A lot of people read "Catcher in the Rye" when they are in their teens. It's a good age for a book that decries the phoniness that's all over the world, especially if the reader has already started to discover those things for themselves. Most grow up to accept that there's a little bit of phoniness in most of life's interactions, though. You may do something you don't believe in for money, say something untrue to help you with the opposite sex or lie to your kids to give them a sunnier reason for something truly awful in life. And rarely do you label someone as a "phony" because the mirror can be harsh.
Joel Sherman isn't one of those people. The New York Post columnist writes today that Andy Pettitte would be a phony if he signed with a team other than the Yankees.
"If Pettitte signs elsewhere, regardless of the dollar figure, he should be viewed as a world-class phony forever around here," Sherman writes. "There should be no more pardons. He should receive no invites to future Old-Timers Games, hear no cheers when the dynastic teams reassemble."
His reasons aren't awful. The Yankees stood by Pettitte after he signed for $16 million last year while knowing that he was going to be in the Mitchell Report, have paid him $108 million throughout his career and he did say, more than once, that he was going to sign with the Yankees or retire. All good reasons to say a player lacks character, none of which would make Pettitte any more of a phony than anyone else.
How many times have players said how much they love playing somewhere and how long they'd like to be there before they sign somewhere else for more money? It's a business and a business with a limited time to earn real money, which makes it exceedingly difficult to criticize players for getting however much money as they can. It works both ways. Teams will sing a player's praises, make him feel like part of a family and then trade him for a younger, cheaper model the second one comes available.
Sports is one thing for fans but another for the people involved in it. They don't sell it as a corporate business where the bottom line matters as much or more than the finish line. That's not something that makes people buy jerseys and paint their faces. You could call that phony, just as you could call it phony when a player does charity work by day and abuses drugs by night.
There's so much in sports (and the rest of life) that could be called phony, in fact, that it would be a more novel approach to find the things that aren't phony and list some of them.
