Sports stars, sex and stalkers

"Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player," baseball titan Casey Stengel once said. "It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in." The issue of sex and the pro athlete has for the most part always been viewed with a certain whimsy, a wink-wink to the fact that boys will be boys and women will chase them around. The notion of the heroic male includes sexual conquests, and male fans at least have tended to give the jocks a pass on sexual exploits. The news media never reported the indiscretions of the players, and a hooking up on the road was just a part of being a male sports hero.

In the movie "Bull Durham," the relationship between Annie Savoy and the minor league baseball players is played out in a positive way: The older woman beds a young stud pitcher and enhances his career. The other groupie in the movie, Millie, sleeps with multiple players, but ultimately marries one of the more upstanding among them. The relationships in the movie are as wholesome as one can get, and the hint of nastiness and coercion is harmless literary fun.

And for many years, the relationships between athletes and their women has been treated as a running locker-room joke. In Jim Bouton's 1970 book "Ball Four," infidelity among baseball players was treated almost cavalierly, with the author and fellow players embarking on "beaver shooting" missions and hiding tape recorders under their beds so teammates could enjoy the sexual soundtrack on the bus the next day. Arizona Diamondbacks first baseman Mark Grace commented a few years ago on Jim Rome's sports radio show about the concept of the "slump buster." When a batter is going through a hitting slump, Grace said the player must find an ugly (and preferably fat) woman. Sleep with her, toss her aside and -- voilà -- the slump is over. It's called "diving on a live grenade," Grace joked, or "taking one for the team."

But in recent years, such apparently innocent sex has turned dangerous.

It started with Magic Johnson announcing he was HIV-positive in 1991, a result, he says, of heterosexual sex with endless partners over a decade. Throughout the 1990s, there has been a parade of court cases based upon athletes' infidelity. Michael Jordan paid a mistress $250,000 to keep quiet about their affair, but the woman then sued the basketball player for $5 million (the case was eventually thrown out). The New York Mets' Daryl Boston paid a woman $600,000 to avoid having her charge him with rape. Boston Red Sox third baseman Wade Boggs was sued by his mistress for failure to pay her "salary and expenses." Boxer Mike Tyson served a prison term for raping a beauty queen. Atlanta Falcons defensive back Eugene Robinson was arrested for trolling for prostitutes the night before the Super Bowl. Irvin, the Cowboys receiver, was caught in a hotel room with "self-employed models," cocaine and sex toys.

With players fathering "fun babies" at an almost Malthusian rate, the law of mathematical odds made certain that the sexual exploits of star athletes would end up in court. The rising salaries had much to do with it; players found that paying off their mistresses and mothers of their illegitimate children was easier than fighting. The expenses have almost become another line item on their business managers' ledger.

Boston Celtics great Bill Russell once joked that athletes "are on scholarship from the time they are in the third grade." Great athletes are doted upon from the time they are kids; they are given special treatment by their families and schools, and then later by fans and the media. They learn to expect special treatment and most of the time they get it.

"I call it 'spoiled athlete syndrome,'" says Steve Ortiz, a sociologist at Oregon State University. "When a cop stops them for speeding, they get out of a ticket. When a restaurant is crowded, they get the best table. Agents clean up their financial messes. Eventually, some athletes don't think the rules apply to them. And those rules include sexual behavior and marital fidelity."

Ortiz studied the marriages of pro athletes by interviewing 47 wives of players in the mid-1990s. He said there were few admitted extramarital affairs in his study group, but he said that most of the players' wives were dissatisfied with their husbands' contributions to the marriage. "Most of these men were doted upon by their mothers, and they basically traded in Mom for a younger, new and improved model," Ortiz says. "They tended to de-sexualize their marriage. Their wife would keep the home base running smoothly, and the player thought as long as he was giving his wife the check, everything was fine. Many of these men feel that because of their careers, because they are gone from home so much, they are off the hook from parenting and other kinds of accountability in their marriage."

Ortiz acknowledges that many marriages outside of sports have the same dynamic. But he says two problems are different by degrees in the athlete's marriage. First, the "hyper-masculinized" world of sports encourages and provides opportunity for infidelity much more so than in an average married man's life. The second point is the financial leverage an athlete has over his wife or partner; make a scene, it is implied, and you get tossed off of the gravy train.

"Most of the wives would get upset with how blatant the groupies were, and how indiscreet the players would be," says Ortiz. "But most of the wives coped by telling themselves that all of this is temporary. That's why they stay with their husbands when they cheat. It's all about survival. They think it will all be over when he retires. But it doesn't work that way, either."

This may explain why Kobe Bryant's 21-year-old wife, with a 6-month-old baby at home, appeared at the press conference last month with her philandering husband, holding his hand and staring deeply into his eyes. When the average guy gets in trouble with his wife, something small like staying out with the boys drinking or not helping with the housework, he might face a punishing weekend of picking out wallpaper at Home Depot or choosing throw pillows at Bed, Bath & Beyond. Kobe gets charged with sexual assault and he fixes things by buying his wife a $4 million ring.

But when the average guy cheats on his wife, he can't get off the hook by writing a check for $4 million. Athletes are different that way.

"A lifetime of developing one skill doesn't allow much time to develop others," Bouton wrote in his 20th anniversary edition of "Ball Four." "Lots of athletes can't function in the real world. That's why they only feel comfortable in each other's company. They sense that something is missing from their lives, but they're not sure what. At the same time they feel invincible because of their success on the field."

"This combination of emotional immaturity and physical ability makes athletes uniquely vulnerable to temptation," Bouton continues. "They can't 'just say no.' They're too busy trying to fit in and show how great they are at the same time."

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