Fast and Loose

It's the 'Player' Who Gets The Girl (Or Girls), and a Rep That's Good and Bad

Once, a while back, every high school had a few -- the bad boys, the sexy, perpetually unhappy James Deans of the 20th century. They were accompanied by motorcycles and Camel cigarettes and a lot of girls saying that, despite the arrest for stealing hubcaps, they were actually sensitive or intelligent. A lot of girls did not say that bad boys were attractive because they were dangerous, exciting, sexy and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to escape the Mom-and-Dad proprieties of teenage life.

Now there are fewer proprieties and more bad boys taking media-glorified rogues as their models: rappers, professional snowboarders, actors or athletes who flaunt their roguery. In high schools, the outsiders are now the insiders: Boys who attract lots of girls, and treat them badly, aren't called bad anymore. They're called players.

Same old game, but less blame and a brand-new name.

"Player" is a label that kids instantly recognize as belonging to someone who prefers sports jerseys to leather jackets, who charms rather than alarms adults and resembles a bad boy in one significant way: attracting all kinds of girls who should know better.

"If James Dean walked in here, no one would notice," says Robert Payne, a Latin teacher for 30 years at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac. "Players," on the other hand, "are popular. They have multiple girlfriends and a reputation of not being sincere with them."

A player tells a girl he's misunderstood by everyone but her -- and makes her believe he can accomplish incredible things with her by his side.

He always seems to have money, even when he's stone broke.

Sometimes he drives a Ford Explorer, sometimes a souped-up Pontiac Grand Am, and sometimes he drives nothing, relying on girls to pick him up and take him to three or four parties every weekend.

The player carries at least two cell phones at all times, programmed to vibrate, not ring. If his girl of the moment happens to pick up one and scan his directory, he denies knowing how those 20 names got there. If he gets caught cheating, he says, "We're just friends," hands her a rose and she believes him, because she knows he'd never give a flower to that other girl.

"Players give off that aura of having been with every girl in school," says Marty McCord, a longtime counselor popular among students at Yorktown High School in Arlington. "It's not true, but that's the image."

Yorktown is an exceptional high school: highly rated academically with a diverse student body of about 1,600. Upperclassmen say they've never seen a fight there.

But it's also unexceptional in the fact that it has cliques, gossip and players such as Duane Tigney, star football running back who graduated this month and Numero Uno player, according to other students.

Tigney carries his 6-foot, 200-pound frame like a slow-moving river on a summer afternoon. In or out of school, he can't stop saying "hi," particularly to good-looking girls, with whom he chats as though he's got all the time in the world and wants to spend it only with them.

"When girls ask me what I'm doing, I say, 'You,' " he brags.