World Of Sports Shows It Forgives And Forgets

Mike Tyson makes his comeback official with a public workout in Las Vegas.

Darryl Strawberry patiently makes his way back toward the bright lights of New York. Fellow substance abuser and one-time sidekick Doc Gooden wants permission from major league baseball to follow.

Mike Schmidt makes a pitch to find room for Pete Rose in Cooperstown.

Everywhere you turned in the sports world last week, somebody was seeking a second chance - in some cases, a third, fourth or fifth chance. And unlike the real world, the odds were tilting heavily in their favor. There you have it: One more reason to think of the sports world as a naive version of the real thing.

Succeed, then fall in almost any other endeavor and everybody you passed on the way up is waving on the way down. Succeed, then fall in sports and before you hit bottom, sponsors and fans are already calculating your comeback player of the year chances.

Fans have short memories. It’s almost a guarantee that if you’ve actually done the time, most of them won’t remember the crime. They care less about accountability than marketability. Less about the numbers rung up in polls than the ones that appear in agate-sized type - who won and who lost and how big the crowd was. Witness the latest barrage of people tripping over one another to line the road back and give their favorite fallen heroes the “thumbs-up” sign.

Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. Some people need work wherever they can get it. Sports is great that way.

When Mike Tyson returned to work Wednesday, it was in a showroom at the MGM Grand Hotel with TV cameras, a horde of reporters and a handful of kids watching his every move. That bunch was in addition to the five-bodyguard, 13-person entourage Tyson brought along to wrap his hands, set up punching bags and make sure the workout was accompanied by the proper music.

The 47-minute session provided the rest of the world with an abridged version of what Tyson’s inner circle had been seeing for several weeks. Mike looked sleek and fast jumping rope and hitting targets that don’t hit back. But he didn’t spar and didn’t speak.

A million questions still await Tyson’s answers. But his silence reminded everyone else the event was being staged on his terms, on sports’ terms; not to answer whether he is penitent, only whether he is motivated.

And his trainer Jay Bright answered that with this requisite voice-over for the film clips that would be shown on the nightly sportscasts.

“Before he went away to Indiana, he was a little bored, on a roller coaster with fame. This time he has great desire, and he’s a pleasure to work with.”

By most accounts, Strawberry, too, has been the very model of comportment throughout his odyssey to return to the majors and New York, even though he enjoyed his few, brief shining moments with the Mets and not George Steinbrenner’s Yankees.

And never mind that Strawberry was less impressive at a few of the stops in between - in Los Angeles and San Francisco and the federal courts, where he faced income tax charges. That was a couple of comebacks ago. All will be forgotten once he turns up in pinstripes.

Steinbrenner was called exploitative for bringing Strawberry back at first. Then he was called cynical for insisting that part of Darryl’s contract be put in a trust fund should this comeback ends like the others. Instead, George should have been praised for being realistic. And here’s hoping he remembers to insist on a similar deal if Gooden somehow gets off suspension and finds his way back to New York.

A selective memory, of all things, has so far kept Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame. That was what former teammate Mike Schmidt tried to illustrate with the poignant story he told at induction ceremonies in Cooperstown last Sunday.

The point of the story was that Rose was Schmidt’s grandmother’s favorite player for all the right reasons: his determination, hustle and guts. Whatever Pete’s later sins were (and they were considerable), Schmidt wondered how much longer they would color the sum total of his achievements.

Considering the world Rose resides in, it’s been too long already.