 | In addition to delivering a Poynter Lecture, Michael Wilbon (left) spoke to students at a master's tea in Pierson College (above) and met with Yale Daily News sports writers. |
While watching an athlete score a touchdown or hit a ball out of the park can still give sports commentator Michael Wilbon a thrill, he believes that getting an education is really the most important goal in the game of life.
Wilbon, sports columnist for The Washington Post and co-host of the ESPN show "Pardon the Interruption," came to Yale on Feb. 23 as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.
At a luncheon with Athletic Director Tom Beckett and other administrators, Wilbon said it was unfortunate that some successful athletes tell young people that they should get an education so that they will have something "to fall back on" if they are unable to have a career in athletics or the entertainment world. That message, Wilbon said, ignores the reality that a good education is a critical need for all but a small handful of people who are able to make a living as athletes or entertainers.
In fact, so committed is Wilbon to promoting education for young people that he is donating his honorarium from the Poynter Fund toward a scholarship at Northwestern University, his alma mater.
During his stay on campus, Wilbon met with sports writers from the Yale Daily News, took part in a master's tea at Pierson College and presented a Poynter Lecture at Sudler Hall. The topics he addressed at these meetings ranged from his work covering sports to specific players to controversies, such as the recent revelation that many professional baseball players use steroids.
It is not surprising that Major League Baseball ignored its players' steroid use, contended Wilbon, because "the culture of baseball not only allows cheating, it encourages cheating."
Wilbon told the audience gathered in Sudler Hall for his Poynter Lecture that he can understand why athletes might take performance-enhancing steroids.
"That's the nature of competition: You want to get better. And people will do pretty much whatever they can do to get better. You compete to win, especially if you think that the guy you're competing against is already doing it," he said.
"I don't begrudge the players for that," Wilbon said. "I hold a lot of this against Major League Baseball for not having a testing program."
Taking steroids is cheating, he stressed, noting, "Even though it wasn't against baseball's rules, it's illegal in the United States." From scuffing the ball to throwing "spitters" to using pine tar on a bat, "there is cheating in baseball," said the sports journalist, "but it isn't illegal in the United States to scuff a baseball."
Wilbon believes that "baseball turned its head [to the steroid use] because it wanted the long ball," calling fan-thrilling home runs "the sexiest thing that baseball has to offer." In fact, most fans could not care less about steroid use for the same reason, he asserted.
"The people who should really be upset about this," he said, "are Henry Aaron and Ernie Banks and Willie Mays ... the people who made the game and hit legitimate home runs, who had to hit those home runs on aching, arthritic knees that could not work out in the off-season."
Asked about the controversy over another ballplayer -- Pete Rose, who was expelled from baseball for betting on games by then-baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti, former president of Yale -- Wilbon admitted uncertainty over whether the hitter would ever be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The sports journalist described Rose as "a great, great, great baseball player" who would be chosen by anyone putting together a team of all-time bests. For that reason, if it were up to him, said Wilbon, he would probably vote to include the hitter in the Hall of Fame -- with the caveat that Rose's ban be mentioned prominently on his plaque, an idea the sports journalist credited to his "Pardon the Interruption" co-host Tony Kornheiser.
However, because Rose recently admitted in his autobiography that he bet on games (something he had denied for years), "I think a lot of people who were ready to put him in have changed their minds now," said Wilbon.
Of allegations that players might be induced to cheat in another sports field -- pro-football -- the journalist was more skeptical.
While describing NFL fans as the "biggest nationalized betting pool in America," Wilbon dismissed an audience member's contention that Tennessee Titan quarterback Neil O'Donnell could have been bribed to throw a game. Given the high salaries pro quarterbacks now command, the sports writer said, "No one bookmaker has that kind of money to give to a player."
Back when players made between $20,000 and $40,000 for the season, "there used to be great reasons for a player to throw a game," explained Wilbon. "They had to work in the off-seasons. Players sold cars in the off-season. They sold encyclopedias. In the Sixties, NFL players used to have basketball teams. They were semi-pro teams, and they would play on the undercard of an NBA game."
A football player today who makes millions of dollars per season "has no incentive," he argued, "not only that, he could lose everything he has."
Instead, said Wilbon, "it's college players who are susceptible now to gamblers, to bookmakers, because they're not getting paid. ... If I'm a gambler and I want to get somebody to throw something, I'd go to somebody who has nothing."
An award-winning columnist who has covered sports for The Washington Post for 25 years, Wilbon joined ESPN's daily sports commentary show "Pardon the Interruption" three-and-a-half years ago.
"Television is fun. But what I am at heart is a writer," he told the audience. "That's what moves me -- the creation of a column, a thousand words. I do that three times a week at least."
Nevertheless, he noted, "It's been fascinating to see how powerful television is. It is so much more powerful than newspapers.
"Newspapers are in trouble," declared Wilbon. "Newspapers are a dying industry, and that saddens me ... USA Today is one of the few papers in the country gaining circulation, and USA Today based its format on television." That newspaper's editors understood "how the industry would be evolving," he said, "that it would go further away from the printed word in long form to short chunks of news in a burst on a screen.
"That transition has led more sports journalists to television. So many of the people you see on television right now were newspaper people," said Wilbon, noting that his ESPN co-host, Kornheiser, also writes for The Washington Post.
"It leads me to wonder about the future of my chosen profession and what's going to happen to it," he noted. "It's a matter of survival for a lot of us to figure out what we're going to do with this old and dear profession."
-- By LuAnn Bishop
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