A transparent ploy
Stung by scandal, major sports and top athletes are embracing a theatrical new policy of openness. Don't be fooled.
WITH THE POISE of a beauty-pageant contestant and the biceps of a Gold's Gym regular, Olympic swimmer Dara Torres recently chatted with Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show." Torres is a 41-year-old mother and five-time Olympian, and her times in the pool have improved with age. So Leno asked the obvious question about steroid use, mentioning that her recent performances naturally raised suspicions.
"I signed up for this new program they have where they blood and urine test," said Torres. "I wanted to be an open book." She pantomimed a needle withdrawing blood from her right arm, and Leno blanched.
If Jay Leno seemed surprised an athlete would sit in his chair and talk about her own blood and urine, well, this is the new face of sports.
In the wake of scandals that have damaged the credibility of one sport after another, "openness" and "transparency" have become the mantras of big-time athletics. Major League Baseball enlisted the statesman and former senator George Mitchell to head its investigation of steroid use, and released his 409-page report to the public. When the New England Patriots were tainted by the "Spygate" allegations of illegally taping their opponents' practices and signals, the NFL invited reporters to watch the videos in person. With the Beijing Olympics underway, it is increasingly common to hear athletes like Torres talk about bodily fluids, hormone levels, and other details once considered deeply private.
But behind the late-night talk show appearances, post-scandal press conferences, and league-sanctioned investigations is an uncomfortable fact: Fans have just as much reason to worry about the fairness of big-time sports as ever. Today's shows of transparency are less a genuine reform than an extension of the careful system of image management that has come to dominate sports in the last two decades.
Instead of fully independent investigations, random drug tests, and cleansing of the record books, sports leagues and their stars are offering tightly controlled exercises in disclosure in which league executives, lawyers, and public-relations personnel still carefully dictate what becomes public and when. The seeming glut of available information - test results, reports, and press conferences - functions as part preemptive strike and part smokescreen, distracting fans from the growing concern that they can no longer trust what they see in competition or in record books.
. . .
The culture of engineered openness has become so ingrained in sports that people sometimes forget it wasn't always this way. Within the memory of most Americans, interaction between athletes and fans and athletes and reporters was far more casual: Athletes were approachable in public, whether hanging out in hotel lobbies or chatting with reporters in locker rooms. Athletes' private matters stayed mostly private, especially when womanizing and excessive drinking were involved.
But as players' salaries and team worth escalated in the '80s and '90s, the leagues - and sponsors like
Professional teams now typically employ dozens of employees in marketing and public relations, who manage the team's image in the community and press and serve as gatekeepers between reporters and athletes. The leagues themselves have their own image guardians. Between the PR staffs, powerful shoe companies, and agents, interviews and information are carefully dispensed. Even athletes' blogs are carefully produced, usually ghostwritten or at least proofread by someone in a team organization or in an agent's office.
When the top sports news of the week is a trade rumor or a pennant race, this approach is adequate to the job. But today the big sports leagues and their superstars are facing a far more serious set of questions that cut to the heart of their credibility. Steroid and other drug scandals have shaken fans' faith in the basic fairness of baseball, track, and cycling, among other sports. The NBA is still trying to unravel the impact of a referee who fed inside information to gamblers. The NFL is working to contain fallout from "Spygate," in which its top team videotaped opponents' signals, and the league then destroyed the evidence.
But so far, in addressing these issues, athletes and leagues have been falling back on the same time-tested measures, staging press conferences, promising open access, and waving around information designed more to dampen public curiosity than to enforce any serious changes.
Baseball's Mitchell Report was the highest-profile effort to root out the story of big-league drug use, but lacked legal authority to compel players or other employees of Major League Baseball to cooperate. As a result, the report - for all its length and detail - interviewed almost no current players, and ended up largely a compilation of hearsay evidence. Baseball did institute random and mandatory drug testing in 2003, but the actual results of those tests, by agreement with the players union, are strictly confidential.
The NBA was shaken for a different reason last summer: A federal investigation revealed that a referee, Tim Donaghy, had been providing inside information to gamblers betting on NBA games. To address the problem, commissioner David Stern held a press conference at a Times Square hotel. The front row of the audience was filled not with reporters, but with league lawyers and PR personnel. When asked if the NBA's referee system would become more transparent in light of the scandal, Stern said, "I think transparency is a good thing." But to date, almost 13 months after the press conference, Stern has never explained how the NBA failed to detect Donaghy's corruption until the feds swooped in. Subsequent reports have raised far more serious questions - whether Donaghy threw games; whether he colluded with referees who are still in the league - and the league has commissioned a former federal prosecutor to investigate its refereeing system. But meanwhile, before the results are even in, the league has been issuing statements that it stands by its officials, and painting Donaghy as a rogue referee acting alone.
On an individual level, athletes have clearly absorbed the leagues' lessons in image management. After Roger Clemens was named in the Mitchell Report for likely use of steroids and human growth hormone, the star pitcher - who had refused to be interviewed for the report - proclaimed his innocence by appearing on "60 Minutes." (Thanks to the absence of mandatory drug-testing policies through the 1980s and 1990s, the allegations against Clemens may never be proved one way or the other.)
When former Olympic sprinter Marion Jones was dogged by rumors she had used performance-enhancing drugs, she repeatedly sat in front of reporters and cited 160 passed drug tests, clean blood and urine samples, and a passed lie-detector test. Pressured by federal investigators, Jones later admitted she had been using steroids since 1999. Now, Jones - once held up as a hero to athletic girls across America - is serving six months in jail for lying to federal investigators.
. . .
Teams like the Patriots and athletes like Jones have a powerful claim on the public imagination, not just through team and national loyalty, but because the sports they play embody an ideal of competition - tough but meritocratic - that provides a model for everyday life.
It may be naive to say that sports have ever reached that ideal. Today, though, thanks to years of dishonest competitors and league officials looking the other way, fans have to reconcile themselves to the fact they may never know the most basic truth about the fairness of the games they watch. How many great baseball players of the '80s and '90s set records with steroids? How many cyclists won the Tour de France title while doping? How many Olympic medals were tarnished by drugs? How many NBA games were manipulated by a criminal referee? Even now, new drug formulations outpace even the most sophisticated tests.
Newly appointed USA Track & Field chief executive Doug Logan says that sports leaders need to stop trying to distract the public with paperwork, and begin looking deeper into the culture that produces cheating.
"The most important thing we can do is stop hiding from the issue and saying, 'Oh, it's better' or 'Oh, look at the number of clean tests,' " he said in an interview.
Drug testing in US track and field, and many Olympic sports, is now handled by an independent outside group - the US Anti-Doping Agency - so the process isn't controlled by the sport's own officials. Logan is also trying to send a message that starts at the top of his sport. When Marion Jones appealed to President Bush to commute her jail sentence, he wrote an open letter to Bush advising against it.
The letter may just be another gesture, but it is a bold one: It's hard to imagine most major sports leagues taking a stand against one of their biggest stars in such a public way. In some sense, by now, they are all part of the same machine.
As that machine keeps turning, and as sports and athletes cloak dishonesty behind Hollywood-style image management, big-league sports is hurting itself, its fans, and the countless honest competitors who still populate its ranks. The real message being sent now isn't that sports are cleaning up their acts - it's that integrity, in the end, is just another marketing ploy.
Shira Springer covers sports for the Globe.
