What Do We Do When a Great Athlete Is a Bad Person?
The cases of O.J. Simpson and Curt Schilling highlight a difficult dilemma.
A couple of events transpired this week that I think touched on one of the thorniest issues in all of sports fandom.
The first was the 2004 Boston Red Sox’s World Series reunion at Fenway Park on Tuesday, from which there were two notable absences — the late, beloved knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, who died of cancer last October, and Curt Schilling, whose latest in a long line of transgressions involved sharing the news of Wakefield’s cancer against the wishes of his family.
The second was Thursday’s news that O.J. Simpson — the legendary running back and pop-culture icon turned domestic abuser, accused murderer and convicted felon — had died of cancer at age 76.
Both Simpson and Schilling became pariahs in recent years, as the court of public opinion ruled them to be men who had acted in ways unacceptable to society — whether the legal system mirrored those findings or not.1 Schilling is famously not in the Baseball Hall of Fame due almost entirely to his off-field behavior, and while Simpson was enshrined in Canton in 1985, there’s little doubt that a modern HOF process would exclude him in a manner similar to Schilling if his candidacy were up for debate today.
Yet, at the same time, both deserve to be considered all-time greats on the basis of their playing careers alone.
Simpson retired as the NFL’s second-leading all-time rusher, behind only Jim Brown; his 1973 season (2,003 yards) still ranks 8th on the single-season rushing leaderboard, while Approximate Value considers his 25-AV performance from 1975 to be tied for the second-greatest season by a RB in NFL history. That’s in addition to a college career that saw Simpson win the 1968 Heisman Trophy and average an astonishing 156.2 yards per game at USC.
For his part, Schilling ranks 23rd on the all-time pitching Wins Above Replacement list with 80.2 WAR,2 ahead of numerous Hall of Famers. He was instrumental in four different World Series runs for three different teams (the 1993 Phillies, 2001 Diamondbacks, and the 2004 and 2007 Red Sox), ranking 18th in career postseason ERA (minimum 50 innings).
In cases like these, how do we begin to separate the art from the artist? Or should we even try?
It’s something I’ve struggled with a lot over the years. I’ve argued before that museums like the various Halls of Fame, theoretically devoted to telling the story of a sport and celebrating playing accomplishments, should only be concerned with what happens on the field or the court. That the hero-worship inherent in considering players to not just be better athletes than the average person, but also better human beings, is misguided and will invariably lead us to canonizing bad people — especially in an age where we can know more and more about players’ personal lives than ever before.3
That may be the cleanest and most uncomplicated way of handling cases like Simpson and Schilling, but it’s also among the most unsatisfying. One of the main reasons we love sports in the first place is that the athletes are human, and that the drama of their struggles relates to the adversities we all face in our own lives. Whether that represents a grand delusion or not, we’re in it for the humanity, and that makes it all the more difficult when athletic greatness is decoupled from character.4
All of this makes the legacy of a Schilling or an O.J. Simpson really tough to talk about in its full context. (There’s a reason why ESPN Films made a 467-minute-long, Oscar-winning documentary to unpack all of the different facets of Simpson’s life.) Sometimes, our greatest sporting heroes are great people, too. Just as often, they aren’t. Ultimately, it’s up to each of us as fans to decide how much that affects our memories of their athletic accomplishments — whether we reconsider the moments we once loved or take them at face value, accepting that performance on the field is only ever one aspect of what makes a player who they are as a person.
Filed under: Miscellany
Simpson was infamously acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, though he was later found liable for wrongful death in a civil trial, and convicted in separate incident involving an armed robbery. By contrast, more of Schilling’s offenses have been of the distasteful-but-not-illegal variety, though the collapse of the game studio he owned (38 Studios) left the state of Rhode Island on the hook for tens of millions of dollars in public debt.
Using my JEFFBAGWELL method (the Joint Estimate Featuring FanGraphs and B-R Aggregated to Generate WAR, Equally Leveling Lists) to average WAR from multiple sources.
Surely there are countless players already in the different HOFs whose actions and beliefs would appall us if we could fully know who they were as people, particular in earlier eras where the prevailing morality of the time differed greatly from our current sensibilities.
Even moments that were originally framed as triumphs of human will, such as Schilling’s 7 bloody-socked innings in Game 6 of the 2004 ALCS, hit differently in hindsight.