Chicken Little, celebrity blogger
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by user Thesportshog
The best part about acupuncture (other than the fact that it is the only thing that makes my back stop hurting) is that it gives one plenty of time to think. You lie there, face down and eyes closed, remaining motionless (because it is a very bad idea to move around with needles in your back), with soothing music playing in the background, and your thoughts run all over the place.
Why do I mention this? Because, yesterday, I was on that table and my thoughts turned to sports. More accurately, my thoughts turned to athletes actions outside the game. The talking heads like to rail about how the Pacman Joneses and Ron Artests and Tank Johnsons of the world are a sign of how rotten todays athlete is. The heads wax poetic about the greatness of yesteryear (even though some of them are my age and yesteryear is 1985) and opine that it is only a matter of time before the athletes completely destroy the legitimacy of their sports.
Unfortunately for the radio hosts, some of us have a memory that extends back before the advent of blogs and wikis and 24-7-365 coverage of every single controversy and confrontation. Some of us can recall the Wade Boggs sex scandal; the various incidents of New York Mets spraying waterguns full of bleach and throwing firecrackers at crowds; the blatant drug use of Steve Howe and Dwight Gooden (among others); Allen Iverson's multiple run-ins with the law; Bob Welch's alcoholism; O.J.'s domestic violence history that led up to the murder; the East German Olympic doping scandals; Ben Johnson; Len Bias; the Colorado University sex scandal; the trainwreck that was Lawrence Phillips; and myriad other incidents that would have been covered to death, dissected time and time again, and blogged to the point of nausea. Besides, if you want to go WAY back, just think of the coverage Ty Cobb's antics alone would have received in a scandal-hungry blogosphere. "The last thing baseball needs is a racist jerk like Cobb... Rumor has it that Cobb once killed a man... he will destroy this sport and bring everyone down with him." (As an aside, Cobb climbing into the stands to pummel a crippled man trumps anything Stephen Jackson and Ron Artest did in the Pistons-Pacers "fight.")
My point? It's not the athletes that have changed. I'm not sure that it's even our perceptions of the athletes and what they are allowed to do that has changed. What HAS changed is how the media (by which, I mean anyone following and writing about these things from the L.A. Times to Joe Blogger) follows, analyzes, dissects, and disseminates, the information. Nothing is happening today that hasn't happened time and time again through the American sports history, so, the next time you hear about Steve Athlete doing something--no matter how bad--just remind yourself that it's probably been done before. Twice.
