A Viewing Habit That May Not Wash With Sports Fans

After running pass patterns for two hours and spending another hour in the weight room, Los Angeles Raider wide receiver Willie Gault emerges from the locker room and turns his attention to an unlikely series of questions: Will Haley discover that her teen-age boyfriend is sleeping with her former stepmother? Will Erica be able to lure Dimitri away from his wife, who recently awoke from a 15-year coma? Will Edmund the gardener’s son be able to prove he’s really the bastard brother of a wealthy industrialist?

Gault is a soap opera junkie. And on the Los Angeles Raiders--a team with one of the most macho reputations in sports, a team that revels in its brawling image, a team whose mascot is a grizzled pirate with a black eye patch--he is not alone. Like homemakers, football players--and baseball and basketball players--enjoy spending their afternoons following the continuing tales of love, betrayal and romantic redemption.

On a recent afternoon during Raider summer training camp in Oxnard, Gault returns to his hotel room, flops on his bed, pushes aside his playbook and flips on the television. For the next hour he eats his pasta and chicken lunch and watches “All My Children.”

The soaps, Gault says, are a way to relax during the high-pressure NFL season, a way to forget about the cornerbacks who, every Sunday, try to separate him from his senses.

After a Raider workout, defensive tackle Nolan Harrison, who is drenched in sweat, slowly limps off the field after finishing a series of end zone to end zone wind sprints. He looks dazed for a moment when asked about his soap opera habit. But he is a professional, accustomed to answering hostile, bizarre or inane postgame questions. So he addresses the issue at hand.

Harrison, a “General Hospital” man, says that while soap opera viewing is a solitary pursuit during training camp, during the regular season up to a dozen players watch the soaps together in the training room. As they soothe sore muscles in the Jacuzzi or ice swollen joints, they avidly follow “All My Children” and “General Hospital.”

Players hoot and holler at the philanderers, shout at the villains and call out warnings to their potential victims. Players “get into it” to such an extent, Harrison says, that it is almost like watching a ballgame.

At 6 feet, 5 inches and 290 pounds, Harrison does not encounter much taunting about his choice of afternoon entertainment. And when a group of behemoth football players are watching soaps in the training room, “you don’t want to be the one who changes the channel,” said Jon Kingdom, head of scouting for the Raiders. The Raiders have a reputation for drafting free spirits, eccentrics and renegades, players the more paramilitary NFL teams want no part of.

“We don’t care if they watch soap operas or war movies,” Kingdom said. “The only thing we care about is they play like hell during the game.”

Many avid sports fans are disillusioned when they discover that their macho heroes spend their afternoons wondering why Dixie slept with Brian or if Erica will marry for the seventh time. But athletes watch soaps because they have their afternoons free and are constantly searching for ways to kill time when on the road, holed up in hotel rooms.

And sports and soaps have certain parallels.

Both are powerful continuing dramas that engender fierce loyalty. Sports fans follow their favorite teams year after year, sometimes generation after generation, through both the contending years and the cellar-dwelling ones. This is their team; they follow no other. Soap opera fans are the same way. Some watch their soap for decades--a few soaps have been on more than 35 years--and follow the characters, the plot lines, the complex romantic entanglements.

“One Life To Live” fans do not switch to “The Bold and the Beautiful” when the story line falters. They tough it out.

Some players are such avid soap opera devotees that they have made cameo appearances. Cincinnati Bengal quarterback Boomer Esiason appeared on “All My Children,” and Los Angeles Ram wide receiver Flipper Anderson had a speaking part on “The Young and the Restless.” He played a young doctor and dramatically intoned his single line: “Thank you.”

About half of the Clippers and Lakers are soap opera fans. One former Laker, center Mychal Thompson, watched three soaps a day and “would literally plan his whole day around the shows,” says Laker publicist John Black. The Clippers often prepare for their daily workouts by catching “The Young and the Restless” while they are dressing and lacing up their sneakers, said forward Loy Vaught, a 6-foot-9, 240-pound power forward who is a longtime fan.

Sometimes, after practice, players will argue in the locker room. Not about ball hogging or violent picks, but whether to watch “General Hospital” or “Gilligan’s Island.”

Baseball players are notorious soap opera fans. The star of “All My Children,” Susan Lucci--who plays Erica Kane, a femme fatale with six ex-husbands--is such a favorite among New York Mets players that before a recent game, she was accorded the honor of throwing out the first ball.