September 30, 2020: Sports Scandals: Lance Armstrong

[On September 28^th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]

On two broader implications of a scandal that’s easy to pin on an individual bad actor.

First things first: there’s no way to analyze the Lance Armstrong doping scandal without focusing on multiple layers to the acclaimed cyclist’s personal mistakes and failings. Not just his years of breaking the rules to enhance his performances with drugs, and not even just his years of lying about that and calling accurate accusations against him a “witch hunt” or worse, and not even just his making hundreds of millions of dollars in endorsements throughout that time (making him at his peak one of the world’s richest athletes, and a great deal of which he has kept to this day), but also and perhaps especially the fact that he still seems to think he did nothing wrong. At its heart, the Armstrong story is about a talented athlete who also seems to be a pretty lousy person, character flaws revealed not so much through his cheating but rather through all of his actions and statements and perspectives that were brought out and amplified by that scandal.

But I hope that one of the things this blog has most consistently modeled over the years is that it’s always worthwhile to examine multiple sides to and factors in any story and history, and in the case of Lance Armstrong I think the scandals helps us analyze a couple broader elements to 21^st century society and culture. One of them is our willingness to overlook system issues in sports in order to celebrate iconic athletes and athletic achievements. The blind eye that fans turned for years to the rampant presence of performance-enhancing drugs in the world of cycling feels quite similar to the willful ignorance with which baseball and its fans treated steroid use for the entirety of the 1990s, and for much the same reason—the home run feats of McGwire and Sosa and Bonds and company, like Armstrong’s multiple Tour de France triumphs (after beating cancer, on which more in a moment) offered sports thrills that we didn’t want to diminish by looking too closely at the men behind the curtain. To at least some degree, the same is true of our collective unwillingness to think for many years (even to this day) about head injuries and football—if sports provide escapist excitement, it becomes quite difficult to consider seriously the problems inherent in those worlds.

Sports often provide even more than escapism, though—they highlight figures who are seen as role models and treated as heroes. For many years Lance Armstrong, who returned from an extended bout with stage three testicular cancer to win all those Tour de Frances in a row and whose autobiography (published in the midst of that run of victories) was titled It’s Not about the Bike: My Journey Back to Life (2000), both presented himself and was portrayed by the media and world at large as a role model and a hero. I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with Charles Barkley that athletes should never be role models—we all (and especially our kids) can learn things from and be inspired by any number of figures, after all. And I’m not even saying that Armstrong doesn’t still offer such potential inspirations, especially to those dealing with a serious diagnosis; that part of his story and life remains present even with all the subsequent revelations and missteps. But as history reveals time and time again, if we simplistically idolize any figure, we are doing an injustice, both to the fraught complexities of human identity and to what we genuinely can learn and take away from those stories. Lance Armstrong is clearly not someone to idolize—but he is, at his worst as well as at his best, someone whose story we can all learn from.

Next ScandalStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

September 29, 2020: Sports Scandals: Rosie Ruiz

[On September 28^th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]

On three layers to the infamous Boston Marathon scandal beyond the headlines.

1)      New York and Boston: I’ve been reading recently about the Mandela Effect, the way in which large groups of people can remember something differently than how it actually took place. I don’t know if this quite qualifies, but it seems to me that Rosie Ruiz is consistently remembered for having cheated her way to the 1980 Boston Marathon women’s title by taking the subway instead of running the full course. Yet that’s in fact a combination of two different sides to Ruiz’s story: she was discovered to have cheated to the Boston title (by jumping out of the crowd on Commonwealth Avenue near the finish line) and stripped of that crown; and subsequently, stories came out about her being spotted on the subway during the 1979 New York City marathon, which had provided her qualifying time for Boston and which was then also stripped from her record. Obviously these are parallel and interconnected stories, but the combination of them into one event reveals at the very least the need to reexamine our collective memories of any figure and history.

2)      Subsequent crimes: As far as I can tell, Ruiz largely disappeared from the public record after those 1980 revelations, with two specific, also parallel exceptions: her April 1982 arrest in New York (on the same day as the Boston Marathon) for embezzling from a real estate company; and her November 1983 arrest as part of a South Florida drug bust. These arrests would seem to indicate that both Ruiz’s propensity for cheating and her troubled life went far beyond the 1979 and 1980 sports scandals, but it’s also possible to see them another way: that after those scandals (before which the 26-year-old Ruiz had never been arrested) her life went off the rails, spiraling into additional criminal behavior. Obviously that’s a chicken-and-egg type question, and the answer wouldn’t change the facts of these different unethical and illegal actions in any case. But it’s always worth thinking about narratives of contingency and inevitability when it comes to the arc of any individual life, just as with all of history.

3)      A Cuban American childhood: Ruiz was born in Havana, and immigrated to (or rather fled to, given the realities of movement under Castro’s regime) the United States with her family in 1962, when she was 8. She was apparently then separated from her mother and lived with extended family in South Florida. I don’t want to overstate the relevance of these complex childhood details, as of course the vast majority of either Cuban Americans or immigrant children separated from their parents do not go on to a life of cheating and criminality. Yet if we simply examine Ruiz’s own life, it’s fair to say that these early experiences would have been influential, and perhaps more specifically that they left her with feelings of instability or uncertainty about such foundational elements as home and family. All part of understanding the story of Rosie Ruiz beyond the headlines, anyway.

Next ScandalStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?

September 28, 2020: Sports Scandals: The Black Sox

[On September 28^th, 1920, four key members of the Chicago White Sox admitted to throwing the 1919 World Series, a pivotal turning point in the unfolding Black Sox scandal. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy the Black Sox and four other sports scandals, past and present!]

On three different ways to interpret what remains one of sport’s most stunning scandals.

When a group of players on the Chicago White Sox conspired with gamblers to “fix” (or rather, from the players’ perspective, throw) the 1919 World Series, a story that unfolded over the following two years and culminated in the 1921 “Black Sox trial,” the scandal seemed to exemplify ideas of lost innocence and purity (which were already in the air in that post-World War I, “lost generation” moment). Nothing summed up those ideas better than the mythic but enduring image of a young boy confronting “Shoeless” Joe Jackson outside the courthouse with the words, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” And in Eight Men Out (1963), his seminal book on the scandal, Eliot Asinof helped reiterate and enshrine those images of the scandal’s corrupting effects and meanings on America’s national pastime and perspective.

There was another side to Asinof’s portrayal of the scandal, however—one that didn’t necessarily take hold of the popular consciousness in his era, but on which John Sayles’ 1988 film adaptation of the book focuses at length. This interpretation focuses less on the effects of the scandal and more on one of its key causes: the striking yet representative greed and selfishness of Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, in an era when professional athletes had (compared to their employers, at least) no power or say in their careers and fates. Sayles, for whom labor history is one of the defining American issues and stories, pulls no punches in his portrayal of Comiskey specifically and the era’s labor dynamics more broadly—he likes to say that he tries to push beyond black and white in his films and engage with the grey areas in between, and I believe he has done so to great success on many occasions, but to my mind his Eight Men Out is at its heart a clear and ringing indictment not of corrupt baseball players, but of a corrupt capitalist system that uses and then scapegoats them.

There’s another way to characterize that system, though: to focus on how much, to quote Denzel Washington’s character in Glory, “We all covered up in it, too. Ain’t nobody clean.” To see, that is, the Black Sox as emblematic of unifying American goals and desires, however much we might like to locate them outside of us instead. It’s to that end, I would argue, that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes Jay Gatsby’s closest New York associate the mysterious Meyer Wolfshiem, a fictional version of Arnold Rothstein, “the man who fixed the World’s Series” (as Gatsby puts it). One could of course argue that Gatsby’s association with Wolfshiem reveals his shadier and more shameful side, the kinds of gangster connections that Tom Buchanan scornfully critiques. But to my mind, Gatsby ultimately embodies nothing less than the American Dream—there’s a reason Fitzgerald nearly changed his title to Under the Red, White, and Blue—and so too, in its own dark and twisted way, does making a fortune by fixing the nation’s most significant sporting event and spectacle.

Next ScandalStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other sports scandals you’d highlight?