9 SPORTS HEROES WITH THE AIDS VIRUS

BOX 6.9 SPORTS HEROES WITH THE AIDS VIRUS

In the 1990s, there were increasing numbers of revelations of sports heroes who tested positive for HIV, the AIDS virus. Perhaps the most celebrated case was pro basketball’s superhero Earvin “Magic” Johnson, who resigned from the Los Angeles Lakers at the height of his career in late 1991, announcing that he had tested positive for HIV. A widely recognized athlete of tremendous talent, as well as a positive role model for youth, Johnson’s announcement was greeted with a massive outpouring of public sympathy. Moreover, he was appointed by former President George H.W. Bush to an advisory committee on AIDS policy (Johnson later resigned in disgust at a perceived lack of government commitment to AIDS) and embarked on a heavy schedule of speaking engagements to youth about the importance of safe sex and traditional values. Receiving heavy media coverage for several weeks, Johnson admitted that he had been quite promiscuous as a single man before his recent marriage, and it was this activity that had presumably infected him. Interestingly, this violation of traditional morals did not seem to significantly affect his superhero status (including lucrative commercial endorsements), as an admission of homosexual relations surely would have. How many products have you seen openly gay Olympic diver Greg Louganis endorse?

In the wake of Magic Johnson’s revelations, the media carried a number of stories about the sexually promiscuous lifestyles of some male professional athletes, and many athletes became vocally concerned about possible physical contact with HIV-infected opponents during a football or basketball game, Still, there seemed to be considerable moral ambiguity about such behavior; during this same period, former basketball great Wilt Chamberlain publicly boasted of having had sex

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with 20,000 different women. Although clearly practicing exceptionally unsafe sex, as well as behavior laden with moral issues, Chamberlain did not lose his hero status. Even a celibate but gay superstar athlete probably would not have been treated half as well.

A very different situation occurred around the early 1992 revelation by retired tennis great Arthur Ashe that he was HIV positive, as a result of a blood transfusion with tainted blood during heart surgery in the early 1980s. Although Ashe had known of his infection for over 3 years, he only chose to reveal the fact publicly after a USA Today reporter had discovered the information and told Ashe that he intended to make it public. Unlike Johnson, Ashe was retired and no longer a public figure and had acquired the HIV virus through means above moral reproach. Although public response to Ashe’s announcement and his death in early 1993 was uniformly sad and sympathetic, the question remains about whether the privacy of Ashe and his wife and daughter or the public’s right to know was more important.

In spite of television’s enhancement of sports heroes, some (e.g., Coakley, 1986; Rader, 1984) have argued that today’s sports heroes are not on the same pedestal as past stars like Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas, Jesse Owens, or Stan Musial. The huge salaries and fast-track living seem to separate such persons from us and encourage their narcissistic and hedonistic tendencies rather than the righteous and humble characteristics that we at least used to think our heroes possessed. The intrusive eye of television focuses on a ballplayer not only when he makes that glorious play, but also when he is petulantly fuming on the sidelines or selfishly proclaiming that he cannot make ends meet on two million a year. No matter that all of us have our selfish and petulant moments; we like to think that true heroes do not, and the age of television makes it harder to maintain that fiction.

Conclusion

Media reporting sports events are doing more than reflecting the reality of that game. Television in particular has changed the very sports themselves. Television has also changed the way that our minds consider these sports and the way our hearts react to them. TV sports is a world all its own, a world often only imperfectly related to the sports in the stadiums, coliseums, or racetracks. When people think of sports, they are most likely to first think of watching television. The perceived reality of sports acquired through television is thus what sports become for most people. Just as media are our knowledge source about groups of people, social values, or products for sale, so do they tell us about sports, how to play them, how to watch them, and

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how to feel about them. The very high level of coverage also sets a clear agenda that sports are important. Sports fans consider what the sportscaster says, not what they observe with their own senses, as authoritative; thus people take their radios and even their small televisions to the stadium, so they can know what is “really happening.”

Now let us turn to a second media domain which plugs in very centrally to our emotions, namely, the world of music.