Sports' Dirty Secret

Eight years later Saad still has no memories of what happened to her immediately after the events of that June afternoon. In fact, she remains uncertain about how she got home that day, and she is unclear as to how she arrived the next morning at Saint John's Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, where she remained for seven days, with a stay in intensive care, and where, according to her hospital records, she was diagnosed with a "closed head injury," impaired vision in her right eye, abrasions around her left eye and over her right cheek, a "large bruise" on her right arm and soreness and spasms in her neck. This battering, according to a medical evaluation written three years later, led to chronic headaches and convulsions. Parish, from whom Saad has been divorced since 1990, declined to comment, according to his representative, James McLaughlin, on this or any other "allegations made by his ex-wife."

While Saad says the beating at the Marriott was the most traumatic she suffered at Parish's hands, it was no isolated event. In fact, she says, the abuse, both psychological and physical, began not long after they started dating in 1980 and persisted throughout their 10-year relationship. There was that night in late '81 when she was eight months pregnant and, she says, "he pushed me down a flight of stairs" because she kept badgering him to tell her why he wasn't coming home at nights. There was the summer evening in '82 when she criticized his erratic driving after a party outside San Francisco, and, according to her, he swung the car to a halt on the shoulder of the road and "took his foot and kicked me out of the car. I was screaming and holding on." She says he left her there, after dropping infant Justin in her arms, to walk for miles in the dark. On other occasions there were kicks to the legs and punches to the face and head, she says, and there were times he took her keys and locked her out of the house, leaving her to make late-night calls for help to sympathetic Celtics and their wives, particularly to Kim and Scott Wedman and to Sylvia and M.L. Carr, now Boston's coach and general manager.

Asked about his and Sylvia's knowledge of the domestic violence in the Parish household, Carr says only, "I've got lots of other positive things to talk about, and I'd rather not comment on this right now." Wedman did not return telephone calls to his home and office in Kansas City. A friend of Parish's who was in Los Angeles that June day says he saw Saad, sobbing and frantic, in the Marriott lobby. Sam Vincent, then a Boston player, says he was in a room next to Parish's and that he heard arguing in the hallway before he answered Saad's knock on his door. Vincent, who now does sports marketing in Orlando, told Saad he did not want to get involved in what he assumed was a marital dispute.

Saad's experience as a battered wife, with its assorted paradoxes and horrors, was singular neither in its nature nor in the dynamics that sustained it. As such it demonstrates why domestic violence is viewed not only as one of America's most critical social issues, as disabling psychologically as it is physically, but also is among the most baffling of social phenomena in its often endless repeated spin cycles of pain, retribution, contrition and more pain.

There is no denying its national scope. Eight to 12 million women a year are assaulted by their partners, numerous studies have shown, and these assaults have been cited as the leading cause of injuries to women from 15 to 44. In fact, more women die from or are injured at the hands of their abusers than are injured or killed in car accidents, muggings and rapes combined, and the numbers that make this point are most likely conservative: While 35% of emergency-room visits by women are for symptoms that may be the result of spousal abuse, as few as 5% of these victims are ever so categorized. An inordinate number of American women seem to trip and fall into hospitals over things that go bump in the night.

But what about the apparent prevalence of athletes among abusers? Are so many exposed as batterers because, as cultural icons, they are subjected to more searching scrutiny? Or does something about sports encourage such behavior? And do athletes indeed batter their mates more than nonathletes—more than, say, lobstermen, judges or insurance agents? While there are no definitive answers on these matters, one study suggests that male athletes are more likely to resort to sexual violence than other men.

That study, conducted by researchers at two universities, Northeastern and the University of Massachusetts, reviewed 107 cases of sexual assault reported at 30 Division I schools between 1991 and '93. The researchers concluded that "male college student-athletes, compared to the rest of the male student population, are responsible for a significantly higher percentage of the sexual assaults reported to judicial affairs on the campuses of Division I institutions." Specifically, while male student-athletes at 10 of those schools made up only 3.3% of the total male student body, they were involved in 19.0% of the assaults. One of the authors of the study, Todd Crosset, assistant professor of sport management at Massachusetts, said that some press reports on the issue of athletes and violence had been exaggerated, but he added, "These exaggerations do not discount that there is solid evidence of a problem in sport."

The subworld of the American athlete is one in which the ancient virtues of manhood—of the brave, cool, tough, dominating and aggressive male—are celebrated. It is one in which sexist machospeak and the demeaning of women have been the means by which men express their maleness. It is a closed culture, shot through with incessant messages of male supremacy, a sermon that drones like Muzak in the national church of sport. Back in 1978, on the day that the New York Yankees first reluctantly allowed female reporters into their clubhouse, the women who stepped into the hallowed room were greeted by a large cake sitting on a table. That pastry, designed by a Brooklyn baker, commissioned by a player, said all you need to know about the world of the locker room: The two-foot-long cake was in the form of a penis. Chocolate shavings, mimicking pubic hairs, were sprinkled around the part shaped like testicles.

It was an unforgettably foul expression of the group contempt in which the intruders to the male bastion were held, and its message was clearer and more powerful than any homily ever hung on a locker room wall: WOMEN NOT WELCOME HERE—HOSTILE TERRITORY. Particularly in the contact sports, things feminine have served as symbols of things to be avoided. "Part of the male athlete's subworld is not to be a woman," says Crosset, a former swimmer at Texas and former assistant athletic director at Dartmouth. "Women are degraded. You don't want to be skirt-of-the-week. You don't want to be a wimp, a sissy. To be a man is not to be a woman. Women are not to be respected. Women are despised."

It was this attitude that moved a high school football coach in Los Angeles to paint the picture of a vagina on the tackling dummies. And it was surely what inspired Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight—the same man who told Connie Chung on national television in 1988, "I think if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it"—to put a sanitary napkin in the locker of a player whose maleness he was challenging. Crosset is not alone in suggesting that such attitudes both denigrate women and ultimately condone and encourage violence against them. In a 1992 essay entitled "Male Athletes and Sexual Assault," Merrill Melnick, an associate professor at the State University of New York, wrote of the "macho-groupthink" of the arena spilling into the home, and he posited that "aggression on the playing field, sexist language and attitudes used in the locker room and an inordinate need to prove one's maleness can combine in complex ways to predispose some male athletes towards off-the-field hostility."