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Buddy, Can You Spare The Truth? Guys Ponder

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By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times

Published: February 17, 2008

In classic buddy movies such as "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," a mismatched pair of friends learn to transcend their differences and forge a lasting, loyal friendship.

In recent months, baseball has provided a darker, and some might say, more realistic story line.

Brian McNamee, a personal trainer who worked closely with Roger Clemens, told federal investigators that he injected the pitcher with performance-enhancing drugs from 1998 to 2001. Clemens has vehemently denied the charges, most recently during a congressional hearing last week in Washington while McNamee sat two seats away.

Then, there is New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, a close friend of Clemens. Pettitte has said that McNamee injected him with human growth hormone and that Clemens admitted to using HGH in a conversation 10 years ago.

Friendship hasn't been this fraught since the days of Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky.

But to many psychologists and sociologists who study male relationships, this rift is an oft-told tale. In less-rarefied worlds - the office, college, a poker group - these experts say, men face similar choices: When do you rat out a pal? When do you stop a friend from harming someone? When do you take one for your buddy?

"These are moments when there's a clash between two conflicting values connected to masculinity," said Michael S. Kimmel, a sociologist at State University of New York at Stony Brook and author of "The Gendered Society." "No.1, you always do the right thing. And the second is, you never betray your friends."

"When a Serpico comes along," he said of Frank Serpico, the cop who blew the whistle on corruption in the New York City police department in the 1970s, "he's both a hero and a villain."

Scholars who study gender differences say that when deciding how far loyalty should go, men make calculations on a case-by-case basis rather than on any gender-specific prescription. Are jobs and livelihoods on the line, as in the insider-trading scandals in which co-workers testified against one another? Is the friendship more valuable than personal fulfillment, as in the case of a man who pursues his friend's wife?

An Unspoken Code For Athletes

For athletes, the calculus is complicated by an unspoken code. Teams need to be cohesive to work together, sports sociologists noted. It is what has kept teammates, both male and female, they said, from speaking out publicly - not just about illegal or unethical acts such as steroid use but also private matters such as the sexual orientation of a teammate or an affair between a teammate and a coach.

"There's a tendency to protect a teammate or the organization, even at the expense of higher moral principles," said Faye L. Wachs, a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, who specializes in sports sociology.

Jim Bouton, a pitcher and the author of the 1970 baseball memoir "Ball Four," said men become "like family and you stick up for each other."

When his book exposed amphetamine use, heavy drinking and fighting among players, Bouton was labeled a Benedict Arnold by the baseball establishment, some ex-teammates and the press, but he never considered his book an act of betrayal.

"There are things I didn't put in the book because I thought they'd violate the players' confidences too much," said Bouton, explaining that his goal had been to share what it was like to be a ballplayer, which he was with the Yankees and the Seattle Pilots. He described the experience as mostly "fun."

"I did hold back," he said. "It's a tell-some book."

In the military, the code of loyalty is strong as well because combat units must also rely on each other to survive life-and-death situations. In cases where misconduct is ambiguous, meaning it could be viewed as necessary, "People are not going to volunteer information" against a fellow soldier, said Mackubin T. Owens, a professor at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., and a former Marine in Vietnam.

Owens pointed to a Pentagon mental health survey of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq, released last year, that showed that more than half of the respondents would not turn in a fellow service member for mistreating an Iraqi civilian.

More than 40 percent of those surveyed, the Pentagon reported, said torture should be allowed to save the life of a soldier or Marine.

Men often test friendships in social circles, too. Kimmel cited the "wing man," who sacrifices his time by walking over with his buddy to an attractive woman at a bar to help seduce her. "It's sort of the essence of friendship, to sacrifice something to prove your loyalty," he said.

Bradford H. Turnow, a 35-year-old elementary school teacher in Long Island who runs the Yankees fan site historyoftheyankees.com and would approve if Pettitte kept talking, said most men would be reluctant to expose a friend. But that was not the case six months ago when he called a friend in his poker group on an unfair play that affected another player.

"Guys are less afraid to speak up in front of a group and say, 'That's wrong,'" Turnow said.

Half of the eight men sided with Turnow, he said, and the argument became so heated he walked away from the table for 10 minutes to calm down.

In the end, he said, friends patched things up over many conversations, and the group survived.

Pressure To Be 'One Of The Guys'

When the lines get blurry, so do the decisions. Tom Chen, a graduate student at Brown, said that an anti-sexism men's group he founded in 2006 at Amherst discussed ethical scenarios, like what someone should do if a friend tries to get a woman drunk to have sex with her. Do you stop the friend?

Chen, 23, said most of the 20 men in his group said they would, but many were also concerned about angering the friend, appearing prudish and bucking the norm.

The pressure to be "one of the guys" is powerful, said Jackson Katz, an author on issues of masculinity. He said before acting, men often weigh the risk of ostracism and loss of status.

"Guys make calculations all the time that it's not worth it," he said. Men "have this notion that you try to prove yourself as a man."

Women do seem to have a different notion of friendship. In the research literature, their bonds are described as "face to face," meaning they share feelings more intensely. Male relationships are "side by side," less touchy-feely and built around activities like sports or work.

But some experts noted that when it comes to loyalty, men and women are not as sharply divided as they once were. In institutions such as the police and military, the same code of behavior rules over both sexes, as the torture scandal in Abu Ghraib prison showed.

Peter M. Nardi, a professor of sociology at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who has written about heterosexual and gay male friendships, said the nature of bonds could also vary depending on ethnicity, sexual orientation and social class.

Gay men, for example, share issues of identity and disclose more to each other than heterosexual men do.

In any case, friendships are rarely worth criminal charges, as former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick discovered. His friends turned on him, implicating him as the owner and operator of a dogfighting ring. (Vick was sentenced recently to 23 months in prison.)

In the steroid scandal, baseball players could face perjury charges, and that is putting pressure on friendships. Indeed, Pettitte and Clemens, teammates on the Houston Astros and the Yankees, are reportedly no longer so close.

Bouton said he doubted that Pettitte would go out of his way to hurt his friend. But if he has information and he is at risk of perjury, Bouton predicted, "he's not going to jail for Roger Clemens."

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