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Thursday, May 08, 2003

Before we await the arrival of the first "Coaches Gone Wild" video, let's focus our lechery on the next entrant in the supermarket-tabloid, sleazapalooza media sweepstakes:

Why, look here, it's venerable Sports Illustrated.

The magazine that 51 weeks a year casts a critical eye and unleashes outstanding writers on the sports world suddenly takes a turn for the worse this week. Or, as the prophetic Groucho Marx might have quipped, it took a turn for the nurse.

Swimsuits are one thing. This is lewd, tawdry and otherwise far beneath even the G-string strumming of that singular issue. This is, in short, a sad day in sports media: SI hits the mailbox, and you may well wish it had a brown, concealing wrapper around it.

"Bad Behavior: How He Met His Destiny at a Strip Club" reads the headline on the story about fallen Alabama Coach Mike Price. First of all, the magazine entered into an exclusive agreement with exotic dancer Destiny Boudreaux -- the inference being, SI paid her as if it were some journalistic rag -- to tell her sordid tale of what happened on the night that prompted the university to fire Price last weekend, before he coached a game.

Do we need to know all these details from SI?

That Price, 57, had "some pretty aggressive sex" with two women April 16 in a Pensacola, Fla., hotel room.

The Birmingham (Ala.) News yesterday quoted a third woman, Jennifer Eaton, who claimed she was one of three women in Price's hotel room that night and denied that any sex took place.

Eaton told the newspaper that the SI story compelled her to step forward and tell her side. She added that the anonymously quoted woman in the magazine is "trying to make a fortune off her lie."

In the end, Eaton said, she spent the night in the room with the coach and the two women she didn't previously know. "He was very respectful," she told the paper. "He was joking around. I think he was just a man wanting some company." When Price left for the Emerald Coast Classic pro-am golf tournament the next morning, Eaton said one of the women ordered $1,000 in food from the room-service menu.

Meanwhile, Boudreaux went on a Pensacola television station -- you can find her interview at www.WEARtv.com -- and told The News that she planned to start a Web site and possibly sell her story to Playboy. Imagine that.

This isn't about conjuring up sympathy for Price, who lost a $10 million job. He was guilty of bad judgment and similarly bad association, as was fired Iowa State basketball coach Larry Eustachy. And what was Eustachy thinking when he allowed himself to drink massive quantities of beer and be photographed at a school with an internationally acclaimed school of journalism? Hellooooooo.

Then there is Martin Brodeur, the Devils' goaltender whose marital split and purported romance with his former sister-in-law was all the rage of a Quebec tabloid called Photo Police before mainstream media picked up on the story in recent weeks, though protective of Brodeur.

Athletes and coaches, especially those with morals clauses in their contracts, who represent major universities or teams, must expect the harsh media glare to follow them off the field as well as on. Our society holds our political leaders under scrutiny for their personal conduct, so it's only natural that it trickles down to sports.

It's just that we should expect a more responsible, restrained, newsworthy approach from our sports media.

SI a year ago uncovered a dirty tale about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, without paying for information or entering into exclusive deals. It long ago reported on cocaine use among pro athletes. It has broken story after story, mostly with dogged reporters like Douglas Looney telephoning sources at 5 a.m. for the sake of uncovering facts.

Uncovering exotic dancers?

Anybody can do that for a buck.

Notes you could write home

In a different SI matter, the magazine last week named the 101 most influential minorities in sports, and two come from Western Pennsylvania: No. 14 Ringgold's Ulice Payne, Brewers president, and No. 73 Fort Cherry High's Marvin Lewis, new Bengals coach.

Newsweek's latest issue does no favors for former Pitt slugger Brant Colamarino of Central Catholic High: It led off an article with the news that he "had breasts." More titillation, eh? Actually, it was a review of a book about Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane, who collects talented players otherwise overlooked -- in Colamarino's case, a first baseman who happened to be pudgy.

The Boston Globe suspended sports columnist Bob Ryan for a month without pay after he remarked on local TV there that someone needed to "smack" the wife of Nets guard Jason Kidd, once an alleged victim of domestic abuse. Granted, Joumanna Kidd outlandishly poses herself and her young child for the cameras during games, but the caustic comments were insensitive for these politically correct times. Ryan was suspended by the paper and banned from TV and radio appearances for a month, and he apologized long after being given a chance on the live show to rescind them.

It's a shame that TV types try to wring the sensational from newspaper writers who are there for their expertise rather than entertainment value. It's also a shame to realize there probably would've been no controversy if Ryan had uttered the remarks on local sports-schlock radio. At least there are standards somewhere, no matter how fluid they sometimes are.