The High Cost of Treating Jocks as Enlightened Beings

Bloody sock. But it was the Rhode Island taxpayer who got soaked.

Curt Schilling made tens of millions of dollars because he could throw a baseball harder and with more movement and accuracy than the vast majority of people. Along with those millions came an ego-stoking public adulation that could warp and distort the most stable person:

Schilling got the idea for 38 Studios while playing for the Arizona Diamondbacks in the early 2000s. By then he was well into his pitching career, and starting to wonder what he might do next. An aspiring businessman and budding philanthropist, Schilling thought of himself as a kind of -- well, let’s allow him to make the comparison: “I wanted to make a difference in the world and take one shot at getting Bill-Gates-rich.”

So our multi-millionaire athlete saw himself as a visionary who could do no wrong. He was a superstar. Not a baseball superstar. A superstar, period. The kind that is beyond any and all limitations. A 21st-century Renaissance man capable of deep thoughts such as this:

Schilling didn’t just want to develop a video game, let alone a sports-based one. He wanted to develop the most complex kind of video game possible -- a “massively multiplayer online role-playing game,” in which thousands of users interact inside an elaborately conceived and designed fantasy world. 

[. . .] 

Schilling had no idea how much time and money it took to build the software required for such a game. And he didn’t exactly help matters by weighing in with suggestions of his own. There was, for example, that instance when he mentioned in an e-mail that it might be cool to have mounted combat on flying pigs. The design team worked on nothing else for a week.

Really, who can argue with weaponized flying pigs? Now, of course Schilling is entitled to do whatever he wants with his money, no matter how far removed from reality his plans may be. But it is only due to our societal worship of the modern athlete that a taxpayer boondoggle such as this could occur:

Less than a year later, Schilling had persuaded the star- struck governor of Rhode Island, Don Carcieri, to issue $75 million in tax-free bonds for 38 Studios. That’s when “the Big Blowhard” -- as Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy once called Schilling -- officially transcended the familiar narrative of the ex-athlete as failed businessman. He wasn’t losing his own fortune on a bad investment, a failed car dealership or an ill-conceived restaurant franchise. He was fleecing taxpayers in order to realize his deluded dreams. 

$75 million in taxpayer money because our society thinks professional athletes are somehow better people than the rest of us simply because they can play a game. We often talk about the moral and societal costs of our disproportional attachment to pro sports. Here is one occasion where we can put an actual monetary price tag on our twisted infatuations.