Poor Sports

"This perception of power changes your reality," said Andrew Yiannakis, a sports sociology expert and the director of Clemson University's International Center for Tourism Research. "Then it is a huge shock when you wind up arrested. For Vick the bubble he was living in burst when the commissioner said, 'Don't call us, we'll call you.' It's amazing what that bubble is; it doesn't jibe with what's around them. They're operating in a world that is a subjective reality.

"What we need is a subjective reality radar detector," he added. "It would be always warning us when we go too far so we can stay in tune with the real reality."

Joe Theismann, a former star quarterback for the Washington Redskins, suggested in a phone conversation last week that we have become a culture obsessed with celebrity. Times have changed, athletes haven't, Theismann said. In his playing days, he figured, there were 15 teammates who could have been arrested and subject to suspensions by current standards. But the spotlight was different in the 1980s: The culture was less celebrity-driven, and every indiscretion by a famous person didn't spin in a 24-hour news cycle.

"There is no anonymity anymore," he said.

In the mid-1990s, sports medicine specialist Robert Goldman dropped a poisonous question in the locker rooms of Olympic athletes, informally wondering the following:

"If I had a drug that was so fantastic that if you took it once, you would win every competition you would enter, from Olympic decathlon to the Mr. Universe, for the next five years. But it had one minor drawback: It would kill you five years after you took it. Would you still take it?"

Fifty-two percent of those he asked said they would.

"It's an amazing statistic," said Nancy Spencer, a former professional tennis player and associate professor of sport management at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

And more than anything else, Goldman's question might explain the heedlessness with which many professional athletes appear to operate. Athletes have the same access to information everyone else has and know the risks of their behavior, whether it's taking steroids or electrocuting dogs. They understand that if they get caught, they could well be arrested and at the least face the rage of a public scorned.

Still, they push ahead.

"Shame is dead," said Scott LaBarge, an emerging issues fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in California. "Nobody is going to be shamed anymore because the media acts so shamelessly. What's the downside for these guys?"

LaBarge thought about the Tour de France and wondered if the riders really had a choice. Since the race began July 7, four riders have been forced out -- three of them last week -- because of failed drug tests or, in the case of former leader Michael Rasmussen of Denmark, failing to appear for scheduled tests. If every cyclist is doping, does anyone really have a competitive edge anymore? Should it matter? It just meant everyone was on the same level and the competition essentially was fair. And is artificially raising your testosterone level or elevating the amount of a certain kind of blood cell that much different from the piles of legal nutritional products athletes can buy over the counter?

LaBarge raised the question of last year's tour winner, American Floyd Landis, who tested positive for abnormally high testosterone levels and may yet have to relinquish his title if an arbitration panel rules against him. What real decision did Landis have? If he needed the drugs to get the extra boost to win the race, was even that short amount of glory worth the horror that followed?

Does anybody have reliable numbers on who is doping or who is using steroids, LaBarge asked, then surmised what many people suspect: no one does.

"Maybe," he concluded, "we have to decide what counts as a sports achievement."