Sports Eliminated
Caldwell, Christopher
Magazines Sports Eliminated By Christopher Caldwell Last month, Sports Illustrated's 3.15 million subscribers were treated to a worshipful account of San Diego Charger Kellen Winslow's...
...Except for the steroids and the gunplay, to be sure, these would be grounds for disbanding almost any college organization, from the Pomona French Club to the Whiffenpoofs...
...SI is certainly the nation's most loyal supporter of the NCAA's approach...
...Should We Root for Mike Tyson...
...It didn't, as SI acknowledged in not one but two apologies for its multiple factual errors...
...At one point, one of the Giants, Mark Bavaro, says, "Now, with abortion death squads allowed to run rampant through our country, I wonder how many future champions will be killed before they see the light of day...
...academic cheating...
...Louis Hawks guard Lenny Wilkens had been kept off the 1960 U.S...
...In December, the magazine implied that former St...
...boosters run amok...
...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...
...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 story's most damning piece of evidence was a trip to a Foot Locker store in Tallahassee, where an operator named Nate Cebrun bought jackets and T-shirts for several team members...
...It would be inaccurate to call SI 's attitude on these matters "politically correct...
...use of steroids and recreational drugs...
...Note what's newsworthy about Dennis Rodman: that he's obsessed with gay fashion but says, "I don't give a - about basketball anymore...
...Luke...
...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 slugging his wife during an argument...
...SI will tolerate nothing but the most pristine records for its future stars-provided they're not point guards with a weakness for braining middle-aged white ladies with bowling-alley furniture...
...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...
...player run-ins with other students as well as with campus and off-campus police...
...Couldn't the accusation also be leveled at many, if not most, of the magazine's subscribers...
...It even weathered controversy over a May cover story on San Antonio Spurs forward Dennis Rodman, which had a photo of Rodman dressed in drag and a discussion of his sexual fantasies...
...and] credit-card fraud . . . Credit card fraud...
...As columnist Anna Quindlen noted in the New York Times, no women are heard from in the video...
...Indeed, at times SI seems to have been reincarnated as a watchdog publication for NCAA whistle-blowers, whose goal is to disqualify as many student athletes as possible for their off-field activities...
...This political engagement is not exceptional for the magazine...
...SI asked with exquisite hypocrisy-what was it doing, after all, but using the former champ's name and image to sell magazines...
...Condescension and implied McCarthyism aside, isn't valuing nothing more than football what football fans are for...
...Miami's offenses included: improper benefits...
...To read SI this summer gives you the impression the magazine wouldn't mind if sports were abolished altogether...
...Given that $6,000 was spent for "half the football team," that comes to an average of $300 per player in sportswear...
...If Tyson is despicable, it has nothing to do with sports...
...And there is evidence that, in the interest of damning sports, the magazine will even put its social conscience on the back burner...
...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...
...Olympic basketball team because of racial prejudice (though the New York Post's Peter Vecsey pointedly noted that Oscar Robertson was on that Olympic team...
...Apart from questions of taste, there's one further objection that should be raised...
...Back then, the magazine opined: No matter how one feels about abortion, it's hard not to be repulsed by the video's inflammatory language...
...Whatever one thinks of Winslow's positions," SI editorialized, "it's encouraging to see [an athlete] engaging himself in the world of which sports is only a part...
...An unmistakable sneer creeps into the magazine's tone when it covers sports figures who actually love their sport or appear preoccupied with winning...
...The inside story of how Florida State football players sullied their national championship by taking illicit cash and gifts from agents...
...The answer surely lies somewhere between self-importance and self-aggrandizement...
...No, it isn't...
...SI suggested in a caption that Florida State should relinquish its title...
...Buy their honor," "tainted," "sullied," "illicit"-the hysterical language calls to mind an article Wolff wrote later this summer (August 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...
...recruiting violations...
...the discharge of weapons and the degradation of women in the football dorm...
...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 abolition of affirmative action...
...That's not how SI felt in February 1991 when several members of the New York Giants collaborated on a ten-minute pro-life video...
...Under cover of this false modesty, Sports Illustrated has arrogated to itself an inadvertently comic role as one of our moral guardians...
...Not "an important part," or even "a part," but "a small part...
...In July, SI 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...
...Cebrun, SI sermonized, had come to Tallahassee "to buy not just clothing but also the honor of Florida State...
...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...
...SI has also long had a morbid fascination with child abuse, domestic violence, and the like...
...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...
...Note what SI likes about Winslow: his engagement in "the world of which sports is only a small part...
...Tainted Title," blared the headline...
...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...
...What is new is that, in its zeal to cover social issues, SI has begun to show a boredom with-even an antipathy to- sports itself...
...Two years ago, SI contributor Ned Zeman blamed racism for the 1993 arrest 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...
...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 disciplinary matters...
...Sports Illustrated would not have had the reputation it built if it confined itself to stories on shortstops and offensive tackles...
...Still, it described McCartney as having "quit as Colorado's coach for a greater quest: healing his family...
...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...
...Now, it's quite possible that college sports needs a disciplinary body like the NCAA, but SI never seems to reckon the athletic cost of that body's zeal...
...SI can, and has, managed these accusations without breaking a sweat...
...SI 's May 16 cover story was almost Biblical in its moralism...
...Magazines Sports Eliminated By Christopher Caldwell Last month, Sports Illustrated's 3.15 million subscribers were treated to a worshipful account of San Diego Charger Kellen Winslow's politicized induction into the Football Hall of Fame...
...the political-world, what they're really saying is that it's a small part of their own majestic vision...
...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...
...When former manager Dave Bristol 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 swim-suit issue...
...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...
...To the people of Hampton, Virginia," Zeman wrote, "the case of Allen Iverson . . . comes down to one odious word: Nigger...
...suppressed or ignored positive tests for drugs...
...Simpson and Mike Tyson...
...Wolff's most notorious effort was his "open letter" urging the University of Miami-a football juggernaut that has won four national championships over the last 13 years-to abolish its football program altogether...
...Tyson himself had already been the subject of a cover story when he was released from prison...
...When University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney quit his job to start Promise Keepers, a family-values movement, the magazine did describe his rhetoric as "rigid," "harsh," and "to say the least, controversial...
...The great tight end accused Clarence Thomas and Newt Gingrich-who was in attendance-of having "targeted affirmative action," and of working to "appease this country's extreme move to the right...
...Of those who criticized Clemson University president 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...
...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...
...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...
...A key focus of SI 's war on its subject matter is the National Collegiate Athletic Association's stringent regulation of athletic recruitment...
...The article described "procurers of talent" looking for "human lucre" at a high school tournament, as if the magazine were covering not the NCAA but the slave trade...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
