Even amid talk-show topics that ranged from discussions about the dimensions of Kobe Bryant’s manhood to the prior suicide attempt of the woman who accuses him of rape, the lowest point was probably when somebody who dated the Los Angeles Lakers star for two months in 1997 was the main guest on the top-rated CNN show Larry King Live. Jameika Williams hadn’t spoken to the basketball star once in the intervening six years, cheerfully admitted that none of their dates involved going out together in public, and yet announced that Bryant was a man of impeccable character who couldn’t possibly have done such a thing.
Bryant will walk into a tiny courtroom in Eagle, Colorado, on Wednesday to formally hear the charges against him. In a Rocky Mountain county that is 94% white, one of the most famous black athletes in America is on trial for raping a 19-year-old blonde hotel clerk. He faces between four years and life if found guilty, but his lawyers claim that this married father of one did nothing more than engage in consensual sex with the girl in his room at the Lodge and Spa at the Cordillera ski resort on June 30.
District Attorney Mark Hurlbert claims he has evidence that will prove otherwise. Long before TV cameras begin broadcasting his every courtroom utterance live to a national audience, Hurlbert has achieved the fame and notoriety that his critics say he craves. Just seven months into a job that pays £41,000 a year — Bryant, by contrast, earns an estimated £12.5m from salary and endorsement deals with Nike, McDonald’s and Sprite — the prosecutor has been the subject of so many death threats that the FBI have been brought in. The racial symbolism of a white attorney trying to jail a black sporting hero is lost on nobody.
Hurlbert isn’t the only key player living under very changed circumstances. From the moment the story broke, the family of Bryant’s accuser has been under siege from the media, and every aspect of her life has been scrutinised. So-called friends of the woman have queued up to give interviews about her character. Some say she’s the type of person who would never tell a lie. Others swear she was at a party two days before Bryant was charged, openly discussing the size of his genitalia. Meanwhile, on a website, you can buy anything from bumper stickers to g-strings supporting Bryant’s cause.
Last week, Bryant’s mug-shot was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, sharing space on the news stands with the Globe, the downmarket weekly scandal sheet which published a photo of his blonde accuser on its front page, a black strip over her eyes barely preserving her anonymity.
Advertisement
This has become the summer of Kobe, and the nation is divided as to whether he is guilty or innocent. Apart from the predictable split along racial lines, there are those who give him the benefit of the doubt because of his previously pristine record, and those who regard him as just another over-privileged athlete unable to understand the word ‘no’. Between 1986 and 1996, more than 400 professional and college athletes were reported to the authorities for serious offences against women, a pattern of misbehaviour that led to the formation, in 1998, of the National Coalition Against Violent Athletes.
In a country obsessed with sport and celebrity, gifted athletes are treated differently from the moment they first show a hint of teenage promise. Ask and you shall receive, as long as you continue to perform in the arena. This is one of the main reasons why poor black kids often neglect their books in order to pursue sporting dreams that they have a statistically minute chance of fulfilling.
If the high-school star makes it to college level where matches are shown live on national television, the cossetting goes up several notches. Normal campus rules do not apply, a factor that appears to hinder rather than help them when they finally collide with the real world. That the fun only ever stops when they either step over the line once too often or when their stars begin to fade is one of the reasons why there are currently so many pros in the ranks of the cons. This is one reason why four major basketball players have fallen foul of the law since the season ended last month, their crimes including sexual assault, attacking a police offer and assault. One of the sport’s recently retired stars, the New Jersey Nets’ Jayson Williams, is awaiting trial on charges of first-degree aggravated manslaughter plus witness and evidence tampering, following an incident where he allegedly shot his chauffeur dead while messing around with rifles at his palatial New Jersey home.
Meanwhile, with American football’s pre-season just getting underway, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are planning their title defence unsure about the status of star tailback Michael Pittman. Four months after running for 124 yards in the Super Bowl victory, Pittman was arrested for using his Hummer vehicle to ram a car containing his wife, Melissa, his two-year-old son and an 18-year-old baby-sitter. With a trial on two counts of aggravated assault unlikely to take place for several months, he may yet be available for the forthcoming campaign. Of a player who at the time of the incident was already on probation for a domestic violence offence, the Buccaneers coach Jon Gruden said: “Michael Pittman is our starter. And I want to repeat, we like Michael Pittman.”
Statements such as Gruden’s are particularly unhelpful in a sport where one in five players have been arrested and charged with serious offences. The National Football League (NFL) is still trying to recover from the fall-out caused by the Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis’s implication in two fatal stabbings at the 2000 Super Bowl and the Carolina Panthers wide receiver Rae Carruth’s conviction in January 2001 for conspiracy to murder his pregnant girlfriend. Despite subsequently pleading guilty to obstructing the police investigation, the perception of Lewis has been so thoroughly rehabilitated that he now earns millions from endorsements.
Advertisement
“I believe at least part of the issue of athletes and crime is about race,” writes Richard E Lapchick, sociologist and founder of the Centre for the Study of Sport in Society. “The media has been persistent in suggesting that basketball and football players, who happen to be overwhelmingly African-American, are more violent than athletes in other sports and people in society in general. The result is that nearly everyone believes that being an athlete, especially a basketball or football player, makes you more inclined to be violent.”
Lapchick argues that in a society where violence against women has reached epidemic proportions, athletes are no more or less culpable than other groups. According to his research, an annual average of nearly 100 coaches and players were arrested for assaulting women during one five-year spell at the end of the 90s. That was two instances per week of a crime that usually numbers more than 8,000 per day in America. Two cases too many, of course, and enough to sustain a drip-feed so constant that nobody is shocked by these stories any more. When Denver Broncos veteran tight end Dwayne Carswell was recently arrested for the third time in five years on a domestic violence charge, it barely merited a few lines in most papers.
In an environment so inured to alleged heroes showing themselves to have feet of clay, it says much for Bryant’s previous standing that news of the charge against him came as a genuine surprise. At a time when one basketball player admitted that many of his fellow pros worry far more about getting women pregnant than contracting HIV, Bryant has convinced the public he is a devoted family man. Albeit one who last week splashed out on a £2.5m ring as an expensive token of apology to his wife, Vanessa, who he cheated on.
The former clean-cut hero with the sparkling smile and enough talent to be talked about in the same breath as Michael Jordan has bought the best legal minds money can buy. Once the trial begins next January, he’ll need them. Colorado is a state which is particularly tough on sex offenders. In some cases the testimony of the victim has been sufficient to secure convictions. Whether Hurlbert has more than that against Bryant, we are about to find out.