Fast and Loose

Tigney's not spittin' a game, says Thad Huston, sitting with Tigney and 10 other players in an empty room at school. Huston pulls out a cell phone camera and punches up proof.

A short guy always in motion, Huston admits his own guilt.

"I've been caught I don't know how many times," he says. "I had two girls after me, they found out about each other, but one of 'em is still pressin' on me."

Tigney knows the young lady in question. "I think some of them like that, to get caught," he says. "It's all a game to them, too."

Tigney and Huston belong to what its members call the Yorktown "brotherhood," a group of about 15 guys from different backgrounds who have played sports and girls since middle school. They observed the moves of their real older brothers at school, parties, even the ninth hole on a golf course where they'd hang out and drink Natural Light beer late at night.

"We wanted to live up to those guys," says Mark Landis, a slender young man with a sweet young face. "I think we surpassed them."

As legacy passes from generation to generation, the player image grows larger than life, in fact and fiction, marketed like crazy. Casanova and Kobe. Lord Byron and Johnny Depp, who threw out what may be the most insincere bait of all time in "Cry-Baby:" "No wonder we're together. I'm an orphan, too."

"Seeing all these people on the screen, seeing the women they're with, everyone wants to be a pimp," says Landis. "Like my man Brad Pitt, now he knows what he's doing."

Maybe the player is getting back at his mom. Maybe he's taking fatherly advice too literally. "My dad told me not to get too serious in high school," says Joe Albrittain, former football quarterback chosen "most attractive" by Yorktown's senior class.

Maybe emotional intimacy scares him. Maybe he's always liked to take risks. Maybe he does it for the status it gets him from other guys. And maybe, says Daniel Kruger, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, his behavior is hard-wired.

Humans, unlike most mammals, evolved to prefer long-term sexual relationships and substantial involvement in child-raising by males as well as females. But in their earlier societies, up to about 12,000 years ago, males tried to spread their seed as widely as possible, under an evolutionary drive to increase the number of children who would survive. Remnants of that earlier instinct survive in what Kruger and other researchers call the personality of the "cad," as opposed to the "dad."

Private parties may be this generation's version of Pleistocene-era roving, and hooking up the predatory behavior of choice. "This hooking up is getting so out of control, it's ridiculous," says Albrittain. He blames it on alcohol, easily acquired.

Tigney gives good parties, his friends say. That's all they'll say, except to hint that he lives on the edge. His girlfriend was homecoming queen at Yorktown this past school year. She carried posters saying "Go Tigney!" to his games. He has been her beau for more than a year and a half.

He is asked if she knows about his various contacts. His friend Huston, listening to the conversation, interrupts: "She'll know when she reads the newspaper."