Soapbox burnout

Last week, two stories dropped that would ordinarily kick off a crap-storm of moral outrage from the world of sports journalism. The public shaming of cycling liar Lance Armstrong and the totally bizarre Manti Te’o dead-girlfriend hoax are exactly the kinds of situations that get all the “serious” sports journalists frothing at the mouth about the poison of athletic celebrity, the betrayal of innocence, the death of heroes, et cetera. Lots of heavy-handedness, lots of moralizing, lots of Jeremy Schaap slow-talking to us as if we were 9 years old.

As a slightly less serious sports “journalist,” I was super excited for this week’s column; mocking faux-moral outrage over the failings of pro athletes is one of my favorite things to do. I have always believed that athletes have nothing to offer us as role models outside of their athletic prowess. It’s illogical to expect that ordinary people who happen to have an exceptional skill and thus find themselves in exceptional circumstances will behave as anything other than human beings. Time and time again, they prove their fallibility.

And that’s typically why we end up with so many articles about how deeply, deeply disappointed we are in the men and women that we looked up to, that we believed in. Shame on you, millionaire who is never held to a standard of accountability that any of us would recognize, for not living up to the model of integrity I completely projected onto you.

It’s self-righteous garbage, every time. And I was really looking forward to writing about it this week, in the wake of these huge stories of fallen athletes.

But after taking the temperature of the room, after reading about Armstrong’s entirely fraudulent career and after trying to figure out exactly who was going to be the object of public derision in the Te’o mess, I realized that the usual outpouring of trumped-up anger was largely absent from the conversation. Hardly any sweeping, grandiose posturing of moral superiority. Almost no slowly shaking heads. Only the furrowed brow of Oprah to remind us that anything untoward had happened at all.

So, when I realized that my column wasn’t going to write itself, I tried to figure out why it was that no one was pretending to be offended here.

I think there are a few obvious factors at work in these cases. No matter how famous Lance Armstrong has become in the last 15 years, he’s still a cyclist; as the inspiration of his battle with cancer fades and is replaced by a legacy of cheating and treating people horribly, it’s impossible to muster the energy to care one way or another about an athlete from a sport to which literally no one in this country pays attention. The “Livestrong” bracelets went out of style a few years ago, so we didn’t even lose an accessory last week. And in Te’o’s case, we’re still just trying to figure out what’s happening.

But I think the general dearth of fake indignation stems largely from the usurpation of sentiment by social media. The grand tradition of sportswriter pomposity is rooted in the supremacy of print journalism; when newspapers were the only disseminators of news, they were also a natural and primary shaper of public opinion. They were the entire public conversation, and that contributed to their self-importance.

Today, with Twitter and the 24-hour sports news cycle, the story moves faster than the antiquated response to it, and the real opinion of fans is expressed instantaneously. They can speak to one another directly now, and it turns out that what they are saying on these topics is usually a joke. In the din of our collective laughter, it’s difficult to hear the overly solemn voices of contrived dismay. If these writers did find some mountaintop to lecture from, they would be Tweet-mocked off of it well before this column ever reached them. And, much as I despise them, I realize I’m going to miss the moralizers now that we can express ourselves for ourselves.

But I still write about sports for a paper. So, with any luck, I’ll become one of them. In the meantime, we still have Jeremy Schaap.