Sports heroes undressed

Stephen Brunt
Globeandmail.com

Some day, it will be fascinating to look back and consider just how it is we got here.

Within living memory, professional athletes were wrapped in mythic armour stronger even than that which protected movie stars. The Hollywood crowd, famous musicians, even in more wide-eyed days, could be dragged down by scandal sheets, their embarrassing personal peccadilloes aired (selectively) for those with prurient interests.

But professional athletes could be drunks and womanizers and racists, could be some of the worst SOBs alive, could behave just as badly as they wanted, and still be held up as shining beacons and role models for youth, their exceptional performance on the field or in the arena accepted as a mirror of their exceptional qualities in life. Commit a crime and go to jail and it might get noticed, but otherwise sports biography was hagiography almost without exception.

That's all changed now, which in the big picture is a healthy development. We'll all be better off understanding that having feet of clay is a universal human condition.

Getting to that point has required repeated doses of shock therapy, the two biggest coming during the past 365 days: first Tiger Woods's multiple indiscretions, and now the tawdry Brett Favre affair.
Yes, other athletes have done worse. Adultery (as in Woods's case) is not a crime, nor is sexual harassment (as alleged in Favre's), though it can in many circumstances at least be a firing offence.
But here are two figures in whom so much has been invested, about whom so much was imagined to justify a kind of three-dimensional heroism.

Though it can be argued that Woods and his handlers worked to create a perfect commercial persona that was never him, the truth is the golfer's previously pristine image was as much a function of wish fulfilment as of any clever marketing campaign.

And Favre, while very publicly battling through life challenges that most of us also face (the death of a parent, the illness of a spouse, the push back against aging) was celebrated as an everyman/superman, a good ol' boy from Kiln, Miss., who just wanted to fling that football down the field as far and as fast as he could. There were other, more problematic details (the painkiller addiction, the boozing, the infidelity alluded to in his wife Deanna's book), but on the big stage provided by the NFL, those were but minor, trivial points that only emphasized his down-home humanity.

Woods was done in by the traditional tabloid route, and by the sheer volume and recklessness of his extramarital adventures.

Favre's path to ignominy is more distinctly of the moment. The alleged object of his affection, Jenn Sterger, is a creation of the Internet age, an attractive young woman spotted on television at a Florida State game who went on to become sort-of-famous simply for being sort-of-famous. (A simple search will tell you - and show you - more.) Voice messages and lurid photographs of what may be his naughty bits, which she allegedly received from Favre while working for the New York Jets, but is said not to have personally passed along, were somehow bought and paid for by a website, Deadspin, which makes hay deconstructing sports (and sports media).

Funny, nasty, always arm's length, always ironic, the site is a perfect example of how 21st-century culture feeds upon itself. This, for them, was a batting-practice fastball.

The mainstream media wouldn't touch the story - at least for a few hours - but when the NFL, sensitized by the Ben Roethlisberger and Ines Sainz affairs, decided to investigate, when one of Favre's Minnesota Vikings teammates acknowledged that the quarterback had offered a tearful apology to the group before their game against the New York Jets on Monday, it was open season, the piling on made all the easier by the growing sense that, this season, Favre's on-field magic has finally deserted him at 41.

("Brett Comes Up Short," the front page of the New York Post read Tuesday morning, referring of course to the Vikings' loss to the Jets on Monday night.) It doesn't make you feel any better, the Woods stuff, the Favre stuff, other than the pleasure some derive from the misfortune of others, for which the Germans have a word.

But it shouldn't make you feel any worse, either, the embarrassment of being revealed as a voyeur aside. They aren't who we thought they were - or who we pretended they were. They're just really good at what they do, which is something we like to watch.

Now let's start redefining that relationship.