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The Dreaded Distractions of Manny Ramirez (and Brett Favre)
By Tony Serri
This month we've learned that there is nothing that professional sports executives fear more than a distraction. This point was hammered home simultaneously by two of the biggest names out there: baseball superstar Manny Ramirez and football's legendary Brett Favre. Both men played the distraction card like experts, striking at the soft underbelly of their teams, (the goodwill of their millions of fans) ultimately frustrating their respective teams into acting against their apparent self-interests in order to end the scourge of distraction. "Distraction" is now the black plague of professional sports. Just a hint of it and teams will cut off their own arms in order to stop the spread of it.
Having helped slug the Red Sox to two world championships in 4 years, Manny Ramirez seemed one of New England's favorite sons. He was irascible and surly but brilliant in his field: the baseball version of Boston's own John Adams. But as the Red Sox deferred on the issue of his contract extension, Manny acted out as relentlessly as a three-year old until team veterans huddled with management and decided that Manny and his distractions should head for the orchards of Southern California to flourish with his fellow fruits and nuts. Here he was welcomed with open arms, potentially the most riveting character in Dodger Blue this side of Fernando-mania. He promises to add a little heat and spice to a team whose recent history has been all Wonder Bread.
Where New England fans tortured themselves trying to appease and understand him, Los Angeles fans will just shrug and laugh it off. Manny brings a cell-phone to left field? Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.
They may be distraction-free but have the Red Sox paid too high a price for focus and tranquility? Have they cut off their heads to be rid of their headache? The most morbid Red Sox fans might point to similarities in recent events to their divestment of Babe Ruth nearly 100 years ago. Is this the dawning of the Curse of the Ram-bino?
In Green Bay, the threat of a distraction in training camp has so addled the Packers that they were willing to pay Brett Favre 25 Million dollars to leave them be. If I were Lynn Dickey, Bart Starr or Don Majkowski I'd seriously consider calling up the Packers and threatening to comeback. For an organization this adverse to distraction, you would think Bart could find a way to turn that into cash.
As far as the Packers are concerned, they now have what they have dreaded all along - the distraction of Favre in training camp. Favre's entire career has been an emotional roller coaster so it's fitting that his retirement and re-instatement be as freewheeling and reckless as his playing style. Yet despite all the fun and mystery he brings to the Packers, the team, the fans and apparently the entire sports world want Favre gone.
So what happened? How did both of these guys go from iconoclasts to national bores? Time and repetition is the common denominator. Nothing has changed about Brett or Manny. We've changed. We've seen their "act" for enough years and want something different. Sports business is show business. Eventually, every great TV series runs out of story lines. Eventually Fonzie jumps over a shark. Mork gives birth to Jonathan Winters. Mulder kisses Scully. Tony Soprano has dream sequences as a traveling salesman. We roll our eyes, we stop watching and eventually the series goes away.
But men are great fun to watch but with their defacto blackmail of their teams, both are spending their carefully cultivated goodwill like sailors on a weekend furlough. Take Favre for example. What happens after Favre comes back this year? Do we start asking the retirement question again? And what if he retires after this season? Will he have the audacity to cry at THAT press conference?
And even though he's off to a hot start with the Dodgers, what happens the first time Manny misplays a single into a triple or when the fans get weary of watching him galumph lazily to first base in the middle of a pennant chase. Will he have he have to audacity to say he's misunderstood or under-appreciated?
Probably yes to both because after all, both these shows are re-runs.