Sports stars, sex and stalkers

When Jennifer Briggs was the beat writer for the Texas Rangers, she said some players would go to clubs after the game, and just troll the parking lot for women, not unlike men driving through seedy neighborhoods looking for hookers. "My nephews came to a game with me one night, and they wanted to meet some ballplayers, but we couldn't get them into the locker room. So I took them to the parking lot of a club near the ballpark. Sure enough, there were players parked there, with women bent over, talking to them through their car windows. All you saw was miniskirts with their asses hanging out, long legs and high heels. At least my nephews got to see some ball players in their natural habitat."

And like Briggs' nephews, this is how many view the professional athlete. They make too much money, they are far removed from the norms of conventional society, they seem to live by their own rules. They treat women as disposable objects, and if they get caught breaking the law, they'll hire a high-priced lawyer to pay their way out of it.

But the life has its perils. Think of what it is like to be away from family for months at a time, to be besieged by autograph seekers every time you go out to eat, to be unable to go to a bar and just have a beer with friends, to be constantly under the media microscope. No pity is warranted -- the jocks sign on to this lifestyle as they cash their enormous checks. But the price of celebrity can no doubt wear on anyone, and maybe the consequence of such star power is how it gets played in the realm of sexual conquest.

Dawkins said nothing prepared him for the temptations he faced as a star athlete. Before he joined the NBA as an 18-year-old, fresh out of high school, he says his pastor and a few veteran players warned him of the perils of sleeping around. "You're a young kid, you're away from your family for the first time and you're lonely," Dawkins says. "You meet someone you think is pretty cool. Before you know it she's up in your room. Most men would be doing the same thing in that situation."

But most men will never face that situation. And one of the lessons of the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case is perhaps the extent to which the athletes in professional sports have been pushed so far outside the norms of society. They are held up as heroes, accorded status unrivaled in our society, and they pocket millions of dollars along the way. They are objects of desire and envy, love and hate. But at the end of the day, they are still just grown-up kids who can run faster and shoot a ball better than anyone else. To expect some higher moral code from guys who play ball for a living is probably unrealistic.

Not to excuse Kobe Bryant. He is a married man who cheated on his wife with a teenager. If convicted of sexual assault, he will be spending time in jail (conviction in Colorado carries a sentence of four years to life). But it shouldn't come as any shock to anyone that athletes misbehave. We have created this aberrant sexualized world in which they live. And in this strange world, it is not wishy-washy to see both sides of the case.

But regardless of which story the jury believes, the Kobe Bryant case is about the curious and grotesque world where sex and sports collide. It is about acting upon impulses without caution, about men and women using each other, of wary eyes being cast on every sexual advance, money and power overriding true love, decency and morality. And although many might fantasize about living in such a world, very few of us would find solace there.

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