Whoring Jocks Challenge Halting Sportswriters
Sport Iconoclast
Smacking fantasy of athletics
By Matt Chaney
Posted December 14, 2009
Old Problem Demands Modern Response by Sport Media
When Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez were publicly accused for performance-enhancing drugs in separate cases, sportswriters gave 'em hell, righteously, but many media overlooked revelations of extramarital affairs by these baseball icons.
Generally, sportswriters have always ignored jocks gone wild on sex.
The problem of whoring athletes only recently incited palpable national disgust, with PGA superstar Tiger Woods the trigger culprit. But blame the sport media too, or the "toy department" of news, which has shirked proper journalistic response on events spanning centuries.
Consider the erstwhile college football team that partied hearty in New York, celebrating victory in a big holiday game. The gang went wild along Fifth Avenue, where the "tipsy" football players "chased" a lone "tenderloin lassie," as a witness reporter would characterize the incident.
The "singing and whooping" players herded the fleeing woman down the block, "half hoisting her" and "half hugging her," per the writer's words. At the corner she was snatched up and carried west on 23rd Street, before a "rough tug" tore away a piece of her petticoat. "There was a wild scrimmage for the trophy, and in the set-to the leader let go of her and she escaped."
Fun for the football players, not the harried woman.
The time was Thanksgiving 1892, when media already designated females as adornments in football's world, as sex objects for athletes and fans, according to modern findings by cultural analyst Dr. Michael Oriard, professor of English at Oregon State University. A former college and pro football player, Oriard analyzes thousands of football texts from the Victorian Era to present.
Print coverage was extensive for that holiday game in New York, with an army of scribes waxing in prose for newspapers and magazines. Several surely witnessed the football players' wilding along Fifth Avenue, mobbing the female target, but only the one writer mentioned it. Oriard observed, "This near-rape of a 'tenderloin lassie' by the privileged sons of Yale and Princeton did not appear in other reports on the game."
Woods, meanwhile, has enjoyed privilege with contemporary scribes that lingered past the ridiculous auto crash outside his Orlando mansion on November 27. Although Woods' initial excuse stunk badly, posted on his Web site, many sportswriters proclaimed he still deserved benefit of doubt.
Never mind, other media ran with the story, cyber writers along with a few sport reporters, and today the fraudulent mythology of Tiger stands properly debunked in public.
Now we know this husband and father kept numerous mistresses while cashing hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsement fees--a fortune gained in part for his misleading public image as devoted family man, perpetuated by news media.
Yet some writers, commentators and editors will persist in classifying an athlete's infidelity as private business, even for a Tiger Woods. A jock must behave horribly with sex to draw any response from them.
Such self-imposed media obliviousness isn't lost on male athletes, who become savvy early as high school. "We know, as athletes, when 'it' begins," said former NFL player Darryl Henley. "It is when you know you are good enough to get away with stuff--and make no mistake, the better you are, the more you get away with."
Henley spoke as an inmate at federal prison, serving a 41-year sentence for drug trafficking and murder conspiracy, during a 1998 interview with authors Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger. Their subsequent investigative book, Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in The NFL, is a mind-blowing account of jock mayhem that includes crimes against women like robberies, beatings and rapes.
The incidents were downplayed as news or left off sportspages entirely, and some female victims didn't bother to notify justice systems that favored local athletes and teams. Most sportswriters also managed to bypass this important book, although some noticed enough to gripe and dismiss Pros and Cons as exaggerated reality. The documented victims could be damned.
I recall sportswriting in the 1980s and 1990s, when most media viewed anabolic-steroid use as personal troubles for isolated athletes. Editors told me the topic was stale news, even then. Sport organizations had no real culpability for steroids, according to prevailing media attitude, and there was no public issue.
Translation: Media were loathe to probe and criticize juicing jocks and doped games just a decade ago, however widespread and apparent the PED abuse. Today we know how well that approach worked out.
In the same period, I covered enough of Major League Baseball to see and hear of rampant sexual activity by married players.
One Cardinals star was blatant with mistresses while raking in endorsements based on his wholesome image, courtesy of sportswriters. At spring training, following a day game at Al Lang Stadium in St. Petersburg, I saw this athlete kiss his wife and sons goodbye then head across the street to the Hilton, where he joined a young woman waiting in the lobby. They walked out the front door together, 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and departed in his luxury convertible while looking on were scribes, photogs and fans. Later the player's wife divorced him, their family devastated by the truth.
A retired Cardinals star, married with grandchildren, was rumored to prefer young sex toys, as in girls, teens. He was a crude old bastard and self-indulgent, capable of rude callousness toward fans and media--a classic ingrate of big-time sport--and I could see him as a pervert. I'd known male coaches like him in high school and college.
I also found that bachelor pro athletes could take whoring to extreme, in part because they knew we media wouldn't report it.
By 2000, Chiefs football star Derrick Thomas was worshipped in Kansas City. Thousands of adults and children wore his familiar jersey, No. 58. But Thomas died of complications following an auto accident, spurring Kansas City's shocking discovery he had fathered seven children out of wedlock with five women. In addition, most of the millions Thomas had earned in pro football were gone, squandered largely on material pleasures.
Local media had inflated Thomas' public image for a decade, grossly overplaying his good character while consistently burying his glaring faults, and the ill-informed public was angry in his wake. Media, suddenly on defense, suggested or flatly stated the late athlete's sex life was a private matter.
I couldn't go along anymore, striving myself to properly report both positives and negatives about athletes and games. Then a report of possible sexual assault by college basketball players landed in my lap, involving a 19-year-old coed who told police she was gang-raped in a dark dormitory room. The sex began as consensual with one player, she said, but others joined in against her will.
I remembered a chilling story involving my college football team in the early 1980s. Around 1990, a former female athlete of the university told me she'd been raped by a former teammate of mine in the jock dormitory. The perp was handsome, seemingly nice, and she'd gone to his room as a naive freshman, anticipating kisses and hugs instead of the brutal attack.
"Why didn't you report it?" I responded, angry with him and sorry for her.
"I didn't think anyone would deal with it," she said.
I couldn't dispute her. Local sportswriters definitely would have ignored her plight.
Thus, years later, I was determined to make a difference in the case of coed and basketball players. The investigating police officer saw evidence of sexual assault and was hopeful my coverage would lead to new information. But officials and boosters of the college, led by its female president, influenced an editor of mine to ensure the story died quickly.
My news report was hijacked after I filed it. The editor took over, deleting solid information and rewriting other passages to absolve the school of responsibility and the athletes of criminal wrongdoing. And he published my byline atop the front-page story!
The female accuser was stunned by the news account, feeling discredited and alone, and she dropped pursuit of a criminal investigation.
The editor's audacity enraged me, and I confronted him to vent and offer my resignation. He apologized, persuaded me to stay on, but our rift was wide and within months I left the newspaper and daily sportswriting for good.
Sport media go on, and my journalistic type remains scarce in the business. Nevertheless, public issues continue to fester around athletes and games, legit news that cannot be ignored in this age of instantaneous information, events including wanton sex by jocks.
Sportswriters may reject news criteria qualifying infidelity for a celebrity jock--whoring around by Tiger Woods is major news, undeniably--but mainstream scribes have to heed their competition for scoop.
"The sports media are caught betwixt and between," veteran sportswriter Frank Deford commented for www.npr.org. "In the innocent past, it was rather a gentleman's rule of thumb that an athlete's off-the-field behavior should not be the subject of coverage unless it appeared to affect his performance on the field. ...
"But as the tabloids widen their reach into sports, it may be rather more difficult for sportswriters to keep on ceding a part of their beat to the celebrity hounds."
E-mail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For information about his 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.
Smacking fantasy of athletics
By Matt Chaney
Posted December 14, 2009
Old Problem Demands Modern Response by Sport Media
When Roger Clemens and Alex Rodriguez were publicly accused for performance-enhancing drugs in separate cases, sportswriters gave 'em hell, righteously, but many media overlooked revelations of extramarital affairs by these baseball icons.
Generally, sportswriters have always ignored jocks gone wild on sex.
The problem of whoring athletes only recently incited palpable national disgust, with PGA superstar Tiger Woods the trigger culprit. But blame the sport media too, or the "toy department" of news, which has shirked proper journalistic response on events spanning centuries.
Consider the erstwhile college football team that partied hearty in New York, celebrating victory in a big holiday game. The gang went wild along Fifth Avenue, where the "tipsy" football players "chased" a lone "tenderloin lassie," as a witness reporter would characterize the incident.
The "singing and whooping" players herded the fleeing woman down the block, "half hoisting her" and "half hugging her," per the writer's words. At the corner she was snatched up and carried west on 23rd Street, before a "rough tug" tore away a piece of her petticoat. "There was a wild scrimmage for the trophy, and in the set-to the leader let go of her and she escaped."
Fun for the football players, not the harried woman.
The time was Thanksgiving 1892, when media already designated females as adornments in football's world, as sex objects for athletes and fans, according to modern findings by cultural analyst Dr. Michael Oriard, professor of English at Oregon State University. A former college and pro football player, Oriard analyzes thousands of football texts from the Victorian Era to present.
Print coverage was extensive for that holiday game in New York, with an army of scribes waxing in prose for newspapers and magazines. Several surely witnessed the football players' wilding along Fifth Avenue, mobbing the female target, but only the one writer mentioned it. Oriard observed, "This near-rape of a 'tenderloin lassie' by the privileged sons of Yale and Princeton did not appear in other reports on the game."
Woods, meanwhile, has enjoyed privilege with contemporary scribes that lingered past the ridiculous auto crash outside his Orlando mansion on November 27. Although Woods' initial excuse stunk badly, posted on his Web site, many sportswriters proclaimed he still deserved benefit of doubt.
Never mind, other media ran with the story, cyber writers along with a few sport reporters, and today the fraudulent mythology of Tiger stands properly debunked in public.
Now we know this husband and father kept numerous mistresses while cashing hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsement fees--a fortune gained in part for his misleading public image as devoted family man, perpetuated by news media.
Yet some writers, commentators and editors will persist in classifying an athlete's infidelity as private business, even for a Tiger Woods. A jock must behave horribly with sex to draw any response from them.
Such self-imposed media obliviousness isn't lost on male athletes, who become savvy early as high school. "We know, as athletes, when 'it' begins," said former NFL player Darryl Henley. "It is when you know you are good enough to get away with stuff--and make no mistake, the better you are, the more you get away with."
Henley spoke as an inmate at federal prison, serving a 41-year sentence for drug trafficking and murder conspiracy, during a 1998 interview with authors Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger. Their subsequent investigative book, Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in The NFL, is a mind-blowing account of jock mayhem that includes crimes against women like robberies, beatings and rapes.
The incidents were downplayed as news or left off sportspages entirely, and some female victims didn't bother to notify justice systems that favored local athletes and teams. Most sportswriters also managed to bypass this important book, although some noticed enough to gripe and dismiss Pros and Cons as exaggerated reality. The documented victims could be damned.
I recall sportswriting in the 1980s and 1990s, when most media viewed anabolic-steroid use as personal troubles for isolated athletes. Editors told me the topic was stale news, even then. Sport organizations had no real culpability for steroids, according to prevailing media attitude, and there was no public issue.
Translation: Media were loathe to probe and criticize juicing jocks and doped games just a decade ago, however widespread and apparent the PED abuse. Today we know how well that approach worked out.
In the same period, I covered enough of Major League Baseball to see and hear of rampant sexual activity by married players.
One Cardinals star was blatant with mistresses while raking in endorsements based on his wholesome image, courtesy of sportswriters. At spring training, following a day game at Al Lang Stadium in St. Petersburg, I saw this athlete kiss his wife and sons goodbye then head across the street to the Hilton, where he joined a young woman waiting in the lobby. They walked out the front door together, 5 o'clock in the afternoon, and departed in his luxury convertible while looking on were scribes, photogs and fans. Later the player's wife divorced him, their family devastated by the truth.
A retired Cardinals star, married with grandchildren, was rumored to prefer young sex toys, as in girls, teens. He was a crude old bastard and self-indulgent, capable of rude callousness toward fans and media--a classic ingrate of big-time sport--and I could see him as a pervert. I'd known male coaches like him in high school and college.
I also found that bachelor pro athletes could take whoring to extreme, in part because they knew we media wouldn't report it.
By 2000, Chiefs football star Derrick Thomas was worshipped in Kansas City. Thousands of adults and children wore his familiar jersey, No. 58. But Thomas died of complications following an auto accident, spurring Kansas City's shocking discovery he had fathered seven children out of wedlock with five women. In addition, most of the millions Thomas had earned in pro football were gone, squandered largely on material pleasures.
Local media had inflated Thomas' public image for a decade, grossly overplaying his good character while consistently burying his glaring faults, and the ill-informed public was angry in his wake. Media, suddenly on defense, suggested or flatly stated the late athlete's sex life was a private matter.
I couldn't go along anymore, striving myself to properly report both positives and negatives about athletes and games. Then a report of possible sexual assault by college basketball players landed in my lap, involving a 19-year-old coed who told police she was gang-raped in a dark dormitory room. The sex began as consensual with one player, she said, but others joined in against her will.
I remembered a chilling story involving my college football team in the early 1980s. Around 1990, a former female athlete of the university told me she'd been raped by a former teammate of mine in the jock dormitory. The perp was handsome, seemingly nice, and she'd gone to his room as a naive freshman, anticipating kisses and hugs instead of the brutal attack.
"Why didn't you report it?" I responded, angry with him and sorry for her.
"I didn't think anyone would deal with it," she said.
I couldn't dispute her. Local sportswriters definitely would have ignored her plight.
Thus, years later, I was determined to make a difference in the case of coed and basketball players. The investigating police officer saw evidence of sexual assault and was hopeful my coverage would lead to new information. But officials and boosters of the college, led by its female president, influenced an editor of mine to ensure the story died quickly.
My news report was hijacked after I filed it. The editor took over, deleting solid information and rewriting other passages to absolve the school of responsibility and the athletes of criminal wrongdoing. And he published my byline atop the front-page story!
The female accuser was stunned by the news account, feeling discredited and alone, and she dropped pursuit of a criminal investigation.
The editor's audacity enraged me, and I confronted him to vent and offer my resignation. He apologized, persuaded me to stay on, but our rift was wide and within months I left the newspaper and daily sportswriting for good.
Sport media go on, and my journalistic type remains scarce in the business. Nevertheless, public issues continue to fester around athletes and games, legit news that cannot be ignored in this age of instantaneous information, events including wanton sex by jocks.
Sportswriters may reject news criteria qualifying infidelity for a celebrity jock--whoring around by Tiger Woods is major news, undeniably--but mainstream scribes have to heed their competition for scoop.
"The sports media are caught betwixt and between," veteran sportswriter Frank Deford commented for www.npr.org. "In the innocent past, it was rather a gentleman's rule of thumb that an athlete's off-the-field behavior should not be the subject of coverage unless it appeared to affect his performance on the field. ...
"But as the tabloids widen their reach into sports, it may be rather more difficult for sportswriters to keep on ceding a part of their beat to the celebrity hounds."
E-mail: mattchaney@fourwallspublishing.com. For information about his 2009 book, Spiral of Denial: Muscle Doping in American Football, visit www.fourwallspublishing.com.
Posted by Matt Chaney at 12/14/2009 6:33 AM 
Categories: Commentary
Tags: golf athletes gender performance-enhancing drugs media baseball privacy infidelity sportswriting NCAA Tiger Woods news football journalism law high school sex NFL PGA steroids reporting health
Categories: Commentary
Tags: golf athletes gender performance-enhancing drugs media baseball privacy infidelity sportswriting NCAA Tiger Woods news football journalism law high school sex NFL PGA steroids reporting health
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