Bad news from sports world

By DAVE SHEININ of The Washington Post

Sex. Violence. And now, right in step, drugs—the third soldier of this apocalypse, the third leg on this perfect and perfectly unholy triangle of sports scandals. If sports truly offers a window into our nation’s soul, do we really want to look inside it right now?

This week’s revelations that New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi and San Francisco Giants superstar Barry Bonds admitted using steroids thrust baseball into the unseemly corners of the newspaper’s front page and the segments of the nightly news that were occupied in recent weeks by professional football and basketball.

The images of Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver Terrell Owens ogling actress Nicolette Sheridan as she dropped her towel during a taped lead-in to Monday Night Football, and of Indiana Pacers star Ron Artest and teammates going into the stands to attack beer-throwing fans, have been replaced by shots of Giambi and Bonds, muscles rippling, launching baseballs into the stratosphere.

Can our games be reclaimed from the clutches of the vile, the obnoxious, the boorish, the needlessly provocative, and return them to the imaginations of children and the entrust of the decent? Or is it too late?

“I wouldn’t reach that sweeping a conclusion,” noted television sportscaster Bob Costas said in a telephone interview this week. “But one general conclusion I can reach is that a lot of the fondness people used to feel for sports is either greatly diminished or gone. Is it still exciting? Yes. Are there still moments that seem transcendent? Yes. But the whole tone has changed to the point where any sense of romance is pretty much gone.

“But it didn’t just happen this week. It has been happening, gradually, for a long time now.”

Perhaps it did not start this week with baseball twin steroid bombshells—Giambi, then Bonds, on back-to-back days—or last month with the towel-dropping and the “basketbrawl” incident in Detroit, or even earlier this year, when Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Milton Bradley threw a bottle at the feet of a heckler in his home stadium, or when Texas Rangers reliever Frank Francisco hit a fan in the head with a chair after going into the stands in Oakland to confront a heckler.

But it certainly seems to have reached some sort of sordid nadir these last few weeks.

Victor Conte, the “nutritionist” at the center of the BALCO investigation, could have been speaking for sports as a whole, and not just the Olympics, when he said on Friday night’s telecast of ‘’20/20’’ that its “whole history ... is just full of corruption, cover-up, performance-enhancing drug use. It’s not what the world thinks it is.”

The wasting away of society’s accepted codes of behavior isn’t limited to sports, of course. It’s visible in politics, in pop culture, on our highways and in our classrooms. But perhaps nowhere has the transformation from a culture of decency to one of confrontation and greed been as acute as in sports.

“There is no such thing as immorality,” said Fay Vincent, former baseball commissioner. “We don’t condemn any behavior, unless it’s illegal. And even then we develop excuses for the people—‘Oh, maybe he had a bad childhood, and that’s the reason he’s like this.’ ”

Thomas Tutko, a professor emeritus of psychology at San Jose State who specializes in sports issues, recently spoke to students at another university in California.

“I asked them, ‘What is the purpose of sports?’ ” Tutko said. “The answer I heard back was, ‘Money and fame.’ No one mentioned character building. That’s sad. We used to have a belief that sports was about character building. And now we’re acting as if that doesn’t even count.”

A towel drops from a suddenly naked woman’s torso. Basketball players brawl with fans. Two star baseball players admit steroid use. What does it all mean when viewed all at once, or does it mean anything?

Vince Doria, the head of ESPN’s news division, said, “In some ways, we’ve all wanted to rush to judgment very quickly to package (these three incidents) very neatly in a commentary on the state of sports today and to see it as a reflection of society as a whole, a connection we’re always trying to make in sports.

“But I’m not so sure we don’t just have three separate stories, with three different issues, and that’s all it represents.”

Still, if one thing ties it all together, it surely is money: the money that makes athletes who have gobs of it believe they walk in a rarefied realm that has little to do with the masses. The money that network executives rake in thanks to one simple, irrefutable notion: sex sells. The money that increasingly comes out of the pockets of fans and into those of the athletes, widening the gap between them. The available money that confronts an athlete with a choice: stay clean and make a little, or risk one’s health and reputation by juicing up in hopes of making a lot more. And the money that baseball itself raked in because of that very choice.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig, now facing the biggest crisis of his tenure since the 1994 strike that forced cancellation of the World Series, spoke this week of the game’s “enormous social responsibility’’ to keep its players steroid-free and its records sacred.

But in the mid- to late-1990s, when suspicions about steroid use first began to surface, baseball’s powers ignored the problem because, some would argue, those powers benefitted financially from the game’s increased popularity, which was traceable to the rise of a handful of charismatic sluggers—such as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, who engaged in a memorable 1998 home run duel.

“There’s no doubt that, coming back from the post-strike hangover of the mid-1990s, when the home run race took place and the nation was captivated,” Costas said, “if there was any reason to question the legitimacy of what those sluggers were doing, baseball didn’t want to hear those questions. Any person paying attention could see the changed body types in that period—not just of (McGwire and Sosa), but of many players. But why confront those questions when it would hurt your business to do so?”

There is plenty of evidence that most fans do not share the outrage of the sports columnists and talking heads when it comes to the steroids story. Even though everyone held strong suspicions Bonds had some synthetic help on his way to setting all those records, fans still turned out in droves. (For that matter, sports writers still voted him to his record seventh MVP award.) In an ESPN poll this week, 82.3 percent of respondents said the revelations didn’t change their views of him because “I always thought Bonds used steroids.”

Fans seemed genuinely more disturbed by Sosa’s corked-bat caper than the notion that his arms might also be corked—perhaps because, as Costas argues, there was video evidence of it. And McGwire, who retired just before steroids became a full-blown crisis for the game, is looked upon as a big, cuddly ox of a man, despite admissions that he used androstenedione—a then-legal “precursor” to steroids—during his record-setting home run race with Sosa.

“We are still very much results-oriented,” Vincent said. “We don’t seem to care as a culture what someone does to succeed, no matter how unseemly. We seem to admire people like Donald Trump as a cultural hero, and I find that mystifying.”

Perhaps, too, we overestimate the level of outrage regarding the brawl in Detroit between Pacers players and Pistons fans. Did everyone —or Everyman—feel as disgusted by what occurred as did the columnists and commentators who saw in it the fall of civilization?

Are the media to blame? On one level, these scandals are simply grist for the never-ending news-cycle mill. The athletes are our creations. We build them up, then we tear them down.

“To tell the truth,” said ESPN’s Doria, “for people in the sports business who are covering the news, it’s been a hell of a two weeks. ... Is the media, whoever that is, guilty of (creating the monster that caused) this? I guess they are. But the alternative is to sit back and not do our craft.”

So what do we do now? It seems unlikely we can go back to the way the games were played in the 1980s, let alone the 1950s. You can’t dissemble the machine. You can’t take the money back out of the games.

You can’t undo what has already been done.

“This genie doesn’t get put back into the bottle,” Costas said. “There are too many crosscurrents and cultural forces at work, television chief among them. What can be done? I don’t know if you can change anyone’s attitudes, but within the bounds of the playing field, you can take a tougher stance towards legislating behavior—as (NBA Commissioner) David Stern with his suspensions.

“If you really meant business, you can say to the TV networks who are your partners, ‘You can promote anything you want, but we’re not going to let you promote antisocial behavior.’ And if you’re baseball, you can say, ‘We’re not going to look the other way when people cheat.’ ”