Unlike Jose Canseco, Paul Janszen had nothing to gain in blowing the whistle so loudly back in February 1989 that it still echoes in Major League Baseball stadiums 16 years later.
There was no six-figure book advance for Janszen, Pete Rose’s best friend, no audience with Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes,” no 24-hour sports-talk radio to turn a few inflammatory words into a weeklong discussion.
There was Janszen, pitiful and alone, staring at the ceiling fan in a tiny room inside the halfway house in Cincinnati to which a judge had confined him for six months for filing phony tax returns.
All he really had left was a measure of pride that had survived his association with Rose, for whom Janszen had bet as much as $10,000 a day on baseball games during the 1987 season.
“I had sunk so low,” Janszen recalled Friday.
MLB offered a rope to pull him out of the emotional pit.
Investigators digging into Rose’s gambling habit requested a meeting with Janszen but promised nothing in return for evidence on Rose.
“It was a freebie, but I knew what I felt inside, and a big piece of me just wanted to do the right thing even though I knew the effect it would have on some people,” Janszen said.
The information he provided eventually resulted in Rose getting banned from baseball for gambling and blaming Janszen more than himself. In MLB’s Dowd Report, which detailed Rose’s gambling, Rose names Janszen as the impetus behind the investigation. Janszen has not seen Rose in person since that year.
“When [MLB] wanted to talk to me, they stressed to me the best interests of the game were at stake,” Janszen said. “And I bought into it and didn’t care what other people were going to think.”
Some days he would wonder if it all meant anything, until one day last winter when he heard Rose admit on television that he had bet on baseball. John Dowd, the author of the report, was on the phone quickly.
“He told me that day that I helped protect the integrity the game,” said Janszen, who now runs a fitness equipment repair business and is writing a book. “I didn’t need to hear that from him, but that affirmation was nice. That all of it was worth it.”
Over time, Janszen gained self-respect but lost friends, the tradeoff every whistle-blower in sports or any other sector of society inevitably risks making.
From Major League Baseball to the International Olympic Committee, from the NFL to the NCAA, from NASA to Enron, people with as much to lose as gain have spoken out for reasons that range from the personal to the profit-driven.
How baseball history records Canseco’s whistle-blowing this winter might depend how quickly his book flies off the shelves and how dramatically his accusations affect steroid awareness and testing policies.
“A whistle-blower is defined as someone who either works in an agency or formerly works in an agency and exposes wrongdoing there, so [Canseco] clearly is a whistle-blower,” said Roberta Ann Johnson, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco and author of “Whistle-blowing: When It Works–And Why.”
When it comes to statistics, Johnson is more comfortable discussing the 1,000 e-mail tips the Securities and Exchange Commission receives every day from whistle-blowers than Canseco’s 462 career home runs. But she knows enough about Canseco to know his motives figure to receive as much scrutiny as the validity of his allegations.
“Most often, the whistle-blower becomes the issue, and that tactic can be very successful in avoiding discussion of the wrongdoing,” Johnson said. “It takes the eyes off the prize.”
To wit, even before Sunday night’s much-hyped “60 Minutes” interview, players linked to steroids in the book such as Roger Clemens and Rafael Palmeiro have attacked Canseco’s credibility as if it were a hanging curveball.
“Everybody always wants to shoot the messenger,” Janszen said. “I was shot so many times in 16 years that I’m not sure the corpse is recognizable.”
It all looks and sounds familiar to Johnson, trained to focus on the message rather than the messenger.
“In spite of himself, Jose Canseco may be contributing to the public good,” Johnson said.
Warning shots
That was Pete Gent’s intent when he used comedy in the 1973 novel “North Dallas Forty” to depict the NFL as a magnet for sex, drugs and the dregs of society. Gent, a Dallas Cowboys wide receiver from 1964-68, became so disillusioned with what he saw as a player that when he retired he felt compelled to warn parents about a game he grew to despise.
His fictional characterization of Cowboys teammates such as Don Meredith as a dim-witted womanizer and Dallas coach Tom Landry as a cold-hearted control freak alienated some friends and drew Gent into “a good share of bar fights,” he said. But the benefits always outweighed the risks for him.
The book eventually was made into a movie and became known as one of the truest behind-the-scenes looks at the NFL.
“I had so many experiences that I thought people needed to hear or read, and it was all inside of me, that when I was done playing, I just felt the need to vomit all that up in writing,” Gent, 62, said from his home in Bangor, Mich. “The book’s legacy, I hope, is that every parent reads it and thinks of it before shoving their kid onto a football field for the first time.”
Agent Leigh Steinberg used to give clients a copy of Gent’s book as a means of introducing them to life in the NFL. The ultimate compliment for Gent came when the mother of former Oakland Raider John Matuszak gave her son Gent’s book in the hospital before he died of heart failure in 1989 at the age of 38.
“I remember he said he liked it because he realized that there were guys out there who were just as crazy as he was,” Gent said. “I guess the book made him feel not so alone.”
Forbidden topic
Loneliness led David Kopay to write his autobiographical, tell-all tale of life as a homosexual in the NFL in 1977. It became a New York Times bestseller, will begin its fifth printing soon and remains part of the discussion every summer in training camp when NFL teams contemplate how to handle it if one of their players came out publicly.
“I guess I was blowing the whistle on myself because I could not live with myself anymore,” Kopay, 62, said from his home in Los Angeles. “I did the book out of certain sense of desperation.”
It empowered Kopay, naturally shy, to become more vocal and active in sharing stories of what he considered a homophobic NFL culture and the relationship he shared with Washington Redskins tight end Jerry Smith, who died in 1986 because of complications from AIDS. It introduced a topic into the macho setting of an NFL locker room that was once taboo and is still discussed awkwardly. But it is discussed.
“It’s one of the biggest social struggles in the league, the country and the world,” Kopay said. “And it helps to talk about it, so from that standpoint I guess I made an impact.”
Truth and consequences
Other examples of sports whistle-blowers abound, and the personal costs vary in each show of conscience.
At the NCAA’s urging, former Baylor assistant basketball coach Abar Rouse secretly recorded his boss, ex-Bears coach Dave Bliss, as Bliss tried to devise a scheme in the summer of 2003 to cover up $7,000 worth of improper payments and portray one of his ex-players, the murdered Patrick Dennehy, as a drug dealer.
The revelations rocked the program and changed many a career for players and coaches. Rouse, now an assistant coach at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, could not comment on his role or motivation because of pending litigation involving Baylor.
In the mid-1990s, lifelong Auburn fan John Thrower, a lawyer from Opelika, Ala., turned over to the NCAA incriminating documents proving payments to former Alabama player Gene Jelks. Thrower even called in local radio shows to brag about his findings, costing himself some business.
Celebrity motivated Thrower as much as school loyalty. But in the end, he felt so distraught over the lack of support from the Auburn community and what he considered a too lenient NCAA penalty that he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution he had attempted suicide.
In cycling, ever since former team masseuse Willy Voet wrote a book on the rampant use of illegal drugs by riders, guys like Lance Armstrong have had to cover their ears from all the whistle-blowing. In track and field, BALCO founder Victor Conte’s involvement in steroid distribution is changing that sport as much as it threatens to change baseball.
It is too early to tell if the charges contained in Canseco’s book will carry the same kind of weight. Or even if “Juiced” can come close to squeezing as much interest out of reporters, fans, players and coaches as the definitive baseball tell-all tome, “Ball Four.”
Jim Bouton’s 1970 book revealed so much drinking and skirt-chasing done by major-league players that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn asked Bouton to apologize. More significantly, the book addressed the financial aspects of the game for the first time. Historians credit “Ball Four” for leading to the abolition of the reserve clause and the establishment of free-agency.
Never shy with his opinions, Bouton has plenty on the latest former baseball player-turned author but none that he wants published.
“I hope you understand,” Bouton said from his home in Pittsfield, Mass. “But I would prefer not to be mentioned in the same sentence as Jose Canseco.”
