A Walk on the Blindside

In

the early '90s in Australia, the coach of a high-profile rugby league team decided that the best way for his men to bond would be through an activity that had been one of his favorites as a player: in the build-up to a big match a prostitute would be summoned to a hotel room where numerous players would take turns having sex with her while the others watched. But on this occasion the coach blundered. Having chosen to go first, he was surprised to see some of the younger players looking on with what appeared to be disgust. "The last thing I wanted to see was his bum going up and down," one of them recalls. "He didn't get it that times had changed."

They have, too, in some ways. But the latest Canterbury Bulldogs scandal suggests football still has its seedy side. At least the coach's escapade involved a consenting prostitute. At the center of the current storm is a 20-year-old woman who has told police that in the early hours of Feb. 22, a number of players sexually assaulted her by the pool at a resort in the northern New South Wales town of Coffs Harbour. The woman, who was taken from the resort to hospital in an ambulance, alleges the assault involved vaginal, oral and anal penetration. At press time, no charges had been laid and several unidentified players had protested their innocence. Police have appealed for witnesses to come forward and expect to interview players soon.

Many people inside and outside the game have expressed anger about what's alleged to have happened, but also bewilderment: whether or not any of the players had committed a crime, how could they be so foolish as to put themselves in this mess? "With some young players today, ego is the biggest problem," says Mark Carroll, a former Australian league player who coaches at Manly. "I pull them aside sometimes and say, 'Hey, you're a footballer. You cart around a lump of pigskin. You don't save lives.'" Sexual shenanigans by sportsmen are not, of course, confined to rugby league.

"Roasting" - multiple men having simultaneous sex with the same woman - has crept into the vocabulary and lifestyle of some of England's Premier League footballers. The case of Wayne Carey - the great Australian Rules player who in 2002 was revealed to have been sleeping with the wife of his North Melbourne vice-captain - lingers in the memory. At the height of that scandal Carey's distraught wife, Sally, told the player's manager: "You're to blame for this. You're to blame, the club's to blame, I'm to blame. We let him think he could get away with anything."

Jeff Bond, former head psychologist at the Australian Institute of Sport, uses the term "pedestal syndrome" to group all the factors that make some athletes believe they can do virtually as they please. League players are especially prone to it, he argues, because theirs is a contact sport: "They're fit, they think they're indestructible." They've also made it in a sport that has recently begun to reward its players lavishly and long encouraged heavy drinking when celebrating a win. Most players are decent people. But they're also younger, richer, more idle and more full of themselves than their predecessors - a dangerous combination.

Many sportsmen are egocentric and competitive "to the point of having borderline personality disorders," Bond says. Their competitiveness is partly why they're so good at their sport - and their coaches nurture it. But some players have trouble toning it down when the siren blows. Footballers want to make the most ferocious tackles, regardless of cost. Yet the same instinct can drive them to sink the most booze and seduce the most alluring women with similar disregard for consequences.

Though footballers are attractive to women who pursue famous, ultra-masculine men, many of these women underestimate how much teammates love to impress and please one another. The vulgar phrase "Get your end in and get your friend in" isn't heard as much in football circles as it was 10 or 20 years ago, when teams had designated "promoters" who organized group sex sessions. With today's game more of a business chasing an ever wider audience, a veneer of sophistication has been laid over many of its unsavory traditions, just as spiraling passes and mesmerizing sidesteps obscure the game's savage core. Some players still consider group sex a privilege of their position. When a sexual encounter with a footballer takes a twist, "some women are prepared to go with it," says a current player. Others are horrified, but drunken, narcissistic players might not notice or care.

No National Rugby League club wants to host the next scandal. Manly have hired Dave Millward, a 100-kg former corrective services officer, to watch over the players when they're out on the town. "They can still chat with girls and exchange numbers," he says, "but that's it. We arrive together, we leave together." In the rush to prevent more trouble, many people are missing the pathos: these tough, wealthy men need a babysitter to protect them from themselves.