The Jordan Conspiracy and an Unlikely "Deep Throat" Analogy

I just watched the "30 for 30" film on Michael Jordan's season-long experiment with baseball. Like most of these documentary films in Bill Simmons' brainchild that try to explore some of the most remarkable events in the world of sports in the last three decades the Jordan documentary was well done. But one of the arguments that the film (and subsequent coverage) has put forward does not pass the test of stringent argumentation.

For years there has been speculation that Jordan "retired" when he did because he had actually been forced to do so by NBA Commissioner David Stern over Jordan's increasingly reckless penchant for gambling. I don't happen to buy this theory inasmuch as there is no actual evidence for it, and I'm quaint about requiring evidence to prove assertions, not least of all those that are damning. But no matter the flaws in the theory, the following argument still does not work:

"It's just nothing more than crackpot theory," he says, sounding exasperated. "Every journalist I talked to said, 'Don't you realize, Ron?' — Every Chicago sports journalist, every national journalist — 'We went down there, we spent a year looking for the smoking gun! We would have won the Pulitzer! If we had gotten it, we would have been spurred!'"

There are at least two major flaws with this argument:

This generation of sports journalists is the same one that managed to miss steroid use in baseball until well after the story developed. And sports journalists have long had an interesting and conflicted relationship with the athletes they have covered. The argument that it did not exist simply because journalists were looking for it is barely an argument at all, never mind being a good one.

Furthermore, and more importantly, it's not as if there had to be a large number of participants in a coverup. If Stern felt like he had the goods on Jordan (and again -- I don't think there were any goods to be had) he could have simply said "Michael, take some time off and this does not become a Pete Rose situation. Fight me and it does." Only two people had to know about this arrangement, two people who both would have had every interest not to talk. There would not have to be a smoking gun at all if these are the only two people who knew about it.

Think of an imperfect but not inapt analogy: Deep Throat's identity. As high as sports journalists might think the stakes are in what they do, political journalism covers a world where the stakes are much higher and the participants have actual power. And yet for three decades no one was able to uncover the identity of Deep Throat despite the fact that more people of necessity had to know about Mark Felt than would have needed to know about a Jordan suspension (at minimum Felt, Woodward, Bernstein, and Ben Bradlee -- and that is a bare and implausible minimum. Forget for now that most of Woodward and Bernstein's historical role is the stuff of myth -- they became cultural icons despite not actually getting most of the story right.)

I don't buy the whole "Jordan on secret suspension for gambling" conspiracy theory. But its plausibility does not rest on the mighty investigative acumen of sports journalists, most of whom only popped in for a Jordan story here or there simply because the whole thing was so surreal and not because they were deeply engaged in debunking the retirement story.

An Odd Odd Man Out

Uh oh. Yet another memoir is having aspersions cast upon its veracity. Odd Man Out is a memoir about a season in the low minor leagues that has garnered considerable press in large part because its author, Matt McCarthy, is a graduate of Yale and is now a medical doctor. Sports Illustrated recently ran an excerpt of the book. But now The New York Times has done some snooping and something is awry.

The accusations are of two types, one damning, one (possibly) less so. McCarthy claims that he took prodigious notes in journals during the time. Yet there are clearly some factual errors, and enough of them are substantial. This is fairly damning, especially since as of now McCarthy has refused to show his journals to anyone. The issue appears to be that his journals are undated. If so, this might be sloppy, but also would explain some of the factual inconsistencies.

The second accusations come from people who insist that they never could or would have said or done certain things. In almost all cases, the things they claim not to have said or done are offensive and make them look bad. These accusations I take with a grain of salt. Anyone who has ever spent any time in a locker room or on a road trip with male athletes and coaches knows damned well the sorts of things that guys will say and do. As a general rule, athletes say piggish things all the time. None would want those words exposed necessarily, but when someone exposes them, a denial does not make them untrue. I sure as hell am glad no one had designs on writing a memoir about my high school sports teams, or even my college track team, as trust me, being at Williams does not make guys any more sensitive about bodily functions, physical abnormalities, women, or basically anyone who can be made fun of. If there is any solace it is that guys are every bit as awful to their teammates as they are in discussing outside targets of their mirth, mockery, or meanness.

Of course if someone who was never on the Williams track team were to write a memoir, would anyone be surprised? The genre is beset with difficulties to the point where maybe we need a five-year moratorium on no-names writing them.

Beating the Bushes

At The Boston Globe Peter Funt has a fun little column on minor league baseball team names. I've been to my share of minor league games all across the United States and have seen the Hickory Crawdads and the Cedar Rapids Kernels and the Midland Rockhounds and Asheville among many others play in cozy ballparks with wacky local giveaways and quaint traditions. I love Major League baseball and my ideal game will always involve Fenway Park. But there is something about minor league baseball that embodies the sport as America's Pastime no matter the status of football in the sporting hierarchy.

[Thanks to Ahistoricality for correcting my Iowa geography.]