Subject: Athletes Out of Control -- an Essay
Date: Published: 11/22/91 (122 lines)
Source:  Wall Street Journal.  Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    LEISURE & ARTS -- On Sports:
    Athletes Out of Control
    ----
    By Frederick C. Klein

    Some friends, knowing what I do for a living, have asked
 when I'd be writing a column about Magic Johnson.  Hadn't
 everyone else, they said?  
    I shrugged and replied that I didn't think there was much
 to say beyond expressing the hope that medical science would
 find something to help the poor guy, and others in his
 situation, before they got really sick.  I guessed I also
 could grope for a silver lining and say that his example
 might convince people that sexual promiscuity has become a
 form of Russian roulette in the era of AIDS, but that's more
 a wish than an expectation.
    But pretty quickly the thought occurred to me that we have
 been getting a lot of terribly bad news about our athletic
 heroes lately, and that the HIV virus may not be the only bug
 going around in the circles in which they move.  Oscar Wilde's
 line that we'd better be careful what we wish for, because we
 might get it, seems to have gained new currency.
    Consider the plight of three other men whose careers at
 least equaled that of Magic.  Mike Tyson, who if not for one
 bad fight in Tokyo would be rated among the greatest boxers
 ever, faces trial in Indianapolis on rape charges.  Pete Rose,
 baseball's most prolific hitter and its most distinctive
 personality of recent years, is banned from his sport for
 gambling and just out of prison on a tax-evasion conviction.
 The once-jaunty Muhammad Ali, who may have achieved his boast
 of being the world's most famous person, is old before his
 time and ill, a figure of pity instead of admiration.
    What the very different current circumstances of these
 quite different people have in common, I think, is that they
 followed a kind of success that appears to be a distinctly
 recent phenomenon.  Sports heroes long have been lionized, of
 course, but the adulation has grown to a point where it seems
 to me to be something new under the sun.
    It includes wealth so great that, probably, it remains an
 abstraction even to its recipients; Rose enjoyed a
 seven-figure annual salary in the last years of his lengthy
 career, while the reported yearly earnings of Johnson, Tyson
 and Ali are or were well into eight figures.  It includes a
 television-based celebrity that has placed big-time athletes
 among our most recognizable figures at a time when
 recognition alone can open just about any door.  Who has not
 seen the sea of a crowded restaurant's waiting room part for
 a local-TV weatherman, for heaven's sake?  
    And it includes a sports-crazy populace's willingness to
 overlook any number of transgressions as long as their
 perpetrators can put points on the board, or some such.  For
 the obviously talented, that sort of destructive forgiveness
 begins in high school, or sooner.  A lot of athletes today
 behave as if they've never heard the word "no."
    This certainly seems to have been the case with the
 25-year-old Tyson.  His biographers, of whom there have been
 many, portray him as a preteen hard case who used his fists
 to get his way on the streets of Brooklyn.  He was plucked
 from a reformatory at age 12 by men who saw him as a future
 boxing superstar and proceeded to use their influence to help
 him avoid the consequences of his later forays into truancy
 and schoolyard bullying.  Once an adult, Tyson's behavior
 turned toward manhandling women who resisted his advances,
 along with the occasional boyfriend who attempted their
 rescue; it's been reported that his own, boxing-spawned
 wealth has smoothed over possible difficulties there.  It
 remains to be determined if he's a rapist, but if he's
 convicted he'll forfeit both his freedom and his career.
    The biography of Pete Rose is less dramatic than that of
 Tyson, but similar nonetheless.  He cracked a windowpane with
 a batted ball at age three, but instead of replacing it his
 parents kept it as a shrine to his prowess and, much later,
 offered it to the Smithsonian.  His mother paid him 50 cents
 for every Little League hit, making him a child "pro."  And if
 he did poorly in school it was all right, as long as he kept
 his batting average up.
    The adult Rose gambled both unwisely and unwell, according
 to Michael Sokolove in his book "Hustle:  The Myth, Life and
 Lies of Pete Rose"; he shoveled money to the bookies on team
 sports, and as much as $30,000 a day through the windows at
 the horse and dog tracks.  Flunkies ran or called in his bets,
 sometimes from the telephones in baseball clubhouses.  One dog
 track let him write checks.  Sportswriters, teammates and
 baseball executives knew of his habit, Mr. Sokolove writes,
 but nobody thought much of it until, finally, it became a
 public issue.
    Like Rose, Ali surrounded himself with sycophants who
 could be counted upon to tell him what he wanted to hear and
 no more.  What he didn't want to hear -- and thus rarely did
 -- was that his skills were failing.  He continued to fight
 long past the time he should have stopped, and as a result
 suffered irreparable physical damage.  Ali's downfall seems to
 have been fame itself; he said he was "the greatest" so many
 times he believed it himself.
    And so we come to Magic Johnson, who stands out even in the
 preceding company.  This was an athlete of superlative talent
 and a disposition so sunny that he was liked by foe as well
 as friend.  At 6-foot-9 inches tall, he could handle the ball
 like a guard or go inside like a center.  Nobody else could do
 what he could on a basketball court.
    Apparently, few could do what he did off the court,
 either.  "I was the one most NBA players looked up to when it
 came to women," he says in a recent Sports Illustrated
 article.  "I lived the kind of social life that most guys in
 the league wanted to live ...I'm no Wilt Chamberlain {who
 has claimed 20,000 sexual conquests} but I was never at a
 loss for female companionship.  I did my best to accommodate
 as many women as I could -- most of them through unprotected
 sex."
    It's hard to believe that, in this day and age, anyone
 with that kind of "social life" eschewed AIDS precautions,
 but Magic did, and it cost him.
    Did anyone tell him that what he was doing was a bad idea?  
 And if anyone had, would he have listened?  

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the
 personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the
 hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering
 from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]