Men's Journal

Sports columnist Matt Taibbi Photo credit: photo by Michael Pirrocco

Bitching by multimillionaire athletes may be reaching a crescendo, but it’s been a long time coming. Way before there was Barry Zito and Vince Young, there was one Amos Rusie.

by Matt Taibbi

If you’re crazy enough to keep checking it, you can catch one of the all-time great sports subplots unfolding on the Tennessee Titans injury report week after week. Because although quarterback Vince Young was originally knocked out in week one with an ordinary injury — seen on the report as “out (knee)” — as the season wore on, that knee improved and the door opened for a first in NFL history: Would Young become the first pro athlete to be sidelined by a whining condition? Would he be upgraded by coach Jeff Fisher to “doubtful (too much money)”? Or, if he improves on game day, “probable (existential angst)”?

To recap: Young, a college megastar at Texas and a pseudo-hit as an NFL rookie two years ago, was booed for playing badly and then left with a sprained knee during the Titans’ opening-day win over Jacksonville. A few days later he was the talk of the league amid reports that he was suicidal. It seems he was depressed about the jeering and the pressure. When he failed to show up on time for medical tests, Young explained that he was going through emotional hardship. “Let the cloud go away for a minute,” he said.

The incident was the crowning moment in an extraordinary year for multimillionaire athletes whining about how hard their lives are. Young’s case is probably more sympathetic than most, since he seems to be legitimately unwell — as opposed to merely having been so obscenely rich and overprivileged for so long that he’d lost all perspective and forgotten how to, well, just deal with shit.

A better example of that would be San Francisco Giants pitcher Barry Zito, who got paid 14.5 million bucks this year to lead the National League in losses and rack up a 5-plus ERA in the best pitcher’s park north of Petco. “Zicasso” was just an ordinary steadily declining lefty starter a few years ago, until the marriage of a timely release into free agency and, apparently, a very severe brain injury to Giants GM Brian Sabean conspired to drop a seven-year, $126 million contract into his lap. Zito promptly lost two yards off his fastball, started serving up screaming home runs to skinny backup shortstops, and became a kind of reverse gate attraction as the most expensive two-and-a-third-inning starter of all time.

Which was certainly a drag for the Giants, and probably even not all that fun for Zito. But Zito should have at least had the decency to shut the hell up about it. Instead, he brought the New York Times Magazine into his home to photograph him staring gloomily at a lone baseball pretentiously still-lifed on his dinner table, while he talked about how the pressures of his huge contract had, as the mag put it, “separated him from his sprite-like former self.” Zito spoke about how great his life used to be, in the good old days when he was merely league-average rich and famous. “It’s a struggle for someone who’s super-aware, like me,” he said. “It would be a blessing to be a typical jock.”

Once upon a time most athletes were working-class kids who would have chewed nails for free meals and $1,000 a year. Then the mass media age came, and next thing you know, even backup catchers are in the news more often than the Secretary of the Treasury. Pro athletes are drowning in so much money and attention they have started to behave like Upper East Side housewives — bored to tears by all their new furniture and feeling positively repressed by their daily regime of martini lunches and afternoon romps with personal trainers. And we increasingly get to play the role of the psychiatrist who listens to them lie back in their furs and complain about it all.

How did we get to this point? Here, a brief time line of the evolution of sports whining:
March 27, 1897: In the first recorded instance of an American athlete getting what he wants by complaining, National League team owners decide to pool money to pay the salary of Amos “the Hoosier Thunderbolt” Rusie, star pitcher of the New York Giants. Rusie, the league strikeout leader, had been fined $100 for publicly thumbing his nose at Giants owner Andrew Freedman from the mound during a contract dispute. He never has to pay the fine.

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