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How much do sports stars
owe the press and public?
of TheColumnists.com
The New York tabloids
were filled recently with pictures of Yankee third baseman Alex
Rodriguez, the $26 million man, cavorting at strip joints and
elsewhere with a busty blonde woman not his wife.
Cool down. Now for the journalism lecture.
What does a high profile professional athlete owe to the press
and the public?
What does the press owe to a high profile athlete?
What does the public really want?
Have rehabitant Lindsay Lohann and jailbird Paris Hilton become
the standards for journalistic ethics?
The world is aflame in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon,
Gaza and other points north, south, east and west.
And ARod’s nighttime actions take over the front pages of
New York tabloids and earn comment in sedate journals such as
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
(Wait until Rupert Murdoch buys the Journal.)
I happen to be an expert on the subject of baseball indiscretions
because I was the middle man in a famed wife swap more than 35
years ago.
Two New York Yankee pitchers, lefthanders Fritz Peterson and
Mike Kekich (that explains everything) were pals of mine. I invited
them over to my home with their wives for beer and burgers on
an off day.
When the empty beer cans were piled almost to the ceiling, they
headed home. They paused outside for an hour or more before completing
a trade.
Shortly afterwards they informed me that they had switched wives,
kids, cars, cats, dogs, houses and curve balls.
Fritz Peterson and the former Susan Kekich made a new life for
themselves. Mike Kekich and the former Marilyn Peterson made
a quick exit. Each married a new “civilian” spouse.
Columnist Dick Young, a newspaper moralist despite an immoral
lifestyle of his own, crucified them in print. Commissioner Bowie
Kuhn took up the cause and chastised them in his office. I escaped
unharmed.
The story got more play for a couple of weeks than the grinding
down of the Vietnam War.
Everywhere I went for the next couple of years I was questioned
about the journalistic morality of telling the tale. Isn’t
a wife swap the business of consenting adults?
That was usually the first question I was asked when I talked
before local Kiwanis and Lions clubs and lectured about journalism
at local colleges.
Babe Ruth had endless liaisons, none of which made the local
papers. Paternity suits, a common athletic curse, were always
settled privately for cash.
Peterson/Kekich coverage seemed to open a new era in journalism.
Off the field adventures were now fodder for newspaper photos
and headlines.
The New York Post, my employer for 30 years, never hesitated
when it was presented with the ARod photos. Gossip sells. The
Post’s Page Six is probably the best read single newspaper
page in history.
Before Roger Clemens signed a $28 million deal to suit up again,
ARod was the highest paid player in the game. What he does on
or off the field makes news.
In the same week the pictures appeared, he yelled while rounding
the bases and scared an infielder off a popup, walked with his
wife in a public park, homered to win a big game for the Yankees
against the Red Sox and reiterated how much he loved playing
in New York.
All of this made big news.
The catty pictures of his evening adventures filled the papers
and stimulated the sports talk shows. Fans became embroiled in
the controversy for a simple reason: They wanted the Yankees
to win and after a blazing month of April, ARod hadn’t done
much in May and early June to help them shake their woes.
The journalistic question about the right and wrong of publicizing
this kind of trash nonsense is debated in journalism schools
and on street corners.
Famed old umpire Bill Klem used to say of a ball or strike or
safe or out, “It ain’t nothing till I call it.”
The New York Times always had a belief news wasn’t
news until The Times printed it.
Now The Post believes gossip isn’t gossip until it
makes it on to Page Six.
What has really changed in journalism in my half century of scribbling
is the Internet.
If The Times, The Post, The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune
or The San Francisco Chronicle won’t print it,
the Internet will. So many of these salacious pictures in the
press now come from freelance cell phone sources. No show business
star, no athlete, heck, no journalist is free of possible chagrin
if somewhere there is a cell phone camera in sight.
We can talk instantly to each other across the world. We can
send photos by pushing a computer button. Man has walked on the
moon and an exploration of Mars isn’t really that far away.
Journalism has to keep up in this changing world or disappear
as an instrument worthy of Constitutional privileges. It sounds
crazy, I know. But keeping up may mean printing pictures of ARod
on the front pages of tabloids when he cavorts with busty blondes
at strip joints in the early hours of game day.
Why didn’t he just stay in his hotel room, enjoy a room
service dinner and watch a rerun of "Grey’s Anatomy"?
©2007 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted
June 11, 2007.
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