Published: July 28, 2007 03:28 am      

Sports makes front page for wrong reason

“I always turn to the sports pages first,” Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren admitted to Sports Illustrated in 1968, because the sports pages record “people’s accomplishments; the front page nothing but man’s failures.”

Who would have thought we’d ever regard 1968 as the good old days? Yet here we are, in the midst of a confluence of front-page scandals enveloping professional basketball, baseball, football and cycling. So how did sports migrate from the back pages to the front?

The short answer is: money. The longer answer is: In this, as with so much else, the notion of there ever having been a “good old days” is primarily nostalgia for a past that we’ve idealized. But now that there's vastly more money in sports (as there is in just about anything else), we find ourselves in — forgive the poor grammar — badder new days.

It’s been almost a century since the granddaddy of all sports scandals, the 1919 “Black Sox” World Series. People wondered if baseball would ever recover — until the 1920s, when Babe Ruth (with a more lively ball) launched homer after homer into the bleachers.

Remember how Major League Baseball “recovered” from the 1994 strike season? Though you’d be hard-pressed to find a baseball executive who would crow about it now, Mark McGwire’s and Sammy Sosa’s home-run derby in the 1998 season was branded the savior of our national pastime.

The combined 136 home runs hit by Sports Illustrated's 1998 “Sportsmen of the Year” certainly resurrected baseball’s revenues, sending ticket and merchandise sales soaring in a way that benefited owners and the players' union alike.

When steroid accusations began to fly a few years later, you could find many of these same characters doing their best impersonations of “Casablanca’s” Captain Renault, so “shocked” were they to discover that anything might have been amiss in their clubhouses.

Perhaps they were too busy counting their money to notice.

Readers of a certain age may also remember the college basketball point-shaving scandals of the early 1950s, when a number of New York teams, beginning with the City College of New York, were revealed to have had shady dealings with bookmakers and convicted felons. Then — as now — the news was regarded as a wake-up call. With hindsight, though, it’s evident that we slept right through it.

Fast-forward to the present. NBA Commissioner David Stern has taken pains to depict referee Tim Donaghy’s alleged gambling issues as the isolated actions of one man. Perhaps they are. But let’s look at the larger sports picture: With all the money bet each year — in licensed casinos and with under-the-radar bookies — on the thousands of games played in team sports on the professional and collegiate levels, it's hard to ignore the potency of the market forces at work.

From the mind-boggling sums involved in professional players’ contracts, to the disconnect between college sports’ take (huge) and players’ earnings (by NCAA rules, nil), to the lucre generated by television and merchandise deals, the incentives to cheat in any number of ways are greater than ever before. The sports business is as big as any now, and it’s probably naive not to expect sports to have its own Enrons and WorldComs along the way.

There’s a level on which we all know and understand this, of course. So why, when doping and steroid and betting scandals emerge, does it so bother us?

Because, like Chief Justice Warren, we like to think we can turn to the sports pages for a break from the trials of “the real world.” When sports end up on the front pages for the wrong reasons, we feel, well, cheated.