In the eighties I heard a first hand account from a co-worker's cousin about the "antics" at a Lakers party. Magic Johnson was an appropriate name; so when I heard #32's press conference announcing his HIV, I certainly *was not* nonplused.
Posted on 10/27/2002 12:57:42 PM PST by fatguy
He was a rookie but already in the NBA All-Star Game. What an experience! It was a few years ago, and he wanted his special loved one, his girlfriend, there with him for his special moment.
So he brought her along, not only to the game but also to the four-day party that goes with it, serving as spring break for NBA players the way Fort Lauderdale used to for college kids. He introduced her to other players and, well, no introduction was necessary. Those players were well-known.
And so was she.
"A bunch of players were laughing that he took this woman," said Larry Platt, who wrote the book Keepin It Real, about the true, behind-the-scenes adventures of a season with five NBA players. "She was a groupie, and the players all knew who she was.
"You're supposed to take your girlfriend or your wife to the All-Star weekend. And this guy--I don't want to say his name--was so green that he didn't know she was a ho. He had fallen in love with her."
Ah, the stories today's athletes will tell their grandkids someday. Michael Jordan filed suit last week against Karla Knafel for allegedly attempting to extort from him $5 million to keep quiet about their relationship. Jordan acknowledged already having paid her $250,000 in hush money a decade ago.
Few details are public, including how, when or where Jordan met Knafel, and whether he was married at the time. But it shouldn't surprise anyone to hear tales of sexual exploits about athletes--even athletes with an image as guarded as Jordan's.
A culture of sex defines the off-field worlds of athletes in major sports. It is a culture with regular players and ground rules, recognized and followed by athletes, their one-night girlfriends and even their wives.
"Adultery is condoned and even institutionalized," said Steven Ortiz, assistant professor of sociology at Oregon State, who has studied the culture. "There is a fast-food sex mentality."
How available is sex to the athletes? Well, the stories are of groupies, groupies and more groupies. Waiting for athletes at the airport. Crowding teams' hotel lobbies in clothes identifying their intentions. Sending nude photos with phone numbers.
Each city has bars where traveling athletes go to meet them.
Platt, whose new book, Only the Strong Survive: The Odyssey of Allen Iverson, will be out next month, has seen it all.
"It's this whole cottage industry,'' he said. "A sophisticated dance goes on between women on the road and these athletes. These women view it as their job to service, and in some cases entrap, athletes.
"A couple of years ago, there was a widespread story of a woman who was with a player who insisted on using a condom. She saved it, froze it and planned to inseminate herself later. [Former NBA player] A.C. Green, an avowed virgin, has been sued four times for paternity. He won all four, but that shows how sophisticated a dance this is. It's so complicated, and yet it hasn't curtailed players' promiscuity."
How prevalent is this? There is no way of knowing. Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have slept with 20,000 women. When Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he had contracted HIV, he said he had no way of knowing who gave it to him.
Former Dallas Cowboy Thomas "Hollywood'' Henderson wrote in his book Out of Control: Confessions of an NFL Casualty that "in my five years in Dallas, I must have had affairs with over a thousand women, from one-night stands to three-day romances to four or five women a night at the orgies. That's just the way it was being a football player in Dallas, Texas."
But several of the current Bulls say the stories are overblown.
"We travel more on private planes and get into a town or city unacknowledged,'' Jalen Rose said. "When we get to hotels, there are not a lot of people you would consider groupies in the lobby.
"But the thing is, no matter what walk of life you are, I'm sure you can find a woman if you are looking. And obviously, the more visible you are, the easier it is.'' Still, every year, the NBA holds a weeklong rookie orientation that includes talks about the dangers of women on the road. And after Johnson's HIV announcement, the players union reportedly gave its members keychains that doubled as condom holders.
"All they can do is warn you and prepare you,'' Tyson Chandler of the Bulls said. "I have a girlfriend. But if you're out there looking, you're going to see beautiful women and you're going to want to talk to them. It's a lose-lose situation. Or maybe win-now, lose-later.'' Ortiz has broken down the groupies into several categories. They're not all 20-somethings.
There are grandma groupies in their 50s; organizational groupies who work in team offices and date players and visiting players; wives groupies, who hang out with players' wives as a first step toward meeting players, and camp groupies, who go to spring training camps.
How do players' wives handle it, knowing their husbands are on the road and living in this culture? Ortiz said the wives of baseball players must live under a code of conduct: What happens on the road stays on the road.
"When wives catch other married players with other women, they aren't supposed to reveal it,'' he said. "And wives aren't supposed to go down to the hotel bars where the players are because that's where married players meet their girlfriends, and where groupies congregate."
Some players take girlfriends on the road with the team, while wives stay home. And other athletes have turned to strip clubs.
Weeks before the Super Bowl in Tampa two seasons ago, two NHL players--Ted Donato and Tyler John Bouck--were arrested at a club there called Mons Venus for violating lap dance laws. NFL officials worried about their players.
"With every NFL team that came into town this year, members of that team, players, coaches, came here,'' club owner Joe Redner said at the time. "Not every player on the team, but we get 10 or 15 players or so. The NFL has sent all the players letters not to come into these places or be arrested. I've got the feeling they're going to come anyway.''
In 2000, the New York Daily News reported that the Gold Club in Atlanta had provided thousands of dollars worth of strippers to athletes, including NBA players Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley and Dennis Rodman.
In the end, though, the NBA All-Star Game is the Super Bowl of sports sex.
"That's the world's biggest party, from Thursday through Sunday," said Pat Williams, general manager of the Orlando Magic. "Every female you can imagine descends. It's mind-blowing to see the outfits, the jewelry, the hairdos. They're at the restaurants, the clubs, the private parties. It's a spectacular sight.
Gosh, what is such a knowledgable person as you doing reading this thread?? :-)
Why would the women want to lower themselves to that degree?
How must it feel to know you won't be remembered the next day... or during the 'act' for that matter?
How available is oxygen to land-dwelling organisms? Tomorrow's news - rock stars take a lot of illegal drugs...
This is a suprise to most of the people in my life. Whenever I mention that celebrity marriages are almost sure to fail, people almost always tell me I'm exagerating and that it only appears that way because the bad ones get publicity.
How many people over the last 15 years thought the Michael Jordon's personal life was a mess.
'Lowering themselves' is about the only thing they are good at and it is their life-time achievement to have 'lowered themselves' on a man that plays with balls ;-)
It's because they are more interested in being celebrities than they are just playing sports.
In Shakepeare's time, the actors (the celebrities of the day) were considered the scum of the earth. Now they are still the scum of the earth, they are just put on a pedestal, that's all.
Athletes, politicians, movie stars, celebrities, will always have groupies of some sort: people who either read virtue into someone who is too distant for that impression to be disproved, or those who hope that the glow of fame and popularity somehow will rub off.
Either way, it's kind of sad really.
Regards, Ivan
They all seem to be interested in sex.
Imagine Janet Reno, Maxine Waters and Madeline Albright, dressed provocatively, cornering Dennis Rodman.
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