I am no journalistic scholar, but I know this much: A sports writer is not supposed to accept money and valuable gifts from athletes or teams. Babies and child-support payments don't even show up on the radar screen.
You can accept food, and lots of it. Court-side seats, yes. Parking stalls, yes. Team brochures, statistics, locker-room access, yes, yes, yes. But money, no. You can't accept cash from athletes. However, I don't know about grocery money and children.That's a new one.
The Julius Erving-Samantha Stevenson affair breaks new ground for the sports-writing profession. To recap: Last week Julius Erving -- a.k.a. Doctor J -- admitted that he was the father of tennis player Alexandra Stevenson, who advanced to the semifinals at Wimbledon.
Dr. J, we were told, "had a relationship" with Alexandra's mother, Samantha, who was a "freelance" sports writer for 30 years. Erving, married since 1972, says he has been providing financial support for Alexandra, if not actually Samantha the sports writer.
Nobody had ever considered this problem in the sports-writing community. I'll bet Red Smith never had this problem. Or Jim Murray. A new chapter will have to be added to the Journalism Ethics textbook: And Baby Makes Three (subhead: What to do when your sports writer comes back with more than an interview).
It's always a good idea to get to know your subjects, of course -- but not in the Biblical sense. Stevenson covered Erving's team, the 76ers, but that's probably understating things, isn't it? Apparently, she went a little beyond "covering." Right into undercovering. Maybe that's what they meant by "freelance." Anyway, I think it's safe to say that their "relationship" failed to fall under the broad heading of "professional distance."
This is the worst thing to happen to women's sports writing since Lisa Olsen and the New England Patriots' locker room. It seriously violates journalism ethics, not to mention certain wedding vows. At the very least, it compromises the reporter's objectivity. Stevenson had a job to do. She had to write about whether Erving played well or if he scored the previous night.
A-hem. And so forth.
The situation presents all kinds of potential problems. Stevenson might have reported out of spite, for instance. She might have written, "Erving scored 23 points while his ever-present, clinging wife sat in the stands having a bad hair day." Or she might have reported out of infatuation: "Julius was wonderful last night and played a cute game."
You just don't know what you're going to get.
Until women sports writers came along, nothing like this had happened in the profession. Mostly because male reporters can't get pregnant, even though most of them look like it. But also because sports writers tend to look like Radar O'Reilly and dress somewhere between rumpled and slovenly. When it comes to sports writers, Oscar Madison really was not that far off the mark.
On the other hand, male sports writers can't worry about the sort of business that Stevenson got caught up in, mainly because most of them haven't completed the first step: getting a date. That's a long ways from Step 15: "tryst."
Beyond the questions of objectivity, the Erving-Stevenson liaison sets women's sports writers back a couple of decades. It reinforces the stereotype of female reporters as groupies entering locker rooms filled with naked or semi- naked athletes in search of more than a good story. Now the sports-writing profession has learned, as did the military, that when men and women are thrown together for idealistic notions of political correctness and equality, things happen that are driven by urges stronger than political correctness and equality. Ask Bill Clinton.
Poor Doctor J. Talk about a mistake having a long shelf life. Nineteen years later it comes back to haunt him. And that's after he's made regular monthly payments on it. What was he thinking? Sex with a sports writer!? It boggles the mind. Most pro athletes fraternize with groupies or cheerleaders or even their wives. They'd rather date Lassie than a sports writer.
When pro athletes want to interact with sports writers outside of a professional setting, usually it involves nasty words. This must have been a very difficult admission for Dr. J because when he said he had "a relationship with (Alexander's) mother in 1980," what he was really saying was, "I had sex with a sports writer."
I don't think this is what journalists have in mind when they talk about getting up close and personal.