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I went over to ESPNW, ESPN’s new site for women sports fans and athletes, to check out the site so I could do a review here. The very first post on the site is one about athletes and cheating originally written for ESPN.

Anyway, the article reiterates what we already know: cheating is a lifestyle in the sportsworld (for those who want to) and some men will work entirely too hard just to get some side you-know-what. The article is about 3000 words, so I’ll share a few highlights here:

On Enablers:

There are unspoken codes in the big leagues. On football Sundays, some NFL players are known to dole out their tickets to two different mates in separate parts of the stadium — the wives’ section and the girlfriends’ section. Their paths are never supposed to cross. The lifestyle, in many locker rooms, is accepted.

Even the women who marry pro athletes often quickly learn the codes and unwritten rules of being an athlete’s wife.

Never is that more pronounced than when wives travel on the road. They know their husbands’ careers and earnings are foremost, so even if a wife sees a married teammate with another woman, she is expected to remain silent and keep that information to herself — even if she is close to that teammate’s wife.

Vikings Tackle B. Mckinnie on waiting until retirement to get married:

“A lot of coaches and players have a lot of distractions at home, and it will cause them not to play well,” says Bryant McKinnie, an unmarried left tackle for the Minnesota Vikings. “At the rookie symposium, we learned that 75 percent of NFL marriages end with divorce within two to three years after retirement. And that’s just something that’s always been on my mind.”

He has a point, but given the fact that a lot of athletes are caught up in drama involving women who aren’t their wives or even girlfriends, not being married isn’t the only key to avoiding distraction.

On repeat offenders:

Toni Blackshear doesn’t date athletes anymore. She knows she’s going to come across as a groupie. She is 41 now and doesn’t really care. She has a 16-year-old daughter with former NFL player Chuck Smith whom she dated when both were single.

She’s also had relationships with a handful of NBA and NFL players who generally had one common denominator: They couldn’t stay faithful.

Girl…

On Technology:

There’s the one about the guy who bought his wife a BMW, then borrowed the car and set the GPS to his girlfriend’s house. The wife got in the car the next day, followed the directions to the address and found her husband with his mistress.

“Technology is, for lack of better words, messing up the players’ game,” Blackshear says. “You cannot miss a beat; you have to be on top of it 100 percent of the time. Once you tell that first lie, you have to keep lying.”

But it works both ways. Cell phones can cover up a lie, she says. Some NFL players keep a couple of them — one that the wife sees and one that is stuffed under a car seat or in a gym bag. That phone, which usually is a prepaid one, is for the girlfriends.

John Nazarian, a former police officer, has been a private investigator for 20 years. He says that on average, he has about a half-dozen pro athletes a year as clients. Usually, it’s because they were involved in extramarital affairs and the mistress is seeking money for her silence. He says he recently had an athlete have GPS devices put on his wife’s car, not because he was worried about his wife’s infidelity, but because he wanted to make sure that when he was with a mistress, his wife was nowhere near.

This seems like entirely too much effort.

Read the rest of the 3000 word article here: