Hey, They're Athletes, Not Philosophers

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And if you think that the lessons gleaned from these incidents are confined to those who read the sports pages, consider recent America's recent moral benchmarks (Clinton-Lewinsky excluded). There was O.J., then Dennis Rodman and Charles Barkley and now John Rocker, Ray Lewis and Bobby Knight. Even Michael Jordan, the ultimate media darling, was declared an open target for the tabloids when his father was murdered, as pockets of the press speculated that the slaying was retaliation for one of Jordan's gambling debts (a theory that was later quietly debunked).

It wasn't always like this. In fact, in the first half of the 20th century, star athletes couldn't buy bad publicity. Unlike Alomar's mostly ignored efforts to help suffering children, Babe Ruth would routinely make the newspapers and newsreels with his photo ops in children's hospitals. But the Babe's darker side wasn't exposed until after he was long gone. The Bambino, the highest-paid athlete of his day, had to take an extended paid leave during the 1925 season to attend to a "stomach problem." The New York sports media ran with the lovable story that the Babe had eaten too many hot dogs. The truth, baseball historians say, is that he was suffering from syphilis.

According to some sociologists, this obsession with the flaws of athletes' characters is a product of the 24-hour news cycle. In years past when we were less inundated with images of athletes, we were spared all but the most heroic feats. Now cable stations have competing round-the-clock sports networks that need to make the field compelling 24 hours a day. Some also point to the afternoon-talk-show phenomenon as increasing America's tendency to live vicariously through TV personalities. And there is scarcely another corner of American society that receives the constant, day-in-day-out media coverage that sports does. Congressmen and business leaders can do a lot of their work behind closed doors, movie stars do their work on closed sets, but pro athletes work on TV and on the back pages of the tabloids.

The result is that a lot of people whose main claims to fame are good reflexes and musculature are now being reproached for failing to come across as good role models for young Americans. It's just one more example, in a line of dismembered politicians and besmirched entertainers, of the American media machine's basic cycle: First it elevates personalities to stardom, then it produces revelations that bring them low, and finally it lectures them for their exposed moral shortcomings. It used to be that the hardest part was to make the team.

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