The Chicago sports media–print and electronic–reached some sort of new low in the wake of Dennis Rodman’s most recent transgression. For days after Rodman kicked a cameraman on the baseline in Minnesota, coach Phil Jackson stopped talking to the media. Gosh, various reporters said or wrote, Phil must be really mad at Rodman this time; he won’t even talk to us. The utter cluelessness of that state of mind is difficult to fathom.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
That moralism is getting increasingly difficult to stomach. We thought it was long since settled whether athletes were heroes and role models–settled in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and many times since–yet newspaper columnists, TV sports anchors, and other blowhards keep trotting out this line of argument. It involves the worst kind of hypocrisy–people taking positions they personally have no faith in, merely to posture for public acceptance. (In this, they are misguided about how gullible and puritanical the average fan is, but we’ll get back to that in a moment.) When someone like New York newspaper columnist Mike Lupica–to stray, for a moment, beyond our more provincial concerns–goes on Larry King Live and talks about protecting sports for “the kids,” who is he kidding? When he goes to a game, is he taking in the action on the level of a child? Is the reason he became a sportswriter so that he could find heroes to identify with? When Bob Costas directs much the same argument against Rodman on NBC, appointing himself protector of the National Basketball Association’s honor, it’s ludicrous, and far beneath his usual considered opinions.
Few of us understand the cost or the difficulty of maintaining an athlete’s high level of dedication, but in general fans seem to have an easier time of it than the professionals in the media do. There is little if any excuse for what Rodman did, just as there was little if any excuse for Roberto Alomar’s spitting on umpire John Hirschbeck (an incident that colors Rodman’s latest misdeed and no doubt contributed to the stiff 11-or-more-game NBA suspension he received). Yet there is an explanation. Athletes are under intense pressure, and in “the heat of battle” (a phrase Rodman himself used in attempting to explain) they are prone to crack. What other explanation is there for Alomar, a player with no history of misbehavior, doing what he did (in a game critical to his team’s making the playoffs, it should be noted)?
In today’s sports world, there is nothing more poignant than an athlete brought low by the very qualities that drove him to greatness, just as there are few triumphs as great as that of an athlete who wins a conflict with himself at the same time he is victorious on the field of play. There are no absolutes and there is little room for morality in the present-day sports world, but if anything this has led to a richer, deeper, more humane sense of what sports is all about. Of course, there will always be people who yearn for an absolute standard of good and evil, of winning and losing. The question is, how do so many of them wind up in the media? o
