SOME THINGS DON’T CHANGE

Where does one look to find the true spirit of the modern American professional athlete? In the passenger seat of Latrell Sprewell’s Mercedes-Benz, riding shotgun during an unannounced six-day holiday from New York Knick training camp without so much as a phone call to club officials because, as Sprewell so eloquently reasons, “That’s what agents are for.”?

In the office of the Angels’ general manager, listening in as disgruntled players demand to know more about this news report about a contract extension for Manager Terry Collins and what can be done to block it?

Poolside with Barry Sanders as the greatest running back of his generation logs another day of “retirement,” rather than endure one more season playing for a coach he doesn’t like, having been bored to tears by a playbook deemed unworthy of his time?

Courtside with Venus Williams as she yawns, squirms and grimaces through her sister Serena’s landmark victory at the U.S. Open, eventually applauding the achievement with all the sound of two hands not clapping?

In the PGA tournament tent, mingling with the tour multimillionaires as they take one look at the fabled Ryder Cup trophy and say, “Nice, but what’s in it for us?”

On the all-important stat sheet being passed around the losers’ locker room, eliciting happy exclamations of, “Well, I got mine.”?

Is this where one locates the state of American professional sports as its boom century draws to a close?

In a handbasket, on hell’s doorstep?

Or, can it be spotted instead inside the athlete’s private gym, alongside the personal trainer and the on-call nutritionist, as he dedicates himself to his craft with a passion and a devotion not found in any generation preceding his?

Alongside his locker stall as he copes gamely with a never-yielding sea of microphones, notepads, tape recorders, television cameras, Internet-ready laptops and requests that he spend tomorrow’s day off on the phone with three national radio talk shows, in studio with the local cable “SportsGab” round-table discussion . . . and, if it’s not too big an imposition, maybe an hour bantering with the fans in the celebrity chat room for https://www.getalife.com?

The answer, most likely, hinges on the numbers printed on your birth certificate. It usually does whenever the conversation turns to These Kids Today. Older folks grousing about the youngsters--it’s the second-oldest complaint on record, having been logged shortly after Adam took his first bite of the apple and immediately phoned his agent, wanting to know what in the devil’s name happened to the cheese platter.

“There’s a quote I heard that I could paraphrase for you,” says David Dimmick, a Penn State professor specializing in sports ethics. “It went, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do with these kids. They’re never going to grow up to amount to anything,’ that sort of thing. And the quote is attributed to Plato.

“So, it has been going on for centuries and centuries.”

With no end in sight. Forty years from now, Peter Warrick will be bouncing a grandchild on his knee and brandishing a wrinkled fist: “In my day, it was harmless pranks, like rigging a $380 discount for $400 worth of gear, penny-ante stuff. Nothing like these kids today. I mean, I never shot the President.”

And if history has taught us anything, it’s that there truly is nothing new under the sun.

Sprewell attacks and tries to choke his coach with the Golden State Warriors, P.J. Carlesimo?

And in 1977, infielder Lenny Randle punched out his manager with the Texas Rangers, Frank Lucchesi.

In Seattle, Seahawk wide receiver Joey Galloway causes the blood of hometown fans to boil with a prolonged and controversial contract holdout?

And in New York, in 1938, Joe DiMaggio did the same.

San Diego Charger quarterback Ryan Leaf curses and verbally abuses a beat reporter merely trying to do his job?

And in decades past, just to name a few, Dave Kingman sent a female sportswriter a rat in a shoe box, Detroit Tiger manager Ralph Houk slapped a writer across the face, Angel outfielder Alex Johnson poured coffee grounds into a reporter’s typewriter, and Denny McLain was suspended by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for dumping water on reporters.

The real history of professional sports in this country--as opposed to the mythology created in the first half of the century by a media more interested in hero-making than reporting, or muckraking--is littered with such examples. Professional athletes have always chased the almighty dollar, would have bolted madly from team to team had free agency been available earlier, have often been surly in their dealings with the media and fans, and have long chafed under coaches and managers they considered oppressive and restrictive.

Sanders now might be the poster child in today’s Spoiled Superstar Athlete campaign, but Magic Johnson, regarded as the consummate “team player” of his era, once got Laker coach Paul Westhead fired because he disliked Westhead’s conservative offense.

Foremost among this century’s sporting myths is Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packer coach who ran his team the way George Patton ran his army, intimidating his players en route to championships and yet--according to the legend--getting fierce, undying loyalty from those players along the way.

Marv Levy, the longtime coach of the Buffalo Bills, now working as an NFL commentator for Fox Sports Net, presents an alternative perspective.

“I happened to bump into Willie Davis, the old defensive end who used to play for Lombardi, one day in a restaurant,” Levy says. “We got to talking and Willie says, ‘You know, if we hadn’t won in two years, we would’ve had a revolt. But we won.’ ”

Dick Vermeil, the St. Louis Ram coach who went 14 years between NFL coaching jobs, was portrayed in the national media as a modern-day Rip Van Winkle when he was hired by the Rams in 1997. Fourteen years out of the league--and then to see Lawrence Phillips, the Rams’ greatest public-relations disaster since the Eric Dickerson trade, driving the welcome wagon?

The culture shock must have registered on the Richter scale.

Vermeil, however, laughs at the notion.

“Oh, there were so many more of those kind of situations in the old days, compared to now,” Vermeil says. “Because no one knew about it then. Everybody swept them under the rug.

“The NFL didn’t have any policies on it. There were a lot more of those kind of characters who had some problems and they were still playing, but no one knew about it. You didn’t have ESPN, you didn’t have CNN, you didn’t have USA Today, you didn’t have all the investigation sources within the National Football League.

“There’s nowhere close to the drug problems you used to have. No one knew about it. The drinking and that? Now, if some kid gets a DUI, I mean, it’s all over the country. He goes into the [rehabilitation] program, which he should. But in the old days, the officer might drive him home.

“Times have changed, for the good. But it wasn’t always policed like it is today.”

Jack Raglin, a researcher in sports psychology and an associate professor at Indiana University, scoffs at “the idea that this is a sudden emergence in pathological behavior” among modern professional athletes.

“We tend to have these postmodern views of what sport was in the past--’The athletes were true heroes back then,’ ” Raglin says. “But when you really objectively take a long look at it, you see a different sort of story, the same sorts of trends--in fact, maybe even worse behavior. You can think of athletes like Mickey Mantle and so on, who were notorious for their off-the-field behavior.

“What I’m always impressed by is when you read about these [contemporary] athletes who are so careful and thoughtful about their lives and keeping healthy and have the long view and kind of managing themselves. Whereas I think in the past, that [behavior] truly was exceptional.”

Price and Press

Today’s athletes have been shaped, for better or worse, by two unavoidable influences that have mushroomed like an atomic cloud in the last 10 years:

Money.

And media.

So much money that, in the view of ESPN basketball commentator Len Elmore, a former player agent, “Guys today can point to playing a sport as a vocation. Their life’s work. How rare a thing would it be, 25 years ago, to think of someone retiring at the age of 35 and playing golf for the next 40 years? But today, for most players--and I’m talking about superstars and middle-level income players--that’s a distinct possibility. The stakes are much higher now.”

So much media attention that no star athlete’s foibles are likely to go unreported for long, contributing to the perception that today’s athletes are out of control and unworthy heirs to the supposedly fine upstanding citizens who graced our ballparks and arenas decades ago.

“There’s a much greater degree of scrutiny today,” says former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason, who retired after the 1997 season to become part of ABC’s “Monday Night Football” broadcast team. “Mickey Mantle might have gone out all night carousing and then go out the next day and hit a couple home runs--and all you’d hear about were the two home runs.

“But today’s athlete, any transgression he makes winds up on ESPN, the nightly sports news and all over the newspapers the next day. In the old days, those kind of things stayed in the locker room. If athletes today feel a little bit insecure, there’s good reason.”

In extreme cases, today’s wall-to-wall media coverage can drive players off their emotional hinges and derail a team’s entire season.

Exhibit A: The 1999 Angels, who didn’t win many games but seriously challenged the major league record for on-the-record clubhouse backbiting.

Bill Bavasi, who weathered the Angels’ tumultuous summer as general manager before resigning, possibly out of exhaustion, believes the media crush surrounding his team--preseason favorite to win the title in the American League West--and his players’ inability to deal with it contributed significantly to a last-place, 92-loss season.

“It changes the way the athlete is,” Bavasi says of the media attention. “Some athletes, who are more of the everyday guy, they get tired of it. He says, ‘Please leave me alone, get away from me’ and tries to do his best with it. . . . Whereas some other guys feel it’s their right to those few minutes of fame every day--and they’ll talk, and they’ll speak.

“And usually a lot of the ill will that develops in a clubhouse is a result of what somebody, what one of their teammates said in the newspaper. Our team had way too much of that.”

Bavasi maintains that “the media has a lot of players fooled into believing that people really want to hear what they have to say.” Personalities within the Angel clubhouse underwent Jekyll-Hyde transformations, he contends, at the sight of a cluster of waiting microphones.

“If you look at the group we had, it really shouldn’t have been a bad group,” Bavasi says. “I am mystified by how they sunk to operate in the press the way they did. I am absolutely mystified. Their profiles did not tell you that. . . .

“I’ll give you an example. As all this hell was going on, as all this was breaking loose, Jeff Huson was talking to [an Angel publicist] in front of his locker and said, ‘You know, it’s amazing what’s going on in the press, because I woke up this morning, read the paper and said to my wife, “Is this the locker room that I’m in?” ’

“These guys, when they’re together, nobody says, ‘Hey.’ But put a microphone or notepad in front of them, and good Lord!”

Money and media, fortune and fame--an intoxicating concoction for even the most stable and levelheaded. But when the overload is thrust upon an athlete in his late teens or early 20s, should anyone be surprised when the young celebrity is periodically thrown for a loop?

“In modern times, we really don’t have a precedent to even go back to that compares to the kinds of money, the kinds of fame, the kinds of influence these young men are garnering these days,” says Russell Gough, an associate professor of philosophy and ethics at Pepperdine.

“If an athlete doesn’t come from a background, from a home where he is very well-grounded and knows the value of a dollar and knows how to handle the pressure, professional sports can really make or break some of these young men. These pressures are clearly much, much greater nowadays than they were, say, back in Babe Ruth’s and Ty Cobb’s day.”

How might Ruth, given his legendary vices and peccadilloes, have withstood the nonstop barrage of late-1990s round-the-clock sports coverage and surveillance? Would he still be a 714-home run man under today’s conditions? Or would he have burned out or flipped out long before 600?

“The fact that Babe Ruth drank and he had his mistresses and so forth just wasn’t talked about then,” says Frank Stadulis, president of the sports fans’ activist group USFANS. “What’s happened now is, we talk about it. And not only that--and believe me, I’m not condoning any of this--but we sort of demand it as part of our glorification of these guys. . . .

“We talk about guys today who epitomize the money-hungry, grabbing, greedy [stereotype]. But they’re not, really. What they are is a reflection of what society is today to a large degree.”

If society has undergone convulsions of change during the last 30 years, why should it expect the professional athlete to remain time-frozen in 1965?

“There are people who might say that many young people today are very different today than they were, let’s say, in the ‘60s, when there were more liberal causes and activism over Vietnam,” says Robert Singer, chair of the University of Florida’s department of exercise and sports science.

“One could also make the argument that in today’s society in general, with a lack of causes, a lack of wars that we’re directly involved with, people have developed the ability to become much more self-centered. I don’t know if you want to say this is unique among athletes, or is it getting to be more of a common thread throughout society?”

Illusion or Reality?

Some popular perceptions about today’s professional athletes, true or false:

1. They are more self-possessed and self-obsessed than they were in the past.

“One of the differences I see,” Dimmick says, “is that probably since the World War II babies, what has happened is that we have really become me-oriented. We don’t have time for anyone other than ourselves. I think a lot of that is because people want to get ahead and want to be successful.

“The unfortunate thing is, the word ‘success’ is defined by someone other than ourselves. . . . The success thing becomes external, rather than internal satisfaction, and too often we interpret that word ‘success’ as winning.”

Gough argues that the biggest difference in today’s athletes is their “world-revolves-around-me kind of attitude. Even with many of the players in olden days, who might have gotten in trouble with the law or were womanizers or what have you, they were still team players, by and large.

“It’s kind of difficult to quantify this, but today’s athletes are definitely more susceptible to a kind of egocentrism. And of course, that has big-time ramifications in how they treat their teammates, their coaches, their fans, and so forth.”

True?

“Players have always been selfish,” counters John Salley, attempting an NBA comeback with the Lakers after a three-year retirement from pro basketball. “It’s not like players have suddenly started sitting around and saying, ‘Well, you know, I got 20.’ They’ve always done that. I was born in the ‘60s and I played in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s, and everyone is turned on by what they do.”

2. Athletes are less interested in teamwork and team success now and more concerned with individual virtuosity.

“Guys think they’ve got to be a part of the next Nike ad campaign,” Esiason says. “They don’t care as much about winning championships.”

Adds Laker forward Rick Fox, a nine-year NBA veteran, “Turn on any sports station and they show the highlights. They show the slam-dunks, they show the guys who score the most points, the triple-doubles. All the things that are fun to watch, but not always the ingredients that go into winning.

“If you’re a young kid watching it and you want to be like an exciting player such as a Shaq or a Kobe Bryant, you’re gonna emulate what they’re doing, the dunks and the fancy stuff.

“So the game has changed, almost to, I guess, a Generation X, quick-hitting, exciting, entertaining style. It makes for fun basketball, but it doesn’t make for correct basketball.”

Again, Salley begs to differ.

“Bob Cousy was a showoff,” Salley notes. “Pistol Pete [Maravich] was a showoff. Earl the Pearl [Monroe] used to spin and hold the ball, as opposed to passing it. Oscar Robertson was--if you want to go back--a ball hog. Jerry West would get 40 some nights. People forget that because they didn’t see it.

“Magic was a showtime player. [But] these are the guys who win championships.”

3. Athletes come equipped with thinner skins than they once did.

Having watched his players melt down under the direction of a blunt-talking, no-nonsense manager such as Collins, Bavasi muses over how they might have fared in an earlier era, playing for such firebrands as Eddie Stanky, John McGraw or Billy Martin.

“They would have crumbled,” Bavasi says.

Angel third base coach Larry Bowa, who played for such driven managers as Gene Mauch and Dallas Green during his 16-year big league career, doesn’t disagree.

“Bill’s right, a lot of players today would crumble under those type of leaders,” Bowa says. “And those [managers], they were the kind of guys who motivated me when I played. If they ripped me in front of everybody, my reply would be, ‘Well, I’ll show you.’ The reply now is, ‘Why is he getting on me? What did I do wrong?’ ”

According to Bowa, the worst thing a coach or manager can do to a player today is “embarrass them in front of their peers. . . . You have to have more one-on-one individual meetings today. If you have something to say to an individual, you can’t say it on the bench now--you wait till the next day when he comes to the park and you bring him into your office. It’s more like being a psychiatrist now.”

4. Athletes will no longer pledge blind allegiance to a coach, a cause or a system. To get them to follow now, they first need to see credentials.

“No question,” says Bowa, who witnessed Collins losing control of the Angels, in large part, because he hadn’t played at the major league level. “Last year with the Angels, Terry would call a team meeting and afterward, I’d have players come up to me and say, ‘What did you think of the meeting?’ I’d say, ‘Well, I thought it was pretty good.’ And they would say, ‘How does he know? He never played.’

“Which to me is a cop-out. Sometimes these guys have played in the minor leagues for 15, 18, 20 and rode buses. They have to know the game. Or they love they game so much . . .

“But we’re talking about a different player mentality now than back when Connie Mack was managing. There were some pretty good managers who never played in the majors. [Tom] Lasorda didn’t play a lot in the big leagues. Sparky Anderson didn’t play, Jimmy Leyland didn’t play. Walter Alston. You can rattle off some pretty big names that didn’t play at the highest level.”

The landscape has changed, no doubt about it. Today it is dominated by athletes who may be more temperamental, may be more sensitive and undoubtedly are more business-savvy than their forerunners. If a modern coach or manager intends to stick around, he had better keep moving.

Even Lombardi, Levy suspects, “might have changed with time. I think he would have adapted. If you don’t change with the times, the times are going to change you.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

NOW & THEN

1997: Latrell Sprewell chokes coach.

1977: Lenny Randle punches manager.

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1999: Ryan Leaf acts like rat to reporter.

1985: Dave Kingman sends rat to reporter.

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1999: Barry Sanders hates coach, retires.

1981: Magic Johnson has coach fired.

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1999: Joey Galloway in contract holdout.

1938: Joe DiMaggio in contract holdout.