Over at Women's eNews, Sandra Kobrin asks one of those questions that's so obvious that it's infuriating nobody asked it long, long ago. Why does torturing dogs to death get Michael Vick banned from the NFL for life (and rightly so) -- while beating up women (which pro athletes do with sickening regularity) has never resulted in so much as a single suspension?
I have, so to speak, a dog in this fight. I spent my undergraduate years at two of America's biggest collegiate football factories. I shared dorms and classes with very young men who were recruited out of high school with great pomp and fanfare, plied by the alumni with sports cars and designer clothes (illegal, but any coach worth his salt knows his way around this), feted at dinners and parties (and orgies) at the finest homes in town, and pulled through to their gentleman's Cs only by the Herculean efforts of advisors and tutors paid by the athletic department. They even had people coming in to clean their rooms and do their laundry, so they wouldn't have to be distracted from practice. They may have lived in the same dorm (at least, until the alumni could arrange a nice condo for them in the best part of town); but their college experience was more akin to living at the Biltmore than living in any reality the rest of us poor scholarship schlubs knew.
Some of these guys got reputations. One year, I lived on the dorm's top floor, just a few doors down from one of the country's top football recruits. By November of his freshman year, the word had gone out among the dorm's 2000 female residents: do not allow yourself to be alone in an elevator with this guy, unless you wanted to be forcibly mauled, grabbed, and fondled. He regarded a closed door -- even one that was only going to stay closed for 30 seconds -- as blanket permission to do what he chose with whatever woman was unfortunate enough to find herself behind it with him. If you didn't want to be shoved and pinned up against the wall, one huge hand groping your breast while the other fumbled for your panties, you were better off waiting for the next car.
This young man put in his four years, left (without a degree, as almost all of them do), and went on to a long career with the New York Jets. Though I personally knew three women he'd mauled in the elevator and one that had been dragged, caveman style, into his room, I don't know that anybody ever reported him. I do know that nothing would have happened if they had. It was still the 1970s, and one 19-year-old woman standing up against the alumni -- rich and powerful men for whom these players were treasured, adored housepets -- didn't stand a chance in hell.
After college, I went on to spend a few years as a sportswriter. I can't say that I ever got inured to the grossly inflated sense of entitlement to everything -- including women's bodies -- that these men had; but I can say that it's so universal in pro sports that acting defensively to avoid it became almost reflexive after a while. The width of the line I had to walk could be measured in Angstrom units: in order to do my work, I had to be fetching enough to get their attention (plain women are literally invisible to men in the sports world; so being blonde, busty, and leggy -- which I was -- was a minimum career requirement); but not so much so that I appeared to invite harassment. I'd already learned the lesson about scanning who I got on elevators with; but I also figured out -- sometimes through a close call or two -- not to drink with them, get in cars alone with them, or (as too many women have famously found out) ever ever ever go to their hotel rooms. Come downstairs, and I'll talk to you in the lobby.
And as for dating: not in a million years. At least, not if your agenda for a spouse includes things like commitment, fidelity, emotional maturity, and not getting slapped around.
It's not an exaggeration to say that, if you're an American woman under 35 wearing attractive business attire, you're probably safer being alone with a radical Muslim terrorist than you are with a pro sports player. These guys regarded instant access to any pretty girl of their choice as a perk of the job. And once they'd made their bid, saying "no" was, in effect, denying them something they honestly, deeply believed was guaranteed in their almighty contract. Even the most gentle "no" (and I cultivated the gentlest, most ego-salving "no" you've ever heard) humiliated and infuriated them. They were entitled, dammit. You were in breach of contract -- and they would find ways to make you pay up, with interest and penalties.
Given this level of casual entitlement toward a mere female acquaintance, I've never been surprised by the stories of far worse abuse toward the women they actually live with. (OJ and I are alumni of the same university. I've never doubted his guilt for a moment -- not because of anything I saw in the trial, but because I've been inside the ego-inflating hothouse he came of age in, and know how his teammates were allowed -- or actively taught -- to treat women from their high school glory days forward. Contempt for women flows out of this culture like rivers from the Rockies; and violence toward them is as inevitable as the Mississippi.) Kobrin lays out the larger picture of this in her story:
Scores of NFL players as well as players from the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball have been convicted of domestic abuse, yet they play on with no fear of losing their careers. Most pay small fines, if that, and are back on the field immediately.Kobrin is saying, out loud and at long last, that Michael Vick's sentence and ban give us an unprecedented opening to call the professional sports leagues on their "boys-will-be-boys" attitude. As ticket prices soar and women make a larger and larger fraction of sports fandom, we need to be demanding that the teams we support take a long, hard look at the character and behavior of the men they're holding up as heroes and role models to our husbands, sons, and co-workers.
The message is clear. Beat a woman? Play on. Beat a dog? You're gone....
Might it be that domestic violence and spousal abuse is so pervasive in sports that it's simply too costly for leagues to suspend so many men? What would happen after all if those poor dear teams couldn't fill their rosters?
The number of athletes arrested for domestic violence or spousal abuse is astounding.
A three-year study published in 1995 by researchers at Northwestern University found that while male student-athletes are 3 percent of the population, they represent 19 percent of sexual assault perpetrators and 35 percent of domestic violence perpetrators.
There are even Web site chronicles that treat the steady stream of offenders as if it were a joke. Check out badjocks.com or playersbehavingbadly.com. Maybe then again, don't. It's enough to make you sick.
Roger Goodell, the new NFL commissioner, has made it his mandate to crack down on athletes who misbehave.
In April Goodell introduced a new conduct policy that stiffens penalties and holds franchises responsible when their players get into trouble.
Just recently Goodell suspended the Tennessee Titans' troubled player Adam "Pacman" Jones for the 2007 season.
Jones had been arrested five times since he was drafted by the NFL in 2005 and has been involved in 11 separate police investigations. Most recently, during what amounted to a brawl at a strip club, he grabbed a stripper and banged her head into the ground. He will not be paid during his suspension and must apply for reinstatement.
But no one has been suspended in the NFL for spouse abuse or domestic violence, even though they've been arrested and convicted....
Major League Baseball, meanwhile, isn't any better in punishing spousal abusers.
Last summer Philadelphia Phillies' pitcher Brett Myers assaulted his wife on a public Boston street and was charged with assault and battery. Major League Baseball did not penalize him, shrugging it off as an off-field incident. Are they saying a player needs to abuse his spouse during a game to get sanctioned? If so, just how does that work?
Don't expect anything better from the National Basketball Association.
Jason Kidd of the NBA's New Jersey Nets pleaded guilty to spousal abuse in 2001.
Was he punished by the NBA? No.
The Sacramento Kings' Ron Artest was suspended last season for 72 games for fighting in the stands. In March he was arrested for domestic violence. For that he got what amounted to a hand slap; an immediate two-game suspension and a $600 fine for a player who makes several million a year.
Artest pled no contest to the domestic violence charge and was sentenced 100 hours of community service, a 10-day work project and mandated extensive counseling. The NBA did nothing here too. Maybe if he had committed the transgression on national TV--as with the fan brawl--more would have happened.
Maybe if he'd hurt a dog he would have been benched for the season.
And we also have to ask: What are the men we live with learning from all this?
That if you simply get rich enough in America, you can buy the right to take whatever you want, and never have to listen to a woman's "no" again? (As if our newly-empowered overclass needs any more encouragement that the law doesn't apply to them.) That women have no boundaries worth respecting? That the price of a woman's life is no more and no less than five million bucks spent on a legal "dream team"? That killing a dog is more heinous than maiming or murdering a human being?
That calling women "bitches" really does put their lives on a value level that is, for all practical purposes, no higher than that of an actual dog?
Is this the world that we, as progressive men and women, want to live in?
I hope Kobrin stays on this case. And I hope other journalists -- not just feminists, but also enlightened sportswriters of both genders -- join her, and turn this into a national issue.
The Michael Vick case has sent the message, loud and clear, that pro sports takes violence against animals more seriously than it does violence against women. But it's also shown that the issue has a soft underside that's ripe for attack. If the NFL is so afraid of animal-rights groups like PETA that it will put an end to Vick's career rather than deal with the fallout, just imagine what might happen when the leagues are faced with a few hundred thousand enraged progressive fans, female and male, demanding that the physical security of the women in their players' lives be accorded least as much moral esteem as that of Mr. Vick's unfortunate dogs.
Update: Mariah Burton Nelson, with whom I once worked on the editorial staff at Women's Sports & Fitness (and who also happens to be one of the finest women's basketball players ever), wrote this article about athletes and domestic violence all the way back in 1994. Proof that this is nothing new -- and way overdue to be fixed.
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