Kick Out the Sports!
by Bob Cook
Bob Cook's weekly ruminations on sports appear Mondays in Flak.
If you're a high-profile athlete, and you feel like kickin' back at a
bar with your buds, drinkin' some brews and chasin' some skirts, here's
one word of advice: don't.
That is, unless you're willing to see your pie-eyed mug end up all over the Web, whereupon, if you're Chicago Bears quarterback Kyle Orton, your team will have to issue a statement defending your right as a legal adult to get sloppy-shitfaced drunk on Jack Daniels and toss a wobbly bird on your own time. A right you've especially
earned if you've just, speaking of wobbly tosses, come off of throwing
five interceptions against the Cincinnati Bengals.
If you're a big-time athlete, there's a breed of camera-phone wielding, amateur paparazzi — the phone-parazzi, if you will — ready to catch you at your weakest, most bleary-eyed moment. Orton's photos, taken at an Iowa bar and forwarded to the Gawker-owned sports site Deadspin, are but the latest snaps of pickled jocks to route their way around the Internet.
It used to be a shirtless, rip-roaring-drunk Babe Ruth, hot dogs in his hands and lust in his heart, could chase half-naked whores from one end of the New York Yankees' train to the other, and the sportswriters and anyone else along for the ride would look at each other and say, "You see something? Me neither."
Now a Duke basketball player can't get tea-bagged at a University of North Carolina fraternity party without the rest of us getting a peek.
From Jim Bouton's "Ball Four" on, fans have soaked up, like beer through Andy Capp, tales of jocks' adventures with what in Ruth's day was called demon rum. But unless you were at Toots Shor's when Mickey Mantle was getting ripped, you didn't see how an athlete looked
while imbibing.
The advent of technology such as camera phones, small digital cameras and Flickr accounts assure sports fans that future Mantles would never be in danger of partying without documentation.
Ask Larry Eustachy, a pioneer in boozing on camera. The Iowa State basketball coach was caught on camera sipping Natural Light Ice at an off-campus party near the University of Missouri. His mug got onto Missouri fan sites in early 2003. A few months later, Eustachy resigned after a Missouri student turned over photos of his Natty Light escapades to the Des Moines Register.
The Eustachy and Orton episodes have this in common: when their bleary-eyedness was confined to the Web, people just laughed at them. Any repercussions came only after a newspaper or some mainstream outlet picked up on the existence of the photos.
So, Dirk Nowitzki and Steve Nash's drunken duet remains an Internet legend only. Chris Chelios and his Detroit Red Wing teammates partying in Ann Arbor with University of Michigan girls young enough to be their daughters was mildly creepy, but didn't kill their careers. All those partying baseball players whose photos appeared in "On the DL," a gossipy athletes' site, get snide comments made about them. Their careers aren't
over, but their dignity is stripped.
And if you get too out of control, someday you could be like that teabagged Duke basketball player, whose future obit will begin, "Reggie Love, best-known for a widely circulated Internet photo of him passed out with some guys' balls in his face..."
If you're an athlete, that's the risk you take going out. You have been warned.
E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.
