THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605240087
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: 92 lines
THE HEAVILY wrinkled face is grimly set, the pursed lips cherry-red. Smoke swirls from a cigarette held between chapped fingers. She looks the interrogator. The photo caption reads: ``Red Menace: Cincinnati owner Marge Schott.''
What a cheap shot.
Red menace? Sports Illustrated's ugly May 20 cover of Schott and its story by ``reporter'' Rick Reilly should warn: ``Witch Hunt: SI Does Hatchet Job on Baseball's Only Female Owner.'' I am hard-pressed to recall shoddier journalism.
In a rush to condemn Schott's ``message'' - of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and any other bigoted social view that a human being can hold - SI becomes a messenger that deserves to be shot.
Objectivity? Balance? Independent inquiry? Forget it.
This bitchy, stingy old broad deserves all she gets. She's ruining the once-proud Cincinnati Reds. She's an embarrassment to baseball. (As if that were even possible.) Who gives a damn about the woman herself? Certainly not Reilly.
In her latest public gaffe, which prompted the SI article, Schott, 67, a third-generation German-American, told an ESPN interviewer that Adolf Hitler ``was O.K. at the beginning. . . . He just went too far.''
I don't know the context in which this remark was made, and - surprise! - SI doesn't enlighten me.
I do know that Schott, a rather rough and ordinary woman, wealthy through marriage and family, has a knack for offensive remarks. To say the least.
Schott was suspended from baseball for a year in 1993 for making racial and ethnic slurs and more recently raised hackles when she complained about how umpire John McSherry's on-field death ruined the Reds' opening day.
But Schott's own cheap shots are no excuse for Reilly's sarcastic, insulting, uninsightful and downright vicious article, headlined ``Heaven Help Marge Schott.''
Heaven help SI if it believes that stories rife with rumor, innuendo, unconfirmed anecdotes and ANONYMOUS SOURCES - so many, it's a joke - constitute ``responsible'' journalism.
I asked ``who says?'' so often while reading this article that I lost track. Attribution is a trifling detail to Reilly, who, at one point, hits this triple of insult-by-anonymity:
``It was weird,'' says one former marketing employee. ``She was great to our families. Absolutely terrific. But she treated us like s---.''
``I think she is the single worst person I've ever known,'' says one longtime Reds employee. ``Spiteful, mean-spirited and evil.''
Says a former top-level employee, ``She's the most cold, calculating person I've ever known. To feel sorry for her is ridiculous.''
Why should I believe people who don't have the guts to go on the record?
And why should I trust a reporter who makes no effort to understand Schott's ``eccentricities,'' referring to her ``idiocies,'' her ``Jell-O-head-edness,'' her ``Marge Vision''?
Aaaah, but understanding would require work. Depth, thoughtfulness. Reilly would rather be cute and write off Schott as a ``bag lady with a trust fund'' who ``may come off as having sniffed too much epoxy.''
Marge Unnewehr Schott, a 43-percent owner of the Reds, has been a successful businesswoman (Schott Chevrolet is well known in Cincinnati) since her husband, Charlie, died in 1968, when she was 39. But Reilly only incidentally, and vaguely, mentions her holdings, and he denigrates her business acumen, saying: ``Today she knows where every penny goes, how every tax shelter works, how wide every loophole can be made.''
Why ruin the story by talking to business associates, friends and relatives and asking them how Schott has survived and flourished? It's so much easier to follow ``Aunt Bee'' around and wait for her to say something demeaning or foolish or (one can only hope) racist.
Or to bait her about Charlie's womanizing or about the militaristic father who called her ``Butch.''
Achtung!
Oh, and about Schott's pathological penny-pinching, the Reds do just happen to have one of the major leagues' highest player payrolls ($39.5 million) - a fact Reilly casually dismisses.
But worst of all, Reilly ridicules Schott for her hard drinking, her chain-smoking, her loneliness, her maudlin attachment to her dead husband and her dead dogs and her paranoia. He even attacks the woman's childlessness.
Not once does he ask a sensitive question that might have enlightened us. Even provided a public service. Is Schott alcoholic? Depressed? Senile? Schizophrenic? What is the state of her mental health? We could have learned so much if only he'd shown some compassion.
There's a red menace here, all right, but it's not Marge Schott. The menace, like the message, is the medium. And this cowardly medium wants Schott out of baseball.
Bush league, SI. Bush league. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor of The
Virginian-Pilot. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
The May 20 cover story is a ruthless look at Cincinnati Reds owner
Marge Schott. by CNB