A-Roid. Stoner Phelps. It's been a bad couple of weeks for our so-called role models.
But Alex Rodriguez was hardly the first star to be caught 'roiding it up and Michael Phelps has a long line of disgraced Olympians ahead of him (including athletes who were doped up DURING the games, not just smoking it up six months after the games).
So is it time we put that old "athletes are our kids' best role models" horse back into the barn?
Because when a player walks out onto a field, court, diamond, pitch . . . they aren't being paid to make kids like them. They're being paid to win a game.
The Yankees don't pick a third baseman based on a history of helping old ladies across the street or even a stellar credit rating. They pick a guy who can hit homeruns, a guy who can whip the ball back to first when pressure's on to keep the tying run off base. In short, they hire an athlete, not a man.
The man - or woman - who plays a professional sport or makes it to the top of the amateur world has something the rest of us don't - talent. It's impressive, sure. And without drive and amibition - both traits we'd like to see in our kids - it would be worth nothing. Still, it's not the answer to making our kids better people. It's inate, something few people are lucky enough to be born with, and few of our kids will ever have.
So why do we push them to focus on athletes? Some of the best in the world were hardly stellar people. Mickey Mantle was an incredible baseball player (and as a die-hard Yankee fan, one of my favorites). But the Mick was also a womanizing alcoholic. By contrast, his dear friend Roger Maris was another stellar athlete, the first to hit sixty-one home runs - without a needle in sight. And he was demonized by the media for his simple, quiet ways, for being the sort of man most of us probably WOULD like our kids to grow up to be - a man who focused on his family, who was honest, who lived a clean life.
The problem with putting athletes on pedestals, is simple. They weren't vetted as child role models. They were vetted as athletes. Anything more is just a bonus.
Image: AllTalkSports
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