I see this on television from time to time, and I think it’s a good idea. So here it is: Warning! Part of this column deals with adult subject matter — and that subject matter is sex.
|
When I was growing up, we didn’t have any professional sports teams in our neck of the woods, so we were free to pick our own. My team (this was before I became a Red Sox fan) was the New York Yankees and specifically the two players who were my personal heroes: Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.
Some of my fondest memories are of huddling under my covers on a warm summer night, listening to Yankees games on my crystal radio. And every week, I hotfooted it down to the cigar store where they sold magazines to see what had been printed about my guys. Maris seemed pretty sedate, but Mickey was usually photographed with an attractive woman on his arm.
My mom said he was a rounder and a rake, but she said the same thing about JFK, and she didn’t hold it against them.
Little did we know what nearly every sportswriter in America and most people in baseball took for granted: Mickey Mantle was a serial womanizer. His escapades went on for years and were so outrageous that books were eventually written about him and Billy Martin, his partner in crime.
But nobody suggested he leave baseball because of his indiscretions. He was an athlete and a role model to kids because of his ability on the field, but nobody expected him to be a saint in his personal life. We figured there was a different standard for athletes and entertainers than for politicians who were elected. We didn’t know at the time that the press was keeping it quiet about the politicians as well. Mickey wasn’t the only star athlete who cut a wide swath.
Babe Ruth was a noted womanizer who simply refused to stop. "I’ll promise to go easier on drinking and get to bed earlier," he once told a reporter, "but not for you, fifty thousand dollars or two hundred and fifty thousand dollars will I give up women. They’re too much fun."
Wilt Chamberlain, the great player with the 76ers and Lakers, once told a reporter that he had relations with 20,000 women. Someone with a calculator determined that meant he’d been with a new woman every day since he was 15, so his claims were taken with a grain of salt. But there was no question about his appetites.
And nobody said he ought to leave basketball because of them.
Darryl Strawberry, a star of the Mets’ 1976 World Series team, was known affectionately as the poor man’s Wilt Chamberlain after he told a reporter he’d been with more than 1,000 women, but not as many as 5,000. Strawberry had lots of problems that marred his career, but serial womanizing wasn’t one of them, and nobody suggested he leave baseball because of them.We could go on like this all day, but the fact is that until recently in our history, we took it for granted that celebrity athletes and entertainers had a different lifestyle than most of the rest of us.
And it’s all got me wondering about the apparent shift in our tolerance that has brought such national condemnation of Tiger Woods, and at this point looks like it will drive him from the game that he revitalized and keep his millions of fans from enjoying his virtuosity on the links.
I’m not apologizing or rationalizing his behavior. I would never apologize for a man, or woman, who breaks a solemn vow and harms his or her family. But I wonder what our new zero-tolerance morality will mean for the future of American sports.
Its history certainly would have been written differently had we applied it at any moment in the past.
• • •
You’ve got to be amazed at the greed and stupidity of some New Jersey politicians.
For the last few years, the U.S. Attorney’s Office has declared open season on corrupt politicians in this state, and the number of them who have been arrested and disgraced would fill a small soccer stadium. If you were a local politician with a corrupt bent, you might have figured out it was a good time to lay low.
But apparently, former Ocean County Democratic Party chief Alfonso L. Santoro didn’t get the message, or was just too dumb to figure out it might not be the best time to take a bribe.
I’ve been reading the saga in Greater Media’s publication the Brick Bulletin, where it was reported recently that Santoro admitted in U.S. District Court on Dec. 3 that in 2008 he took bribes totaling $6,500 from a witness who was cooperating with the FBI in return for his help getting a development approved.
Like many of the other numbskulls who were nabbed in various stings over the last few years — like Operation Bid Rig and the carnival of crime surrounding Solomon Dwek — he took his mordita at a public restaurant, and now faces a maximum sentence of five years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine.
The whole sordid mess has other Ocean County Democrats trying to figure out how to rebuild faith in their party. And what, you ask, is the name of the new party chairman who took over the county organization recently — the guy who’s promising to clean things up?
Wyatt Earp! You just can’t make this stuff up.
• • •
After my recent columns on Thanksgiving and cooking disasters, I heard from several people who had experienced similar fiascos. My favorite came from a friend who recounted a Christmas dinner at his wife’s family home, where he was initially asked to give the blessing before the big holiday meal. He declined but was then asked to dish up the clam chowder.
He had served about three bowls, he said, when he noticed something unusual in his ladle. Someone screamed. Someone else reacted more viscerally. And then, in horror, he realized what he was about to dish up: the lower half of his mother-in-law’s dentures! She said she must have lost them when she tasted the soup as it simmered. I don’t know about you, but after hearing that tale, I may never eat clam chowder again. Especially with those little crackers that resemble molars.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.