charges filed against four University of Illinois football players this year show a change in the old “boys will be boys” attitude.
“I don’t think there is any question that some people in Champaign rebelled against tolerating that kind of thing,” Canham says.
Such a hard line can be a shock at schools which place their scholarship athletes in special dorms, where behavior that can euphemistically be called boisterous is both tolerated and almost encouraged. Once the athletes leave the dorm, such behavior is called antisocial, but only punished in the most serious instances. The athlete in trouble is usually bailed out by a coach, which creates a mental dependency that can eventually turn out as damaging as a chemical dependency.
“Society allows athletes to think they can get away with violating certain rules and regulations,” Hill says. “There is a tendency to think if you can run and throw, someone will always take care of your problems. That sends a dangerous message; you don’t become responsible for your own actions. “A person who becomes accustomed to having rules being bent gets the attitude, ‘I’ll get away with it; I’m exceptional and above the law.’
Ultimately, he does something for which he must be held accountable, and the athlete is often the most surprised when he bottoms out.”
So a Morris goes to jail, as have Heisman Trophy winner Billy Cannon
(counterfeiting) and Cy Young winner Denny McLain (racketeering and other charges), as will Cy Young winner LaMarr Hoyt (misdemeanor drug charges). Yet even Hoyt, the former White Sox pitcher who had been arrested more than once for possession of illegal drugs, has seemed to get the benefit of the doubt, with a sentence of less time in jail (45 days) than was recommended in an earlier probation report or by the prosecutor.
“I think people feel more sorry for than bitter at LaMarr Hoyt,” says Jerry Reinsdorf, chairman of the Bulls and White Sox. “He may have walked away from $3 million in guaranteed money.”
“The public must understand that a person gives up a lot, sometimes mental maturity, to make the pros,” says Hill, a management consultant in Washington who also helps run the Inner Circle, a counseling program for Cleveland Browns with chemical dependency problems.
Gooden, it turns out, may be a prime example of that. Only 22, he seemed poised far beyond his years, and the Mets helped insulate him from reality by shielding him from the press as much as possible. His performance until last season, when he looked bad only by comparison to his own previous brilliance, was so spectacular it seemed like a fairy tale that doctored the truth about Doctor K’s youth and immaturity.
The reality was a young man who exaggerated a traffic accident during last spring training, was involved in an argument at a car-rental counter in April, came up with a variety of excuses for missing the victory parade after the Mets won the World Series and confirmed that a young woman in Tampa–not his fiancee–had given birth to his child. The wedding has been postponed.
All those mistakes were re-emphasized when Tampa police stopped Gooden Dec. 13 for erratic driving in his Mercedes with the easily identifiable license plate, “Doc.” Whatever other reasons may have been involved in the arrest, Gooden wound up being charged with a third-degree felony for fighting with the police.
“Dwight Gooden seemed to have incredible poise for an adolescent, but he was an adolescent,” says Northwestern law school professor Len Rubinowitz, who specializes in civil rights. “I wasn’t that surprised what happened to him, given the pressures building on him at such an early age. And there may be a racial aspect to it.”
Brosnan said he was greatly surprised by news of the arrest: “After spending time with Dwight, it never occurred to me he could do what he has done.” Counters Edwards: “The only thing I’m surprised about is that people continue to be shocked and surprised. Let’s admit it’s very, very idealistic to expect athletes, with no help, to deal with all the pressures facing them.”
Athletes far younger than Gooden are often in worse trouble, particularly those from the underclass Edwards says provides “a disproportionate number of the athletes in major sports.” Drugs are the most common problem for these young men, who are nevertheless recruited by universities with one end in mind: money, the natural by-product of winning.
“This isn’t a thing where you take an Eagle Scout, make him a pro athlete, and he becomes an armed robber,” McGee says.
“We drug test; we don’t drug educate,” says Northwestern athletic director Doug Single. “Then we keep our fingers crossed there is no big scandal.”
That hope proved futile as soon as Len Bias died. This year, more than a couple dozen other college athletes have been involved in drug problems that, because of the Bias case, were both more visible and less shocking.
“Who’s next? Will it be a Larry Bird or a Michael Jordan? There isn’t much left that will shock the nation,” says Single.
“The drug scene doesn’t simply come to athletes because they have time and money,” Edwards says. “People now recruit drug abusers.
“Those kids bring with them the blend of character traits that are survival prerequisites in their community. In the black underclass, someone snorts dope, maybe a little coke, maybe even sells a little, and he’s getting over, coping the best he can.
“Then he suddenly winds up in a middle-class (college) community, where he is out of place in the absence of a massive commitment to cultural, academic, social and personal reorientation.”
Universities rarely commit to any of that, which is why there are cases like that of Kevin Ross, who was unable to read or write but still eligible to play basketball at Creighton University. It is only a short step from admitting an athlete with those academic deficiencies, which are all too common in big-time college sports, to taking one with antisocial tendencies.
“Enough schools that want to be No. 1 are not discriminating on admissions,” Canham says. “It started to change 10 years ago when the financial crunch hit college athletics. The coach says, ‘The heck with class and character.’
“The public’s attitude has changed, too. There is no question that the general feeling is, ‘College sports are all bad.’ “
Canham, coincidentally, was on a committee that helped Maryland examine its problems. His impression was that university was less guilty of bad judgment than poor support and follow-up when difficulties were recognized.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Edwards says. “The machinations with Proposition 48 and the ‘death penalty’ will mean throwing a kid to the wolves, then business as usual.” (Proposition 48 requires that an incoming athlete achieve designated minimum scores on the SAT or ACT tests to get a
scholarship. The “death penalty” suspends a school’s program for repeated NCAA offenses.)
“Nothing will change until an aggrieved party says, ‘No, no, no, what I’m doing is suing the university for turning these untutored kids loose on the community.’ Some people can’t see the steamroller until it has crushed them flat.”
Many athletes already feel overwhelmed by the system once they leave the arena. All but the superstars lose the perks and treatment that made them feel even more special. They have to buy the clothes and cars that were routinely given to them, and some of these athletes struggle even to get a job.
“We treat athletes the same way Europeans used to treat royalty,” Hill says. “The difference is the queen is royal for life. The athlete is only on the throne as long as he can play.”
Most athletes want to continue to live like kings after their careers are over. The pressure to maintain a lifestyle can contribute to the crimes of a McLain or a Cannon.
There is, in most cases, nothing inherent in sports that encourages most crimes committed by athletes. Some do, however, allow on-field behavior that falls outside the usual conventions of society.
“Those athletes involved in contact sports, where there is a premium on aggression, have a higher propensity of aggressive behavior off the field,”
McGee says.
“Hockey players are allowed to do things that are felonies on the street,” Giamatti says. “When (Boston mayor) Ray Flynn said he would send police on the ice if there were another brawl like the one they had earlier this season, I applauded him. It’s not a game when assaults are taking place.”
Applying the same standards for violence in the arena that are applied to violence outside the arena is unlikely as long as the arena is considered only a form of entertainment that is somehow separate from real life. The irony, of course, is athletes are held to different standards of behavior than entertainers are.
“Entertainers seem to be almost fictitious,” Fencik says, “while athletes are very real. It has to do with the belief that the action on the field has nothing manufactured or fabricated. Because of that, there is a feeling that athletes aren’t make-believe.”
At the same time, the public wants to perpetuate the mythology of athletes that has existed since the ancient Olympic Games. Athletes are expected to adhere to a credo, “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (faster, higher, stronger), that emphasizes superlatives. We want athletes’ physical strengths to include moral imperatives, and we remain disappointed and surprised when they do not.
“We tend to think of athletes, unfortunately, as adhering to a higher calling, with something spiritual and noble about it,” Hill says. “We turn on the TV and hope the athletes we watch are as close to perfection as possible. If not, it impedes the watcher’s ability to escape his own imperfect, humdrum life.”
The athletes themselves seem only too aware that such dreams are impossible. A .300 batting average is no evidence of human perfectability, nor is athletic accomplishment any evidence of respect for one’s own body.
“That athletes took better care of themselves is a preconception I brought, and I was stunned to find out it isn’t true,” McGee says.
The Baltimore psychologist was even more amazed by the results of an exercise he conducted at the Orioles’ minor-league training center last spring. When McGee asked those young players to list athletes involved with drugs and/or crime, they filled four blackboards in 10 minutes.
“The kids were awed and so was I,” McGee says. “What produces that reaction is seeing the large number of athletes in trouble conflicts with even the basic assumptions they have about themselves.
“They aren’t Jack Armstrongs. What could be more obvious at this point?”
