The "good guys" narrative in sports

On Saturday, I walked around West Hollywood with my headphones in, listening to Your Smith songs. I didn’t want to be distracted by a TV on a patio bar on Santa Monica Blvd. and catch a glimpse of the LSU/Alabama game. It was the biggest game of the weekend, maybe the entire season, and the narrative around it was that it was the good guys—the LSU Tigers—taking on the evil empire of Nick Saban’s Alabama, which I just didn’t have the stomach for.

For a lot of 2019, I was working on a story with Jessica Luther, my frequent reporting partner and very good friend, about LSU football. The story was for Deadspin, which is why I am telling you about it in my newsletter that used to be about the Olive Garden, rather than sharing a link to a full story. But it was about a police report that went into detail in alleging how folks in LSU athletics responded when they were told about (now-former) wide receiver Drake Davis’s abuse of his girlfriend (he pled guilty in March). It was about LSU coach Ed Orgeron describing Ed Ingram, who was awaiting trial at the time on two charges of sexual assault, as “a great young man” he “would like to have on the team.” (The charges were dismissed and Orgeron got his wish; he told reporters that, when Ingram returned to his teammates, “they all cheered for him.”) It put things like the fact that two LSU football players were not charged after they were involved in the shooting death of a man last December alongside the Baton Rouge sheriff having presented Orgeron with a key to the jail, as a funny joke.

We never completed a draft of the story. A few months ago—before the official death knell of Deadspin, but after the writing was clearly on the wall—our editor, Diana Moskovitz, gave us a call and told us that she couldn’t guarantee that we would have the full institutional support of the outlet in publishing the story, and that we might want to look elsewhere for a place to publish it. But, of course, where else do you go at this point?

If the story had been at a Texas university, we’d have done it for Texas Monthly, where I’d taken a staff job since we began work on the story—but LSU is outside of our jurisdiction there. So we just sat on it, knowing that there were a lot of things, already out there and in public, that made the “LSU are the good guys” narrative that was steadily building feel like it was missing a whole lot of context.

And then, this weekend, LSU—with Ingram in the lineup, with one of the players involved in that fatal shooting rushing for the game-sealing touchdown—beat Alabama and were greeted as liberators in the sports world, and I kept my headphones in to tune it out.

Sports are more fun when there are good guys, and being a die-hard fan of a team requires you to think about them that way. I ran into an old editor a few weeks ago and we talked about journalism and sports and some of the depressing stories I’d worked on in recent years. You were a sports guy, she asked. Has that been ruined for you?

And the answer was yeah, pretty much. I mean, I still watch games. It is still a very good product on TV, and it is still part of how I connect to my family and some friends I don’t have much else to talk about with these days. Exciting things to watch are still exciting things to watch. But to be a fan, to be someone who lives and dies by how his team does on the field, like I was a few years ago? You have to believe, on a fundamental, little-kid level, that the people who wear your team’s uniform are the good guys, and that the teams you don’t like are the bad guys. And I don’t have that ability anymore.

There’s little that’s genuinely atypical about what we learned when reporting on LSU. (The fact that, when Drake Davis was still just a promising young athlete who had yet to commit to a university, a very wealthy LSU booster became his legal guardian, was admittedly a surprise to me.) But for the most part, it was just sports. When we were in the midst of it, I was on a call with Jessica and Diana and said something like, I think this story is going to be a big deal, and Diana was more cautious. Maybe, Diana said, but it’s a big school. It’s not going to shock people.

She’s right, ultimately. After all, most of this is already out there, and that’s not what we talk about when we talk about LSU. Even the good dudes of sports media call them “heroic.” 

If you pay attention to sports, you know that the stuff we were investigating is common, that it could be any team, any school, any organization. There are sometimes good people who work actively to ensure that their programs are run well and in ways that their fans can be proud of—but if those coaches turn in a few losing seasons, they’ll be replaced, because sports doesn’t actually care about that stuff. It may not happen everywhere, but it can happen anywhere. I get why LSU fans are excited, and I get why the sports media world is having fun declaring Orgeron and his team to be the scrappy underdogs taking on the evil powers that be. But when the game is on, these days, I’d rather just keep my headphones in.