The Entitled | Frank Deford | Talks at Google

Give a round of applause for Frank Deford.

Excuse me. I'm still sort of sorting myself out because I flew down from Portland this morning. And in a classic case of what it's like to travel in America today, the flight was canceled, and I had to find my way through Medford, Oregon, to get here. So I'm still. I still don't really know where I am, as a matter of fact. So I appreciate your having me here. I don't know who often usually talks at these things, but it's kind of intimidating for a sports writer to be in this kind of company. Many of you probably know a basketball coach best known for his antics in Indiana, now bivouac somewhere out in Texas, Bobby Knight, who's also a great student of journalism. And Bobby once said the best time in every sports writer's life were the three years he spent in second grade. So.

Actually, as much sports writing as.

I've done, I've resisted writing a sports novel again for a long time because I've used my novels as an opportunity to get away from sports, to move aside, and I've done all kinds of other topics. The trouble with sports novels is that they have to compete with real sports. I mean, it's no fun. I've always said that the flip side of that are lawyer novels, because the law in real life is tedious and dull. I mean, it's plea bargaining. So you can write a lawyer novel, and you're not competing with the law. But me, here I am competing with Tiger woods and Rodriguez and Peyton Manning and so forth.

So I knew that when I wrote.

Another sports novel, it had to be more than just about a game. And, you know, in a way, my book, my novel, the entitled, is kind of a prequel, that television word to the last sports novel I ever did, which was Everybody's All American many years ago.

That was about an athlete, what it's.

Like to be one at the end of the career when you're trying to find a new life. And the entitled is about a great athlete at the very height of his career, when the spotlight is brightest and when it's glaring. And when, as the title suggests, he feels that everything is his due. First of all, I ought to tell you how I came to choose the team. I decided to make it a baseball novel. And then I wanted a Loser because one of the main characters is an old baseball manager who's finally gotten his chance in the big leagues. And so I picked, naturally, the Boston Red sox.

This was 2004. I was just sort of putting it together in my mind. I was really working on a movie.

Then about Roger Bannister and the Four Minute Mile, but I blocked it out that way. And I had the Red Sox. And of course, you know what happened to the Red Sox that year?

Yes, thank you.

And they won. And so I had to pick another losing team, and I picked the Chicago White Sox.

At this point, I'm beginning to feel like Nostradamus. And I had to go through. I literally had to go through the whole manuscript at that point. Thank God.

By now computers had come in and replaced the Chicago White Sox with someone. And this time I chose the Cleveland Indians. I am very big in Cleveland, I can tell you. I was there a couple of weeks ago because I assured them that if history was any guide, the Indians would win this year, which they haven't done since 1948. But anyway, I needed a losing team to make this work. And my manager is a guy by the name of Howie Traveler, who, as I said, has been around forever and ever and ever. And he is paired with a young superstar named J. Alcazar. And it's the story of these two guys whose arc is completely different. Alcazar is young and glamorous and handsome and strong and. And capable of playing baseball as well as anybody who ever did. And Traveler is quite the opposite. The old busher who could never play the game himself, but who loves the game so very, very desperately and has dedicated his life to baseball and because of baseball, lost a great deal of his personal life. And here is Howie before a game, sitting in the dugout.

So Howie would sit there, chewing the.

Fat, imagining that he was still chewing tobacco, laughing, entertaining, commanding his own dugout salon. Of course, he'd seen Alcazar play before he started managing him, but especially when he first got the Indian job and wasn't used to the man's achievements, game in and game out. How he would pause at whatever he was doing and just gaze at Alcazar when he took his cuts and batting practice. How he would simply marvel at him one evening early in the season at the Sky Dome in Toronto as Alcazar laced pitch after pitch, so graceful, all so effortlessly, all so absolutely perfect of motion. How he jumped up in the dugout and dipped at his knees, swinging his right arm back behind him. What's that? What's that? He called to the assembled members of the Diamond Press.

What's what? Called Howie, you know, like in the.

Olympics, the Frisbee type thing, that famous sculpture, the discus thrower, One of the More learned writers said, right. And I'm telling you, if that son of a bitch who made that statue, if he were around today, he wouldn't do the discus thrower. He'd do J. Alcazar swinging a baseball bat, because that's the prettiest thing in all the world. The modern ball player. And please understand that I could have written the entitled about any sport. For that matter, I could have written it about show business or rock music or any place where the stars are young and have lots of money. They're. They do feel such a sense of entitlement. There are just so many perks. It even amazes me that as many of them as do manage to come through relatively untouched. I think about myself if I were 23 or 24 years old, we're making $10 million a year and every woman was chasing me and everybody was trying to give me things. Man, that's hard, that's difficult. I'm amazed.

And this is the way it is.

This is J. Alcazar as he comes to stardom. At first, it was downright fun to be a male starlet. There were newspaper guys wherever he turned, radio people shoving microphones in his face, television cameras with famous television faces interviewing him, playing up to him.

The media did eventually get to be.

A pain in the ass, of course.

But Jay understood that he just must.

Put up with them. After all, they were just always there before the game, on the field, even as he waited to take his licks and batting practice after the game, even naked as he padded to the shower with just a towel round his loins, in deference to the rashy female reporters who were allowed in locker rooms now. Why would anyone want to talk to a naked man, Jay wondered. Who wants to talk to anybody unless they're also naked themselves? Alcazar looked at it this way. Most of his retinue that surrounded him were there strictly to serve him. His agent, Montague, first of all, and Brenda, Montague's secretary, who answered all his mail and dutifully reminded him of obligations and birthdays. The team's public relations people, Alcazar's reps at Louisville Slugger and Nike, the Indian coaches and doctors and trainers. Your every medical whim immediately attended to, plus massages, the equipment guys, the clubhouse guys, everything your heart desires, food and drink, batteries for your appliances, charging for your cell phones, the best clubhouse attendants even had Mother's Day and Father's Day cards stamped, you understand, available. Because who could expect big leaguers to remember such a thing themselves? And don't worry. Don't worry, Jay. I'll mail it for you. They were all especially attentive to him, not only because he was a monster star, but because he learned early on to tip excessively. Jesus. After all, he just had so much money. It was easy to pass some of it around. 20s, 50s, hundreds. Hey, thanks a lot. Buy yourself something, honey. Come on, take it. They did. They all took it. And they all loved him the more for it. And of course, in the center of all this is women. As all of us who have not had the good fortune to have been great sports stars ourselves. As we know only too well, women gravitate to athletes. The classic case is the quarterback and. And the cheerleader. The all American twosome. And if there's one thing, if there's one place where athletes feel more entitled than anywhere else, it is with the opposite sex. Sex. Sex is the ultimate perk. It comes so easily. And generally speaking, over time, it simply comes to be expected.

There was an old Yankee pitcher named Wade Hoyt who remembered the ancient days.

Of all day game ball in this fashion.

In the daytime you sat in the.

Dugout and talked about women. And at night you went out with women and talked about baseball. I always loved that quote. I was determined to get it into the book. How he knew it hadn't changed a great deal. And maybe now, except maybe now, with all the night games, it was harder to fit the women in. On the one hand, they made themselves more available. Now women did. Women had become more of a convenience than they had when Howie had first started off in the game. That, Howie understood, was an offshoot of the women's movement, dovetailing neatly into the predominance of night games. In the full scheme of things, he thought it was a fair enough exchange. I'm not giving anything away because it happens in the very first chapter. But the plot of the book does not center around any particular baseball game so much as it does an incident that takes place after a baseball game. It's a rape.

Or is it a rape? Did J. Alcazar, the great superstar, the.

Handsome, glamorous young man who could probably have almost any woman in the world that he wanted, did he actually rape that woman in the hotel room in Baltimore? Or did she set him up in order to get at his pocketbook? And of course, this thing happens all the time now. The leagues now even have seminars for rookies in which they warn them to look out for sinister women who may prey on them often thought perhaps the leagues could perform a greater service if they also had seminars for women warning them about athletes who might prey on them.

In fact, I had the idea for.

This book before Kobe Bryant got caught up in his rather infamous he said, she said situation in Colorado. And I think athletes and celebrities aside, that the whole matter of date rape, or anyway, the allegations of date rape are an intriguing part of the fabric of modern society. It happens a great deal now and it's often so impossible to decide. He said this and she said that. So the thrust of my book, the thrust of the entitled is twofold. On the one hand, there is the overriding issue, did the great superstar actually raped someone? But the undercurrent, sweeter part of it is the story of the relationship between these two men of different generations, of different talents, of different races, of different backgrounds, thrown together on their team, in their sport.

Howie's the boss.

He's the manager. But he knows that he, in a real way, is ruled by Jay Alcazar. Not only that Jay has to perform for him on the field, but beyond that, if Jay doesn't cotton to him, Howie knows that he won't be there long.

Howie is a prototype going a long.

Way back in baseball, back even to the beginning of the 20th century. In the early days, the best players became captains of the team and then sort of playing captains and playing managers.

And it was a while before the.

Bum as a player, as a manager began to emerge. But that is so often the case.

Because it is true in all sports that somebody who is very natural at a game, very good at it, isn't.

Necessarily very good at telling someone else.

How to play it.

It all comes so easy to him. It's difficult, perhaps for him to manage other men. Branch Rickey, Joe McCarthy, Walter Alston. If any of these names mean anything to you. Sparky Anderson, both managers in the World Series last year are of this type. Jim Leland never got anywhere near the major leagues. Tony De La Russo played a few years in the majors, but he was strictly. He wasn't even a journeyman. He was just a hanger on. Earl Weaver is perhaps my favorite of the sort. When I envisioned Howie, I often thought of Earl, both sort of short and stumpy. Earl was much more profane. He was much more profane than just about anybody.

And I always saw Jim Palmer, who was Weaver's bete noir.

Like J. Alcazar, absolutely gorgeously handsome. My wife always thought that Palmer was the best looking man that ever walked on the face of the earth. Palmer, so accomplished, tall, handsome Weaver, a bum of a player, short One time, in exasperation, Palmer said to Weaver, you.

Know, Earl, the only thing you know.

About pitching is that you couldn't hit it. And that sort of summed up their relationship and Howie, how he's just a good, white Midwestern guy, the salt of the earth, nature's noble one.

It's people like that who, in many.

Respects, are the game much more than the ones who are the great stars. On the one hand, he feels so diminished that he could never succeed as a player at the game that he loved. And on the other hand, he knows that he must command men who. All of whom are better at it than he is. Here's Howie talking to Alcazar early in their first season, when he has dared. When Howie has dared to criticize Alcazar. And just in a minor way, let me tell you something, Howie. Howie said I wasn't good enough playing. You know that. And it drives you crazy when you're not good enough, but you're only almost good. Alcazar looked a little bored, but he sort of trapped himself putting his leg up. So he stayed that way and let the manager go on. You try to figure it out, you see, and after a while, Jay, you realize it doesn't make any difference. Even if you could figure out what it is you're doing wrong, you still can't fix it. You can't make Sow's ear into a silk purse. What the hell is that? Alcazar said.

Yeah, you know, like, you can't make that into gold.

It was.

It was like. It was like what Popeye said.

You.

You remember Popeye, the spinach guy?

Alcazar said remotely, at least. How he had thrown so many obscure illusions at him that he didn't seem to be so worked up anymore. Yeah, well, what Popeye said was. And how he screwed up his mouth like he had a pipe in it. I. I am what I am.

I was what I was.

But, Jay, I started looking altogether more closely at the other guys, especially the ones that were pretty good, and I could see stuff. It's what I do good, Jay. I notice. I notice baseball. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm finally managing in the big leagues, because I notice better than just about anybody. Alcazar took his long leg off the desk and stood up straight.

Yeah, but maybe you notice wrong.

Oh, yeah, sure, Howie said. But I got a much better batting average noticing than I ever did batting. The other main character in the entitled is. Well, the entitled character. Athletes are so entitled in our Culture, aren't they? We feel they're different from you and me. They're a mandarin society within our democracy. And we do have this sort of conflicted attitude, that.

Which I think is the key to.

Reading the book, how you respond to these guys. On the one hand, we so admire.

Them for the extraordinary things that they.

Can do physically, what they can do with their bodies especially. We admire them if they wear a uniform where the name of our city or our college is across their chest.

But that worship comes at a price.

Because we also feel that society judges them differently. It annoys us, doesn't it, that athletes are rewarded unjustly, that they're excused when they break the rules. They're so much more recognized today than they ever were before. It's so much more richer, so much more famous, and so much more tempted.

And I think that we think that we know them too, because they are.

Covered so much by the press, especially someone in baseball who every day we read about. We do get the sense that they're ours, that in a way, they kind of belong to us, much more so than, say, actors. And so we get to the great. The great J. Alcazar. If it was a baseball book, the hero had to be Hispanic. And Alcazar, it means fortress in Spanish, which I thought was perfect for him.

Originally, I had him as a. As a Dominican, but then it occurred.

To me that in the whole book, he would be speaking in broken English, which would make him seem dumb even if he wasn't. It would make us recall the skit on Saturday Night Live.

Remember, baseball had been very, very good.

To me, and I did not want that in anybody's mind.

So then I made him into a.

Dominican American who had grown up here. And finally it occurred to me that I should make him Cuban, which was in the processing of a novel in one's mind. That was one of the smartest things that I decided to do because I'd been to Cuba a couple of times. And of course, it's an intriguing and fascinating and sad place. And I could incorporate my own experiences into it.

As I had given Howie, though a.

Very generic background, I wanted to make Jay something very special. He comes from a wealthy family.

His stepmother is a society Anglo lady. He's sophisticated, at least for a ball player.

I mean, he can, for example, dance. And he's got that. That tangled life back in Cuba where we spend a lot of the second part of the book.

Yet with it all, he's got to.

Be a celebrity, a star. He's got to be. Suffer all the problems and all the pleasures. The pleasures and the pressures that all these guys do. One of the first people that I gave the bound manuscript to, I wanted someone in the game to see it. And I was at a charity dinner with Mike Schmidt, the Hall of Famer from the Phillies, and I asked him.

If he wouldn't read the book.

And he came back, and much to my delight, he said, frank, I didn't know you spent 10 years in the majors. How did I miss you? Which made me feel absolutely wonderful. But he went on to say, he said, you know, I'm an entirely different person than Jay Alcazar, but absolutely, you've.

Got how I felt, what I had.

To put up with. All of that is absolutely there, and it's not. It's not any trick. I've been covering sports for a long time, and I've known an awful lot of these guys, and I've known that dynamic of celebrity, and that's what I wanted to. To write about, to present one of these little gods of sweat here in the beginning of the 21st century, and Jay.

It was important that Jay be bright.

And attractive and stylish, among other things.

If you didn't like him, you would.

Never believe him when he protested that he didn't rape that woman. And over time, indeed, he does come to admire Howie and to understand him. This is what he says to his best friend on the team. He says, listen, Ali, I was dubious at first, but the son of a bitch has been in a million games. It's almost like it's all the same to him. The Bushes, Triple A, the majors, he's even managed in Puerto Rico. You know, it's all the same. It's just games.

Most managers, they don't do what's necessarily right.

They just do what they can justify. You follow me? Yeah, yeah, I know, Ali said. Howie's not like that. He's been kicking around the ass end of this game for all his life, and he gets this chance, this one chance, and he's figuring there'll never be another one. You hear what I'm saying, Ollie? Howie Traveler will play the seventh game of the World Series, like at some horseshit game in Class A in the middle of July. And indeed, to everyone's amazement, how he does indeed manage a seventh game, in a way that shocks the baseball world, especially in the way that he manages Alcazar in that game.

So it's a tricky pas de deux.

Between these two guys, this odd couple, and it's made all the More intriguing by the fact, which again, you will find out early on in that first chapter, that Howie is something of a witness to that incident, which may or may not lead to rape. And so what will Howie say?

Jay's whole life.

And then Howie's career will hinge on what he decides to finally do.

So that's a little bit of.

A little bit of a snapshot of the entitled. And now in the time you've got left, I'll leave you sit over here in the director's chair, and I'd welcome taking any questions that you all might have. Let me move over here. Thank you all.

Yes, sir. I noticed that.

Serious.

My question is, as a baseball fan that I've been my whole life, I'm feeling very conflicted now about Barry. Oh, I. I watch him play. I admire everything about how he gets the ball. I don't like his attitude for people and the way he's treating people. And the question I'm wondering is, how do you deal with that conflict, given what he's accomplishing?

I think everybody's trying to struggle with that. Yeah.

I mean, it's interesting to me what.

Hank Aaron said, because I think that.

Spoke volumes when he said, I'm not going to go.

He said, I don't even know his name or I don't know how to spell his name. And usually athletes in any sport, when.

One of their records is broken, they're very gracious.

And even if they don't mean it, they say, I know records are meant.

To be broken and I'm so glad.

For Joe and all that sort of thing.

And they're there and they present ending with something.

And the fact that Aaron, who is.

A consummate gentleman, would do something like.

That, I think sort of gives a cue to anyone else. It's sort of in my mind, kind of let. Let see League got the commissioner off the hook.

I think Bonds, his problem is twofold.

I mean, first of all, the greater shadow is, you know, did he take drugs? Which, you know, any reasonable person can't deny. But beyond that, he must be the.

Surliest person who's ever played any sport.

I mean, maybe Ty. Excuse me, maybe Ty Cobb was a.

More miserable human being, but it's hard.

To believe there's just sort of no reservoir of goodwill with Barry Bonds, as much of a rascal and a liar and a cheat as Pete Rose was. You know, there was something of a pleasant road there.

Bonds almost wants you to dislike him.

So if you're asking me, I'd say you're off the hook. You don't. The only people who like him are you people in San Francisco, which just shows the power team and how we will forgive anybody on a team. I mean, the lesson of drugs is if it's an individual sport like track and field or bicycling, you know, we have nothing to do with them because those are people. We have no loyalty to people, but we have loyalty to teams. And so people are prepared to forgive, at least for a while.

Yes.

As a great player and all those other things, kind of anecdotes about his personality and things.

Will that.

Will the same thing happen with Buns?

We almost revere Rose a little bit, too.

It's different because the cheating makes you wonder. There are some people who say, look, everybody did it and surely a lot did. And so we just have to accept the fact that in a way, Bonds cheated better than anybody else, but that the playing field, as we say, was level. And maybe over time we will accept that and say, well, it was a strange era, but kind of everybody did it. And nobody was including the press, nobody was calling attention to it. But I think anybody who would presume to know what the future is going to say about Bonds and the other guys, about McGuire and Sosa and so forth, I don't think anybody knows. I don't think we know how it's going to play out. I would guess that when he's up for the hall of Fame, which could be as early as five or six years, I think a lot of guys won't vote for him right away. I think they'll punish him. Now, whether subsequently he'll go in, I wouldn't be surprised, because there is the argument that he was such a great player even before he started taking steroids, that he could have qualified for the hall of Fame if he quit baseball in 1999, which is an interesting argument. Yes, sir. They're back.

Also, by the way, if people could hold up their hands so we can get a mic to them.

Oh, great. I didn't know that.

I came up with this weird idea, and some of my friends think it would actually be a worse statement for the game. But my idea was when Bonds hit silver number 750, from that point on, he never sees another pitch within 10ft of the strike zone until he retires, just to basically say, okay, you got this close, but we know that you did something, we're not going to let you have a chance to break the record. And as I say, friends of mine have said, well, that would be actually a worse violation in the game than someone taking steroids. I'm curious about your opinion.

It's an.

It's an interesting proposition.

Very unlikely. I said on my NPR one morning that I was going to throw a party and invite Commissioner Selig and Hank Aaron and then they could use that as an excuse. They could say, I'm sorry, I have to go to Frank Deport's party. That's about. It has about as much chance of happening as your thing. You've got the mic back there. Well, let me take this one right here first.

So you've seen sports change. All the sports have changed. And it's really a business today.

How do you resolve your. Your love for the sports versus you're also part of the business. Oh, I'm part of the business. But you've got to remember that, yeah, there's money in sports now, but there's always been money in sports. The idea that there was some sort of golden age is more myth than truth. Oh, yeah. Now that's something else again. As a matter of fact, I think the gentleman said in the off season they had to take off season jobs. I think that changed people more than anything else. More athletes more than the intrinsic additional amounts of money. Because if you had to work in the hardware store or sell an insurance or something for four or five months out of the year, man, that grounded you. I mean that now the players are.

Usually with their posses or their entourages.

Or their personal trainers all that time. And if anything, they're even more insular than they are during the season itself. But I think you, I think you can separate. I mean, hell, you go to the theater or see a movie and the actor up there is making millions of dollars, but you get caught up in the, in the drama. And I think it's the same thing with sports. And I do think this, I think that, that no matter how much money they make, they are competitors. And except for a few of them, when the game's on the line, they're.

Really not thinking about money.

Maybe I'm usually accused of being too cynical, but maybe I'm a bit of a Pollyanna there in thinking that they do play just as hard as ever, even if they got a lot of money in the bank.

You've got somebody back there, Frank, so I don't mean to put you on the spot.

That's all right.

You talked a little bit about sports writers not having written about performance enhancing drugs while it was happening. So my question to you is, did you Sort of at least have an inkling that all of this was occurring as it happened. And if not, how could that be? With it sounding like there's steroids just, like, rolling around a clubhouse everywhere? And if you did know, why did you or other sports writers decide not to write about it?

Or, you know, it's funny, because usually I think sports writers are. The newspaper guys I'm particularly talking about are pretty tough. I've always said that if sports writers had been covering President Bush and the administration before the war, they wouldn't have let him off as easily as the political writers did. And I really believe that. But in this one case, we just seem to have gotten caught up with it. And we were lotus eaters.

We were just stupid.

We went along with everybody else. I remember in the midst of that season, the McGuire Sosa season, when everybody's going wild and a friend of mine who runs track and field said, I don't get it.

They're killing us.

They're killing us. They're throwing our guys out. You know those guys are guilty. You know they are. Look at them. Look at their heads.

Look at their body.

What do you think they ate? Spinach? And everybody is giving them a free ride. And it's almost like, you know, we just went to sleep for a while and we were every bit as guilty as management, as the players union, as the players themselves. The good guys who weren't using drugs but were accepting it. I don't know. It was one of those times in which everybody can take credit for being to blame. We're all in it together, and it was stupid and wrong. Where's the mic? Yeah, go.

You wrote a book about baseball, and most novels, sports related novels, seem to be about baseball. Why do you think that is? Why does baseball have more novels about it than, say, football or basketball or other sports?

George Plipton used to say that the smaller the ball, the better it was to write about. In other words, baseball and golf made better. Better than, say, football and basketball, which I don't think was true, but I think I wish I'd said it because everybody keeps repeating it, including me. I think generally speaking, the best sports to write about are the ones that have the fewest competitors wearing the fewest clothes. I'm not being facetious. I mean, that's why they keep making so many boxing movies, for example, because it's so simple. I mean, we got what, Sylvester Stallone at the age of 60, bringing back Rocky. I mean, and he got caught with steroids, by the way, or Something in Australia. I mean, do we need this? No, but it's so simple. Two guys banging each other. Baseball sort of goes against that. But of the team sports, baseball is the only one where you have that individual subset at any moment as one batter facing one pitcher. And so it's ideal in that sense. It's so easy as a writer to zero in. I mean, that I found out I got my batter at bat. He does X in football. It's, you know, a swirl out there. And the other thing is, baseball, for whatever reason, is kind of like the last cracker barrel.

I know.

It's the last place where people just sort of sit around and tell stories. I don't think anybody tells stories on the football bench, but they still do. It's an oral game. And the fact that it's so traditional, more so than others, I think all of this lends to it. As I said, I could have written this book about any sport, but it just seemed to me that baseball was the one that lent itself best to telling a story. And it must be a lot of other writers who think that way, because, as you say, a preponderance of sports books are about baseball. Name a good basketball book. You can't. A good basketball novel. There's no such thing. And I covered basketball much longer than I covered baseball.

Oh, yes.

What we got now? Oh, right here. This is switching gears a little bit. But I'm curious what you think of the job that Roger Goodell is doing as far as NFL discipline on the recent arrest. I think he's doing a fabulous job. I mean, if anybody here went out to a bar at night and had a gun and got involved and people got shot up, or you were caught dragging your girlfriend down the stairs by her hair, the chances are that Google would say, you know, we don't want him. No, he didn't do it during office hours. But that's not what we want. And so I don't think that athletes should be treated any differently than anybody else. Athletes have always been naughty. You know, boys will be boys. If you give money to young men and have them travel. This is true history, back to the Homer and the Iliad. They're going to get in trouble, a certain number of them. I mean, that's the reality. You're just playing with fire. But what I have, what I think is so new, is the tremendous amount of violence with athletes and the brutality toward women.

Guns.

Now we even got dog fights. That one came out of left field. I had no idea that was to come Up. Well, there have been studies which say that, number one, team athletes tend toward violence, more toward individual athletes, because in simplest terms, it's the mob mentality. Okay, I say studies. I don't. I can't be altogether sure this. This is true, but that makes a lot of sense to me. And football, it's awfully hard to think that you can sort of pack park that violence that you supposed to display on the field the minute that you walk off. And so, no, I'm not altogether surprised that a large amount of that violence comes from football players. I think if, you know, we could expect it. But at the end of the day, I think the commissioner is taking a stand. He's going to have another, bigger problem, bigger than drugs. I mean, these football players who weigh over 300 pounds, and I mean, they're going to be walking wounded at the age of 30. So many of them, I mean, we're already starting to see it. No knees, no joints, and a lot of them, the concussions, I think that's going to be a continuing problem in football long after other sports have at least mitigated the issue of driving drugs.

Hi.

I'm curious to know what you think about the role of sports writers in the future, because it seems like more and more athletes are turning to their own blogs to get their own messaging out. And then leagues like the NFL Network and MLB and NBA tv, they have their own broadcast network. So how do you. How do traditional newspaper and magazine writers fit in there?

We feel threatened, but, I mean, it's not just. Just sports writers because blogs go across all the disciplines, and all of us in print journalism are trying to figure out where the hell we're going. Nobody knows what's going to happen to newspapers, what's going to happen to magazines. My old magazine, Sports Illustrated, is in complete turmoil. They have no idea, you know, should we concentrate on si.com more than on the magazine? And yet we're not getting any advertising over here. And we are here. Everybody is completely confused at this stage of the game. And the blogs just confuse things more. Don't forget something. Another innovation of more recent vantage is sport radio. Oh, my God. That. That has caused all kinds of problems because, like, as with blogs, there's no filter. People just write things. People just say things. And one of the things it does is that the athletes sort of lump everybody together in journalism, and some jerk is saying something on the radio or in a blog, and all of a sudden some very respectable professional is getting, you know, badly treated and frozen out. So It's a situation that goes all the way through journalism, and it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out in the next five or 10 years. But I haven't got the foggiest idea, but neither does anybody else. I'm no dumber or smarter. Yes. Oh, back there.

Okay, so on the kind of. The performance enhancing drug thing, why do you think that steroids are considered a bad thing when laser eye surgery, which is more useful for baseball, is perfectly fine?

That's a subject that comes up all the time. First of all, they're illegal. So, I mean, you could say that laser eye surgery is not illegal and steroids, performance enhancing drugs are. But what you're saying is, well, suppose we legalized steroids. I think the hardest one to make the argument against is blood doping. If I want to take my blood out and juice myself up with it later, you know, rationally, that's a hard argument, hard to go against, and I think somebody somewhere down the line is going to make that argument. But somehow, you know, you're saying, where do we draw the line?

Aren't you?

And some people say, you know, they have, like, these.

Caves you get into.

Now which create the atmosphere so you can practice or sleep as if you're in Bolivia, up in the Andes, and it'll help your blood, and that's okay. Somehow, though, I just. I think we like to believe that sports, which is about, after all, physicality, that it's got to be pure, it's got to be real. I'll ask you the question.

There's a.

There's a runner in South Africa named Oscar Piscoris. You heard of him? He's a double amputee, and he finished like second or third in the 400 meters in the South African Games. Now he's got these extraordinary. I don't know what they call them. They look like flippers on. Should he be allowed to compete? Because one of these days those things are going to be even more advanced. So do we turn athletes into. Into robot men?

I just.

I just think it's interesting because it is interesting, an argument where I think a lot of people say it's for the purity of the game. But on the same hand there, you know, for decades, you know, amphetamines were baseball players and totally overlooked. And still, I mean, I still think that's a huge problem now in baseball that not enough people talk about.

I think if they ever find out that steroids are not harmful, and some people make that argument that apart from the roid Rage and the temporary problems that they cause, then if we, if, if we were to, say, make a safe steroid, then I think it would be very hard to argue that they're not the same as all the other advantages that athletes have taken. But I'll tell you right now, boy.

Steroids do change you.

I mean, they make nasty people.

And.

And so right now I think it's hard not to come down on the side of the people who are trying to keep them out. Yes, now we get you.

So my question is one of covering scandals, particularly in the last year with the Duke lacrosse incident, which, and you mentioned you alluded to Kobe Bryant with the rape, that was it really a rape kind of thing? And with both of those cases and now with this one of steroids and baseball as well, with the violence of the football players, there really seems to be a media, just mayhem around them. And particularly for Duke where it was college athletes and it wasn't at a, you know, at a good school that, I mean, it wasn't, I mean, not that other schools aren't good, but I mean that. It was a big, it was a big school, but I mean, it was lacrosse. Like it wasn't a football team, it wasn't a basketball team. How do you kind of account for this mayhem? Do you think it's warranted when the coverage just becomes so much?

You're calling the mayhem. I just want to make sure I understand you. The media is creating the mayhem.

I guess the media circus around these events.

First of all, let's throw out the Duke scandal because that's so aberrational. I mean, as it turned out, this extraordinary case where the district attorney is lying the whole time, withholding evidence, and everybody went off half cocked.

And I mean, do you think, for.

Example, that if it had been the Duke basketball team, the president would have banned the team? I don't think so. I mean, everything is crazy about the Duke skin. So let's forget that. Let's just talk about scandals in general. There's an ongoing scandal in college athletics. I mean, you could go to practically any big time college and find out that the athletes are frauds. As far as, as students, it's hard to do, but we all sort of wink at that. It's all part of the American scene. We love our college sports and our high school sports, and so we're going to say that you have to be eligible, but you're not. So that's one scandal that nobody really ever touches or rarely touches. You look for the more obvious Ones, the violence and so forth. And the rules have kind of changed since I got into the game. And again, it's not just in sports. Sports, it's across the way that it used to be that there was sort of a gentleman's agreement that what went on off the field, if it wasn't criminal, if it was just personal issues, you didn't do anything about them as long as you thought it wasn't affecting the player's job. In other words, if you saw Matt at 3:00 in the morning drunk, and he hit two home runs the next day, it's pretty hard to write. But all that changed when television came in. I mean, what President Kennedy got away with in his personal life, it's the classic example, never mind ball players. Now, we tend to be. I don't know if you'd call it a circus, but we're going to be much more dedicated. And it even got to the point.

Where we got to peephole journalism a.

Couple of weeks ago with Alex Rodriguez, but then he was flaunting it. It's one thing, I mean, if you can cheat on your wife, be discreet, right? Isn't that what a gentleman would do? You know, and he's got this woman and he's showing her off in casinos and everything else. So it was almost like, okay, take my picture, catch me. And they did. So again, even there, if, if Rodriguez had been discreet, no, I don't think that ever would have happened. What I'm saying is each incident is different, but by and large, we are much more on the case now than we ever were before, and not just in sports, but across the board.

So I have a question about disparity of payroll in baseball. So my team, the Red Sox and the Yankees, other teams, are playing with 140, 160, $200 million payrolls against teams with 20, 30, $40 million payrolls. You have. You have teams like the Twins that come out and do very well with relatively low payrolls, but on average, you know, it doesn't seem like a fair playing field.

Right.

So I was wondering what your thoughts are in the future. Whether baseball is going to trend more towards the NFL system or if there's other solutions that are going to.

Actually, baseball has come a long way. I mean, it used to be that there was sort of no controls whatsoever.

And.

I can't expect it to be any more modified than it is right now because the union simply wouldn't tolerate it. And the union's pretty strong in baseball, even though they've Been rattled by all the drug stuff because they were on the wrong side for a long time. They mixed up recreational drugs with performance enhancing drugs and put them all under the same umbrella and, you know, got caught. But the reality is that a lot of teams like the Minnesota Twins do win, you know, the ace Moneyball. So it's. It's a much better situation than it ever used to be because it used to be that the good teams could. Could pretty much sign anybody they wanted. And there was, you know, there was no. No top. So I think the system is fairer now than it's ever been. Is it ever going to get any better? No, I don't think. I don't think it is. I think that basketball and football are pretty much in place. You know, like football, they don't have guaranteed contracts, and I don't think that's going to change. So much of it is. Once something is established, it's so damn hard to correct it one way or the other. And the other thing about baseball is everybody's making money. Players are making money, the teams are making money. There's more fans coming out than ever before. So not that many people are upset. And your Red Sox are in first place. Hey, one more quick question.

You've had the privilege of interviewing many, many people. Who is your favorite?

Arthur Ashe. I mean, if you'd asked me to name one. For some obvious reasons, that his life ended so tragically and that he meant so much.

But he was also.

He was a close friend of mine.

We were about the same age, and.

We sort of grew into the business together. I sort of knew Arthur before he was Arthur Ashe. And he was also exceptionally bright. He really was. And we went to South Africa together.

When he broke the color line, I.

Lived with him over there. You know, sports writers don't usually write about important things. That was one time that I did. So if I had to name one guy, I would name Arthur. And I miss him dearly. That's it, Adrian. Oh, great. Thank you.