Not Work Safe

I was trying to find a good article about athletes & groupies, but couldn’t find one that fit all of what I was looking for, so I’ll take some excerpts from a few.

Groupies offering sex

Because top athletes have status in society, they attract people willing to provide sex to get close to them. “Sometimes (baseball groupies) find out where players are staying on the road and just show up in the bar. Some women get obsessed; I’ve gotten faxes and flowers. It can get a little weird,” said Shawn Estes, a pitcher with the Giants…

In his book, The Dark Side of the Game, Tim Green, who played in the NFL for eight years, says that groupies who follow athletes around should be avoided for three reasons: they bring diseases, they disrupt marriages, and they can trap players through pregnancy.

Said baseball player Darryl Hamilton (who has been in the majors for ten years) “… after a while it loses its thrill. … it’s the same women every year and it gets old. I was out the other night and it was kind of embarrassing. Nowadays, I’d rather not go out at all unless it’s someone pretty special.”

All-Star game is draw for groupies

And in many ways, groupies are as much a part of professional basketball lore as endorsement deals and overpriced sneakers. “When you play in the NBA, there are women waiting to meet you in every city along the way,” former L.A. Laker Magic Johnson wrote in his 1992 autobiography “My Life.” “Some people classify all of these women as groupies. . . . To me, a groupie was somebody who more or less collected athletes, who was interested in meeting lots of them.”

NBA groupies stake out clubs, hotels and sports arenas in hopes of chancing upon players. And there are a number of different kinds of groupies, according to Ortiz: “lot lizards” (groupies who hang out where players park their cars); “marry-mes” (groupies who want to be wives); “camp groupies” (those who live near team training camps); “organization groupies” (those who work in the team offices); “wives groupies” (those who try to get to players through their wives); and “grandma groupies” (those in their 40s and 50s).

From Payback is fair play for NBA great’s ex about Patrick Ewing’s ex-wife

We’ve all heard about NBA groupies in hotel elevators. Is it worse than we imagine?

I remember being part of the rookie transition program, and players who had been in the league were coming back and telling us: “Watch out, there are people who will just be there lying in wait to work a game on you.” With the Knicks, they had these policies that wives couldn’t travel to the road games, so you weren’t able to observe firsthand what was going on.