Sports Scandals

by Laura Finley; Jeffrey J. Fountain Peter Finley

  The impact of the Donaghy scandal could be felt throughout sports, but in basketball in particular there was anticipation that fans would openly question calls, accuse officials of being ''on the take,''56 and perhaps even call a referee ''Donaghy'' when they don't like or agree with a call.

  Chapter 4

  SEX: ASSAULT, HARASSMENT, COVER-UPS, AND ACCUSATIONS

  Estimates are that one in four women in the United States will at some point in her life be the victim of domestic violence. Likewise, one-quarter of all college-aged women suffer an attempted rape. These are horrifying statistics. It is well-documented that athletes are overrepresented as accused rapists and abusers, although conviction figures do not show such an overrepresentation. Some maintain that male athletes are targeted by women who claim to have been assaulted so they can attain money or fame. Others say the low conviction rates are another sign that athletes are privileged. Rather than demonstrating innocence, the argument is that athletes are not convicted because of the general hero-worship of athletes in the United States. Some of the cases included in this chapter do not involve rape or domestic violence, but still include shocking behavior towards women. For instance, the case of reporter Lisa Olson, who was sexually harassed while working in the New England Patriots' locker room, exemplifies the difficulties for women in a male-dominated world. Exploitation of women is sadly common in the country as a whole, and certainly the world of athletics is no different.

  WADE BOGGS ADMITS TO SEX ADDICTION - SUED BY MISTRESS

  Major League Baseball received more media attention than normal in summer 1988 when Margo Adams filed a $6 million palimony lawsuit against Wade Boggs of the Boston Red Sox, a four-time American League batting champion. Her claim was that Boggs had essentially breached an oral contract with her when he failed to leave his wife. Boggs admitted having an affair with Adams that stretched over four years, but denied ever promising to leave his wife and family for her. In August 1988 Adams doubled her lawsuit to $12 million, arguing that Boggs inflicted emotional distress on her when he reported to the FBI that she was trying to extort money from him.1 The embattled Boggs, trying to gain public support, went on television and claimed he felt he was a ''sex addict'' and that it was a disease. He had apparently diagnosed himself after watching an episode of Geraldo Rivera that dealt with the issue of oversexed people. Boggs added that he was cured and had made peace with his family and was moving on with his life.

  Adams kept the sex scandal in the papers with a tell-all interview and pictorial with Penthouse magazine in spring 1989. The article painted a poor picture of Boggs, suggesting he had issues with white players dating black women.

  In the article, Adams also said that Boggs referred to Roger Clemens as ''Mr. Perfect,'' and that he believed Jose Canseco could only hit because he was on steroids. Adams received at least $100,000 from Penthouse for the story.2

  The courts eventually dismissed a large portion of her lawsuit. This eliminated the opportunity to collect punitive damages, which meant that she could collect no more than $48,000 if she won the case. This was the amount she lost from taking time off of work to go on road trips with Boggs and his team.

  A month after that ruling, Adams was arrested at a Nordstrom department store and charged with shoplifting a $258 coat. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanor petty theft. The scandal ended eighteen months after the legal battle began, with the two sides agreeing to an undisclosed settlement that was likely far, far less than what she had dreamed of getting. In 1990 Adams married the man who photographed her for Penthouse, and they had a son a year later Boggs played in twelve consecutive All-Star games and was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005. The case demonstrates that many sports fans are loyal to their idols, and that even negative publicity cannot always keep a star from achieving Hall of Fame status.

  SEXUAL ASSAULT ROCKS GLEN RIDGE, NEW JERSEY

  On March 1, 1989, a group of high school athletes sexually assaulted a mentally disabled girl in the basement of a home in Glen Ridge, New Jersey.

  The incident shook and divided the residents of Glen Ridge, who had compared their town to a Norman Rockwell painting and cherished the squeaky-clean image of their little corner of small-town America.

  Christopher Archer lured the girl with the promise of a date with his brother, Paul, to the basement of a home where twins Kyle and Kevin Scherzer lived. The girl had an IQ of 64 and the mental capacity of an eight year old.

  The Archers, the Scherzers, Peter Quigley, and Bryant Grober commanded the girl to perform sex acts on herself and on them. All seven would eventually be convicted or enter plea agreements. Another student, Richard Corcoran, would stand trial separately after he made statements incriminating the others.

  He was the son of a Glen Ridge police lieutenant. The boys used a broomstick and a baseball practice bat to sexually assault the girl.

  The young lady did not tell anyone about the rape for several days, but the boys bragged, and rumors of the sexual incident quickly spread through the school and community. The victim eventually disclosed the event to her swimming coach, and seven boys were arrested. Many in the community, however, blamed the victim for the incident, citing previous incidents of sexually inappropriate behavior. Students generally supported the boys, all of whom were athletes and very popular. One student even talked the girl into saying the acts were consensual. Later investigations revealed several other incidents of violence and misbehavior by the accused, including several against the same young lady.

  In 1993 the seven defendants were tried for the offenses. The defense aggressively attacked the victim with what the New Jersey Law Journal would dub the ''Lolita Defense,'' in which they attempted to paint her as an aggressive seductress and the defendants as the victims. The strategy backfired, as the jury was largely offended by the notion that it was the men who needed protection, as one defense lawyer suggested. The trial was the first in which evidence of rape trauma syndrome was allowed as evidence in a New Jersey court. Four of the men were convicted and three were sentenced to serve some time in detention. Two of the other defendants made plea bargains. Charges were dropped in the case against Richard Corcoran after the parents of the victim decided pursuing the case was not in her best interest. The defendants that were convicted and sentenced have all been released. Corcoran filed and won a lawsuit against the Essex County Prosecutor's Office for malicious prosecution.

  Seven years later, Corcoran joined the Army. Police made no fewer than six visits to his home, responding to domestic disturbance calls. He later shot his estranged wife and another soldier (they survived) before turning the gun on himself in a tragedy near Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Corcoran had attended a mandated anger-management class at the post that very afternoon.

  The Glen Ridge case became the basis for a 1997 book by Bernard Lefkowitz titled, Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb, which later became a made-for-television movie. For many who read them, the news coverage, book, and movie opened their eyes to the dangers of a culture that permits an ''anything goes'' mentality when it comes to athletes. Others continue to maintain that this sort of thing can never happen in their backyard.

  NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS SEXUALLY HARASS LISA OLSON

  Boston Herald sportswriter Lisa Olson sought a behind-the-scenes resolution when she claimed that players for the New England Patriots sexually harassed her as she conducted interviews in the team's locker room on September 17, 1990. What she got was a highly publicized brawl that largely cast her as out of place in a man's world, followed by threats and harassment from the Patriots' fans.

  The event in question took place during a practice-day interview with cornerback Maurice Hurst. Other players gathered around, some naked, and began to fondle themselves and harass her with questions like, ''Is that what you want?''3 The players were later identifled as Zeke Mowatt, Michael Timpson, and Robert Perryman. Olson and her editors approached Patriots officials with hopes of a quick resolution, se
eking only an apology, but hopes for that were scuttled when the Boston Globe broke the story four days later and team owner Victor Kiam foolishly called the complaint ''a flyspeck in the ocean'' and labeled Olson, ''a classic bitch.''4

  The National Football League launched an investigation and appointed Philip Heymann to lead it. The result was a 108-page report that concluded Mowatt fondled himself while making inappropriate comments. Patriots' media relations director James Oldham said he witnessed Perryman gyrating his naked hips behind the reporter and also commenting to her while Timpson joined in. The report also concluded that the players believed Olson was a ''looker'' and they sought to teach her a lesson. It was important to note, as the battle about whether women should be in the locker room raged, that Olson had attempted to interview Hurst outside, but he wanted to talk inside the locker room instead. NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue fined the team and the players. The Patriots' fine ($25,000) was taken directly from the team's share of television revenue and Timpson paid his $5,000, according to Tagliabue. The other players, however, never paid their fines, and the league, facing appeals and lawsuits from the athletes, never forced the issue.

  When it appeared the incident could not become any uglier, Kiam demonstrated shockingly poor taste by cracking a joke at a banquet attended by about 750 people, honoring Kiam and fourteen others. The comment, which alluded to Olson and the first Gulf War, which was ongoing, suggested that she and Iraqis had all seen ''Patriot missiles up close.''5 Kiam apologized, but the damage was done. It would cost him more than an apology, as Olson decided she had had enough of the belligerent owner and filed a civil suit. She named the team, Kiam, Oldham, and the three players in the suit. Citing a legal strategy to save money by avoiding the legal fees of a trial, the team settled the case. Media outlets reported that Olson received between $250,000 and $700,000 or more. The Patriots organization called those figures grossly exaggerated. Olson announced that she would use the money to establish a journalism scholarship at Northern Arizona University, her alma mater, and said that the decision to settle was made in light of her father being diagnosed with cancer.

  Olson's life was terribly disrupted in the aftermath of the incident and the enormous media attention it attracted. Over 1,400 news articles were written within two years and countless television broadcasts debated the issue. According to her own accounts, Olson received more than one hundred obscene phone calls and hundreds of pieces of hate mail. Her apartment was broken into twice, and someone wrote, ''Bitch, leave Boston or die,'' in the foyer. Her car tires were slashed and a note was left on the window that warned it would be her neck the next time.6 She claimed that private investigators were harassing her, hired by Kiam to determine whether she had ever had an abortion and at what age she lost her virginity. To escape the mounting pressure from the harassment and threats, Olson left the country, taking a job in Australia at the Sydney Daily Telegraph Mirror. It took her a few years to return to covering sports. Even in Australia, coaches who knew of the scandal harassed her at events she covered. Sociologists forwarded theories on why Olson suffered such indignities.

  A study prepared by Mary Jo Kane and Lisa Disch for the Sociology of Sport Journal concluded that a woman in the locker room, as a sports writer, ''represents a threat so profound that she must be displaced from her role as a social critic of male performance and reassigned to her 'appropriate' role of female sex object.''7 Other female sports reporters acknowledged that when people, male or female, learned of their job, the first question asked tended to be, ''So, what's it like in the locker room?''8

  MIKE TYSON CONVICTED OF RAPE

  Heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was known to be exceedingly aggressive, both in and out of the ring. In 1986, at just twenty years old, Tyson became the youngest heavyweight champion ever when he knocked out Trevor Berbick. He defended his title for four years, finally being knocked out in 1990 by James ''Buster'' Douglas. Over his seven-year career, Tyson had amassed a 41-1 record, with thirty-six knockouts. Estimates were that he earned $100 million in prize money. His career came to a screeching halt when he was accused and then convicted of raping a beauty pageant contestant. The case captured the public attention and split Americans, many of whom became entrenched into either the belief that he was a despicable rapist or that she was a conniving liar who sought to cash in from her encounter with a star athlete. The case was voted the top sports story in 1992 by the Associated Press.

  On February 10, 1992, twenty-six-year-old Mike Tyson was convicted of raping eighteen-year-old Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel, where he was a judge for the Ms. Black America pageant and Washington was a contestant. Tyson claimed the sex was consensual. The jury unanimously convicted Tyson, and he was sentenced to ten years in prison, with four of them suspended. In November 1992 the Washington Times reported that Tyson had infected Washington with a venereal disease when he raped her. Her attorney did not specify which venereal disease.

  Tyson supporters claimed he was falsely accused, and that the case was yet another example of how black men are not treated fairly in the criminal justice system. Democratic representative William A. Crawford of Indiana claimed at a July 1992 rally, ''Many people in this city, this state and throughout the nation, myself included, sincerely feel Mike Tyson did not receive a fair trial.

  No act of force or violence, nor even the explicit or implicit threat of force or violence, was demonstrated or proven in the trial.''9 Another high-profile supporter, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, pronounced, ''Mike liked women; he didn't make no bones about that. Desiree wasn't silly. Desiree was smart.''10 Farrakhan also said the pageant made a huge mistake in inviting Tyson to be a judge and to meet the candidates. ''You were bringing a hawk into a chicken yard and the chicken got eaten up.''11

  It was later revealed that Ms. Washington had discussed book and movie deals with advisors prior to the trial, which she had previously denied. Tyson employed high-profile defense attorney Alan Dershowitz to file an appeal in which he maintained Washington's desire to make money provided a motive for her to fabricate the charges. Two of the jurors said Tyson should have been given a new trial, as that information would have made them doubt Washington's credibility. One even said, ''In hindsight, it looks like a woman raped a man.''12 Another juror explained she might not have convicted Tyson had she known that Washington ''hung out in night clubs since she was 16 and isn't the innocent young girl presented in court.''13 Washington explained that she had signed a contingency-fee agreement prior to the trial, but did so because she thought that it was to assist her in navigating the media onslaught brought on by the trial, not to make money.

  Mike Tyson curiously smiles and shows his handcuffs as he is transported to prison in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was sentenced to six years for rape of a beauty pageant contestant. Courtesy of AP Photo/Jeff Atteberry.

  Tyson was released from prison for good behavior after serving three years of his sentence. He remained on probation for four years and was required to undergo psychological counseling as well as perform one hundred hours of community service each year. In June 1995 Tyson settled a lawsuit with Desiree Washington for an undisclosed sum. The settlement was in lieu of a trial in which Washington sought compensatory damages for assault, battery, false imprisonment, and emotional distress. Tyson has continued to maintain his innocence. At a 1995 welcome-home celebration in Harlem, New York, Tyson was asked if he was sorry.

  Long-time promoter Don King jumped in to respond, ''Sorry for what? Come on!'' Upon release from prison, Tyson immediately announced he would return to fighting. He also initiated a new charitable foundation for children.14

  Tyson returned to the ring after his release, but was a shadow of his former self. He also continued to demonstrate erratic, and sometimes criminal, behavior. He famously bit Evander Holyfield's ear during a boxing match, which many argued brought shame to himself and the sport. He later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault in 1999 and to cocaine possession and driving unde
r the influence in 2007. Ken Jones of the London Independent commented, ''Even before Mike Tyson dramatically unifled the heavyweight championship by knocking out Michael Spinks in 91 seconds on 27 June 1988, it could be sensed that he was as likely to end up in a penal establishment as the Hall of Fame.''15 Tyson will live in infamy, as much because of his antics as his athletic ability.

  MARV ALBERT PLEADS GUILTY TO ASSAULT AND BATTERY

  In 1997 fifty-six-year-old sports broadcaster Marv Albert, the voice of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers and the lead announcer for NBC basketball, was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery. Albert had allegedly attacked Vanessa Perhach, a woman with whom he had a ten-year sexual relationship. She said Albert had thrown Perhach on a bed in a Virginia hotel room, bit her on the back more than a dozen times, and forced her to perform oral sex. Perhach alleged that Albert angrily attacked her because she refused to allow another man to join in their sexual activity. Albert's attorneys said Perhach had a history of retribution against lovers and was a chronic liar.16

  Albert, who was engaged at the time, abruptly ended the trial when he pleaded guilty to the charges. He said he wanted to end the ordeal before it brought more misery to him, his fiance, and the rest of his family. The two days of testimony featured accounts of Albert's sexual activities, including his penchant for threesomes and his fondness for wearing women's underwear.