I’ve been working on a longer piece about agent responsibility to not only their client, but the sponsors as well, but Mike Lupica of the Daily News has the same idea I do: It’s about time to hold agents responsible for whatever their role is in pandering, enabling or facilitating bad behavior or steroid use in their clients.
Here is Lupica’s article. From the article:
“Somebody will get around to talking to the player agents. Asking them what they know about Dr. Galea. Or maybe they won’t ever be put on the griddle. Somehow, throughout the era of performance-enhancing drugs, it is as if somebody granted agents permanent immunity, even though logic makes at least some of them unindicted co-conspirators of this time in baseball.
The commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig, gets blamed for everything except syringes. Everybody in the world knows how fiercely the Major League Baseball Players Association protected the guilty over the last decade. But what about these controlling agents? Does anybody think that the biggest stars in the world send themselves to Canada to see Galea, even if he has proclaimed himself a visionary and pioneer of sports medicine?
Scott Boras, who is Beltran’s agent, did everything except schedule Beltran’s knee surgery and scrub in himself. Now we’re supposed to believe Beltran went to see Galea on his own. Or that the Mets sent him. Come on.”
Now the time has come to ask the same questions about Tiger Woods and his entourage. Who knew he was spending unbelievable amounts of time in a harem of loose women for hire and why didn’t they think about the damge discovery would cause to the sponsorship deals. Did any of them procure these women? If so, the sponsors should look sharply at them for devaluing their investment.
The same questions hold true about Woods’s reported addiction to painkillers. These dangerous drugs are a serious health problem, causing many deaths nationwide.
Lupica asks similar questions. From the article:
“It was Tiger Woods’ management firm, IMG, that put him with Dr. Galea, and before long Galea was on his way down to Orlando to work with Woods when he was rehabbing from knee surgery. Woods wanted to get back faster, and it was in IMG’s best interests for him to get back faster, and that is how the search for the next hot guy from sports medicine begins. It is always about coming back, getting healthy, staying healthy. Or getting bigger and stronger….The illegal thing that Galea is accused of doing is transporting human growth hormone and another drug that is illegal in this country across the border from Canada. If it turns out to be true, and if Galea gets set down for that, you will probably be asking yourself how he decided which of his patients got the legal drugs and which ones didn’t.”
Lupica is right on the mark…Woods’s problems are not going to be solved as it seems all the panderers and enablers are still in place. Never forget his mother’s alleged comments to Elin which supposedly sent Elin into a towering rage: Kultida and the rest of Team Woods think they can get back to the way things were – by going to ground, hiding, and acting as though nothing had happened or that the problem was just a brush-off, a blip. The New York Post published this article which includes revealing glimpses into the thinking of Kultida, and by implication, Tiger, his team, and Tim Finchem:
“Elin feels that Tida is totally against her,” the source said. “[Tida] keeps urging Elin to talk to Tiger and sort things out — as if it was just a silly argument over a trivial matter.
“[Tida] had been telling everyone how ‘Team Woods’ would soon be back together and this all would blow over. That made Elin furious.”
You watch…Elin is no fool. She wasn;t at Woods’s Act of Contrition for one reason only: I think she’s not coming back, and I think the reason why she’s not coming back is because Woods has not canned the OTHER source of the problem…the handlers who let this thing get out of hand in the first place.
I’ll never forget it…an oily sports agent I know was discussing steroids in sports with me a few years ago. He said they should be legal. I asked him point blank, with all the health problems they cause, if your daughter got caught doing them on the high school lacrosse team, would you think differently. He said, “as long as she got a scholarship, no…not at all.”
Then he asked me the real question.
“C’mon, Jay…” he began, sidling up close to me like trying to impart secret wisdom, a simpering smile on his face. “Don’t you want to be filthy rich?” All that was missing was a bawdy wink.
Sure. Who doesn’t? But at what cost? Look at the price Woods paid: everything he ever was.
Pamper, protect, obey, and worship…it just doesn;t work in the long run.
