I want to note the passing of Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner who died of an apparent suicide last week.

In April 2007 Penner publicly announced that he was transitioning from male to female and changing his byline to Christine Daniels. In October of 2008 he quietly changed his byline back to Mike Penner and resumed his male identity.

Penner didn’t discuss his transition back to male so we don’t know whether his level of happiness was unaffected by transitioning to female or whether the transition proved to be too difficult. But I do want to make one point that came to mind when he first announced his transition to female.

Our fast changing society has come far in allowing people to transition from male to female and vice versa – children in grade school are now recognized for crossing gender lines and are treated respectfully by their parents – but we haven’t made much progress in unraveling the duality of gender.

The recent case of Caster Semenya is indicative of the problem. Semenya won a 2009 World Championship in the 800 meters for South Africa but questions about her gender have turned her life upside down. Is she female or not? The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) made her undergo gender tests even though officials of the organization admit that there is no ultimate gender test. There is no clear delineation between male and female.

In the case of Mike Penner, he had one choice if he wanted to transition – from male to female. He could hardly have gone to his boss at the Los Angeles Times and said, “You know what, I don’t feel like a guy so I’m gonna noodle around in the gender spectrum to see exactly where I fit and get back to you in a few months.” At least not if he wanted to keep his job.

Our culture doesn’t allow anything in between male and female except for a few bearded women I know of and they surely don’t write for big city newspapers. I don’t know the source of Mike Penner’s unhappiness but I do wish we could unshackle people from the male/female polarity and allow them to wander around in the gender spectrum till they find their place.

Maybe Mike Penner would still be around if he’d had that opportunity.

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It’s the tennis offseason and though there is tennis news today – notably, Amelie Mauresmo has retired – I’m going off into the world of golf to address the issue of privacy and Tiger Woods’s current predicament. After all, if Tiger’s good friend Roger Federer were caught in a similar muddle, I’m sure he’d be screaming for privacy too.

Here’s the story. Tiger drove his car into a fire hydrant and a neighbor’s tree last Friday night and his wife Elin smashed in the back window of his SUV with a golf club. Tiger’s initial statement made it look like Elin was trying to rescue him by breaking the window but it’s more likely that they were arguing about rumors of an affair between Tiger and a woman named Rachel Uchitel.

In the days after the accident, evidence of two more affairs arose which led Tiger to release a statement on his website admitting to transgressions. While he was at it he made it clear that being a high profile athlete doesn’t mean losing privacy:

…no matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy. …Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.

To which I have to ask, where has Tiger been hiding for the past few decades?

Was he chained to the driving range whenBill Clinton went to disastrous lengths to deny having had sex with Monica Lewinsky? Did he forget that Lewinsky saved the semen-stained blue dress she was wearing when she had sex with Clinton?

Did he think his text messages and voicemails would vanish into thin air after he sent them to Jaimee Grubbs, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress who told US Magazine she had a 31 month affair with Tiger?

Was his television broken when baseball player Roger Clemens vehemently denied steroid use only to have his former trainer turn up with steroid tainted syringes with Clemens’ DNA on them? Did he not take note when Clemens’ running buddy Andy Pettite avoided similar grief by admitting to using human growth hormone?

Did he contract amnesia when his close friend Michael Jordan was sued by a former mistress for $5 million?

What does privacy mean in the era of text messages, cellphone cameras and youtube? Not much really. As for public confessions, if you have an extra-marital affair and you don’t confess, the object of your affections will.

The issue is not privacy; the issue is intelligently adjusting to the flow of cultural and technological change. If you get caught in an indiscretion, you have to know two things: 1. Evidence of your indiscretion exists and someone will take advantage of the notoriety that comes with reporting it. 2. The best strategy is full disclosure.

When someone tried to extort money from David Letterman by threatening to disclose his affairs with female employees on his staff, Letterman went on his show and admitted to the affairs. The only thing I’ve heard about lately is a joking reference to a “David Letterman Fidelity Retreat” on a radio commercial.

One last note. Younger high profile athletes should pay very close attention because how many of these athletes don’t end up having extramarital affairs? Whatever the number is, I guarantee you it’s very low.

When Martina Navratilova learned that Andre Agassi tested positive for crystal meth and got away with it by lying, she compared Andre to U.S. baseball player Roger Clemens. Martina was referring to Clemens’ lies about using steroids in the face of evidence to the contrary. Whether it was intentional or not, by comparing Andre to Clemens she put the focus squarely on both players’ suspicious late career success.

Clemens resurrected his flagging career and won four of his seven Cy Young awards and both of his World Series rings after the age of 30. Andre won five of his eight slams after the age of 29.

Clemens explained his success in magazine articles detailing a brutal workout regimen with his trainer Brian McNamee. The articles extolled Clemens’ work ethic as he pushed himself to new heights on the stationary cycle and endured hours of medicine ball torture with McNamee.

Replace McNamee with Gil Reyes and you have a similar scenario. Agassi met Reyes in 1989 but it was 1999 when Andre says the two of them agreed to retool his workouts. Now the magazine articles described interminable sprints up a 320 yard paved hill on Christmas morning. Andre turned 29 in 1999 and that year he won both the French Open and The US Open – the first and only time he won multiple slams in one year.

Retooled workouts are a plausible explanation for Andre’s later success but suspicion now comes with the territory after getting duped by Clemens. And then there’s baseball player Barry Bonds who set the record for home runs when he was 36 years old and also attributed his late career success to hard training.

There’s evidence that Clemens cheated. His trainer covered his own butt by keeping tainted needles he used to inject steroids into Clemens’ butt. Gil Reyes would never in a million years out Andre. And the ATP – nor it’s pre-WADA independent drug organization or whatever it was the ATP blamed for swallowing Andre’s lie for the crystal meth postive – clearly wasn’t interested in disclosing drug use by its players.

We’re not supposed to taint legends without evidence. But we should at least be rolling our eyes at Andre’s late career success with as much cynicism as we showed at the French kiss defense Richard Gasquet used for his positive cocaine test.

Others rolled their eyes too. Gasquet is currently defending himself in front of the Court of Appeal for Sport (CAS). The CAS is appealing the decision by an independent tribunal called by the International Tennis Federation (ITF) which gave Gasquet a two and half month suspension. The ITF and the World Anti-Doping Agency think he should have been banned for at least a year.

Major League Baseball protected baseball players before the league was pressured into starting a drug testing program. The ATP protected tennis players before the ATP accepted Olympic drug testing standards. That protection helped players at the time but now it leaves them under permanent suspicion without much hope of resolution.

Then Andre comes out with the most revealing sports autobiography I’ve ever read and I wonder if part of it is a cover; a way of distracting us by highlighting his crystal meth escapades so we’ll bemoan his recreational drug use instead of wonder about his late career resurrection.

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I started writing about Andre Agassi’s new autobiography Open last week. In excerpts of the book released at the time, we learned that Andre had done crystal meth and gotten away with it and his multicolored ‘do depended on a wig. While those revelations were surprising, they didn’t change my opinion of Andre all that much. He’s always been outrageous relative to the rest of the rather staid tennis world.

But that was before I took off on a cruise to the Caribbean and found myself restricted to my bed as our ship tossed and turned and banged into waves on its circuitous path around hurricane Ida. By the time I re-emerged, new excerpts of Andre’s book had been released and now my feelings towards Andre have changed.

First, let’s credit the publisher of the book with p.r. genius for releasing excerpts with increasingly titillating revelations. Second, let’s credit Andre for being the showman he’s always been. His father really missed the boat considering his longtime employment in Las Vegas casinos. He had a performer on his hands in Andre and he diverted him into tennis instead.

This, actually, is the essence of the book. Andre has hated tennis ever since his father cobbled together a hulking ball machine that loomed over 3 year old Andre like a videogame monster. The book is nothing if not a sharp portrait of the ways we spend our lives negotiating our relationships with our parents.

According to Andre’s father, Mike Agassi, he made his son hit a million balls during the year he was 7 years old. In response, Andre figured out that hitting the ball off the frame of the racket sent the ball over the fence and gave him a short reprieve while his father retrieved the ball. When his father gave him speed before a junior nationals final, Andre figured out that keeping the match close before finally winning it would tell his father that giving him speed didn’t make that much difference and might dissuade him from doing it in the future.

Fast forward to Andre’s adult activity with crystal meth and two marriages with women who had overbearing fathers, and you can see that the process of processing our parents is a never ending trip. Steffi Graf is his current wife and her father Peter Graf is one of the few tennis fathers on earth who compares to Andre’s father in the race for overbearing tennis parent. This is amply illustrated in the book when a meeting in Las Vegas between the two fathers results in a confrontation that Andre has to break up.

I know this world on a much smaller scale. My mother treated me like Cinderella. I was the one cleaning the house and ironing my mother’s darling son’s clothes while he was out being a juvenile delinquent. I got back at her by accidentally breaking off most of the rays on her prized sun clock and outperforming her darling son in every aspect of my life.

You can feel that same kind of bitterness and jealousy in Andre’s voice. And not just towards his father. He trashes Pete Sampras for being a one-dimensional player and a bad tipper. Andre is hardly in a position to slam Pete for being one-dimensional considering how much time he spent in the middle of the baseline and the bad tipper thing is just silly.

Andre’s stated reason for writing the book is to unburden himself, but this book is just one more example of the acting out he describes in the book and that’s why he’s getting so much grief from the sports community. The tennis community wants to know why such a great champion would wound them by saying he hates tennis and always has, and the rest of the sports world is mocking Andre for being an adult who’s still crying about his father.

But the sports world is used to reading sports books not memoirs. Sports books about champions focus on adulation and overcoming odds while memoirs are often records of screwed up family relationships and people’s screwed reactions to those relationships. Memoirists know they’ll look bad.

Andre does too and I appreciate him all the more for it.

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