These are the people in your neighborhood.

• Date: 01 May 1999
• Author: Regenstein, Elliot

OUR GUYS: THE GLEN RIDGE RAPE AND THE SECRET LIFE OF A PERFECT SUBURB. By Bernard Lefkowitz. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997. Pp. xi, 443, $29.95.

The 1997 St. Louis Rams media guide contains a glowing description of the team's star rookie from the prior season.(1) The guide highlights his brilliant college career, describes his solid first professional season, and mentions that he grew up in Los Angeles. In a gray box above his football statistics, it notes that he frequently visits the Emergency Children's Home (ECHO) for troubled youth, where he talks to kids and plays basketball with them.

The description would all look pretty normal if it wasn't a portrait of Lawrence Phillips. Almost every other sporting publication has written of Phillips not as a mentor to underprivileged youth, but as the man who in 1995 savagely beat Kate McEwen, a University of Nebraska basketball player and Phillips's former girlfriend.(2) The Rams media guide story about Phillips helping children is apparently true.(3) But, unfortunately, so are the stories of his driving recklessly, missing team meetings, and assaulting a woman in Florida in June 1998.(4)

A running back described as the "[b]est football player" in the 1996 National Football League (NFL) entry draft.(5) Lawrence Phillips spent 1998 as a man without a team. The Rams, who selected him with their first pick in 1996, the sixth pick overall, cut him in November 1997, long past the point at which he became more trouble than he was worth.(6) The Miami Dolphins briefly placed him on their roster, but Phillips never translated his considerable talent into any performance; in July of 1998, the Dolphins also released him.(7)

Somewhere well down the athletic pyramid from Phillips are Kyle and Kevin Scherzer and Chris Archer, three high school athletes from Glen Ridge, New Jersey, who in 1989 violated a young woman with a broomstick and baseball bat.(8) Bernard Lefkowitz(9) spins their disturbing story in Our Guys, which turns out to be not only a painstakingly researched account of a single grotesque incident, but also a broadside assault on the behavior produced by the insularity of both American suburbia and athletic culture. Our Guys traces the development of the "Jocks" in Glen Ridge, describing their shockingly delinquent childhoods; it also tells the story of the rape survivor, Leslie Faber,(10) a mentally retarded girl whom Lefkowitz describes as "the most trusting person I've ever met in my life."(11)

That trust apparently led Leslie to the Scherzers' basement, where she performed oral sex on one boy, Bryant Grober, and was then raped with the broomstick and baseball bat by the Scherzer brothers and Chris Archer (pp. 19-21). While there were thirteen boys in the room when Faber arrived, only the Scherzers, Archer, and Grober were fully prosecuted. At trial their attorneys decided, as the football cliche goes, that the best defense is a good offense, and portrayed the mentally retarded girl as a sexual aggressor who wanted the boys to have their way with her.(12) They essentially decided to put Leslie Faber on trial.(13)

The tactic failed. While Grober was only convicted of a conspiracy count, the other three were convicted of second-degree conspiracy and first-degree aggravated sexual assault by force or coercion.(14) Archer and Kevin Scherzer were also convicted of first-degree aggravated sexual assault upon a mentally defective person.(15) The trial judge handed down a relatively short sentence of fifteen years with no minimum term,(16) and the Scherzer brothers and Archer appealed. The convictions for aggravated sexual assault by force or coercion were overturned on the grounds that no reasonable jury could have found that Leslie Faber was forced or coerced into the acts in question because Leslie engaged in the activity voluntarily.(17) The only defendant to have his sentence reduced by the overturning of the conviction for aggravated sexual assault by force or coercion was Kyle Scherzer, whose maximum term was cut down to seven years.(18) Eight years after the incident, the three athletes -- who had been free on bail during their appeals -- were finally dispatched to a medium-security detention center for young adult offenders.(19)

Violent crimes against women committed by athletes like Lawrence Phillips and the Glen Ridge Guys have been subject to increased scrutiny in recent years.(20) One fact Lefkowitz dwells on is that the Glen Ridge athletes came from two-parent white families living in a posh suburb -- hardly the experience of Phillips, a black man who grew up in foster care. What they have in common with Phillips, however, is that they play football. So two central questions emerge: what are the similarities and differences among the many male athletes who commit crimes against women? And is there something about athletic culture that makes jocks more likely than other men to commit crimes against women?

This Notice first criticizes the notion that the racial polarization of either the world of sports or suburban New Jersey contributed to the Guys' delinquency. It then evaluates the arguments that men who are athletes are particularly prone to violence against women, first by examining the culture of athletic teams, and then by comparing that culture to academic and professional environments. Next, this Notice agrees with Lefkowitz that Glen Ridge should be criticized for its attitude both before the assault and after more details of the crime had surfaced. Finally, it considers the matter of forgiveness in sports, focusing in particular on how society decides which athletes' transgressions it is willing to overlook.

1. THE BLACKBIRD

   One of the main reasons people move to affluent suburbs like Glen Ridge is they believe they can avoid having their kids exposed to violent thugs like Richie Parker.(21) Parker, a supremely talented basketball player, forced a sixteen-year-old girl to perform oral sex on him in a stairwell at his Manhattan high school in January 1994. Ongoing bad publicity from the New York tabloids turned him into a sort of Typhoid Mary among college basketball coaches; universities disciplined or forced out those who attempted to recruit him. Parker eventually spent two years in exile at an Arizona junior college before returning to New York to play for Long Island University, more than two years after the stairwell incident.(22)

   Parker quickly acknowledged his wrongdoing and apologized. In contrast to the disdain for women shown by the Glen Ridge Guys, Parker at the time of his crime had a long-time girlfriend whom he treated with decency and respect, and who stuck with him through the criticism.(23) But the media repeatedly portrayed Parker, who is black, as "some kind of sick animal."(24) Would a white kid in Parker's situation have turned into such a pariah?(25)

   For many years before the basement incident, the Glen Ridge Guys unapologetically and brazenly made a habit of degrading girls. Twelve years before they raped her, the Scherzer twins were part of a group of boys that coerced five-year-old Leslie into eating dog feces (pp. 68-71). The boys of Glen Ridge routinely tormented Faber, but she never received the "honor" of being invited to a party with the cool kids (p. 14). At those parties, thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls performed oral sex on the Guys, often seriatim (pp. 127-28). The Guys demeaned even the girls who were ostensibly their friends. They trashed the house of one young woman who routinely cooked dinner for them and was considered part of the "in" crowd (pp. 130-31), and then later the Guys stole money out of her purse at a school dance (pp. 156-57). And her torment was meager compared to the Guys' treatment of one unpopular girl, whose house they literally destroyed in a three-day orgy while her parents were out of town -- leading to the girl's removal from Glen Ridge High by her parents when they returned (pp. 131-38). Punishments for these misdeeds were generally swift and toothless (pp. 157-58), and the Guys got the message that they would get away with whatever they did.

   Because so many professional and major college athletes are black, attacks on the criminality of male athletes are sometimes characterized as attacks on the criminality of black men.(26) But that characterization is unfair; many athletes criticized for deviant behavior are white. A study of the NFL showed that while the majority of professional football players with serious criminal histories were black, blacks also composed the majority of players in the league.(27) Moreover, some of the better-known NFL felons in recent years have been white.(28) While the racial problems in sports may be deep and important, the problem of athletes committing violence against women -- or other crimes -- is not one particular to athletes of any race.

   Lefkowitz seems to want to go beyond the question of whether there is a correlation between race and criminality among athletes, and he suggests that growing up in a racially homogenous suburb contributed to the Guys' delinquent behavior. He never, however, successfully makes that suggestion into an argument. Lefkowitz discusses the racial insularity of Glen Ridge several times without building a causal link from Glen Ridge's homogeneity to the...