When Will Athletes Grow Up?
October 14, 2009 by Jeff Spiegel
Every child has a hero growing up, and for many young boys, that hero plays a sport. For many people in my generation, that hero might have been a baseball player. Imagine the pain, sadness, and confusion those children felt when they realized their favorite player cheated during the steroids era. Remember that guy you almost worshipped for the years of your youth? A cheater. Talk about the trauma, but I wish this pain ended with steroids.
Open the sports page or flip over to ESPN.com any day of the week, and the headlines are constantly filled with stories of professional athletes making poor choices. Take just this week for example: USA Soccer star Charlie Davies was injured in a car crash at 3:30 in the morning just two days before a world cup qualifying match. 3:30 am?!? Professional golfer Anthony Kim was accused of coming back to his hotel trashed the night before his final President’s Cup match. Oakland Raiders Head Coach Tom Cable is accused of punching his assistant coach in the jaw, and then threatening to kill him. These stories even extend beyond simply the girdiron onto the soccer pitch and golf course!
Now obviously in all three of these cases, they are based mostly on speculation, but how rare is it that one of these stories will be found to be completely untrue? It isn’t even these stories that are relevant either, but the simple fact that our headlines are bombarded with stories like these daily. Maybe the crash wasn’t Davies fault, but why was he out so late so close to a big game? Take what you want out of these stories, but these are just the ones from the last two days. The Miguel Cabrera story from a week ago was one of the worst stories to surface about an athlete in my lifetime. Getting plastered with the opposing team the night before a must-win game down the stretch of the Major League Baseball season, and then getting into a fight with his wife. Yeah, sign my kid up for his fan club. Cabrera is one of the best players in the game on the field, but this event shows that all the kids who idolize him are better off looking up to someone else, and Cabrera isn’t even alone in that sense.
When I look across the landscape of the next generation of sports stars, I am beginning to see some hope. I hope I am not speaking too soon, but rising stars like Albert Pujols and LeBron James seem to have their lives together with a good head on their shoulders. They have been positive role-models, as Pujols has gone as far as offering to pay back his entire salary if he was ever caught using steroids, while LeBron offers a breath of fresh air by convincing the world that he actually enjoys what he does on the court, having fun with things like his team’s pre-game introductions. Going one step further to the college ranks is even more refreshing.
When you talk about the face of college football, there is no doubt that right now that title rests with Tim Tebow. Now there is a guy to look up to. Many people don’t like him, but I urge them to at least respect him for bucking the trend of bad-character guys headlining the sports pages. The guy has become the butt of every joke for his service trips and virginity, but are these really things we should be making fun of? Whether you’re religious or not, or a virgin or not, I don’t see how one could argue that they would rather have a late-night party animal for their kids to look up to than a “goody-goody” like Tebow. The same can be said about Colt McCoy, who went on a service trip of his own and simply got ridiculed for “copying” Tebow. Really? A guy takes time out of his own busy schedule to help others, and all we can do is make fun of him? No wonder our athletes have ended up as they have.
We live in a culture in which we praise athletes for competition and crazy antics, and then are ashamed of them when they mess up. When someone doesn’t mess up, and goes even further to reverse this negative trend, we ridicule them.
At the end of the day, every person has the right to make whatever decisions they would like, and athletes are adults capable of making good decisions. These guys have hit the jackpot of genes in life and find themselves in a position that millions, if not billions, of people would die to be in. They have kids looking up to them everywhere, and yet all of this still doesn’t seem like enough incentive to keep them from making serious mistakes. How hard is it to say no to drugs and keep your gun at home, while calling it an early night the night before the biggest game of your life? I am not asking every player to feed the homeless and end world poverty, I just ask that they understand that they are held to a higher standard than the rest of us, because millions of people probably aren’t looking up to you and me. Over the course of life, most children and fans who look up to players eventually grow up and get their life together, but I’m starting to wonder when their heroes will follow suit.
Очень интересно, но все в будущем хотелось бы еще побольше узнать об этом
Млин, спамеры просто достали уже этим своим примитивом!
I added your blog to bookmarks. And i’ll read your articles more often!
Very cute :-))))
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Здравствуйте. Прошу у Вас помощи. У меня сложилась очень нерадужная ситуация. Дело в том, что мой блог с недавнего времени перестал показываться в результатах поиска Яндекса. Сам блог проиндексирован, то есть если посмотреть наличие конкретной страницы в результатах поиска, то она там имеется. А вот по поисковым запросам, да и по точным текстовым вхождениям сайт не находится. При чём его нет не только в сотне, но даже в тысяче показов. Ума не приложу, что произошло. Сайт был доступен, перебоев у хостера не было. А обнаружил это – в статистике LiveInternet, который вдруг стал показывать гораздо меньшее количество посещений.
Кстати, читатели с Гугла и Рамблера идут в прежних объёмах.
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