We have a problem with sports in America – and it's not what you think

It was another week of athletes behaving badly in public, and another week of moralizing about the place of sports associations in making a proper example of our personal heroes.

The word came down this week that Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, would receive a six-month suspension from USA Swimming and will not compete in the world championships next summer – a significant penalty, considering that he’ll miss the biggest competition before the 2016 Olympic trials.

Greg Doyel of CBSsports.com took to his pulpit to say that he wished his own employer would follow that lead and mete out the severest of penalties should he be caught drunk driving: “Some judge somewhere should throw the book at me and then when the book settles to the floor my bosses here at CBSSports.com should pick it up and wallop me over the head with it. Suspension, at the least. Because CBSSports.com should stand for something more noble than a vehicular game of Russian Roulette.”

The OJ Simpson trial was huge. Not only did we hear about him allegedly murdering people, we lived it for two years
He went on to suggest – with relish – that USA Swimming’s judgment might just have ended Phelps’s career.

It seems these days that every time an athlete screws up off the field, the commentati are sitting in wait to hurl insults and exclamation points at our privileged punching bags, along with the leagues, who could always be doing more.

But it wasn’t always this way. Sports sociologist and author David Ripath of Ohio University remembers a time when there was a certain dubious omertà between sports writers and the teams they covered. “You had sports writers who knew that athletes were taking drugs and cheating on their wives. Mickey Mantle was a hard drinker and got behind the wheel and none of those things were found out.”

Mickey Mantle watches as youngsters carry signs in his honor at Yankee Stadium – nobody was interested in his drinking habits. Photograph: New York Daily News Archive/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Something changed when we started to talk about athletes as role models. Ripath marks a transition in the 90s, when media became more competitive, desperate to drum up stories for the 24-hour news cycle. “There were other factors, but the OJ Simpson trial - that was huge. Not only did we hear about OJ Simpson allegedly murdering people, but we lived it for two years.”

But as opposed to moderating American faith in the moral superiority of the professional athlete, it whet our collective appetite for the sports scandal, for the glorious spectacle of watching an athlete fall from a great height. Our increasing intrusion into players’ lives off the field of play is matched only by our prudishness and outrage when we find those lives as grubby, accident-prone, and imperfect as our own.

This is an attitude that seems uniquely American to Simon Licen, a professor of sports studies and media at Washington State University. He says that Americans are much more demanding of their athletes than they are in other countries. “This has a lot to do with the American promotion of individualism and meritocracy. You need to be a self-made person, and you, specifically, need to succeed. You have to be infallible.” He contrasts this with the UK, “where athletes – even football players – are first and foremost players”.

When did we start to require that sports associations offer a more perfect justice than can be had from the courts?
It’s hard to make the argument that cleaning up sports – particularly in terms of addressing rampant cheating that might compromise the integrity of the competition – could be a bad thing.

But what about off the field? When was it that we started to require that sports associations offer a more perfect justice than can be had from the court system?

Licen sees the American sports brand built on a kind of incomparable integration into society. Professional sports leagues are granted antitrust protection. We also subsidize sports arenas disproportionately, furthering the idea that sports are something that are a general good to our society. To a certain extent, he says, we are allowing these leagues to regulate themselves, putting them above the law.

He argues that US sports leagues have fought for that lofty position: “They sell themselves as being good social institutions. Pillars of the community. As opposed to in the UK, where sports leagues are first and foremost sports institutions.”

US presidents throw out the ceremonial first pitch to begin a MLB season. George W. Bush used to own the Texas Rangers.

President George W Bush at a Texas Rangers game. Photograph: ERIC GAY/AP

When the reality of that carefully cultivated image falls down, people feel duped. “The public start expecting leagues to model moral standards. When these organizations fail to enforce these moral standards, this outcry appears,” says Simon.

He describes any sort of punishment meted out as “opportunistic” and financially motivated to protect a brand. As a result, the penalty to athletes is unevenly distributed in an attempt to anticipate and match public outrage.

Suzy Favor Hamilton hadn’t run in the Olympics since 2000, but when she was outed by the Smoking Gun for prostitution in 2012, she lost everything. She was never charged with a crime, but all her sponsors dropped her, her motivational-speaker work evaporated and the Big Ten Female Athlete of the Year award dropped her name from its title.

The Daily News front page headline when Suzy Favor Hamilton was outed. Photograph: New York Daily News/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Perhaps she’s doing better now – reached for comment, she said she won’t be granting interviews for another year.

The advent of social media has had the effect of opening everyone’s life to greater scrutiny. But athletes seem to have borne the brunt due to our high – if non-specific – standards of behavior for professional athletes.

For instance, on Wednesday, when the Guardian published Danny Green’s admittedly inappropriate selfie in front of a Holocaust museum, traffic to the site went nuts.

“There’s a thirst out there for knowledge, and we hold on to every little tidbit,” says Ripath.

He argues that we compensate professional athletes well enough that they should be reasonably expected to meet a higher standard: “With great blessings come great responsibilities. You’re representing more than yourself.”

And what about Olympic athletes, who aren’t particularly well paid and have to shill for sponsorship, carefully tending that Bob Costas-narrated, soft-focus image? “When you’re an Olympic athlete, you’re representing the flag,” says Ripath. “Is it fair? Well, life’s not fair. Don’t be an Olympic athlete if you can’t step up to it.“

When you’re an Olympic athlete, you’re representing the flag. Is it fair? Well, life’s not fair.
And by and large, they seem to meet that higher standard. It’s hard to calculate athletes’ offender rates, but by various estimates they seem to be comparable to that of the rest of affluent society. With one important exception: the NFL players’ standout criminal activity, according to Fivethirtyeight, is for domestic violence, which they categorize as “downright extraordinary”.

The shocking details of spousal and child abuse have created a groundswell of commentary demanding that the NFL “get tough” on players. This, despite the fact that the NFL has done a pretty cockeyed job of judging the relative seriousness of domestic violence versus weed use versus HGH.

We demand this of sports leagues because they’ve maintained that they can self-regulate and offer us a more perfect justice than we will find in the US legal system. Christian Dennie, an attorney and sports arbiter with Barlow Garsek & Simon, explains that closed-door arbitration provides a speedier judgment than a trial. It’s also, advocates say, a way to prevent the rich and famous from finding themselves above the law. In effect, sports arbitration is a way to restore legal balance, which is a sad acknowledgment of the state of our court system.

Ray Rice is the latest NFL player involved in domestic abuse allegations. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

And there’s the rub. It seems that all of this increasingly cinematic handwringing over the state of our athletes’ moral fiber might be no more than an exercise in frustration over bigger problems in our society.

John H. Richardson said it best over at Esquire, in an excellent feature on Lance Armstrong’s banishment (which you really must read if you haven’t). He makes the case that disgraced athletes at this moment in time are our whipping boys for more significant violations of social code – violations that have gone unheeded by a broken justice system. Disgraced athletes are “the essence of this whole mean-spirited era when so many real villains have gone unpunished”.

Will athletes be scared straight by our collective gall? Will they live up to our great American mythos that the good guy always wins?

Clear standards are important, says Ripath, to ensure that athletes aren’t punished solely on the basis of the public’s desire for blood - and to make it clear what exactly they’re working towards. But he admits that it will be a challenge for leagues to determine where to place the high water mark. “Heck, if I was held to the standard of an athlete, and I certainly had a checkered sports career - I mean, it’s almost impossible for Jesus Christ to meet that standard.”