A Sacrificial Rite of Spring

By Pico Iyer

We have grown accustomed in recent years to seeing our leaders, our preachers, our financiers, all implicated in dirty and immoral acts. Yet now the shadows seem more and more to be clouding even the green fields of sport. Is nothing sacred? Sport, after all, was supposed to be the arena we could visit to get away from ugly realities, refresh our sense of grace and possibility, and enjoy the catharsis of a well-defined universe, presided over by umpires who distinguish fair from foul. This year, however, as the regenerative cycle of baseball's spring comes round again, there is less of a sense of a new beginning: not only has one of the game's most upstanding onetime icons, Steve Garvey, been revealed as a three-timing playboy, but its finest hitter, Wade Boggs, has been hung with the "A" of adultery.

Nobody ever said that sports should be above the law; cheating, in fact, has become so rampant that innocence itself would be a crime. When he drugged his way to a gold at the Olympics, Ben Johnson made a mockery not only of the Games' utopian ideals, and of the nation he was representing, but also of all the competitors who were relying only on their natural talents. Yet all of Boggs' cheating, by comparison, was off the field. No one ever accused him of being a dirty player. Nor has anyone shown that his indiscretions affected his performance as an All-Star: in reality, after his affair was brought to light last year, Boggs hit a remarkable .380 (as opposed to .310 before). Even the trespasses that Boggs did commit seem almost trifling at a time when five football players at the University of Oklahoma alone are variously charged with gang rape, dealing in cocaine and assault with a deadly weapon.

John Tower too went through, not long ago, the humiliation of having his private life made public. Yet that was because Tower, like Gary Hart and Dan Quayle before him, was in line for a position in which discretion is imperative; the Secretary of Defense's self-control is a matter of national welfare. All that is at stake in the Boggs case is dreams. We do not care whether our car mechanic, say, is a philanderer, so long as he does the job that he is paid to do; so too with our athletes. We pay our baseball players to entertain us, to inspire us with feats of self-transcendence, to do the things that we can only dream of doing -- like hitting a 100-m.p.h. fast ball or leaping over fences to make the catch that saves the day. By those standards Boggs is one of the greatest wonders in the game today, whose level of consistent excellence would be the envy of anyone in any job. The vicissitudes of his private life are as irrelevant as his habit of eating chicken before every game.

Why, then, does the exposure of Boggs, though so much less important, feel so much more plangent than the rejection of Tower? Perhaps because we place more faith in our athletic superstars, and expect more faithfulness in return. Heroism is famously a game of inches: get a little too close to a role model, catch him at the backstage entrance, and the loss can be desolating. Admiration is itself a form of suspended disbelief; turning a blind eye can be as much an act of forgiveness as turning the other cheek. We cannot afford to see our heroes at too close a distance -- not least because we have so few heroes to spare.

Athletes, of course, are hardly the only victims of a rapid and rapacious desire to bring icons down to size. Mike Tyson is merely learning lessons about the price of celebrity that Liz Taylor and Mick Jagger were forced to learn many years ago. Yet sportsmen belong to more innocent kids than do movie stars or musicians, and to adults who wish to be more innocent kids again. Tyson, moreover, appears in the ring for only a few minutes every few months, and Cabinet members work mostly behind closed doors; both are ultimately judged by professionals and peers. Boggs' skills, by contrast, are on public display up to 200 days a year, reviewed by millions of strongly partisan fans who are convinced of their own authority. In a curious way, then, Boggs is an even more public figure than the Secretary of Defense, and to that extent more vulnerable.

Besides, we tend in our moralism to forget how treacherous morality can be. Last year the Hanshin Tigers, a professional baseball team in Osaka, got rid of their longtime star, the American Randy Bass, because he stayed at his ailing son's bedside instead of returning to the team. For the Japanese, putting family before company was the ultimate sin; to Bass, no doubt, abandoning his son for a game would have seemed the greater treachery. Many fans these days believe that baseball players who turn their heroism to capital, selling autographs to kids (Mickey Mantle earns more from signing his , name than he ever did from playing ball), are committing far sadder infidelities than Boggs.

None of this is to excuse Wade Boggs: it is only to say that this affair is a private affair, whose sorry consequences need have reached only the parties involved. Those who challenged his mistress's honor were not necessarily claiming that she was selling herself, only that she was selling her story. Yet we, in buying it, are surely accessories to the crime. For we are not, after all, accusing Boggs of anything extraordinary (every office has its adulterers); rather, we are crushed to find him ordinary. And it is not so much that the national pastime has been scarred by scandal as that scandal sometimes seems to be the national pastime. In our appetite for gossip, we tend at times to gobble down everything before us, only to find, too late, that it is our ideals we have consumed, and we have not been enlarged by the feasts, but only diminished. Let the harassment fit the crime, one is tempted to conclude. And let him who is without sin throw out the first ball.