Like just about every other office on planet Earth these days, mine is water cooler-consumed by L’affair Tiger. And how could we not be? With Tiger’s out-of-wedlock trail of tail, leading him apparently even into trailer parks in hot pursuit, we are witnessing the unfolding of a tragi-comedy the likes of which has never so engulfed an American sports or cultural icon while he’s been at the uttermost apex of his prowess. This ain’t Fat Elvis on barbiturates, or a retired baseball star turned manager betting on his sport. It’s not Kobe (one accusation, one acquittal) or Wilt (20,ooo major conquests there, but only revealed decades after his retirement). My God, even David Letterman of all people is laughing at it.
This isn’t a sex story. It’s a sex maniac story, one of unprecedented self destruction, carried off by the world’s greatest athlete. There are places this story went yesterday that suggest to me the very real possibility that not only is this story going to consume our culture for many, many more months but that its ultimate fallout may well end Tiger’s career. Bright people in golf really are wondering this now.
Imagine.
A week ago I was prepared to claim this wildly sordid story worthy of a ranking with the ten greatest sports scandals of all time. This morning, I maintain that it’s now no. 1, and distanced by a Tiger 2-iron from its nearest rival. And the story has also occasioned my thinking about hockey’s greatest scandals, and where they might rank in some pecking order of infamy.
When Michael Vick morphed into a puppies-are-better-off-dead fit of sociopathetic deviancy, I treated that as a degeneracy at the outer extreme of thuggery — Vick being Vick — and while he was a star NFL player, I don’t know that any hardcore pigskin follower thought of him as a best-in-the-league QB. Pete Rose put the hustle in Charlie Hustle all right, but his egregious act was committed in his post-playing career, and as we dissected his indiscretion we sort of shrugged a bit in acknowledging that Rose, unlike Woods, was a character who long kept bad associations. This didn’t altogether remove the sting or shock of what he did, but we weren’t flabbergasted by the notion — Pete Rose would never be mistaken for say Cal Ripken on the likability meter.
Mike Tyson? Abandoned in childhood, reared in in-ring violence as salvation, enriched, then surrounded predictably by parasites. A thug is born. No shock at his fate.
The closest comparison in sports with Woods’ predicament in terms of clean character getting thoroughly assassinated, I think, might be with Alex Rodriguez’s admission, just earlier this year, of steroids use. Baseball’s optimists I think had pinned well-founded hopes on ARod representing a distinct and separate class of the sport’s competitors who’d carry out their stellar careers unsullied by the pervasive and pernicious substance scandal. Alas, no. Still, the shock with ARod lasted about 48 hours before I think most just shrugged in resignation and said, “That’s [modern] baseball.”
What makes Tiger’s trials late this year positively Shakespearean isn’t his sex drive per se — although in that regard he appears to make a certain ex-President comparatively Puritan — but the cavalier quality with which he indulged them. Gracious, when did he find time to get to the range and hit balls?
And what really catapults Tiger’s transgressions in a relative sense are their mere timing: pulsating pixels are chronicling this fantastic feat of the prurient, in a frenzy. We’re in F5 overdrive with this one in a way that no scandal that preceded it could have been.
There are more than a few not-so-sidebar aspects to Tiger’s tale worth monitoring in the weeks and months ahead, and reflecting upon now. For one, perhaps for the last time we’ll endure outsized mainstream media snobbishness directed at tabloid press on credibility grounds. Seriously, the sordid accounts are flying fast and furious, and Tiger’s legal team sure doesn’t seem to have much objection with much of what’s been aired. I mean, given the Wall Street-sized stakes of Tiger’s endorsement arrangements, you’d think he’d have lawyered up hard to protect himself against baseless charges.
It’s worth reflecting upon, I think, who’s bringing you the breaking facets of this story and who isn’t.
Actually, with this story, “tabloid” press has to a degree been conflated with (new) (johnny-come-lately) electronic press. However questionable you regard Tiger Untamed as a “news” story, you do have to acknowledge that the unraveling of an iconic titan is a story not unearthed by any leading media outlet of legacy. Theirs after all is an increasingly archaic craft. And that begs a second sort of sidebar consideration: golf’s unreported underbelly of rampant infidelity. Going forward, you have to think that on some level the golf press will be altered in some capacity — many of them knew a few of the basics of this story but sat by silent and idle, a press pack to make Pierre Salinger proud. All they missed out on here was perhaps the biggest sports scandal story in the history of the world. Golf’s existential lifestyle of luxury and opulence carried out in the warm sun of gated community after gated community ought to have tipped us off long ago.
And now here’s where again I get to sing hockey’s praises when our sport is juxtaposed by madness all around it. Does hockey have a scandal in its closet meriting placement in a top 10 in sports list? That’s a laugher. Top 100? Perhaps. It may well be that hockey’s greatest scandal, outside of the formation of the Southeast division, still is one that occurred more than 50 years ago — the Richard Riot of 1955. We tend to get really bent out of shape in our sport by fashion crimes committed against hockey sweaters.
Tiger not so long ago gave hockey a good ‘dissing. I bet this morning he wishes he’d watched a bit more playoff puck with his free time.
9 Comments
For hockey scandals, the question is what measurement you use to judge it. Is it global awareness, impact on the way the casual fan looks at the game or the gravity of the acts committed?
Theoren Fleury, of late, has resurrected perhaps hockey’s worst scandal, the Graham James sexual abuse case in the junior Western Hockey League. It shook the game at its foundation: the relationship between coach and young athlete(s).
Mike Danton’s travails rate pretty high in scandal if low on the other two scales.
The Maple Leaf Garden sexual abuse scandal, revealed in the late 1990s, was tangential to the game of hockey but brought the cathedral of the game into disrepute as a haven for a multiple predators through the 1970s and 1980s.
But again, all these things were only well publicized in Canada. Their overall scandalousness depends on how you measure such things.
Guy,
I agree with you about both the notoriety and severity of those scandals as well as their provinicialism. And of course, the perps in those stories aren’t hockey’s performers but rather peripheries on the sport — junior coaches and such. Makes it no less tragic of course.
I agree with Guy. If the issue is attention, it’s as much a function of hockey being less covered than other sports. If the issue is severity, I think hockey’s right up there.
I’d tend to think that Mike Danton’s effort to pay someone to have another person killed trumps infidelity, steroid use, or even financing/running a dogfighting ring, for example. In terms of gravity of the offense, I don’t see any way that’s not in the top ten. Heck, off the top of my head I don’t see anything that beats it out for number one.
In less egregious offenses, you have Martin Brodeur’s affair with his sister-in-law, and Brendan Shannahan moving in on his line-mate’s wife. Both of those are at least as sordid as the sex scandals you referenced, and if they’d been players of the same stature in the NFL or NBA, I think the coverage would have exceeded what it did those other cases.
Danton certainly gets beat out by OJ, who did more than conspire. But more basically, he was a fringe fourth-liner. (I’m being intentionally flip.)
How about the Gretzky’s wife and Rick Tocchet gambling scandal, just 3 years ago. And of course, the Ciccarelli, Courtnall, Stevens limo incident right here in our own backyard. Late 80s, I believe.
1 — “trail of tail” — classic.
2 — so what’s your top 10 sports scandals of all time? I love lists like this. #1 has to be the Black Sox. maybe glo-pucks on Fox.
3 — I guess I wasn’t really shocked at the Tiger scandal. I know he had squeaky clean image, but that’s all it really was. I’m surprised by the scope of his actions, but not at the underlying cheating. When the story broke, I thought “super rich athlete cheats on wife .. hardly ‘stop the presses’ news.” Put it this way, this story could been about almost any athlete and I wouldn’t be shocked. Disappointed if its someone whose sweater I wear — but not likely shocked.
4 – Don’t know if counts as a scandal, but the Danny Heatly/Dan Snyder incident made it to mainstream news.
“…carried off by the world’s greatest athlete.”
Is Ovie involved in a sex scandal or something?
I forgot that Tiger Woods passed off hockey! He can suck it.
Heatley’s wild ride is up there but definitely not near the top 50 for sports scandals. I think Farty CrapSorely’s assault on Brash is probably in that neighborhood, though. The life and times of Chris Simon?
I’d say the Caps’ most mortifying, and team-changing, scandal is the alleged sexual assault of a minor involving Scott Stevens, Dino Ciccarelli, Geoff Courtnall, and Neil Sheehy. Ciccarelli and Courtnall were the team’s leading scorers at the time, and, well Scott Stevens is Scott Stevens.
While the situation was far from clear-cut, and no civil charges were ever filed, the scandal shook the team. Stevens went to St. Louis, as did Courtnall, and Ciccarelli was basically given away just three years after he came to DC in exchange for Mike Gartner and Larry Murphy.
What really happened? What might the Capitals have been had they kept that core together? Matters for conjecture only — but there’s no doubt that scandal changed the Capitals for a long time.
For hockey… the on-ice seems to make news much more than the off-ice. McSorley and Bertuzzi (of relatively recent times) both made mainstream.
Post a Comment