The Dangerous World of Wannabes

By John Elson

Baseball players call them "Annies." To riders on the rodeo circuit, they are "buckle bunnies." To most other athletes, they are just "the wannabes" or "the girls." You'll find them hanging out anywhere they might catch an off-duty sports hero's eye and fancy: at Los Angeles' private Forum Club, at jock-oriented watering holes like Mickey Mantle's in Manhattan or Bigsby's in Chicago, in the lobbies of hotels where teams on the road check in. To the athletes who care to indulge them, and many do, these readily available groupies offer pro sport's ultimate perk: free and easy recreational sex, no questions asked.

The sex may be free, but there is a price for the life-style. In the Nov. 18 issue of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, Earvin ("Magic") Johnson attests that he contracted the virus that causes AIDS, and which forced his premature retirement from the Los Angeles Lakers, "by having unprotected sex with a woman who has the virus." And who was that woman? Magic does not know. "Before I was married," he wrote, "I truly lived the bachelor's life . . . As I traveled around N.B.A. cities, I was never at a loss for female companionship . . . After I arrived in L.A. in 1979, I did my best to accommodate as many women as I could -- most of them through unprotected sex."

Like most other Americans, pro athletes were generally shocked and saddened by Johnson's plight. His fellow players of the National Basketball Association, however, had special reason for concern about Johnson's flagrant promiscuity. It has been common practice for some pro players to share the favors of groupies who beguiled them. Had the woman who infected Johnson passed the virus to other players? Magic's pregnant wife Cookie tested negative for HIV, but had he given the virus to other women who were still out there sleeping with the stars? Says Charles Barkley, star forward of the Philadelphia 76ers: "There are an awful lot of men, women and children sweating it out in this league. If you don't practice safe sex after being scared like this, you're out of your mind." The possibilities were frightening enough to get some athletes thinking about the unthinkable: abstinence and marital fidelity.

The presence of sexually available women on the sidelines of sport is nothing new. After all, Babe Ruth's appetite for women was as insatiable as his lust for food and booze. In his newly published memoir, A View from Above, Hall of Fame center Wilt Chamberlain boasts of having slept with 20,000 women -- an average of 1.4 a day for 40 years.

Many experts believe the groupie subculture flourished as professional sports became ever bigger as a business. Athletes now expect pampering off the court or field as long as they perform well on it. The notion that athletic prowess and sexual attraction go together reaches down to every budding jock who swaggered across a junior high schoolyard. Colleges routinely line up young campus beauties to orient athletically talented freshmen who have signed letters of intent. And the sexual mystique of the college sports hero lives on. Says Bill Little, sports information director at the University of Texas at Austin: "When I went to school here, girls always swooned around the football players. Now they do something about it."

When these stars hit the big leagues, with salaries to match their talents and egos, opportunities and temptations multiply. Says Harry Edwards, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a personnel adviser to two pro teams: "We are looking at an institution so influenced by images of virility, masculinity, potency and sensuousness that sex and sport have almost become synonymous."

Who are the groupies, and what do they want? Observers of the scene say they are usually of college age or slightly older. Mainly they seek money, attention and the glamour of associating with celebrated and highly visible "hard bodies." According to a 31-year-old who has had affairs with athletes in two sports, "for women, many of whom don't have meaningful work, the only way to identify themselves is to say whom they have slept with. A woman who sleeps around is called a whore. But a woman who sleeps with Magic Johnson is a woman who has slept with Magic Johnson. It's almost as if it gives her legitimacy."

Wannabes are usually too smart to approach athletes on the playing fields. But they know all the after-game hangouts and usually can find out where visiting teams are staying. "We never reveal where we stay when we go on the road," says Arthur Triche, an executive with the N.B.A.'s Atlanta Hawks. "But some of them are willing to call every hotel in town. When night falls, they move in. You see some of the same faces from town to town. They're like card collectors." And they are seldom shy about intentions. Recalls Miles McPherson, a former pro-football defensive back turned preacher: "When we went to clubs, women would be competing in any way to get to us, and it is very easy to take advantage of that situation. Some said they wanted an autograph, and then they'd ask you to sign their breasts."

Says Susie Erickson, fiance of Atlanta Braves pitcher Mike Bielicki: "I'll be holding Mike's hand, and they'll come up and whisper, 'What are you doing with her when you can be with me?' Ask any wife or girlfriend to pick out a groupie, and they'll all point to the same one."

Groupie action, says a New York City-based sportscaster, is heaviest in baseball, with basketball second. "Baseball players have a long season, they're on the road for weeks, and they stay in one place longer," this announcer explains. "Basketball players have it easy because they're so recognizable." Although a few tennis stars like Andre Agassi are invariably trailed by a mob of squealing fans, that sport is not conducive to groupie action: the best players stay inaccessible and have entourages to fend off unwanted wannabes.

Women athletes, less well known and less well compensated, are not usually subject to the same degree of temptation as are men -- though much of that may have to do with a lingering double standard. "A guy can go out to a bar, have a beer, talk to the bartender," says tennis star Gabriela Sabatini's coach, Carlos Kirmayr. "But if you are a woman alone in a strange town, you are usually stuck in a hotel by yourself."

The problem for male stars, of course, does not simply have to do with the wiles of conniving women. Philosophy professor Dallas Willard of the University of Southern California notes that a lot of team athletes are ill- equipped to handle pro sports' off-field pressures. "Many star athletes today," he says, "are from poor backgrounds -- poor not only in a financial sense but in terms of education, emotional and social preparation for life. They do not have the wherewithal to deal with the availability of sex, the offers to satisfy almost any gratification." Berkeley's Edwards claims to know of at least seven cases in which athletes have paid off groupies who threatened to go public with phony rape or paternity charges. And as both league officials and team executives increasingly admit, at some of the places where groupies trawl, drugs and alcohol are often present in quantity, further impediments to sensible judgment.

Just as Magic Johnson is now promoting protection in sex, franchises are doing more to protect their assets -- the players -- from temptation. The N.B.A. has a mandatory rookie orientation program that includes a seminar on AIDS and a dramatized enactment of problems a player may face regarding women and friends. More and more N.B.A. teams are flying charter and unloading their athletes onto buses parked right on the tarmac. Some teams visiting Phoenix prefer hotels near the Coliseum to the Westcourt hotel, 10 miles away. The Utah Jazz books rooms at a hotel in New Jersey even when they are playing at Madison Square Garden. "New York has too much," says the team's president, Frank Layden.

Some stars admit that there is only so much teams can or should do. "Players have to take more responsibility for themselves," says Knicks guard Gerald Wilkins. "That's just the bottom line. No woman can ever be caught with a guy if the guy doesn't want her to be there. It's just that simple." Kevin Johnson of the Phoenix Suns concurs. "Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything," he says. "We have to be in charge of our own bodies." The penalties for failing in that responsibility have never been higher.

With reporting by Sally B. Donnelly/Phoenix and David E. Thigpen/New York, with other bureaus