Commentary : A Reminder: The Road Will Make a Bum of the Best of Them

In scholarly tones, the sociological commentary said the incidence of immorality is highest among migratory workers.

An insightful baseball writer interpreted that to mean “the road will make a bum of the best of them.”

The Margo Adams-Wade Boggs kiss-and-tell revelations should be played against that backdrop. They really aren’t new, except that it’s always new when the covers are pulled off the peccadilloes of the rich and famous. This isn’t an important story in the sense of the sex scandals of Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker; they were taking the money of people who believed what they said.

Adams’ statements are more than mere smarmy gossip because they tell the painful truth that being able to hit .355 doesn’t in itself make a man a swell person. Too bad the public doesn’t want to hear it.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, as the expression goes: Not all athletes are guilty of the charges Adams makes against Boggs -- many of which Boggs has admitted. There are plenty of faithful husbands and decent people in sports. But don’t be outraged at the published statement that not all of them play in the image of the Wheaties box; some of them are more suited for Penthouse, where the first installment of Adams’ tales appear in the April issue.

Don’t spend a whole lot of sympathy on Margo Adams’ self-illustrated plight. She knew what she was getting into; she was as much the hunter as the hunted. She pointed at Boggs and told an acquaintance: “Bring him.” She was exploiting Boggs as much as he was exploiting her.

If Adams had succeeded in taking Boggs away from his wife, would she have had any right to think some other woman wouldn’t have done as much to her? Of course, they all think it will be different for them.

Remember the line from Bjorn Borg’s T-shirt: “Never love a tennis player; to him love means nothing.”

Certainly, Boggs made his own bed.

All professional athletes are inundated with available sex. All of them. There are women who feel a magnetic pull from athletes or rock stars or entertainers or politicians. They are commonly known as groupies. The first groupie probably waited at the athlete’s gate at the Colosseum in Rome or passed him a note near the lion pen. There are all kinds of variations on the groupie. There are the Deadheads -- male and female -- who go to the ends of the earth for Grateful Dead concerts; there are groups of adults who structure their lives around travel with the Yankees. Sex has little or nothing to do with it for them; they are drawn to the aura of the stars.

And then there are the real groupies. Once upon a time they were known as bimbos or Baseball Annies. And they were there before the big money. Some take their devotion to the extreme. In 1949 the first baseman for the Phillies, Eddie Waitkus, was shot by Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who thought she loved him so much that if she couldn’t have him, nobody would.

She had never met Waitkus but had made a shrine to him beginning when he played for the Cubs. When he came back to town as a visiting player, she checked into the Phillies’ hotel. She left a note inviting him to her room.

And he went. And she shot him.

When he was recovering in a hospital, Waitkus asked: “Why did that silly honey do that?”

Of course he went to her room as males have since Adam in the Garden. Waitkus was a bachelor. To many, a ring does not cut circulation. Athletes learn from the beginning that the world exists to please them.

There is the basic bit of advice given to the athlete’s wife: Don’t surprise your husband on the road; you may be the one surprised. Ballplayers go out for food and drink and relaxation after a ballgame. They usually go where people their age go. Where ballplayers go, unattached women go. Both sides know where the meat markets are. Helen of Troy understoodas much.

For some of them the circumstance is no different from any singles bar-recreation center where boy meets girl. Obviously, for others it’s something else. Adams notes that “many of those self-proclaimed ‘Christian’ players” were not above doing drugs or having extra-marital affairs. Thursday’s revelation was that Steve Garvey, who was married Saturday, made two other women pregnant during the time after his divorce from his first wife. Garvey -- image as cleanest of the clean -- promised to assume responsibility. “I’ll live up to my moral obligations, which I feel strongly about because I’m a Christian,” Garvey said. Nobody expected him to be celibate. And being responsible is admirable, but he should have known something about planned parenthood.

That’s not quite the same as the Adams-Boggs affair. The one to feel sorry for is Debbie Boggs, his wife and mother of his children. With all of the mounting evidence, she bought her husband’s claims that they were “only one-night stands.” It’s the constant terror of the athlete’s wife who understands even a little bit. She has either complete trust, or denial.

She has heard the denial of the athlete whose wife saw him with another woman: “Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?”