SI story on Big Ben

Again, what is news? Was Pierce's GQ story that revealed Tiger Woods to be a typically crass and immature, or normal, 21-year-old, news? Or would it have been better to buy into the Tiger-as-messiah story Gary Smith offered? Which was closer to the truth and which was free and false PR? Which story did Tiger's people love? Was either news?

 

Interesting piece, but very little new info, which is rare for SI.

I kind of hope that with the Tiger Woods and Roethlisberger scandals more athletes get called out for being the douchebags they are and I'm not talking about "Oh, he was mean to the media." I'm talking about guys who are borderline rapists who cheat on their wives, abuse drugs and alcohol while the public thinks they're wonderful.

 

Agree... I guess I'm glad they do since I let my subscription run out as soon a couple years back.

 

It was with John Rocker.

 

Why do you care if borderline rapists who cheat on their wives and abuse drugs and alcohol are assholes to the general public; if they don't tip well; if they tell a bellhop to go eff himself? You really care about that? Is the fact that they're borderline rapists who cheat on their wives and abuse drugs and alcohol not enough?

 

I enjoyed the story about Big Ben asking out the woman in front of her husband.

 

So Pierce should have wrote the Gene Banks story?

 

Unless someone scooped him. But I imagine he would have come a long way regardless.

 

That's the thing. I remember the Rocker story being front page news for weeks when at the same time a Arizona reliever (albeit not a big name player like Rocker) had been arrested for putting a gun in his wife's mouth. Even in Phoenix, the Rocker story got bigger play.

 

Pierce was right to write what he did because so few people had any idea what Tiger was like and this was a rare case where he actually seemed human. It never bothered me that Tiger told a couple dirty jokes, but watching everyone react to it was really amazing.

 

Again, how many magazine pieces do we see these days where the subject participated little, or not at all? Not many. Why? Because they're hard. And magazines like to have the athlete posed on the cover, playing along. (Especially ESPN the Mag, which I don't even think runs anything other than posed/staged cover shots.)

I'm not expecting the 29-year-old guy from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to write the definitive Ben Roethlisberger piece, because it's really hard. It's hard to have the stones to do it, and it's hard to deal with the backlash that would almost certainly surface when it ran. But we can, and should, want the best of the best (which is what SI and ESPN should be, whether your agree that they are or not) to strive to get us the most accurate and honest portrait of an athlete. And they don't need to wait until the tide of public opinion turns before doing so. That's what makes the best journalists the best. Sometimes the truth is uncomfortable. Vanity Fair and the New Yorker write about people all the time without their participation, and no one says "John Edwards is an asshole? Why is that news? Lots of politicians are assholes."