Restoring the Faith After Hitting the Bottom
By SELENA ROBERTS
Sports of The Times
August 1, 2007
What good is a nadir if it’s denied or ignored? What’s the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can’t buy a cheap epiphany?
Amid the current death spiral/global warming/Harry Potter end of sports leagues, it would be useful for professional custodians to refrain from their reflexive acts of rebuttal and embrace their bottoms, so to speak.
Doom is simply a chance to reboot. Look at the Celtics.
The smoke circles around Red Auerbach in Boston should never be confused with halos — the championship architect is to be revered, not deified — but there was a cloak of N.B.A. royalty linked with the Celtics of old that had been shredded to dust rags of late.
Boston’s odd signings and poor trades and spare victories had turned the team into a late-show punch line of the N.B.A. Even this year’s lottery left the biggest chapter of Leprechauns this side of Notre Dame holding three-leaf clovers when Boston, the second-worst team in the league, couldn’t parlay its Ping-Pong balls into either Greg Oden or Kevin Durant.
They could have crawled into a lobster pot, but the Celtics’ hierarchy came up with a draft-night plan to snare Ray Allen. The move proved to be a lure. Suddenly, Minnesota’s loyal Kevin Garnett wasn’t so averse to Boston when he allowed an angel of mercy in the form of Kevin McHale to complete a deal with Danny Ainge in an act of Celtic nepotism.
Now Boston possesses the erudite Allen: art collector, philanthropist and a veteran straight-shooter with the quick release of a clay pigeon trap. And they employ the selfless Garnett: eager to please, a defensive devotee and a multitasker in the lane capable of 20 points and 12 rebounds every night.
The clam chowder is on the house. Faith has been restored in Boston by a team belly-up in image not two months ago.
The reclamation of trust between fans and leagues has been dissected a lot over the past week after Michael Vick’s indictment on dog-fighting charges, a point-fixing investigation into the referee Tim Donaghy, more doping revelations in cycling, and the inorganic chase of Hank Aaron’s record by Barry Bonds.
•
But resurrection is up to self-awareness on the part of athletes, commissioners and owners. Each has to ask themselves, “How low can we go?”
“Part of it is, what criteria do you rely on that suggests you’re at the bottom?” said Peter Roby, director at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston. “How do you measure success? How do you measure failure?”
When sponsors pull out? When ratings plunge? When player salaries retreat?
Some commissioners understand the stakes. The N.F.L.’s Roger Goodell has played a determined Judge Judy in punishing recalcitrant players. N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern will no doubt turn his security department upside down to find the hole that allowed Donaghy to go undetected.
Some athletes realize the consequences. A group of young riders in the Tour de France, fed up with yet more doping scandals, organized a protest before Stage 16. Older riders pulled away from the youth movement, including Michael Rasmussen, who wore the yellow jersey at the time, but was later fired by his team for lying to antidoping officials about his whereabouts.
Sometimes it takes an apocalypse to launch a rebirth. The new generation of riders realizes their sport has pedaled into the gutter. And that’s a start.
“It’s fundamental to change that those who have as much to do with shaping the culture are involved in holding each other accountable,” Roby said.
Baseball isn’t there, yet. With its World Series audiences disappearing, with corporate big hitters treating Barry Bonds’s journey as radioactive, with its doping policy privately mocked by its own players, baseball plods along, blind to its predicament.
The thin blue line in the clubhouse — where everyone sees, but no one says — means that a dime-store novelist like Jose Canseco is left to cash in on baseball’s dark interior by penning himself as the credible insider.
“We’ve got to give young athletes — teammates and others — the social permission to say, ‘You know what, as much as I love you as a teammate, I don’t agree with that behavior or it’s not in our best interest as a team to be doing what you’re doing or it’s not in your best interest,’ ” Roby said.
•
“I think the key to any culture or any society is when those involved in the day to day take responsibility for how others are going to act and how it impacts the rest of the culture,” he added. “I think that’s kind of the tipping point.”
A reversal isn’t impossible. Anything can happen when responsibility kicks in. Revivals can happen (see the Celtics). Epiphanies can occur (see cycling). Accountability can begin (see Goodell). The key is to be aware of your own bottom, so to speak.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
Sports of The Times
August 1, 2007
What good is a nadir if it’s denied or ignored? What’s the value of reaching the lowest of the low if it can’t buy a cheap epiphany?
Amid the current death spiral/global warming/Harry Potter end of sports leagues, it would be useful for professional custodians to refrain from their reflexive acts of rebuttal and embrace their bottoms, so to speak.
Doom is simply a chance to reboot. Look at the Celtics.
The smoke circles around Red Auerbach in Boston should never be confused with halos — the championship architect is to be revered, not deified — but there was a cloak of N.B.A. royalty linked with the Celtics of old that had been shredded to dust rags of late.
Boston’s odd signings and poor trades and spare victories had turned the team into a late-show punch line of the N.B.A. Even this year’s lottery left the biggest chapter of Leprechauns this side of Notre Dame holding three-leaf clovers when Boston, the second-worst team in the league, couldn’t parlay its Ping-Pong balls into either Greg Oden or Kevin Durant.
They could have crawled into a lobster pot, but the Celtics’ hierarchy came up with a draft-night plan to snare Ray Allen. The move proved to be a lure. Suddenly, Minnesota’s loyal Kevin Garnett wasn’t so averse to Boston when he allowed an angel of mercy in the form of Kevin McHale to complete a deal with Danny Ainge in an act of Celtic nepotism.
Now Boston possesses the erudite Allen: art collector, philanthropist and a veteran straight-shooter with the quick release of a clay pigeon trap. And they employ the selfless Garnett: eager to please, a defensive devotee and a multitasker in the lane capable of 20 points and 12 rebounds every night.
The clam chowder is on the house. Faith has been restored in Boston by a team belly-up in image not two months ago.
The reclamation of trust between fans and leagues has been dissected a lot over the past week after Michael Vick’s indictment on dog-fighting charges, a point-fixing investigation into the referee Tim Donaghy, more doping revelations in cycling, and the inorganic chase of Hank Aaron’s record by Barry Bonds.
•
But resurrection is up to self-awareness on the part of athletes, commissioners and owners. Each has to ask themselves, “How low can we go?”
“Part of it is, what criteria do you rely on that suggests you’re at the bottom?” said Peter Roby, director at the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University in Boston. “How do you measure success? How do you measure failure?”
When sponsors pull out? When ratings plunge? When player salaries retreat?
Some commissioners understand the stakes. The N.F.L.’s Roger Goodell has played a determined Judge Judy in punishing recalcitrant players. N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern will no doubt turn his security department upside down to find the hole that allowed Donaghy to go undetected.
Some athletes realize the consequences. A group of young riders in the Tour de France, fed up with yet more doping scandals, organized a protest before Stage 16. Older riders pulled away from the youth movement, including Michael Rasmussen, who wore the yellow jersey at the time, but was later fired by his team for lying to antidoping officials about his whereabouts.
Sometimes it takes an apocalypse to launch a rebirth. The new generation of riders realizes their sport has pedaled into the gutter. And that’s a start.
“It’s fundamental to change that those who have as much to do with shaping the culture are involved in holding each other accountable,” Roby said.
Baseball isn’t there, yet. With its World Series audiences disappearing, with corporate big hitters treating Barry Bonds’s journey as radioactive, with its doping policy privately mocked by its own players, baseball plods along, blind to its predicament.
The thin blue line in the clubhouse — where everyone sees, but no one says — means that a dime-store novelist like Jose Canseco is left to cash in on baseball’s dark interior by penning himself as the credible insider.
“We’ve got to give young athletes — teammates and others — the social permission to say, ‘You know what, as much as I love you as a teammate, I don’t agree with that behavior or it’s not in our best interest as a team to be doing what you’re doing or it’s not in your best interest,’ ” Roby said.
•
“I think the key to any culture or any society is when those involved in the day to day take responsibility for how others are going to act and how it impacts the rest of the culture,” he added. “I think that’s kind of the tipping point.”
A reversal isn’t impossible. Anything can happen when responsibility kicks in. Revivals can happen (see the Celtics). Epiphanies can occur (see cycling). Accountability can begin (see Goodell). The key is to be aware of your own bottom, so to speak.
E-mail: selenasports@nytimes.com
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