TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112591/1125992.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.9 KB | 190 lines

                                                                                SOCIETY, Page 77

The Dangerous World of Wannabes


Magic Johnson's plight brings fear into pro locker rooms across
the country and spotlights the riskiest athletic perk:
promiscuous sex

By JOHN ELSON -- Reported by Sally B. Donnelly/Phoenix and David
E. Thigpen/New York, with other bureaus


    Baseball players call them "Annies." To riders on the rodeo
circuit, they are "buckle bunnies." To most other athletes, they
are just "the wannabes" or "the girls." You'll find them hanging
out anywhere they might catch an off-duty sports hero's eye and
fancy: at Los Angeles' private Forum Club, at jock-oriented
watering holes like Mickey Mantle's in Manhattan or Bigsby's in
Chicago, in the lobbies of hotels where teams on the road check
in. To the athletes who care to indulge them, and many do, these
readily available groupies offer pro sport's ultimate perk: free
and easy recreational sex, no questions asked.

    The sex may be free, but there is a price for the
life-style. In the Nov. 18 issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Earvin
("Magic") Johnson attests that he contracted the virus that
causes AIDS, and which forced his premature retirement from the
Los Angeles Lakers, "by having unprotected sex with a woman who
has the virus." And who was that woman? Magic does not know.
"Before I was married," he wrote, "I truly lived the bachelor's
life . . . As I traveled around N.B.A. cities, I was never at
a loss for female companionship . . . After I arrived in L.A.
in 1979, I did my best to accommodate as many women as I could
-- most of them through unprotected sex."

    Like most other Americans, pro athletes were generally
shocked and saddened by Johnson's plight. His fellow players of
the National Basketball Association, however, had special
reason for concern about Johnson's flagrant promiscuity. It has
been common practice for some pro players to share the favors
of groupies who beguiled them. Had the woman who infected
Johnson passed the virus to other players? Magic's pregnant wife
Cookie tested negative for HIV, but had he given the virus to
other women who were still out there sleeping with the stars?
Says Charles Barkley, star forward of the Philadelphia 76ers:
"There are an awful lot of men, women and children sweating it
out in this league. If you don't practice safe sex after being
scared like this, you're out of your mind." The possibilities
were frightening enough to get some athletes thinking about the
unthinkable: abstinence and marital fidelity.

    The presence of sexually available women on the sidelines
of sport is nothing new. After all, Babe Ruth's appetite for
women was as insatiable as his lust for food and booze. In his
newly published memoir, A View from Above, Hall of Fame center
Wilt Chamberlain boasts of having slept with 20,000 women -- an
average of 1.4 a day for 40 years.

    Many experts believe the groupie subculture flourished as
professional sports became ever bigger as a business. Athletes
now expect pampering off the court or field as long as they
perform well on it. The notion that athletic prowess and sexual
attraction go together reaches down to every budding jock who
swaggered across a junior high schoolyard. Colleges routinely
line up young campus beauties to orient athletically talented
freshmen who have signed letters of intent. And the sexual
mystique of the college sports hero lives on. Says Bill Little,
sports information director at the University of Texas at
Austin: "When I went to school here, girls always swooned around
the football players. Now they do something about it."

    When these stars hit the big leagues, with salaries to
match their talents and egos, opportunities and temptations
multiply. Says Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, and a personnel adviser to
two pro teams: "We are looking at an institution so influenced
by images of virility, masculinity, potency and sensuousness
that sex and sport have almost become synonymous."

    Who are the groupies, and what do they want? Observers of
the scene say they are usually of college age or slightly
older. Mainly they seek money, attention and the glamour of
associating with celebrated and highly visible "hard bodies."
According to a 31-year-old who has had affairs with athletes in
two sports, "for women, many of whom don't have meaningful work,
the only way to identify themselves is to say whom they have
slept with. A woman who sleeps around is called a whore. But a
woman who sleeps with Magic Johnson is a woman who has slept
with Magic Johnson. It's almost as if it gives her legitimacy."

    Wannabes are usually too smart to approach athletes on the
playing fields. But they know all the after-game hangouts and
usually can find out where visiting teams are staying. "We never
reveal where we stay when we go on the road," says Arthur
Triche, an executive with the N.B.A.'s Atlanta Hawks. "But some
of them are willing to call every hotel in town. When night
falls, they move in. You see some of the same faces from town
to town. They're like card collectors." And they are seldom shy
about intentions. Recalls Miles McPherson, a former pro-football
defensive back turned preacher: "When we went to clubs, women
would be competing in any way to get to us, and it is very easy
to take advantage of that situation. Some said they wanted an
autograph, and then they'd ask you to sign their breasts."

    Says Susie Erickson, fiance of Atlanta Braves pitcher Mike
Bielicki: "I'll be holding Mike's hand, and they'll come up and
whisper, `What are you doing with her when you can be with me?'
Ask any wife or girlfriend to pick out a groupie, and they'll
all point to the same one."

    Groupie action, says a New York City-based sportscaster,
is heaviest in baseball, with basketball second. "Baseball
players have a long season, they're on the road for weeks, and
they stay in one place longer," this announcer explains.
"Basketball players have it easy because they're so recognizable."
Although a few tennis stars like Andre Agassi are invariably
trailed by a mob of squealing fans, that sport is not conducive
to groupie action: the best players stay inaccessible and have
entourages to fend off unwanted wannabes.

    Women athletes, less well known and less well compensated,
are not usually subject to the same degree of temptation as are
men -- though much of that may have to do with a lingering
double standard. "A guy can go out to a bar, have a beer, talk
to the bartender," says tennis star Gabriela Sabatini's coach,
Carlos Kirmayr. "But if you are a woman alone in a strange town,
you are usually stuck in a hotel by yourself."

    The problem for male stars, of course, does not simply
have to do with the wiles of conniving women. Philosophy
professor Dallas Willard of the University of Southern
California notes that a lot of team athletes are ill-equipped
to handle pro sports' off-field pressures. "Many star athletes
today," he says, "are from poor backgrounds -- poor not only in
a financial sense but in terms of education, emotional and
social preparation for life. They do not have the wherewithal
to deal with the availability of sex, the offers to satisfy
almost any gratification." Berkeley's Edwards claims to know of
at least seven cases in which athletes have paid off groupies
who threatened to go public with phony rape or paternity
charges. And as both league officials and team executives
increasingly admit, at some of the places where groupies trawl,
drugs and alcohol are often present in quantity, further
impediments to sensible judgment.

    Just as Magic Johnson is now promoting protection in sex,
franchises are doing more to protect their assets -- the players
-- from temptation. The N.B.A. has a mandatory rookie
orientation program that includes a seminar on AIDS and a
dramatized enactment of problems a player may face regarding
women and friends. More and more N.B.A. teams are flying charter
and unloading their athletes onto buses parked right on the
tarmac. Some teams visiting Phoenix prefer hotels near the
Coliseum to the Westcourt hotel, 10 miles away. The Utah Jazz
books rooms at a hotel in New Jersey even when they are playing
at Madison Square Garden. "New York has too much," says the
team's president, Frank Layden.

    Some stars admit that there is only so much teams can or
should do. "Players have to take more responsibility for
themselves," says Knicks guard Gerald Wilkins. "That's just the
bottom line. No woman can ever be caught with a guy if the guy
doesn't want her to be there. It's just that simple." Kevin
Johnson of the Phoenix Suns concurs. "Nobody's forcing anybody
to do anything," he says. "We have to be in charge of our own
bodies." The penalties for failing in that responsibility have
never been higher.