A Sports Post That's Not Really A Sports Post

King Kaufman, the World's Greatest Sportswriter, has a column up today (you have to watch an ad, but it's worth it) in which he asks, essentially, just how much are we willing to absolve for the home team?

The jumping off point, unsurprisingly, is Barry Bonds. Bonds has received a hero's welcome during the Giants home opening series after being vehemently jeered during San Francisco's visit to San Diego. Kaufman, who's been one of the most reasonable and intelligent commentators around on Bonds since the steroid allegations began to swirl in earnest, has this to say about the love-in for Bonds on Thursday:

It's one thing to forgive and forget the wearing of a visiting uniform and embrace the new guy on the home team, or to turn on a hometown star when he comes back in road duds. Harmless high jinks. It's another to put aside your values, your sense of right and wrong, when they get in the way of root, root, rooting for the home team.

I think that's about right. To be clear about this, I don't think there's anything wrong with rooting for someone you think is a bad person, or at any rate, someone who has acted badly to play well for the team you support. But singling such a person out for special approbation, as Kaufman cites Giants fans doing with Bonds, is more than a little weird. I don't think the twenty-five guys on the Blue Jays roster are likely to be any better or worse than baseball players as a class. So while I root for them to do well collectively, and while I, like every fan, have personal favourites based on the way they play-Roy Halladay, in my case-I can't imagine that I'd keep wearing my Halladay jersey or rooting for ex-Jays like Orlando Hudson, Carlos Delgado and Dave Bush if any of them were convicted of sexual assault or something.

As, for example, members of the Duke lacrosse team are likely to be. This horrible little story, which Kaufman alludes to at the end of his column about Bonds, isn't just a sports story-there are obvious and important currents of race, gender and class involved as well-but I find the unseemly aspects of locker room culture the whole thing brings to light to be horribly fascinating in particular.

What creates a culture of entitlement so entrenched that these men, if they're guilty, felt they could rape a woman in public and get away with it? How, precisely, do the 44 guys who apparently were around while this was going on but were not themselves rapists not DO ANYTHING to stop it? Does the occasionally nigh-fascist group ethos of sports teams play into the second question? Is Kaufman right to point to the privileges of athletes writ large as a partial answer to the first?

As those of you who know me know, I played four years of varsity level soccer, at a school where athletics, while respected, certainly had no particular cachet and with a group of guys who were a much better group of people than the Duke lacrosse team appears to have been. Those caveats aside, I've certainly seen and participated in my fair share of team-driven stupidities, and I think there's definitely something about groups of young men united in physical activities that leads to "team-building exercises" ranging from the moronic to the criminal.

I certainly don't propose banning team sports or anything nutty like that, but administrators have to be better supervisors of teams if this sort of thing isn't going to be a rare but regular occurence. Our coach at King's used to tell us, at the practice immediately preceding the rookie party, "Remember, (nudge, nudge) there's to be no underage drinking at this thing." I can't help but wonder if the Duke lacrosse coach, who has now rightly resigned, told his boys something similar.

Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money has links to discussions of other aspects of the whole sorry affair.