Columnist Dean Juipe: Sex, sports get a little too cozy

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or 259-4084.

It is always offensive. Every year. No exceptions.

Undeterred, Sports Illustrated's 36th annual swimsuit edition hits the newsstands today and every subscriber with impressionable children or even with a hint of morality is obliged to either provide an explanation for its tawdry presentation or toss it away.

It's shameful that it even exists and remarkable that the women's organizations in this country have let it prosper.

In some respects, the swimsuit edition is symbolic of the nation's declining standards. When it debuted in 1963 it was more travelogue than skin fest, but over time those qualities have reversed and in recent years the magazine has continually narrowed the gap to where it's approaching out-and-out obscene.

If nothing else, it's a mainstream contribution to the notion that it's acceptable for men to use women. But, come to think of it, so is simply reading the sports pages any given day.

It's Sodom and Gomorrah out there when, on the eve of the Super Bowl, the starting free safety for the Atlanta Falcons is arrested for soliciting prostitution. Worsening the situation is the fact that just the night before his misdeed, Eugene Robinson received the Bart Starr Award from Athletes In Action for his "high moral character."

He let his wife attend the awards dinner with him, but he left her (and their children) in a motel room when he hit the streets of Miami in search of sexual gratification.

His disgraceful conduct is forgivable only in a Biblical sense. In truth, Robinson will never live down the shame he brought upon himself.

Yet it's easy to wonder if the typical athlete is devoid of shame. Take Oscar De La Hoya, who arrives in Las Vegas today for his Saturday fight at the Thomas & Mack Center with Ike Quartey. The Golden Boy, doing his best to take a run at Wilt Chamberlain's record for conquests, has gone through countless women and fathered at least one child out of wedlock; a second is in dispute; a potential third will be legitimized when De La Hoya marries his pregnant girlfriend this spring.

But he's no Evander Holyfield. The heavyweight champ, a reciter of scripture and considered a holy man of sorts in some parts of the country that look past his contradictory ways, has fathered nine children with six women. He has had two wives.

Although he's the best known of these athletic offenders, the Real Deal is not alone when it comes to producing a horde of illegitimate children. Shawn Kemp of the Cleveland Cavaliers has seven kids from what is believed to be six women. UNLV great Larry Johnson, now with the New York Knicks, has five children from four women.

A full 32 percent of children born in America have unmarried mothers. That figure was 18 percent in 1980.

Of course Sports Illustrated is not solely to blame for this pitiful trend, yet it contributes to it in its own once-a-year way. However subtly -- or not so subtly, given the blatant sexuality of the photos it uses -- it says women are objects of amusement, there for man's pleasure.

Perhaps there's a time and place for such displays, but in an otherwise stellar magazine that is passed around hundreds of thousands of households, it's inappropriate.

The world would be a better place without it.

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