Warning: Sports Stars May be Hazardous to Your Health
DeParle, Jason
Warning: Sports Stars May be Hazardous to Your Health Sports celebrate health. Cigarettes cause death. So what's that Marlboro sign doing at Shea Stadium? by Jason DeParle In case you missed...
...They sent a piece of the patient's lung into the lab, grew his disease in petri dishes, and sprinkled them with competing chemicals, to see which seemed to work best...
...He recently went before Congress to warn that restrictions on cigarette advertising could lead to a surge in smoking, since "the prominent health warnings now carried in all magazine tobacco advertising will not be seen by millions of readers...
...Anti-smoking groups took to the air with an inordinate amount of creativity...
...The marriage of cigarettes and sports has at least three insidious consequences...
...They can't do it by putting a commercial on the T.V...
...Then the mucous disappeared, but the cough kept hanging on...
...The Whitney...
...One strategy might just be to rename the event...
...That doesn't mean race car drivers are welcome to promote cigarettes, of course...
...It lets visitors know that the "smoking lounge is located on 6 center" Not long ago, Dr...
...Imagine how many baseball fans, teenage and adult, would get the message if Darryl Strawberry held a press conference to denounce the indecency the Marlboro sign lends to the Shea Stadium outfield...
...See photo, page 35.] At Fenway Park in Boston, a sign for the Jimmy Fund for cancer research, a favorite Red Sox charity, hangs above the right field bleacher...
...After the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi produced a recent anti-smoking commercial for Northwest Airlines, RJR pulled its $70 million Nabisco account...
...But the Canadian skiers rebelled, with some refusing to accept league trophies...
...It might be nothing that 10 days of antibiotics can't cure...
...Just as important is the need to 'engineer' more activity into daily life...
...We backed up and started again...
...It wasn't just conscience that governed the team's decision, Shouffer said, but practical considerations, too: One member is an asthmatic "who falls over dead when he gets near smokers...
...Now, the guide says, with their own massage therapists and "state-of-theart forecasting system," they've become "synonymous with style...
...The fervor at NBC wasn't much greater...
...Now there's an original argument...
...Joining together, the top 50 reporters at the Times or the Post or ABC could exercise real pressure—particularly if they said they were willing to take a cut in pay equal, on a percentage basis, to the loss in revenue, as long as the executives and shareholders did the same...
...Kelly did concede that it was hard to get a tight shot of the Indy 500, which NBC also broadcasts, at least one that would crop the Marlboro sign off the racecar's hood...
...What the athletes need is a little leadership, and one place where you might hope to find it is the office of Dr...
...by 1987, this figure had dropped off to 29 percent...
...Since 1964, the industry had been stuck with the Surgeon General's warnings and increasingly vocal criticisms of their products...
...Don't you care about the welfare of women...
...Insisting that Philip Morris was not trying to make cigarettes seem glamorous, Weiss said, "We don't ask any of our players to smoke...
...In fact, throughout the guide—not to mention the nation's sports pages and television broadcasts—we find these stars showcasing their enviable talents in front of cigarette ads...
...it can stretch out yawning on beaches of bone marrow...
...to identify itself or its products (including name, logo, and colours) on: flags, poles, course markers, scoreboards, award presentations, start banners...
...No, it's s-p-o-k-e-s-m-a-n," he said...
...Of all the things to push on kids...
...Pause...
...When I did, Weiss sounded astonished...
...I'm retracting that, Jason...
...It's precisely the rareness of these qualities that brings us to admire her so, and to pause a moment when looking at her picture...
...What is your personal opinion...
...through the Fairness Doctrine they were subsidizing the other side's artillery...
...Maybe even Brown didn't want to hear himself offer this explanation, however, because he began to sound annoyed...
...One day, it knocks...
...The driver who wins three of the top four races wins a bonus called, accurately, the Winston Million—you get the idea...
...His hair will fall out...
...she pauses, racket poised, before exploding into her backhand...
...Though Congress finally passed the ban over the broadcasters' objections, the TV executives, to whom the term "conscience-stricken" could not fairly be applied, did win a soothing concession: the ban didn't take effect until midnight on January 1, 197I—after the commercial-thick bowl games were aired...
...When I called Wulf he confirmed that he had warned Connolly about possible conflicts of interest, and he acknowledged the conversation with Wolinsky...
...The third reason why cigarettes' infiltration of athletics is bad is that it circumvents the ban on television ads...
...By then, the average man—or, increasingly, woman hasn't been feeling his usual robust self for three months or so...
...A: "I think the Surgeon General is but one voice among many in the continuing debate about cigarette smoking...
...It's incompatible with the objective of sport—to promote a healthy lifestyle...
...cigarette signs didn't violate at least the spirit of the ad ban, Kelly's tone became distinctly less friendly...
...generous patrons," and to argue that, "A nation has a cultural health as well as a physical health...
...The chest may be its harbor but it can sail wherever the bloodstream goes, and it explores the body at leisure...
...Q: Is the Surgeon General an informed individual...
...If they didn't broadcast sporting events with cigarette ads, she said, there wouldn't be any left to broadcast—which is sort of the point...
...but cigarettes kill more widely...
...doing about it now...
...The 150 m.p.h...
...In this case, the person was John Banzhaf, a 26-year-old law school graduate...
...You have to ask them...
...Isn't the purpose of the uniform ban to keep baseball players from promoting cigarettes...
...A: "I'm not a doctor...
...The more marginal one's status in society, the more likely one is to smoke...
...In 1970, they went to Congress to say they wanted out...
...They're the sponsor...
...The Surgeon General has likened the addictive powers of nicotine to those of heroin and cocaine: all of them create psychological and physical cravings...
...and answered, "No...
...Pam Shriver's career earnings are $3.9 million...
...The cancer managers radiated it down...
...The Canadian skiers told RJR to drop dead—you can, too...
...it could always instigate an investigation itself...
...A) Chris Evert, or B) the cancer ward...
...I asked in parting...
...And sports journalists, for the most part, have provided it...
...Among the ads was a two-page spread from the Tobacco Institute, which asked "Is cigarette advertising a major reason why kids smoke...
...It's certainly not expected at CBS, where CEO Larry Tisch happens to wear a second hat as chairman of the board of Loew's, owners of Lorillard Tobacco, makers of Kents, Newports, and Trues...
...and there's scarcely anyone more glamorous to a teenager than a star athlete...
...If one company withdrew its ads, it ceded an advantage to its competitors...
...By channeling some of that $250 million ad budget into sports sponsorship, cigarette companies were right back on the air...
...Look northward, New York Mets...
...But imagine if the entire Mets roster signed a petition, refusing to play the 1990 season under the Marlboro banner—refusing to donate their authority as athletes, T.V...
...I'm not qualified to answer that...
...In 1977, the magazine did find space for "Chaws," a nine-page celebration of chewing tobacco by an array of baseball stars...
...What are the sports editors' options...
...Evert, lung cancer has just surpassed breast cancer as a killer of women...
...Cigarettes show up twice...
...The sole reason it didn't run was for editorial purposes...
...They smoke now, too...
...Well, that's their fault, Axthelm said...
...But lung cancer rarely loses...
...She suggested I call Steve Weiss, the manager of media relations for Philip Morris, U.S.A...
...Too bad they're a cigarette...
...For lots of them, it's just not on the radar...
...Salem," it said...
...The man on the horse theme is central to both, and we feel it has worked well as a partnership...
...Daniel Mirvish, John Larew, John Heilemann, Michael Carolan, and Anita Bose provided research assistance...
...The oldest one sent away for that Cigarrest, or whatever you call it...
...Tennis champions, after all, are models of health, particularly the health of heart and lungs, where endurance is essential...
...Seemed is the operative word here...
...By the time we said goodbye, all three of us knew he'd he dead by Christmas...
...It's not advertising or athletes that cause teenagers to start smoking, but "peer pressure," says Steve Weiss, the Philip Morris spokesman and ethics buff...
...If he inhales each one six times—a modest estimate—then 42,000 jet streams a year travel down his throat and into his lungs and out his mouth and nose, bathing the tissues of the respiratory tract in clouds of smoke and nicotine...
...I'm a feminist...
...I don't make it") and rationalization ("It's a legal product...
...The first, and perhaps most troubling, is that it obscures the connection of cigarettes and disease, subliminally and perhaps even consciously...
...The second troubling fact about cigarettes' tryst with sport is that it allows them to penetrate the youth market...
...Everybody in the business knows it's because of TV coverage...
...But the mere fact of the patient's presence at such a sophisticated facility indicated he'd been luckierthan most...
...Without the magnifying effects of broadcast coverage, tobacco's 20year outbreak of sports fever would meet its antibiotic...
...It is lazy and can afford to he...
...Hmmm...
...Under sophisticated "cancer management," his disease had disappeared twice, adding a few years to his life...
...The type of lung cancer known as "small cell" may respond to chemotherapy, although the response, even when complete—driving the cancer from all medical detection— almost never stays that way...
...Then he hung up...
...Shallouf ended the conversation by saying, "If I find somebody opinionated—someone willing to give their opinion—around here, I'll call you...
...Cocaine and heroin inflict their damage more quickly...
...When I suggested that subways might not pack the prestige of Major League Baseball, and, anyway, someone needed to take the first step, he got angrier...
...During chemotherapy, the patient will almost surely succumb to wild fits of vomiting...
...And it's not as though sports journalists can't see what's going on...
...There, bearing the impressive title of "Director, Worldwide Operations," was Anne Person, a college classmate of mine...
...The dangers of milk What kinds of inhibitions might such revenues induce...
...In the two decades that King's been selling Philip Morris her image of vigor—she not only played Riggs, remember, she beat him—lung cancer has overtaken breast cancer as a leading cause of women's death...
...We're just the players union...
...Most athletes can probably claim to have given the issue little thought (some too convincingly...
...He wasn't mad, he said—not at Lucky Strikes, not at the disease, not at the clumps of hair that keep falling out "all over the bed and all over the pillow...
...Ninety-five percent of the girls do"—as though this excuses her prominent role in their promotion over the past two decades, as though this justifies her taking the court against Bobby Riggs in 1973 dressed in Virginia Slims colors, with Virginia Slims sequins on her chest...
...I think I'll defer this one over to Virginia Slims," she said...
...So does a Marlboro sign...
...The daily papers have been silent...
...These days, televised tennis and auto-racing doesn't sell cigarette ads but does sell equally lucrative car ads and truck ads and beer ads instead...
...Otherwise why would they want to pump millions of dollars into sports...
...To be sure no one missed the point, the contract added: "The Association shall use its best efforts to have the events telecast on national network television...
...Sports Illustrated, the industry giant, weighed in at 11.3 percent—or $27 million...
...But as far as tobacco's involvement with sports, "I would say on the level of the world's evils, I would say it ranks pretty low...
...I don't choose to do it...
...Marlboro While it would certainly help if Sports Illustrated saved its righteous indignation for Kools instead of Kool Aid, the tobacco companies have friends in even higher places—television...
...Philip Morris, no doubt, would be happy to sponsor another educational program, to help kids kick the hero-worship habit...
...As for her thoughts about tobacco, she said, "I just can't do it...
...Sports sponsorship has become such an spectacular success that by now all kinds of corporations want in—the John Hancock Bowl, the Mazda Gator Bowl...
...0f course, my daughters have always been after me to stop...
...But while cigarette consumption is declining, it's declining least among blacks, women, high school drop-outs, blue-collar workers, and other groups whose members tend to lead more difficult lives...
...Again the cancer fled...
...empire full of cigarette ads, hasn't brought an exceptionally skeptical view to the issue of tobacco and sports...
...To protect themselves from losing a competitive advantage to some less scrupulous, upstart station, the networks could seek a ruling from the FCC, pointing out tobacco's circumvention of the law...
...To nearly everyone's surprise, the FCC agreed, announcing in 1967 that henceforth broadcasters should air one antismoking spot for every three or four cigarette commercials...
...Acting alone, the reporter who condemns cigarette ads may get branded an "activist" and sent to write obits...
...Ask Greg Connolly, a Massachusetts dentist hired by Major League baseball to help athletes quit chewing tobacco...
...The writers went on to document another crass exercise of corporate power, blasting the National Dairy Council for "disseminating educational material on nutrition that pointedly neglects to suggest that readers might want to restrict their intake of eggs, whole milk, butter...
...Does money mean that much to you...
...In the 1983-84 season, RJR's brand, Export A, became the official sponsor of the Canadian Ski Association, which oversees the country's major competitions...
...For one, a number of newspapers have actually allied themselves as cosponsors of cigarette-backed sporting events...
...I'm basically neutral," she said...
...One cell becomes two, the two become four, the four become eight, and the cancer is off and racing...
...By accepting tobacco sponsorship, the country's singers, dancers, curators, and the like help ensure this doesn't happen...
...All I can do is give you a personal opinion...
...The tissues' revenge The average American smoker consumes about 7,000 cigarettes a year...
...As they do, the word "Winston" may quickly come to mind: one of the races is called the Winston 500...
...Major League Baseball, after all, forbids athletes from smoking in uniform—why can't it forbid them from playing in front of cigarette billboards...
...They used to show people sailing around smoking cigarettes...
...Are you editorializing...
...A tumor the size of a cubic centirneter— the size, say, of a bouillon cube—will contain about a billion cancerous cells...
...The recognition of this power is why the soccer star Pele won't pose near cigarette signs...
...By July 1986, a CT scan could no longer find the lump in his chest...
...When I asked Jerry Kirshenbaum, the fitness article's co-author, how the ethics of that ad compared to the Dairy Council's plug for milk, he said, "I really don't think I want to discuss this any further...
...For a sense of how cigarette revenues have shaped the attitudes of the magazine world, consider the views of George Gross, executive vice president of the Magazine Publishers of America...
...Baseball: Cigarette companies have ads in 22 of the 24 Major League ballparks in the United States, typically in spots that enhance broadcast coverage...
...See Monthly Journalism Award, November 1988...
...their success in co-opting the nation's health elite to promote a product that leads to an array of fatal diseases is extraordinary...
...When technicians turn on the switch, a 12.5 ton medical marvel will send between 180 and 300 "rad" burning into the diseased cells...
...Philip Morris "promised us all kinds of publicity," the team captain, Eric Shouffer, told the newspaper...
...Cancer management then called for a round of brain radiation, since the disease is known to sojourn there...
...Turning back to the media guide, I flipped to the section marked "Virginia Slims Personnel," and, to my surprise, found a familiar face on the page...
...he asked...
...Since 1971, when the ban on televised cigarette ads took effect, the cigarette companies' efforts to reach their target audiences have grown more complicated...
...Their ties to tobacco endanger the public health by continuing to make cigarettes seem glamorous to kids, and by keeping the cigarette signs on T.V...
...While accepting the Devil's money may be defensible if you give nothing in return, the recipients of tobacco largesse have given something very precious indeed, the one thing the cigarette sellers could never earn on their own: respect...
...I don't feel bad at all about looking somebody in the eye and saying, 'Virginia Slims is our sponsor,' cause they're a great sponsor," she said in 1986...
...There is something there, the doctor reports—pneumonia, maybe—but he's careful not to sound too alarmed...
...Wolinsky says Wulf told him, "based on common sense, magazines do not like to upset their advertisers by publishing stories that are negative on an advertised product...
...If we'd wear big Philip Morris logos on our chest, they told us we'd be on 'Good Morning America' and so on...
...It showed an athletic young woman, 'iving into a pool...
...I have to keep coming back to the thing with our Constitution—free rights, free markets, whatever...
...The man with the cough Lung cancer, which is almost always fatal, is a curiously polite disease...
...In this, they are no different than crack peddlers...
...The initial indication may come as quickly as 15 minutes, but final confirmation can take three or four days—itself a sample of the waiting that will fill future months...
...What we really should be striving for is not to have athletes conform to more rules, but to have our kids realize that athletes are not role models," he said...
...Then again, if the Winston Cup can't exist without Winston, then isn't it more cigarette ad than sport, after all...
...We're not in the sports business...
...Cigarette strategists now had to contend with a more complicated world...
...It's certainly fair to say that Sports Illustrated, itself part of a larger Time, Inc...
...Thus comes Terrence Cardinal Cooke to say a prayer at a cigarette-sponsored display of Vatican art, leading one Philip Morris vice president to boast, "We're probably the only cigarette company on this earth to be blessed by a cardinal...
...He called back a few days later to explain that "we only show the part that shows the scoreboard...
...Failing that, how about a big "Surgeon General's Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy" slapped on the photos of the tourney...
...His chart tagged him as lucky, too...
...Brown wrote back a nothing-I-can-do letter ("legally permitted," "forced to recognize an individual's rights") promising serenely that, "This is an ongoing problem, however, that we will continue to address...
...But most of all, they're synonymous with fine physical form...
...The cancer now appeared throughout his chest and liver...
...I'd appreciate a little more openmindedness...
...There are newspaper stories leading up to and following the race that mention the Marlboro name frequently, and this is excellent exposure...
...I called Brown recently to see how the progress was coming...
...Or better yet, trotted out with a paint brush to cover it up...
...The camera near the visiting team dugout at Shea Stadium, for instance, which is used to capture men leading off first base, frames the player with the Marlboro sign in left-center...
...That is, race car drivers can smoke and drive, but soccer stars certainly can't smoke and sprint...
...Of course, the appropriateness of such an association with Kool-Aid, a product not ordinarily thought of as promoting fitness, might be questioned...
...But, though she answers a phone at Philip Morris headquarters, she said she was only a "consultant" and that she worked "only on the tennis end...
...Carry, the executive editor and a former smoker, said that quitting was one of the hardest things he'd ever done...
...When later asked by ABC News if he'd really said, "If we have to fly to Louisville, Kentucky and crawl on bended knees and beg the cigarette company not to take their ads out of our newspaper, we'll do that," Hoop said, "True...
...And if kids look to athletes as role models...
...At ABC, Lydia Stephans, the programmer with a clear-eyed view of tobacco's clever loophole, argued that there's little the networks can do...
...So now they do it through sports...
...I asked Doug Kelly, an NBC spokesman, how the network deals with the tobacco ads that line scoreboards and racetrack infields...
...In 1985, Alan Blum, the anti-smoking activist, wrote to Brown and suggested he do something to remove cigarette ads from stadiums...
...The bold corporate logo of the Virginia Slims series emphasizes the bond: a woman, sassy and sleek, holds a racket in one hand and a cigarette in the other...
...Draped in a soft blue gown, the man with the cough gets wheeled into a 65-degree room, where a surgeon snakes an optic fiber down his throat and snatches a piece of lung...
...It glides through the body, making itself at home but careful not to cause a fuss...
...They've found a loophole...
...That's absolute garbage," he said...
...In March, a tumor in the throat wouldn't let him swallow...
...To push the process along, a little unity would help...
...Relatively speaking...
...While Bobby Brown dealt with his lack of good answers by slamming down the phone, and Doug Kelly dealt with it by seeking anonymity, at least Axthelm stayed on the line...
...But that wasn't the explanation that Wulf gave Howard Wolinsky, a Chicago Sun-Times medical writer, when Wolinsky asked what happened...
...Obviously, both the Post and Times have had unkind words for tobacco...
...In 1965, 40 percent of American adults smoked...
...They're synonymous with wealth, too: Chris Evert's $8.6 million in lifetime earnings places her a distant second to Martina Navratilova's $14 million...
...he said...
...Six months later, in September, 1988, it returned...
...and why is that...
...You're saying that cigarette smoking causes a disease...
...If treatment kills a billion minus one, the patient is still left with a fatal disease, for the one that survives will continue to divide...
...Leave your car at the far end of the parking lot...
...Those of us less physically gifted than Hana Mandlikova can't help but envy the strength in her legs, power in her arms, and stamina in her lungs as Jason DeParle is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...Time seems to stop until the word arrives...
...I prefer to be known as an NBC spokesman...
...you can expect some discomfort...
...Sprinkled throughout the media guide are photos of athletes in peak physical condition: Manuela Maleeva bends "low for a forehand volley," "Hana Mandlikova intently awaits a return," "Gabriela Sabatini puts to use her 'smashing' backhand...
...Regarding the tobacco issue, I don't choose to share my opinions...
...Ten days later, when the cough and the spot on the X-ray have endured, it's time for another look...
...The Guggenheim Museum...
...I'm glad you're doing it," said Leonard Shapiro, sports editor at The Washington Post, who was more thoughtful about the topic than most of the journalists I spoke to...
...Next came an electolyte imbalance, which brings more vomiting and the possibility of seizures...
...He spoke in a monotone, with no peaks of anger or dips of despair...
...In a interview with The Daily Racing Form, Ellen Merlo, director of marketing promotions at Philip Morris, explained the event's appeal: "First, it has created enormous visibility for Marlboro...
...This time, the cancer managers tried the experimental therapy called In Vitro Best Regimen...
...If lung cancer is caught in an early stage, that is, if it's anatomically confined, there's a chance it can be surgically removed...
...As for the dailies, no one who has walked past the sports desk of an average American newspaper is likely to confuse it for a breeding ground of social reform...
...The cigarette companies weren't just losing the battle...
...Meanwhile, one could suggest that Sports Illustrated has been less than zealous in publishing alternative points of view...
...During halftime, fans joined a contest to kick a ball through the "o" in a Winston sign...
...said Wayne Robertson, an RJR executive, in a trade journal...
...The tobacco companies have also needed the help of sports journalists, and, again, they've gotten it...
...Winston Cup racing, born 1971...
...Relish for a moment the thought of a Sam Donaldson of sport trailing Chris Evert and you get a sense of how vulnerable athletes would be to a determined inquiry: "Ms...
...What could the Mets management do...
...Reynolds, was one of four major sponsors of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City...
...another is simply known as The Winston...
...Q: "Isn't one of the areas in which women are achieving parity lung cancer...
...Those who think that tobacco's conquest of sport is complete, however, can take heart—according to the Chicago Sun-Times, Philip Morris recently lost the $12,000 sponsorship of the U.S...
...It is cigarettes, not cocaine, that cause about 390,000 deaths each year according to C. Everett Koop...
...But the more loudly he defended the marriage of the two, the more embarrassing it became to listen, all the more so because he seemed like a terrifically nice guy...
...Its 456 glossy pages bear tribute to what the guide immodestly calls "one of the greatest success stories of the modern sports world"—how women's tennis stepped from obscurity into the limelight of the Virginia Slims circuit, where this year players will compete for more than $17 million in prize money...
...If the world saw them as the drug pushers they are, Congress would ban their ads, if not their product, and Drug Czars would join the fray...
...The team of Camel girls was stationed at each stadium distributing free samples . . . . Sponsorship of World Cup 86 provided Camel with a golden profile that reflected its product image of independence, masculinity, and adventure...
...I disagree with a journalist who calls and issues a very opinionated statement, when the credo of journalism is balance, fairness, and accuracy...
...The same issue that emphasized the dangers of elevators and eggs more than Marlboros, Camels, or Winstons, happened to have ten pages of cigarette advertising...
...Q: Does smoking lead to disease...
...But her husband smokes too...
...Earlier in the decade, RJR even tried to field its own World Cup club...
...The magazine's beer-ad revenues in 1988 were $6.3 million—significant, but far short of tobacco's $35 million...
...And cigarette smoking, as the Surgeon General recently reminded, "is the chief avoidable cause of death in our society"—death, more precisely, from heart and lung disease...
...But these days, she and the other stars of women's tennis have actually had to fight off other corporate sponsors who would welcome the chance to take over...
...The purpose of this fevered gift-giving has been to divert the public's attention from what tobacco companies really do: lure people, particularly young ones, into buying a highly addictive drug, which, if used as intended, courts death...
...by Jason DeParle In case you missed it, this year's press guide to the Women's International Tennis Association is an impressive volume...
...The sportswriter who, by chance, does develop a Donaldson complex on the issue isn't likely to find great encouragement from above...
...He hasn't...
...When Billie Jean King set out 20 years ago to find a sponsor for women's tennis, she may have needed Philip Morris as much as it needed her...
...Perhaps the constituency least pleased by this prospect was the broadcasters, who were then banking about $250 million a year in tobacco ad revenues...
...Judging from another Sports Illustrated article, the magazine seems to think that tobacco isn't just a "fringe" issue in sports but also in health...
...It was quiet in his room...
...The Houston Chronicle, The Houston Post, The Boston Herald, and the Los Angeles Times have all joined Philip Morris as backers of Virginia Slims events, while the Atlanta Journal joins RJR in financing the Atlanta Journal 500...
...Back from biopsy, then, the man with the cough will have two options...
...They still needed to saturate the culture with the idea that smoking leads to happiness, but television, their most powerful weapon, seemed off limits...
...The story of the ad ban is an interesting one in itself, and perhaps its most salient moral is that, despite the immense wealth and power of the tobacco companies, there is, in fact, much that one person can do...
...Sperduto said...
...On it went for about an hour, a stock recitation of the Philip Morris line...
...if all withdrew at once, they were subject to antitrust reprisals for collusion...
...Is that K-e-1-1-y...
...Bobby Brown, the American League president, former New York Yankee, and cardiologist...
...Only the tension of waiting...
...And what are King & Co...
...In sponsoring the 1983 "Winston Team America Series," it compiled an allstar team and held a 30-game series against the pros in major stadiums across the country...
...A large and growing number of sports now lend their athletes' credibility as fine physical specimens to the tobacco companies, whose products, by the Surgeon General's estimate, kill about 1,000 people a day...
...The idea that they have a moral obligation to speak out against tobacco's role in sport is likely to strike many sportswriters as about as compelling as their obligation to champion educational reform in Zambia...
...Sample...
...If he hadn't been chosen for a government study, he probably wouldn't have been there...
...Why the dairy council even gave those milk pamphlets to kids...
...And perhaps equally significant, beer companies don't feel as imperilled, and hence, as vindictive, as cigarette makers do...
...boomerang team to an anti-smoking group called Doctors Ought to Care, which is run by Alan Blum...
...He'd had a full life, he said, and Dr Sperduto nodded in support: his patient had been married for 33 years, with three daughters, and four grandchildren...
...He referred me to the code of reportorial probity, as articulated by the professional society, Sigma Delta Chi...
...He's 55 or 60 years old, and has been smoking most of his life, but never had any problems as a result...
...It's not that he's been any more complicit in the promotion of cigarettes and sports than most other big-name sports writers...
...What I recall is the general slogan, `You've come a long way, baby,' as being a good thing for women," he said...
...When the pitchmen of Philip Morris say, "You've come a long way baby," they could very well be congratulating themselves...
...Continuing to coo about how "loyal" Philip Morris has been, while rebuffing a bid by Proctor & Gamble last year to take over the women's tour...
...It's a fringe thing," says Peter Carry, the magazine's executive editor...
...Noo—h0000," she said, keeping the answer to herself...
...This is a sport that has other problems besides cigarette sponsorship, of course—such as encouraging 16-year-olds to play Richard Petty on the interstate...
...It's a legitimate story...
...The chemotherapy, meanwhile, had caused a "peripheral neuropathy," the sensation of burning in the patient's arms and legs...
...The small group of network executives who control the nation's sports programming have unique power where tobacco and athletics are concerned...
...And the networks have been perfectly happy to show an infield decked with Marlboro banners, race cars painted with Marlboro signs, officials wearing Marlboro logos—while pretending that cigarette ads are still banned from the air...
...why do you display your athletic talents in front of that Virginia Slims banner...
...It can list south toward the groin, or tack its way north to the brain...
...Skiing: For about eight years, until last season, Loew's sponsored the Newport Ski Weekend, which offered half-price lift tickets in exchange for cigarette boxes...
...If the heads of CBS, ABC, and NBC simply turned on the TV, saw the whirl of Marlboro cars, flags, and banners, and said, "Hey, that's a cigarette ad—don't show it," the game would be over...
...What the tobacco industry needed was friends, and its strategy for finding them was sound: it decided to buy them...
...We use sports as an avenue for advertising our products...
...It's too bad that Pete Axthelm doesn't have a spokesman...
...To some extent, cigarette companies have been losing the war...
...The major components of this culture are indifference ("I just report the news...
...His body will go limp...
...rest and repeat...
...For leads on many of the following items, I am indebted to Dr...
...But the more he talked, the more his answers turned back against him: "I just don't want to be set up as an idiot," he said...
...We haven't done the piece you're doing...
...Perhaps, finally, he was as unconvinced by his own defense of the cigarette companies as I was...
...The media's own conglomerate status means it has more than one flank exposed...
...Just twenty years ago, the nation's best women tennis players languished before small crowds on high school courts...
...it won't be me...
...Smokes Illustrated The fit athletes of the Virginia Slims circuit who swat balls in front of cigarette ads, in a tournament named for a cigarette brand, pocketing large sums from a cigarette company's largesse, are but a small subset of the great marriage of sports and tobacco...
...all buildings, podiums, backdrops...
...Hacking hags Whether or not the figure of 1,000 deaths a day presents tobacco companies with a moral challenge, it certainly presents them with an economic one: how to replace the thousands of people their products kill each week...
...King went on to say that "Personally, I hate cigarette smoking...
...It announces itself at the time of its choosing...
...Interestingly, Sports Illustrated did run a very hardhitting article last year on beer's effect on sports, which shows the magazine hasn't just simply tuned out on moral issues...
...It was just a cough at first, with a hit of mucous, and sure to go away in another week...
...Cancer doctors speak not in years but in packyears, and this man's number was 60: one-and-ahalf packs of Lucky Strikes a day, times forty years, beginning at age 15...
...We have a waiting list for inside billboards," says Jane Allen, who works in the marketing department of the Charlotte Motor Speedway...
...This is odd...
...But those with a subtler touch will still find a way to communicate that inordinate crusading on the issue does not enhance journalists' career advancement...
...Previously, cigarette companies had to hire actors to play athletes in their commercials, but now they've got the real thing...
...For days afterwards he may feel too exhausted to lift himself from bed...
...Consider the timing: Virginia Slims, born 1971...
...Mets to RJR: Drop dead Of course, cigarette companies couldn't co-opt athletics if athletics wasn't willing to be co-opted...
...The cancer held firm...
...By December 1987, it was back, and four more months of chemotherapy began, this time with different chemicals...
...The article doesn't exactly ignore tobacco...
...The second type of lung cancer, known, straightforwardly enough, as "non smallcell lung cancer," does not respond to chemotherapy...
...Maybe it's become such an ingrained part of our culture, it's something we don't even notice...
...A: "I don't want to comment on that...
...Is that your opinion...
...Though television viewers were still being blitzed with ads that showed happy smokers in vigorous poses, now they received other visions too: a Marlboro-like man, bursting boldly through the saloon doors, only to collapse in a fit of coughs...
...At that age, it makes you feel like you're a big man...
...He said that two different editors, including baseball editor Steve Wulf, warned him that higher-ups might find a possible "conflict of interest" with advertisers, but Wulf told him to try it nonetheless...
...Brown couldn't have been more disingenuous: he said he didn't know the reason athletes were forbidden to smoke in uniform, just that it was on the books and he didn't feel compelled to change it...
...stars, and teen idols to the nation's number one health hazard...
...Rascals...
...And, of course, the FCC needn't be shy...
...Secondly the image of horse racing and the imagery of the Marlboro Man campaign seem to have reinforced each other...
...What she's saying is this: Let someone else get lung cancer...
...Lung cancer is the tissues' revenge...
...While tobacco's been busy assembling this circle of courtiers, athletes aren't just any members of the court...
...Perhaps she would have some thoughts on the compatibility of tennis and tobacco...
...As for billboards, Brown agreed that "anytime you have advertising, the tobacco companies think you have a chance of increasing sales—that's why they're doing it...
...Use stairs instead of elevators...
...While actual cigarette advertising in many papers is modest, it's not so modest that publishers are anxious to lose it...
...Among the privileges it received in return was the chance to post four sevenmeter Camel signs next to the field, where the worldwide television audience of 650 million for the final game alone could see them...
...The first bout of management began in 1985 with the onset of chemotherapy, monthly for eight consecutive months—four or five days of chemicals followed by a week or so of vomiting and exhaustion...
...Denunciations of RJR in The Washington Post could mean fewer ads for Camels, Oreos, and Smirnoff in Newsweek, just as an attack on Virginia Slims in The New York Times could lead to the end of the $900,000 of tobacco ads that appeared last year in its wholly-owned Tennis magazine...
...In 1983, the magazine ran a 10-page article deploring the sad state of "fitness" in America, explaining how poor diet and a lack of exercise contribute to heart disease and general ill health...
...For starters, they needed the cooperation of the athletes, and, with a few praiseworthy exceptions, they've gotten it...
...each causes a chemical reaction that makes the body want more...
...Emphasis added...
...Brown at least can claim that he's not actively soliciting the billboards, just shrugging his shoulders while others do...
...Within five years of diagnosis, 87 percent of those afflicted can expect to be dead...
...In 1986, Connolly says he contacted the magazine and offered to write a piece about the program...
...But cigarette peddlers are jauntily strolling the halls of their latest museum exhibits...
...But tobacco companies desperately need teen smokers for the simple reason that few people start smoking once they are adults...
...This, remember, is a man who's been at the top of the profession that should be chasing cigarettes from sports: "Obviously, I can be criticized since we all make our outrageous salaries as a result of tobacco and beer advertising, so I know I'm setting myself up," he began...
...The physicians reduced his dosage—good for the bowels, bad for the pain...
...Let's have a look, the physician says...
...Because as Hana Mandlikova intently awaits a return, she does so in front of a big sign that says "Virginia Slims"—a product not known for promoting the powers of heart and lung that lie at the center of her trade...
...I hate cigarettes...
...It also omits Camille Duvall, champion water skier and the cover girl for the current issue of Philip Morris Magazine, where the company that insists its interest in athletes has nothing to do with glamour, describes her as "gorgeous— swimsuit issue, pack-it-in-Paulina, no-exaggeration, gorgeous...
...I think it's inappropriate for a cigarette to sponsor any sporting event—period," he said...
...Noting the saturation of TV with cigarette ads, he sent off a three-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission, arguing that the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to give anti-smoking groups their say...
...We're in the cigarette business...
...And that's just the daily press...
...That's great," Dr...
...Thus comes Philip Morris beneficiary Alvin Ailey, writing the Surgeon General last year to call tobacco executives "enlightened...
...Cigarette spokesmen self-righteously insist they have no such goal...
...Or almost—there was a momentary point of diversion...
...The Joffrey Ballet...
...Ken Read, who represented Canada twice in Olympic skiing and is now a broadcaster, was among the leaders of the protest...
...Philip Morris invites skiers at a number of Western resorts to take the "Marlboro Challenge," a plunge down a timed race course festooned with Marlboro flags...
...Can I ask you something...
...It is confident...
...It seemed to work...
...Their unique evocation of health, access to television, and influence on teenagers makes them especially prized, and a report this year by the Surgeon General adds extra emphasis to the point about youth: "The uptake of smoking is now a phenomenon that occurs almost entirely during the teenage years...
...A pathologist slices the sample, using one portion to prepare a quick slide and saving the rest for future tests...
...Imagine how heartless those Kool-Aid peddlers are...
...On the average, tobacco provided 11.3 percent of the sports journals' income, down slightly from 14.0 in 1976—but up impressively from pre-ad ban days of 1966, when it was only 2.1 percent...
...To remove them, however, would be "unrealistic," since tobacco companies could still advertise elsewhere, such as in subways...
...She said it didn't work...
...The media employees who wait for the executives to move are likely to wait a long time...
...My father smoked, both my brothers smoked," he said...
...Virginia Slims...
...But they couldn't have done it alone...
...I am absolutely not qualified to say what anybody does or does not do...
...and I'll get rich and famous in the process...
...When I met him in July, the man with the lucky chart, a former auto mechanic now 58 years old, was back for more treatment...
...And the conglomerate nature of cigarette ownership may mean that other ad revenues are also at stake: RJR's holdings include Nabisco, Del Monte, and Kentucky Fried Chicken, while Philip Morris controls those of Seven-Up, the Miller Brewing Company, and Genera/ Foods, makers of Jello, Maxwell House, Tang, Oscar Mayer, and so forth...
...It was now January, 1989, and nothing was happening...
...His fears about the possible conflict of interest, he said, "turned out not to be the case...
...I would leave that to more informed individuals...
...It's not our policy to identify our spokesmen here...
...Lying on the table, the man with the cough feels nothing...
...I'll stick a chaw in my mouth and everything seems to get a little brighter," said pitcher Rick Reuschel...
...Connolly turned it in, but the piece never ran...
...The new anti-tobacco policy isn't on the horizon at ESPN either, where RJR/Nabisco owns 20 percent...
...Who are you, sir...
...The tobacco companies need this false status as respectable corporations in order to survive...
...I want you to know that I'm recording this conversation," he said...
...Metastatic small cell lung cancer to the left neck, mediastinum, right hilum, and liver" Dr Sperduto said...
...Then, growing agitated, Weiss said, "That's their choice...
...a wrinkled hag on a respirator, cigarette in hand, asking, "Aren't I sexy...
...Another experiment began—a monoclonal antibody, the discovery of which had earned a researcher a Nobel Prize...
...I disagree with your premises...
...But the disease rarely gives itself away before spreading so far that surgery is no longer an option...
...If this list seems lengthy, don't forget it omits the Vantage Golf Scoreboard, Salem Pro-Sail races, Lucky Strike bowling, the Winston Rodeo, Benson & Hedges on Ice, and any number of other cigarettesponsored sports...
...But I'd like to know what people like Billie Jean King, Chris Evert, and Martina Navratilova—athletes who have thought it over, and pledged the cigarette companies their fidelity—can claim, but they aren't returning phone calls on the issue...
...Breast cancer, testicular cancer, prostate cancer, and others have all been known to succumb to the linear accelerator's might...
...I believe in free enterprise," King said in 1983, on one of the few times she's been publicly quizzed on her tobacco ties (significantly, it wasn't a journalist but an anti-smoking activist who asked the question...
...The problem is what they call the "therapeutic-to-toxic ratio"—how to kill cancer cells without killing other cells too...
...It was the broadcasters, remember, who did their level best to keep cigarettes commercials on the air...
...The word cancer has been there all along, but no one's wanted to say it...
...Have they no shame...
...That didn't work either...
...On their half, I think it's clever...
...When I asked if that all those 150 m.p.h...
...Though there's something oddly reassuring about the touch of his cold stethoscope on the patient's chest and back, it's less reassuring to he directed in front of the X-ray machine...
...Marlboro Cup horse racing, born 1973...
...The Los Angeles public pools were offering free admission to "to children producing wrappers from Kool-Aid packages," the authors said...
...He said he found the question—is there a contradiction between the vigor of athletics and the disease caused by cigarettes?—a breach of journalistic ethics...
...That's definitely not curable...
...Quick: speak the words "Virginia Slims" and what do you see...
...The company's original contract called for "the exclusive right...
...Bench him...
...The contract was modified following the protest, and the controversy led finally to a ban on all tobacco advertising in Canada...
...Just as baseball players, acting together, could bring the necessary pressure to bear on ballparks, writers and producers can put pressures on the media corporations...
...If the word is something like squamous cell carcinoma— lung cancet--there will begin a difficult discussion indeed...
...Don't set me up after a lung cancer paragraph and say, 'Virginia Slims has done a lot for women.— Sixty pack-years There's an odd sign on the door to one of the cancer wards at the Bethesda Naval Hospital...
...Alone, that is...
...By the end of the conversation, Axthelm began to sound concerned...
...With the messy little business of cigarettes put behind, the magazine turned a tarter tongue toward a real social blight: sweetened water...
...When Ellen Merlo of Philip Morris brags about "the newspaper stories leading up to and following the race that mention the Marlboro name frequently," sportswriters could decide that henceforth the "Marlboro Cup" will just become "The Cup...
...Who funds you...
...A few "sports" might go under, at least in their present forms...
...A loophole' Just as it takes a certain physiological culture for cancer to conquer a lung, it takes a certain journalistic one for tobacco to conquer sports...
...Newspapers routinely make such judgments about proper editorial content, screening out, say, obscenity...
...Emphysema Slims For those keeping moral score, cigarettes' involvement with aerobic sports, like tennis and soccer, is probably the most indefensible, since the respiratory fitness those sports require and represent is precisely what cigarettes deprive people of...
...For the most part, that willingness consists not of active promotion but of silence, which is just as necessary to the cigarette salesmen's success...
...Doctors know how to kill cancer cells...
...The withdrawal wasn't as easy as it might seem, however...
...A phrase like "let's not get worried until we know what we're dealing with" will almost certainly follow...
...What they needed was an order: ban us, they asked...
...Next, it advises "'lifestyle' changes, such as cutting out cigarettes...
...As if peer pressure were something that filtered down through the ozone layer and had nothing to do with race cars and tennis stars...
...We're just going to remove a small piece of tissue, the physician says...
...The driver who accumulates the most points during the season wins the $1 million Winston Cup...
...Judging from my recent discussions with sports broadcasters, however, the dangers of such an outbreak of moral zeal seem slight...
...Alan Blum, a Baylor physician whose anti-smoking research and protests (like the staging of an "Emphysema Slims") makes him the Don King of the anti-smoking world: Soccer: Besides the world's most enviable lungs, soccer offers cigarettes two other advantages: wild overseas popularity at a time when American tobacco companies are stepping up their Third World trade, and a growing popularity among American youth...
...A recent 12-page advertising supplement for Marlboro Grand Prix racing in The New York Times Magazine cost close to $300,000, according to the Times's advertising department...
...SI suggested that this was "cynical, ironic, immoral, hypocritical...
...I asked Read what he thought about the cigarette companies' argument that they're only promoting brand loyalty and, therefore, not encouraging kids to smoke...
...In the waiting room, there is a human community—wife, children, friends from work, grandchildren perhaps—that is connected through nerves and fears, or, maybe, prayers...
...Let no one mistake the point—the cigarette companies haven't been shy about exercising this clout...
...Autoracing: Since 1971, RJR has been the chief sponsor of NASCAR's premier circuit, the $18 million, 29-race Winston Cup Series...
...If you answered A)—and most people do—then Philip Morris has you right where it wants you...
...Donning the mask of philanthropy, the tobacco companies have courted not only athletes but ballerinas, modern dancers, jazz musicians, museum curators, unions, civil rights groups, feminists, religious leaders—almost anyone with a glimmer of uprightness and a use for cash...
...It may respond to radiation...
...He said he was speaking to Wolinsky about magazines in general, not Sports Illustrated, which he said "does not let its advertisers dictate its editorial content...
...Ad men More to the point is a basic fact of American journalism: Publishers like the income from cigarette ads, and few are likely to regard an anti-tobacco crusade as a boon to business...
...Tobacco spokesmen have a way of sounding positively wounded when someone suggests they're scheming to entice the young—the Tobacco Institute even funds an anti-teenage smoking program...
...At that point, Weiss's voice took on the tin echo of a speaker phone...
...The big magazines, like Sports Illustrated, are thick with tobacco ads and thin on tobacco critics...
...Cytoxan won...
...Horse racing: Rather than take over an existing horse race, in 1973 Philip Morris simply went out and created one from scratch: the nationally-televised Marlboro Cup, which it sponsored until 1987...
...Driving out of the hospital, we passed an advertisement on the side of a city bus...
...people can make their own choices")—with a generous sprinkling of publisher's greed, in the form of cigarette ads...
...When you're using sports as a tool, you're influencing youth...
...While Strawberry's probably valuable enough to get away with it on his own, lots of lesser players aren't...
...Beer's involvement in sport, through sponsorship and advertising, led the magazine "to wonder just what kind of cultural hypocrisy is going on when Americans relentlessly insist on immersing sport—our most wholesome, most admired, even (sometimes) most heroic institution— in a sea of intoxicating drink...
...So what—maybe Connolly can't write...
...Struck by this seeming contradiction, I called Renee Bloch Shallouf, whom the guide lists as Media Services Manager for the players union, and asked if she, too, was impressed with the incongruity...
...In April, the pain medicine was locking his bowels...
...As Lydia Stephans, programming manager for ABC Sports, said, "I'm sure that's why Virginia Slims put up that money—so they could get that recognition, the association with sports and health...
...His appetite began to slow...
...And into his veins it went, over the course of five monthly cycles...
...Not many will respond as forthrightly as Mark Hoop, publisher of the Twin Cities Reader, who flatly fired the reporter whose preview of the Kool Jazz Festival pointed out that Duke Ellington had died of lung cancer...
...Camel cigarettes, manufactured by R.J...
...A cardinal sins But tobacco's problems extended beyond the TV ban, and sports was only part of the answer...
...A brochure by ISL Marketing, a firm that handles World Cup marketing, explains: "The launch of their Camel Filters in Mexico was arranged to coincide with World Cup 86...
...In respectable society today, cocaine peddlers are objects of scorn...
...It's unrealistic for tobacco ads to be removed from baseball parks," he said...
...And with good reason—from the time it first gets uttered, the average lung cancer patient will live less than three years...
...Paul Sperduto, an oncologist at the National Cancer Institute, escorted me onto the NCI ward and pulled the medical chart of a patient, who, four years ago, coughing, had gone to see his doctor...
...Though still outnumbered, these hacking, wincing images of death began to register: cigarette consumption declined in each of the next four years...
...If the process works and the cancer goes into retreat, chemotherapy can earn the patient a modest extension of life...
...but neither can claim to have provided the kind of unforgiving coverage that tobacco has earned with a product that every two years kills more Americans than have died in all the wars of this century...
...When it's time for the bombardment to begin, the patient will stretch out beneath a linear accelerator— a hulking structure that, resembling a 10-foot microscope, hunches over his form...
...Now I'm trying to get them to stop...
...I doubt many, if any, do...
...As anyone understands who's watched someone they care for try to quit, the pack-a-day smoker "chooses" his habit as freely as the cocaine addict chooses his...
...Perhaps the doctor will say it first: The purpose of the biopsy, he explains, is "to rule out cancer...
...Meanwhile, a 1986 study by the University of Michigan School of Public Health found that no other category of magazines—fashion, politics, generalinterest, and so forth—relies more heavily on tobacco ads than do sports magazines...
...That's a very opinionated statement...
...We can go into an area where we're marketing an event, measure sales during the event and measure sales after the event, and see an increase in sales...
...I'm not going to comment on that," he said...
...Cigarette manufacturers exploit sporting events in a variety of ways, ranging from such old-fashioned strategies as stadium advertising to the virtual invention of eponymous sports, like Winston Series Drag Racing or Marlboro Cup horseracing...
...Sometime, somehow, a cell rebels and begins to divide...
...The Refreshest...
...First the magazine argues, "The problem is not only too little exercise—the culprits in the case of children include TV and, recently, video games—but too many cigarettes, too many calories and a diet far too rich in salt and saturated fats...
Vol. 21 • September 1989 • No. 8
