Reminder: Professional Athletes Are Entertainers, Not Role-Models

 By: Justin Jacobs

Cedric Benson really isn’t in the good graces of Bears fans, and by now most of you probably know why. Of course Benson isn’t the only Chicagoan who has been acting a fool lately. Ozzy Guillen, the manager of the Chicago White Sox, went off on the media the other day for being too tough on his team, and yelled at Chicago fans for not giving the White Sox enough credit even though they are the only team in Chicago that has won a World Series in the last 100 years. A few days later a couple of blow up dolls were found in the White Sox clubhouse, apparently some players thought that lightening the mood would be a good way for them to get out of the dreaded hitting slump they had been in for the last couple of weeks. Of course the media got a hold of this story and (pardon the pun) blew it way out of proportion.

(Well at least we know Ozzy really cares about his team.)

These stories have really bought some much needed laughs into my life lately. Final’s Week can be a stressful time, and it’s always nice to see that there will always be people out there that dumber than I am (which is no small feat), and that most of them are professional athletes. I’m not sure why Chicago has been such a lightning rod for athletes acting like idiots lately, but I’m not complaining.

I always hate when some member of the media goes on a television show and rants about how athletes to be role-models to the youth of America. Really? Do we really want to are kids looking up to overpaid and often undereducated athletes who hold out of their contracts so they can make an extra million dollars when they are already making tens of millions? It’s been proven over and over again that professional athletes don’t make good role-models. Look at some the greatest players in any of the professional sports and tell me whom our youth should look up to: Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, Roger Clemens, Joe Namath, OJ Simpson, Isaiah Thomas, Barry Bonds, Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain. Do you want your kids to be like these guys?

I don’t really blame professional athletes for turning to booze, gambling, drugs (recreational or performance enhancing) or womanizing. These are people who from a young age have had enormous pressures on them since they were barely hitting puberty to be winners. Most of them train all their life to compete at the highest level of physically demanding sports in order to achieve the riches and glory they are promised by everything they see on television and the internet these days. You add that kind of pressure to the fact that most of these athletes skate through their academic due to their athletic abilities and you have a recipe for disaster. What do people think is going to happen when you give someone in their late teens/early twenties millions of dollars with no real idea of how to manage either the money or themselves? In this day-and-age young professional athletes have to deal with agents, publicists, endorsers, magazines, television, radio, fans, and those that are jealous of what they have. That’s not to mention their responsibilities as an employee of a giant corporation, whether it is the MLB, NBA, NFL, or whatever sport they are in.

It’s got to be scary for a young man or woman to cope with these responsibilities. Could you imagine a resident doctor having to work the ER in Detroit with only a year of law school and also have to appear before the press at the end of every shift to talk about his performance? I’m not saying that being a doctor isn’t a more important occupation than a professional athlete. I’m just trying to illustrate what these kids have to go through. A lot of people wonder why a lot of these athletes keep their family and friends so close to them, even when they are more trouble than they are probably worth, well the answer is simple, they are a security blanket. Who else are these people supposed to go to? What else do they know?

(If it can happen to Marv, it can happen to anybody.)

When I first heard about the Marvin Harrison shooting incident, I wasn’t as surprised as most of the media seemed to be. The pressures of being a rich athlete these days can get to anyone. Even a seemingly humble, quiet mannered, man like Harrison can fall prey to the pressures of being an professional athlete. These athletes have become celebrities, they are on the cover of US Weekly and People almost as much as Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, and you’ve seen what fame has done to them. You put someone in a stressful situation for long enough and eventually the stress is going to get to them. It’s something that I don’t think the average person could understand. We are all too grounded in reality to be able to comprehend what these athletes go through. We shouldn’t feel bad for them, that was the life they chose to lead, but we also shouldn’t tell our kids to look up to these guys. I’ll let Sir Charles drive the point home…