By Wednesday evening, when the details of a $15 million lawsuit against Roberto Alomar had leaked from a federal court in Brooklyn all the way across America, Google News was listing precisely 459 articles about the former Baltimore Oriole, and not one dealt with his terrific hitting skills, or his magical fielding skills, or even his unfortunate spitting skills.
They dealt, instead, with the most intimate details of Alomar’s sexual life. They repeated an ex-girlfriend’s claims about Alomar and AIDS. They repeated claims about Alomar’s libido. They repeated claims about a homosexual rape suffered when Alomar was a vulnerable teenager.
And each story left you ashamed for reading it, and invading another human being’s privacy, and hoping such details about your own private life (however tame it might be) would never be made public. And it left you wondering about America’s sick and gluttonous appetite for the secrets of famous people’s private lives.
It never ends, does it?
Gossip’s our national sport now, as long as it’s somebody else being gossiped about. From the timid dawning of People magazine and the tacky entertainment shows where show biz masquerades as news, everybody’s looking for an angle, something the competition hasn’t got. The line between public and private is now completely blurred.
Alomar, the second baseman who played here for three marvelous years and one hideous tick of the clock, finds himself sued by his ex-girlfriend, who claims punitive damages for emotional distress. She makes all sorts of sexual allegations, detailed in the lawsuit, and thereafter repeated in stories carried in newspapers, on Web sites, on TV and radio.
The allegations, Alomar’s attorney, Charles Bach, tells the New York Daily News, are “frivolous and baseless.”
But not painless.
And now they’re repeated endlessly, and embellished everywhere, until they become part of the complete narrative of Alomar’s life, real and imagined.
Once, it was a life about a career .300 hitter with 10 Gold Gloves and a flair for the dramatic. Alomar hit when it counted, and fielded when it seemed impossible. Many see him as a future Hall of Fame member. When the spirit moved him, he could be as good as anyone who ever wore the Orioles uniform.
At other times, he could embarrass himself. Everyone around here remembers that awful instant when Alomar lost all composure and spit in the face of umpire John Hirschback during an argument over a called third strike.
Alomar was suspended for five games. There were allegations that Hirschback used a slur against Alomar – but that was never proven. Alomar was vilified. One man stood up for him: Orioles owner Peter Angelos, whose loyalty was later mocked when Alomar took a hike for higher money rather than stay in Baltimore.
So we’re not talking about the world’s leading citizen here.
But nobody deserves this kind of treatment – and let’s have no false platitudes about the public’s right to know. The public has no right to know the secret details of people’s sex lives.
What we have now is a constant feeding frenzy. We’re a nation of gossip junkies, mainlining empty titillation. It greets us at the grocery store checkout counter, where the love lives of Angelina and Jen play out like some athletic competition.
It’s there on the tabloid TV shows, where we learn the names of the latest celebrities to check into drug rehab clinics, and it’s there on Web sites pulling reluctant gays out of closets. All, as if these stories offer some public service.
And now it’s Alomar, whose sex life becomes something to chat about when we’re tired of bemoaning the collapsing economy. Sure, we’re all going broke – but at least we’re not that poor guy Alomar. Did you hear the latest?
The story’s universal now. Google’s got 459 separate articles on it – 459 different news organizations that couldn’t resist being left out. The competition’s too keen now, and so ferocious that everything’s fair game. Nobody wants to get scooped.
But sometimes the scoop is a shame on all of us. Those who report it, and those who read it, and those who gossip about it. It’s invasion of privacy masquerading as the public’s right to know.
On Wednesday, reporters went to Alomar’s father and brother, both of whom have baseball backgrounds.
“We’ve never talked about something like this,” said the father, Sandy Alomar Sr.
So maybe it’s true, and maybe not. It’s information plucked from a lawsuit, where all manner of things can be alleged. But it’s part of the public discourse now, and part of the narrative of Roberto Alomar’s life.
Scouting report: Clutch hitter, superb fielder. Alleged Hall of Shame sex life.
But the shame’s on all of us who imagine this is anybody’s business but Alomar’s.
