A Less-Than-Heroic Effort to Examine ‘Idols of the Game’

How can anyone laugh away the surliness and violent rages of Cleveland Indians superstar Albert Belle, as several NBC Sports announcers did during an American League playoff game when they chuckled on the air about reports of his most recent eruption: tearing up the clubhouse out of anger and frustration?

Why was a charming professional actor and former football great named O.J. Simpson viewed by so many as a golden hero despite awareness in some circles that he had a darker, volatile side that included beating his wife?

Why are sports stars anointed as national role models even when their prowess as human beings may not come even close to matching their soaring performances as athletes?

You won’t find answers in “Idols of the Game,” a three-part documentary on TBS that winds up largely glorifying the sports industry’s influential giants and the affectations of their success.

As many early sportswriters did, some sportscasters regard themselves as extensions of the very industry they cover. With TBS, it’s no illusion. Because of its sports telecasts and the sports franchises controlled by its CEO, Ted Turner, TBS is part of that industry.

You’d like to think that that linkage did not influence “Idols of the Game,” and that its occasional gushiness is coincidental.

What you get here are amiable profiles of history’s super jocks--from Jim Thorpe to Michael Jordan--that hold your attention at times with appealing archival clips and anecdotes galore. And you get Dabney Coleman, facing an antique typewriter in his shirt sleeves, suspenders and felt hat as Scribe, a generic, old-fashioned sports reporter who hosts and narrates this series, which was created and written by Robert Lipsyte, a sportswriter for the New York Times. Scribe is a workable device, but Coleman was better as Slap Maxwell, the cynical sportswriter he played in a lightly watched ABC sitcom of the late 1980s.

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The highly regarded Lipsyte tells his TV story in two-hour chunks. The first, “Inventing the All-American,” opens interestingly with Thorpe, the amazingly versatile Native American athlete who careened downhill from honors in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics--”Hi, King,” he is said to have addressed the King of Sweden--to humiliating paydays as a “Hollywood Indian.”

Part 2, “Babes in Boyland,” is useful for its survey of females in organized sports and their struggle to balance the male-designed “uneven playing field” that has inhibited their progress as athletes. And Part 3, “Love and Money,” charts sports as big business, using Notre Dame football, from Knute Rockne to Lou Holtz, as one road map. And the evolution of major league baseball’s free agency as another.

“For 100 years, owners screwed the players,” says author and former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton. “For 20 years the players screwed the owners. We’ve got 80 years to go.”

When the subject is baseball, as it is intermittently throughout this series, “Idols of the Game” is mostly a redundant sandlot rendition of “Baseball,” the more- than- you- ever- wanted- to- know- about- a- sport marathon that reaffirmed documentarian Ken Burns as the favorite pastime of PBS.

The superficial portrait of Babe Ruth in Part 1 naturally reviews his exploits off the field as well as on, and thus his personification of the hedonistic 1920s. “The culture of the times dictated a hero like Babe Ruth, and he fulfilled that role,” historian Peter Levine says about the big-partying, big drinking, boorish Bambino, who, we hear, set records for “sirloin steaks, cigars and dames.”

To protect their meal ticket, Levine says, sportswriters collaborated with Ruth in seeking to keep the most chaotic areas of his personal life from the public. Yet even after being “outed,” his standing as heroic role model endured, as if what mattered most were not his binges with booze and other excesses but his binges with the bat.

“Idols of the Game” ponders that barely at all, even though the matter lingers in your mind as the program’s assembly line brings on Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Arnold Palmer and Muhammad Ali.

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You can’t argue the elevation of African Americans Louis and Robinson to icon rank, for their achievements as black specks in a white universe transcended sports and spoke to their character outside of athletics--even though, as Harry Edwards says tonight, picking Robinson to integrate major league baseball “was much more about business than it was about brotherhood.”

But what motivated the fanatical “Arnie’s Army,” those legions of loyalists who adoringly trailed Palmer across golf courses and sports pages not only because he was terrific with a set of clubs but also because he was, well, Arnie? What did that mean? Why did they idolize him? What did they really know about him other than that he removed some of the silk stocking from golf while being arguably the most charismatic golfer ever?

Moreover, what comes to mind about the concluding “idol” of Part 1--the great floating and stinging Ali--beyond his brilliance in the ring, his former glibness outside of it and his clash with the government over refusing Army service on religious grounds during the Vietnam War?

It’s his lack of graciousness, the mean-spirited way he would stand over vanquished, crumpled opponents, taunting and screaming at them as they lay helpless on the canvas. Was this a quality to admire?

It’s a giant step to Simpson and Belle from the Babe and Ali. Or is it?

Surely no one who overlooked Simpson’s behavior--even before he was accused and then acquitted of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman--did so because they endorsed wife beating. Nor did the NBC announcers mean to make light of the troubled Belle’s violent nature or where it could lead should he not learn to control himself. If they had known how thoughtless and irresponsible they sounded, in fact, they probably would have been horrified.

What this illustrates, however, is how easily and instinctively we’re seduced by things shallow, how our reasoning and judgment are clouded by public persona (as in the case of Simpson) and athletic skill (as in the case of Belle), or both. And how in such matters, either because of wrong or misplaced values, we wink at their offenses because of the great pleasure these “gods and idols we molded from clay,” as Scribe labels them, bring us on a superficial level.

Because jocks play ball, we play ball with them, and blindly make them our icons.

* “Idols of the Game” airs tonight, Tuesday and Thursday at 5:05 p.m. and 7:05 p.m. on TBS; all six hours will repeat Saturday, beginning at 9:05 a.m.