Oden latest to learn nothing is private

Rob Oller commentary: Oden latest to learn nothing is private

Greg Oden awoke early Tuesday morning to learn a lesson that as a celebrity he should have grasped by now: that privacy does not suffer fools gladly.

At 6 a.m. Portland time, the Trail Blazers center received a call from a friend telling him to check the Internet because someone had posted nude pictures of him standing in front of a mirror.

One click of the mouse and Oden knew instantly the mirror image would reflect poorly on his reputation as a NBA player who always tries to do the right thing.

"I've had better days," he told a radio sports talk host during one of several interviews in which he apologized to his family, team, fans and Portland community for something he said happened 1 years ago, when he sent racy photos by mobile phone to a woman he was seeing at the time.

Sending sexually explicit messages or photos between mobile phones is called sexting. Oden, 22, realizes it was stupid. He needed to realize it when he was 20. But stupid is a persistent little bugger. Universally unwanted, it patiently waits for that day when common sense takes a nap.

Those naps are increasing in frequency as a volatile mix of celebrity and social media turns every camera-equipped cell phone into the flash-popping paparazzi and every voice mail into the end of Tiger Woods as we knew him. The image of O.J. Simpson's white Bronco speeding down a Los Angeles freeway seems antiquated compared to today's snoopervision, where even pillow talk can land you on David Letterman's top-10 list.

No place is safe. You have to wonder when athletes will realize that. Unfortunately for Oden, the former No. 1 draft pick serves as an object lesson on the subject.

"Somebody gave me a graph of my Google (search results) since it happened, from like 5 a.m. to 11 a.m., and the rate said, 'Volcanic,' " Oden said during a news conference in Portland.

The Web is insatiable that way, ignoring only those celebrity athletes who have the good sense to stay out of the news by not making any. It's simple. Make smart decisions and you won't be smarting the next morning.

Oden said he's already learned his lesson.

"I've definitely matured since then and none of that stuff is going on," he said. "You have to be careful with what you do and who you trust and who you think things are private with."

Obviously, he hasn't learned the lesson completely. Private? Nothing is private when a professional athlete makes an error in judgment. If blackmail doesn't get you, bitterness will. If it's not money they want, it is a pound of flesh as payment for some past slight. Or, to the horror of the celebrity circuit, a private moment goes public simply because some dude with a cell phone sees an opportunity for a good laugh. YouTube is a famous athlete's worst nightmare.

Oden is not the only one trapped by the trappings of success. Cleveland Indians center fielder Grady Sizemore also took pictures of himself in the nude and sent them by phone to a girlfriend, only to have a hacker post them online. And then there is Woods, whose ability to control his image was shattered, not by the mainstream golf media he kept at bay but by a voice mail that went viral.

Some say Woods' lack of cell phone savvy cost him, but really it was arrogance. He thought he could wall off the world because he was Tiger, but no wall is high enough to fence out Facebook and Twitter -- not to mention sexted photos of oneself.

It is an irony that should not be lost on Oden, that going forward he needs to protect himself from himself. In today's world of self-publishing, the athlete need remember that "we have met the enemy, and they are us."

Rob Oller is a sports reporter for The Dispatch.

roller@dispatch.com

source : http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/sports/stories/2010/01/28/oller_1-28.ART_ART_01-28-10_C1_1TGE734.html?sid=101