Last month, Sports Illustrated” s 3.15 million subscribers were treated to a worshipful ac- count of San Diego Charger Kellen Winslow’s politicized induction into the Football Hall of Fame. The great tight end accused Clarence Thomas and Newt Gingrich — who was in attendance — of having “tar- ‘geted affrmative action,” and of , working to “appease this country’s extreme move to the right.” ! “Whatever one thinks of Win- slow’s positions,” SI editorialized, ‘”it’s encouraging to see [an athlete] ‘engaging himself in the world of ” which sports is only a part.” That’s not how SI felt in Febru- ‘ary 1991 when several members of !the New York Giants collaborated on a ten-minute pro4ife video.
” Back then, the magazine opined:
No matter how one feels about abortion, it’s hard not to be re- pulsed by the video’s inflammatory language. At one point, one of the Giants, Mark Bavaro, says, “Now, with abortion death squads allowed to run rampant through our coun- try, I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day?”….Apart from questions of taste, there’s one further objection that should be raised. As columnist Anna Quindlen noted in the New York Times, no women are heard from in the video.
This political engagement is not exceptional for the magazine. Two years ago, SI contributor Ned Ze- man blamed racism for the 1993 ar- rest and conviction of Georgetown University basketball player Allen Iverson for smashing a chair over the head of a middle-aged woman in a bowling alley. “To the people of Hampton, Virginia,” Zeman wrote, “the case of Allen Iverson… comes down to one odious word: Nigger.” (It didn’t, as SI acknowledged in not one but two apologies for its multiple factual errors.) In Decem- ber, the magazine implied that for- mer St. Louis Hawks guard Lenny Wilkens had been kept off the 1960 U.S. Olympic basketball team be- cause of racial prejudice (though the New York Post’s Peter Vecsey pointedly noted that Oscar Robert- son was on that Olympic team).
SI can, and has, managed these accusations without breaking a sweat. It even weathered controver- sy over a May cover story on San Antonio Spurs forward Dennis Rodman, which had a photo of Rodman dressed in drag and a dis- cussion of his sexual fantasies.
It’s surely no surprise that the magazine — a mainstream national news organ, after all, owned by Time Warner. — should oppose pro- lifers or Newt Gingrich or the aboli- tion of affrmative action. What is new is that, in its zeal to cover social issues, SI has begun to show a bore- dom with — even an antipathy to — sports itself. Note what S! likes about Winslow: his engagement in “the world of which sports is only a small part.” Not “an important part,” or even “a part,” but “a small part.” Note what’s newsworthy about Dennis Rodman: that he’s obsessed with gay fashion but says, “I don’t give a — about basketball anymore.” To read SI this summer gives you the impression the maga- zine wouldn’t mind if sports were abolished altogether.
An unmistakable sneer creeps into the magazine’s tone when it covers sports figures who actually love their sport or appear preoccu- pied with winning. Of those who criticized Clemson University pres- ident William Atchley for too meekly accepting NCAA sanctions in 1982, SI writes, “That stand led to his branding as a pointy-head who — hellfire! — valued something more than football.” Condescen- sion and implied McCarthyism aside, isn’t valuing nothing more than football what football fans are for? Couldn’t the accusation also be leveled at many, if not most, of the magazine’s subscribers? Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight is a favored whipping boy, most recently for his “unbridled” mouth, his “verbal abuse,” and his “boorish, bullying behavior.” And there is evidence that, in the interest of damning sports, the magazine will even put its social conscience on the back burner.
When University of Colorado foot- ball coach Bill McCartney quit his job to start Promise Keepers, a fam- ily-values movement, the magazine did describe his rhetoric as “rigid,” “harsh,” and “to say the least, con- troversial.” Still, it described Mc- Cartney as having “quit as Col- orado’s coach for a greater quest:
healing his family.” A key focus of SI’s war on its subject matter is the National Col- legiate Athletic Association’s strin- gent regulation of athletic recruit- ment. SI is certainly the nation’s most loyal supporter of the NCA/s approach. Now, it’s quite possible that college sports needs a discipli- nary body like the NCAA, but SI never seems to reckon the athletic cost of that body’s zeal. SI will tol- erate nothing but the most pristine records for its future stars — provid- ed they’re not point guards with a weakness for braining middle-aged white ladies with bowling-alley fur- niture. Indeed, at times SI seems to have been reincarnated as a watch- dog publication for NCAA whistle- ‘blowers, whose goal is to disqualify as many student athletes as possible :for their off-field activities.
At would be inaccurate to call SI’s attitude on these matters “politically correct.” The magazine, usually in the person of staffer Alexander Wolff, uses the language not of the revolutionary vanguard but of the reactionary bluestocking, and it consistently winds up more Catholic than the Pope on discipli- nary matters. Wolff’s most notori- ous effort was his “open letter” urg- ing the University of Miami — a football juggernaut that has won four national championships over the last 13 years — to abolish its football program altogether. Mia- mi’s offenses included:
improper benefits; recruiting viola- tions; boosters run amok; academic cheating; use of steroids and recre- ational drugs; suppressed or ig- nored positive tests for drugs; play- er run-ins with other students as well as with campus and off-cam- pus police; the discharge of weapons and the degradation of women in the football dorm; [and] credit-card fraud…
Credit card fraud? Except for the teroids and the gunplay, to be sure, these would be grounds for dis- banding almost any college organi- zation, from the Pomona French ;lub to the Whiffenpoofs.
SI’s May 16 cover story was al- most Biblical in its moralism.
“Tainted Title,” blared the head- line. “The inside story of how Florida State football players sul- lied their national championship by taking illicit cash and gifts from agents.” The story’s most damning piece of evidence was a trip to a Foot Locker store in Tallahassee, where an operator named Nate Ce- brun bought jackets and T-shirts for several team members. Given that $ 6,000 was spent for “half the football team,” that comes to an average of $ 300 per player in sportswear. SI suggested in a cap- tion that Florida State should relin- quish its title. Cebrun, SI sermo- nized, had come to Tallahassee “to buy not just clothing but also the honor of Florida State.” “Buy their honor, … tainted,” “sullied,” “illicit” — the hysterical language calls to mind an article Wolff wrote later this summer (Au- gust 7) on a Florida junior college where athletes in academic trouble were racking up credits by taking courses in which the final exams could be mailed in. The article de- scribed “procurers of talent” look- ing for “human lucre” at a high school tournament, as if the maga- zine were covering not the NCAA but the slave trade.
SI has also long had a morbid fascination with child abuse, do- mestic violence, and the like. May 15 saw Wolff’s article on three coaches recently arrested — hell- fire! — for doing stupid things while drunk, the worst being Atlanta Braves” manager Bobby Cox’s slug- ging his wife during an argument.
When former manager Dave Bris- tol quipped at a dinner a few weeks later, ” If I had [Atlanta’s] bullpen, I would have slit her throat,” SI came back at him: “Bristol set a new standard for tastelessness…” There’s something brazen about a magazine setting itself up as the guardian of exploited women even as it busily diversifies the soft-core porn empire that has grown up around its notorious annual swimsuit issue. In July, S/published another long wife-beating article — “Sports” Dirty Secret” — that focused on Vikings quarterback Warren Moon, Chicago Bull guard Scottie Pippen, ex-Celtics center Robert Parish, and a handful of other athletes, with a nod to O.J.
Simpson and Mike Tyson. “After his ex-wife’s description of how Parish beat her,” wrote Gerry Callahan in a follow-up article, “it doesn’t matter how many points he has scored or games he has played.” Parish has clearly shown himself to be a jerk, but it ought to be possible to recognize the fact without belittling the sport he plays.
Tyson himself had already been the subject of a cover story when he was released from prison. “Should We Root for Mike Tyson?” SI asked with exquisite hypocrisy — what was it doing, after all, but using the former champ’s name and image to sell magazines? And yet SI felt free to dress up its question in full stentorian regalia with a paragraph-long quote from the Gospel According to St. Luke. The question sums up the SI attitude towards sports, one neatly captured by columnist Ellen Goodman, who told SI, “Saying you separate Tyson the man from Tyson the boxer is saying, I don’t care about his raping Desiree Washington.”
No, it isn’t. Mike Tyson didn’t become the heavyweight boxing champion for his rapine behavior, any more than William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for routinely getting tight and engaging in lewd antics. If Tyson is despicable, it has nothing to do with sports. There’s nothing wrong with a sports magazine covering the unsavory side of sportsmen, but one has to wonder why it does so to the exclusion of its ostensible subject. The answer surely lies somewhere between self-importance and self-aggrandizement. Just read SI: It’s easy to tell the writers who really love sports from those who consider themselves such princes of prose that it’s a vile humiliation for them to be discussing something so fluffy.
SI has long believed its editorial mission included writing about the larger questions raised by the American fascination with sports and the behavior of stars, teams, and owners themselves. Ray Cave, who helped run the magazine in the seventies before taking over Time, mentions a pair of 5-part series on women and blacks in sports that the magazine ran as long ago as the late sixties and early seventies.
He likes the coverage of issues on sports” periphery: “It’s a responsibility of a magazine to broaden the scope and interest of its readers, ” he says. “Sports Illustrated would not have had the reputation it built if it confined itself to stories on short-stops and offensive tackles.”
Cave is right, but one is reminded of a competent waiter who tells you he’s “really a writer”: When SI’s editors and defenders call sports a “small part” of the wider — i.e. the political — world, what they’re really saying is that it’s a small part of their own majestic vision. Under cover of this false modesty, Sports Illustrated has arrogated to itself an inadvertently comic role as one of our moral guardians.
By Christopher Caldwell
