Sports Illustrated Poll : The Disbelieving True Believers

Perhaps the most frightening statistic uncovered in Sports Illustrated’s comprehensive investigation of Americans and their attitudes about athletics is that 86% of the respondents believe professional athletes use illegal drugs.

That is a devastating statistic, a huge number that could ultimately undermine this fragile house of cards.

For sports to succeed, fans must care about who wins and who loses. But why should they care if 86% of them believe the athletes are on heroin or cocaine, uppers or downers, or some combination of these performance-altering illegal substances?

Pollster Seymour Lieberman, who conducted the survey for SI, said his findings indicate “some erosion in the feeling that athletes are role models and heroes. We begin to see some chinks in the fans’ affection (with sports). It remains to be seen if this turns to disaffection.”

That spells trouble.

Within the drug section of the poll, Lieberman published some other interesting findings. One is that younger respondents were less concerned with the use of drugs by athletes than older people. But more young people than old--93% in the 18-34 category compared to 64% of those over age 65--believe athletes are involved with drugs.

The poll named pro football and baseball as America’s most popular sports--no surprise there. But those same sports also led the poll in the perception of drug usage with 62% and 54%, respectively. That means more than half of all Americans believe that athletes on the country’s two most popular sports are using drugs.

Timing is important here. The poll was conducted last November and December, well after the Pittsburgh drug trials in which baseball’s dirty laundry was embarrassingly aired, but before the post-Super Bowl drug charges involving the New England Patriots. Would a later survey have increased pro football’s numbers?

Seventy-three percent of those polled favor compulsory random drug tests for athletes while only 14% opposed them. Only 20%, however, favored the strongest form of punishment, a ban for offenders. Steve Garvey of the San Diego Padres would have fallen in that category.

“We need hard, firm rules for abusers,” Garvey said. “Rehabilitation plus one year (suspension) for the first time. The second time, it should be three to five years. It’s a privilege to play professional sports and the right to play should be upheld by those who don’t use drugs.”

It may seem almost grandiose to question 2,000 people and then issue generalizations based on their responses. But Lieberman said that with a plus-minus margin of error of 3%--routine for these kinds of surveys--his results are accurate.

“We do these polls with different samples and there is very little change in the results,” he said. “You don’t need a larger poll.”

There was a light side to the survey, too. It inquired about what the respondents’ greatest sports fantasy would be and discovered that more men, 35-32%, would prefer to throw the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl than to get the winning hit in the final game of the World Series.

It also found that more women than men, 15-8%, would prefer to ride the winning horse in the Kentucky Derby, and by 10-4%, to win the U.S. Open tennis tournament.

Then there was a tiny fraction among the women, 2%, who had perhaps the most interesting fantasy of all. They want to win the heavyweight boxing championship.

Lieberman’s questionnaire also asked about sports betting and discovered that about as many people (31%) claimed they won money as those (33%) who said they broke even, and those (36%) who said they had lost.