Poor Sports
Risking Livelihood and Reputation, Some Stars Don't Play by the Rules

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 29, 2007

At the end of a week that made no sense, the question was, Why, with millions of dollars at stake, with reputations earned over years of touchdowns, mountain climbs and traveling calls, would so many sports figures throw so much away at once?

It didn't seem to make much sense as Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick walked into a federal courthouse in Richmond to plead not guilty to conspiracy charges stemming from an alleged dogfighting operation. Nor was it clear why National Basketball Association referee Tim Donaghy, the son of an official, would risk a 13-year career by fixing games and providing inside information to others, as the FBI is investigating. Nor was it understandable why so many cyclists in the Tour de France, in a year when everyone was looking for doping evidence, nonetheless would fail tests for performance-enhancing drugs.

Today, 60,000 people will gather at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to celebrate the inductions of two of the sport's most beloved stars of this generation -- Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn. But many other eyes will be on Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants as he closes in on Major League Baseball's career home run record despite an ongoing federal investigation into whether he lied about steroid use.

Is Bonds a hero, or a cheat? Why is it so hard to know what to think of professional athletes today?

Alan Goldberg, psychological consultant to many college and Olympic teams, blames an adoring public and the media, which he said help to create images of players as gods. Too often television, newspapers and magazines mythologize athletes, he said, giving an illusion that they have some kind of superior integrity when in reality they aren't much different than anyone else.

Then when a player gets arrested or is caught using steroids, the news unleashes screams of outrage from sports commentators and the public alike. "We created this thing," Goldberg said. "We created this idea that athletes are above the law."

Vick was the face of the Falcons and one of football's most dynamic players, at least until NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell ordered him not to report to training camp until the league completes an investigation into the conspiracy charges. According to the federal indictment against Vick, he partook in illegal dogfights for much of his professional career, even as Nike and other national companies poured millions into advertising campaigns centered around his likeness.

On Friday, Nike suspended Vick's endorsement deals without pay and halted sales of Vick-related shoes and other products at its retail stores. Reebok stopped sales of his No. 7 jersey.

If the allegations against Vick turn out to be true, it seems such a reckless thing to do, especially when many of the other athletes in trouble were breaking the law for the purpose of improving their own performance.

"Why did Vick do it? It's a great question," Goldberg said. "You can look at Michael Vick and say, 'Is he stupid?' Maybe he has bad judgment. Maybe he was insulated from it."

Many of those who study athletes for a living are convinced ballplayers feel a sense of entitlement. Their fame has afforded them privileges. They could skip study halls in high school, slip through classes in college and, if they proved to be really good as professionals, might find a different set of rules applied to them. Maybe they could miss the offseason workouts their teammates had to attend. Maybe they didn't have to travel on the team bus or stay in the same hotel as everyone else.

Such privilege gives athletes the sense they are indestructible, even to the point of being above the law.

"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."