by John McGuinness - March 13, 2008
What is it that fans want from athletes?
Well, we want them to have talent, for sure. We want to see people do things we cannot do ourselves; drain jump shots from twenty feet out, hit 500 foot home runs, effortlessly throw a fifty-yard spiral.
But we want more than that. We want them to care, damn it. Just like we tell ourselves we would if we were professional athletes (our lukewarm efforts in our actual careers notwithstanding). We want athletes willing to take on risk and push themselves through suffering for the good of the team. They should be singularly focussed on winning a championship. Sports folklore is full of stories of athletes who risked or shrugged off injury, and inspired their teams to greatness -- from Willis Reed limping on to the court for the seventh game of the NBA finals to Kirk Gibson looking like he's using his last steps to get around the bases to the "diagonal rule" for reporting hockey injuries during the playoffs (right shoulder = left knee), to Michael Jordan scoring 38 points in the Finals with the flu. Our obsession with toughing through injuries is such that in a ranking of the greatest matches for Pete Sampras, who won 14 Grand Slam Titles, some against top players like Andre Agassi and Boris Becker, the #1 match was a quarterfinal US Open match during witch Pete Sampras became ill. Of all the great plays in John Elway's career, probably the best remembered is when he dove head-first for a first down in the fourth quarter of the Broncos' first Super Bowl win.
As I was writing this, one of my local news stations just ran a top 10 list of injured performances, featuring most of the performances I mentioned above.
This isn't just for stars, though. Almost every team has a player who is short on talent but long on hustle, the guy who always seems to have a dirty uniform or a cut over his eye or floor-burns on his knees. Not coincidentally, this guy is almost always the fans' favorite player on the team.
There is nobody less popular than the talented athlete who does not accept risk or pain for the good of the team. This receiver who gets "alligator arms" when a defensive back is closing in, the "seven inning pitcher", the hockey player who hides behind a visor. These are the targets of the fans' derision.
It's not just physical sacrifice we celebrate. There are few better ways for an athlete to ingratiate himself to a fan base than to take a "hometown discount," that is, sign a contract for less than his true market value in order to remain with his current team, or for a shot at a championship. The athlete who accepts more money to play for another team, just like any of us would jump at a larger job offer? He's a no-good mercenary.
For "sports" like professional wrestling, the charge is even more explicit. Fans demand that these entertainers constantly ratchet up the risk and pain they are willing to endure for our entertainment. And they better never go backwards.
Given this environment, is it any wonder that athletes would reach for steroids and other performance enhancing drugs? It's a double whammy -- athletes can increase their physical capabilities, and do so at physical risk to themselves. What could be more admirable than that? Isn't that what fans always wanted?
As it turns out, not quite.
In addition to wanting to see athletes push themselves to the limit to entertain us, we'd like to maintain some innocence about it, too. We want to believe we're not supporting a fundamentally exploitative enterprise, like, say, Eliot Spitzer.
So what if most NFL players cannot walk without difficulty once their playing days are done? We don't have to see them then, except when they're comfortably seated telling an amusing anecdote on the latest NFL Films release. We don't have to face the toll the game has taken on these men's bodies if we don't want to, and Lord knows we don't want to.
Widespread steroid use makes denial even more difficult. If we know that guys are shooting themselves up with substances they don't completely understand in order to entertain us, can we cheer them on and retain the moral high ground?
This may be part of the reason why Barry Bonds' pursuit of the home run records was much less celebrated than that of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire. With McGwire and Sosa, we could look the other way and choose not to believe that their power surge came from a syringe. Was the ball juiced? Bonds made it almost impossible to kid ourselves, having turned himself from a great all-around player to the greatest power-hitting specialist of all time.
An interesting outcome of the Mitchell Report is that many of the named players claimed their use of performance enhancing drugs was short term, and only to help them recover from injury. They just wanted to get back and help the team. The implication is that it is using illegal drugs to restore productivity is morally superior to using them achieve a new level of productivity.
Recent events in pro wrestling have made the real-world impact of what these athletes do to entertain us even more difficult to ignore. At WWE's Wrestlemania XX in 2004, Eddy Guererro and Chris Benoit both departed as world champions. Now both are dead, the latter having also killed his wife and young son. And they are not the only ones. Clearly, there is something destructive about the culture of professional wrestling. Who wants to support that?
Another recent event highlighted the fans' complicated relationship with the real-world actions of athletes.
Toronto Maple Leafs center and captain Mats Sundin is in the final year of his contract. This contract includes a "no-trade" clause, a concession teams occasionally grant star players. He is 37 years old, and has spent most of his NHL career with the Leafs. The Leafs are having another in a string of bad years, and could improve their future positioning by trading Sundin for younger players and draft picks, except that Sundin must approve any trade, and has expressed no inclination to do so. So Leafs management began a public campaign to pressure Sundin to waive his no-trade clause. Sundin didn't.
The response from Leafs fans? An outpouring of support for Sundin. Despite the protestations of sportswriters (who I'm sure each just got back from meeting with their editors requesting an immediate transfer to a Stanley Cup contender's city), fans seemed to understand why Sundin wouldn't want to pack up and move out of his 15-year home.
But wait, wouldn't accepting the trade be what's best for the team? And wouldn't it give Sundin the opportunity to win a championship. Isn't that what it's all about?
It seems there's a limit to how far we want athletes to go. We want to see effort, but we don't want to think they're hurting themselves in the process, at least not too obviously.
Go all out for the championship, but if you hurt yourself in the process, don't come crying to us.
John McGuinness is a father and software engineer living in St. Louis, MO. He blogs at Man Bites Blog.