The Kobe Bryant Case Confirms the Pathology of Jock Culture

I know Kobe better than anyone. The great person you see on the court and in the public is a far greater person off the court.

-Vanessa Bryant, wife of Kobe Bryant, of the Los Angeles Lakers NBA team, now a defendant against rape charges

On June 30, Kobe Bryant checked into the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera in Vail, Colorado before he was to undergo knee surgery. Bryant is an all-star guard with the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association, and 24 years old. At 17 in 1996, he became the youngest player ever to be drafted by the NBA. Today he is married and has a six-month-old daughter.

When he checked into the spa, hotel employees say the complainant in this case was working as a concierge for the summer. She had graduated from  the year before, and was attending college, but returned home for her summer job. Employees also say that the complainant greeted , as is her job, and later went to his room. They said a guest complained about noises coming from the room, and that later the complainant left the room, returned to the lobby and went home.

Later that night Kobe went to the front desk and chatted, for an extensive period of time, with the night auditor according to employees. In the morning, say employees, Kobe chatted with a spa employee who described him as, relaxed and friendly. On that same morning, the complainant was in a local hospital being examined for evidence of rape. A sexual assault complaint was immediately filed.

The allegation was big news. Kobe is marketed as a player with a clean-cut image. The sports sections of papers across North America carry plenty of news of sexual assault charges against male team athletes, but I have yet to read anything that remotely resembles investigative journalism once the news is announced.

The news is either buried as one or two sentences in Sports Digest or is sensationalistic stuff (I cannot call it journalism), not because the sexual assault of young women is taken seriously as a social phenomena, but because Kobe is a product of the star making sports machinery.

The complainant's personal life has been danced across the Vail Daily, and the newspaper has already sued the Eagle Police Dept. for access to the 911 calls she made as they will have her address on them. The police have declined giving them access, nor allowed the media to release her name.

When I spent six years researching and writing about Canadian junior hockey teams and the allegations of rape, particularly the gang rape of girls, that were made against them, there were no convictions.

One player, Jarret Reid, who played for the Sault Saint Marie Greyhounds, pleaded guilty, he said, to save his girlfriend, who he apparently still loved, from the trauma and embarrassment of a trial in which she would prove to be wrong. All others were acquitted, if the case even got to trial. In virtually every case the girl or young woman had to leave town before the trial began as the wrath of hockey fans upon her was unrelenting.

There are many complications involved in sexual assault. Most often the complainant and the accused know each other. They may even have had sex in the past, or when sports teams are involved, the complainant may have had sex with other players. Many players told me if she does this, it is obvious she is up for grabs.

Sexual assault most frequently occurs without witnesses. It is a private crime. In the case of celebrity athletes, witnesses are most often friends of the athlete, or his teammates, who may also be implicated in the assault. Unfortunately for girls and women, being in a man's room, at the party, in the basement, at the nightclub - take your pick - is reason enough in many peoples' minds to believe that sex can only be consensual.

In the case of professional male athletes, there is an even stronger belief as these guys normally have no problem finding willing sexual partners, and find them they do.

A sport marriage is institutionalized adultery 

Sport sociologist Steven Ortiz, who teaches at Oregeon State University, did his dissertation on the wives of professional male athletes. He interviewed 37 wives extensively and defined a sport marriage as institutionalized adultery. Vanessa Bryant has said publicly that her husband committed adultery, but in the next breath claimed, he is a loving and kind husband and father.

Ortiz found these wives put up with behaviour from their husbands that includes shunning them in public when the players are with their girlfriends, being emotionally and physically distant, and being lousy lovers. None of the women reported intimate, satisfying sex lives. They said they didnt have very active sex lives with their husbands, but felt obligated to put out before a road trip, as they tried to ward off what they saw as the inevitable and endless sex partners on the road.

Sexual assault cases ask us to examine what consent really means.

I interviewed girls and young women who wanted to have sex with hockey players. And why not? They believe the star making myths as much as anyone else, especially those who come from small towns and are nave to the manipulative way in which the media manufactures young gods. In small towns, these guys are all packaged, like Kobe Bryant, as clean cut.

But wanting sex with a manufactured product is not the same as a physical encounter with a real athlete, especially if, in sports where he formed his masculine identity he uses his body in aggressive and violent ways. Especially, if in sport, where he learned the most important rules in his life, you must do all that is possible to score and win.

Sport scribes have yet to acknowledge the powerful relationship between sport, sexuality, and how boys and men learn gender in other words, how they learn to act out masculinity.

In North America all those accused of crimes, including the most heinous, are innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Eagle County District Attorney Mark Hurlbert says this is why it has taken nearly three weeks to lay a charge against Kobe.

"This decision came only after reviewing all the evidence, testimonial evidence and physical evidence, after reviewing the relevant statutes, after reviewing the relevant case laws," said Hurlbert. "I have an ethical burden not to prosecute a case unless I can prove it without a reasonable doubt."

Let us hope the media exercises the same intelligent thoroughness, and the machinery that keeps male athletes on pedestals doesn't destroy a young woman to keep an athlete in place.

The Globe and Mail, 23 July 2003