Putting out that cigar
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist, 06/11/99
David Satcher is going one-on-one with Michael Jordan, one of the greatest basketball players ever. He is defending against Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever. He is batting against Yankee pitching star Orlando Hernandez. He is swinging clubs against golfing great Tom Watson.
He is matching wits against World Series champion manager Toe Torre, six-time NBA champion coach Phil Jackson and 1986 Super Bowl champion coach Mike Ditka. He is trying to outgab four-time Super Bowl champion quarterback and broadcaster Terry Bradshaw and former football star and broadcaster Ahmad Rashad. He is trying to stop Hall of Fame lineman Mean Joe Greene. In fact, he is trying to score against the entire National Football League Players Association.
Satcher is taking them on, all at once. He has no choice. He is the surgeon general. All of these stars are cigar smokers and will fumigate you if you don't like it.
''My first choice is that we will be able to cooperate,'' Satcher chuckled over the phone yesterday when reminded of the stars who smoke. ''But I have been a fighter all my life. Wherever we find barriers to health, we try and get through.''
A study in the current New England Journal of Medicine confirmed common sense assumptions about cigar smoking, the fad of the prosperous 1990s. The study found that cigar smokers had twice the risk of mouth, throat, and lung cancer as nonsmokers. The risks go even higher with three or more drinks a day.
Noting the rise in cigar smoking in California, from 1-in-20 men to 1-in-11, Satcher wrote in an accompanying editorial in the journal, ''We must do a better job of educating the public, especially children and adolescents, about the risks to health associated with cigar smoking.''
The job will be hard. Since celebrity easily trumps common sense, Satcher is trying to chase Jordan, Gretzky, and the rest with a heavy limp in the arena of public influence. Most of the above stars have given long interviews to smoking magazines that reinforce the idea that cigars signify being on top of the world.
This is especially true with athletes, who already have a well-developed sense of superiority and invulnerability. The best example was Jordan and the Bulls. Nearly the whole team smoked last year on their way to their sixth and last title. Dennis Rodman gave teammates humidors for Christmas. Jordan opened a cigar bar near the United Center.
They smoked so much that even Jackson, who loves cigars as ''a way to celebrate the good feeling of what life can bring us,'' had to crack down on his players during the playoffs. ''I would tell them they should only be smoking one cigar per day because of the detrimental effects so much smoke can have on their physical conditioning and the efficient working of their lungs,'' Jackson told Cigar Aficionado last fall. ''Unfortunately, I've still seen some of the guys smoking as they drive up to the arena right before the game.''
They lit up big time on TV after winning the title, so much so that delegates to the American Medical Association voted 474-1 to urge sports leagues and television networks not to show tobacco smoking by athletes.
The AMA's action is a start. Since Satcher would find it laughably futile to point fingers at athletes who can wave championship rings while they blow smoke in his face, he would be better off appealing to sports commissioners and players associations. The marketing arm of the NFL Players Association this year endorsed a cigar line, using the name of Hall of Famer Tony Dorsett.
He should urge the commissioners to tell players and coaches that given the risks of cigars and their influence in society, they should be discouraged from smoking when they represent the team (he should also include chewing tobacco). He should ask players' associations to refrain from endorsing tobacco products.
Satcher should ask the networks to ask their broadcasters to stop parading cigars. Active players and coaches should be fined for giving interviews that essentially serve as free advertising for cigar companies, a sophisticated, upscale way of circumventing the advertising bans of the new national tobacco settlement. A part of every interview of a sports figure in Cigar Aficionado focuses on the figure's favorite cigars.
It is a lot for Satcher to catch up with the world's most incredible athletes and successful coaches. But this week's news should take some of the limp out of Satcher's legs. He is one study closer to exposing this symbol for being on top of the world as a faster way of being lowered to the bottom. ''I believe that they care about children and do not want to advocate something that can cause death and disability in children,'' Satcher said. ''I believe that if we can get that message across about cigars, we will see a change.''
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
This story ran on page A31 of the Boston Globe on 06/11/99.
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