[On September 28th,
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 21st 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?
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