The Misperceived and often Overlooked Folly of Sport

First appeared on April 14th, 2009
in The Lebanon Reporter

Good, bad or indifferent, we are all riders on the information superhighway. Ours is an age when co-workers can have video of you backstabbing your boss at the office get together posted online before you have even finished your profanity laced rant. It is this ability to document every second of our lives so easily that is creating so many potholes along the road for stars of the sports world.


To be honest I view sports as entertainment; or folly for our friends across the pond. That being said somewhere ours went from a culture that found moral direction from parents and authority figures to one that looks for guidance from complete strangers who hit, kick and shoot balls for a living.

In its infancy Sports, like all of us, may have wet its diaper and eaten Kibbles n’ Bits out of Fido’s bowl when the parents were distracted. But Sports went on to bigger and better things by somehow outgrowing its original intention. Blame it on Vegas or performance enhancing drugs or perhaps the downfall of the Gong Show, whatever it may be, today many fans take their sports, and their athletes, far too seriously.

Perhaps it’s all a product of living in today’s “make me feel better about my life now” world. But if you combine the level of instant information that exists at our fingertips with the ubiquitous hero worship of sports stars you have a recipe so unhealthy even Jamie Oliver can’t save us.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to athletes being heroes. There is the “Athletes are performers only and not meant to be role models” argument and then there’s the “I could dunk on all the guys who made the junior high team I got cut from if only Mom would buy me that $100 pair of Air Jordans” argument.

Charles Barkley may have said it best when he quipped, “I am not a role model”. Which is especially true for students of the English language and 6’1 guys who think they can play power forward in the NBA. Besides role models, just like the movie “The Blindside”, are vastly overrated anyway. Reggie Miller and Larry Bird were both role models of mine growing up and Spike Lee never taunted me, nor did I grow to be 6’10.

So it is when our heroes fall on hard times many of us become totally captivated. Perhaps the saddest thing in all of this is Phil Mickelson could have won this year’s Masters with only a sawed off three iron in his bag and charged off the Eighteenth green into a flaming Butler Cabin to rescue a boy with leukemia and most would still remember this as the year Tiger returned from his scandal.

It’s just too easy for us to both find out about as well as become wrapped up in the off-field misadventures of our sporting heroes. Is it really fair however? Is it fair to drag them around like a goat during a heated game of Buzkashi simply because they have personal shortcomings or demonstrate poor choices? This does not excuse their behavior, it simply means who are they to be judged so harshly and not us?

Far be it for me to speak for professional athletes, I don’t know any. But can we really expect them all to approach their lives as standard bearers for American culture? This would be like expecting William Hung to perform Rawhide at Bob’s Country Bunker and not have beer bottles tossed at him too. Worth the price of admission? Yes. Realistic? No.