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Turtlegate
Online auctioneer eBay's latest scandal centers on illegal trade in tortoise goods and other endangered wildlife products.
By Ted Rose
[01/21/00]

Down the up staircase
McCain and Bradley were the darlings of the press corps for a while, but now they are its victims.
By Joe Conason
[01/21/00]

Washington, 90210
Defenders of the White House-network drug-ad deal lost the battle of spin.
By Sean Elder
[01/21/00]

Newt's makeover
The shunned former speaker, reborn as Big Ideas Guy, calls for an end to adolescence, and says we're not really in the Information Age yet.
By David Corn
[01/20/00]

Pirate radio goes legit
Micro-broadcasters can't believe their ears as the FCC moves to legalize low-power stations.
By Fiona Morgan
[01/19/00]

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Rocker was the midnight cowboy of the bullpen who'd never been far from his home in Macon, Ga., until he signed a major league contract. His redneck swagger rubbed the Bleacher Creatures of Shea Stadium the wrong way. When he sprinted out to the mound with the game on the line, they chanted, "Asshole, asshole."

Rocker gave it back as good as he got, spitting at them when they spat at him, and letting his body language tell them that they made him sick. The fans loosed a barrage of batteries, beer bottles and other objects at Rocker when he was on the bench, tossed Coke on his girlfriend and counted the ways in which his mother had sexual congress with strange men for money. He countered by heaving fastballs into the chain link fence separating players and fans, and laughed when they cringed behind it.

It had some of the weird symbiosis of Andy Kaufman's running gag with wrestler Jerry Lawler -- a complex act based on big gestures of mutual abuse that was fated to become something more than an act. Rocker was so into his crash-dummy conquest of New York, deriving power from the hatred of strangers and reveling in the spammed hate e-mail and the foaming-at-the-mouth letters to the editor, that he was bound to do something. (At one point in his fateful interview, he chortled over his discovery that merely by calling Mets fans the degenerates he had no doubt they were, he could "make them mad enough to go home and slap their moms.")

Like the kid in the sixth grade who manages to say one funny thing and then spends the rest of the year desperately upping the ante in hopes of getting one more laugh, Rocker probably thought that he had capped them good when he gave his opinion in Sports Illustrated about the human contents of the No. 7 subway train to Shea. "Some kid with purple hair next to some queer with AIDS right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids." Just for good measure, he added that it sucks to walk for an entire block through Times Square among a bunch of foreigners who can't even speak English and that he had a black teammate who was a "fat monkey."

It is easy to imagine him mentally pumping his fist in triumph after doing his shtick. He was Howard Stern with a 95-mph fastball.

Rocker was stupid in every respect -- for dredging up such thoughts in the first place (although his picture of the demographics on the No. 7 train, some have claimed, is not far off), and especially for dredging them up in front of Sports Illustrated's Jeff Pearlman, a writer who, given Rocker's unhinged immaturity, entrapped him even by asking him to speak. Pearlman sat through a hyperventilated conversation of more than seven hours to get this good stuff. But is he Mark Fuhrman in cleats? Or is he merely an expression of the national id whose blurted-out comments represent the sinister opinions secretly held by all the rest of us?

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