L.A. Confidential: Lies, Damn Lies, And Josh Shaw

A college football star shows up on campus the Monday before his team's first game with two badly sprained ankles and a story that is perfectly heroic: swimming pool, drowning cousin, balcony.

So perfectly heroic, in fact, that it garners national attention. Suddenly everybody knows Josh Shaw, USC Trojan, Team Captain. They know Palmdale, the suburb where he grew up, and where he saved the poor boy. "I would do it again for whatever kid it was, it did not have to be my nephew," says Josh Shaw.

The glow of heroism fades quickly in Los Angeles. Too quickly. Anonymous phone calls reach the USC Athletic Department. Rumors of a police investigation swirl. Vaguely worded statements from coach Steve Sarkisian appear. Walls go up, as they often do in the neighborhood around campus, meant to keep out what isn't wanted. Sometimes that means people. But other times it means questions.

Then, suddenly, a confession. The hero story is a cover story. They say the big lies are the easiest to sell: just make them memorable so the suckers tuck them safely into their imaginations. Nobody fact-checks Palmdale. It's too far out of the way. The only answers you find there are the ones you aren't looking for.

Josh Shaw admits it's all bull. The balcony responsible for his sprained ankles is not in Palmdale. Hell, there may not even be a swimming pool involved at all. An indefinite suspension might assuage the moralists out there. It might make everything seem like it's wrapped up in a neat little box. But the truth remains hidden.

***

The Josh Shaw story is real-time L.A. noir. Raymond Chandler would have dug it. Dozens of characters with unclear motivations. Outrageous lies. Conflicting reports. A shadowy cabal of millionaires (that's USC). Possible burglaries and vague police involvement. Gratuitous Los Angeles geography.

Best of all, the action is unfolding rapidly and unpredictably—versions of the truth keep overlapping and then falling away completely. What keeps you reading a detective novel? It's wanting to find out who did it. The greats withhold information, they keep stringing you along, teasing you into making assumptions, and then upending them.

In sports, information is everything. There is so much of it available to us. Twenty-four-hour television networks, internet databases full of arcane statistics, social media websites that cycle blissfully through endless bits of news, trivia, and rumor. Fans expect to know things, to have knowledge inserted into their blood by way of IV drip, if it comes to that.

But what makes sports compelling is that little bit we don't know. The mystery behind team chemistry, or what separates two players equal in size and skill and talent in the final moments of a game. And of course, the most important of the unknowns: Who will win a game or match or tournament.

It's not just the surreal details that give the Josh Shaw case its lurid appeal, it's the very fact of not knowing. The information, the truth we want so badly, is being obfuscated by Shaw, by USC, by lawyers, and by whoever else can get in the way.

Obfuscation is not a new phenomenon in sports. Athletes themselves do it by speaking in cliches, talking without saying anything. "My ankles really hurt, but I am lucky to be surrounded by the best trainers and doctors in the world. I am taking my rehab one day at a time," Shaw said on the USC website in the initial heroic report. Great quote.

Locker rooms are highly guarded, and players protected. This is especially true at the college level, where athletes—adults by and large, remember—are still considered "students," too young to speak freely to the public. There's a reason university athletic departments call their media relations people "Student Information Directors." And there's a reason Sarkisian passed the buck vaguely to "campus authorities" when addressing the media on Tuesday.

College athletic departments are closed, conspiratorial environments. Historically, they are also often up to no good. Which brings us back to the ambitious lying of Josh Shaw and the quickness with which USC turned that lie into a public relations coup—and then disaster. No wonder they are whispering around the fancy red brick buildings in University Park.

But what really happened? Who will answer that? The ankles remain injured. What dark and shadowy forces are at play in the City of Angels? Will a Trojan Horse reveal itself to be hiding conspiracy in its hollow guts? The truth seems to always lie on the next page.

Follow Eric Nusbaum on Twitter.