Little-Kid Syndrome persists into adulthood.
We’re all guilty of it. At one time or another, we’ve all idolized professional athletes. And when they are riddled by controversy and scandal, we are the first ones to decry their ill-advised behavior.
Fact of the matter is it’s juvenile, superficial and moronic. For the record, thinking of athletes as role models is a socially constructed sham. Blame the media for shamefully helping to create these larger-than-life personas.
Since when did professional athletes become surrogates to parental accountability? Since when did players profess to be beacons of integrity and piety? Most of all, when did we start buying into this fraudulent, baseless farce of athletes as role models?
Hey, America. It’s time to grow up.
America is void of realists, a land of opportunity and disillusioned idiots looking for moral guidance from a man who is paid to sink balls in holes. I’m talking about Tiger Woods. These same incompetent dum-dums believe a Ben Roethlisberger isn’t supposed to be served smack between two honey buns.
Save the outrage.
The sexual revolution has made promiscuity as American as freedom fries.
Let’s not pretend Big Ben is being vilified because he put himself in a compromising situation that, at the end of the day, resulted in rape allegations. If that were the case, he’d no longer be denigrated after Georgia’s district attorneys determined there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. Instead, Roethlisberger is still being publicly flogged, his name sullied so we can feel like we’ve retained a shred of human decency in the Grand Canyon of eroded morals.
Somehow lost in the furor is our own self-demeaning philandering. Athletes are held to higher standards simply because they are on the public stage. But it’s all just a big act, except it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find level-headed people who can discern fiction from reality.
In the same breath, society promotes a culture where hookups are but a mouse click away and pornography is constantly available for consumption. Are we really going to dilute ourselves into believing athletes won’t throw caution to the wind and give into their own carnal cravings?
Understandably, since Nietzsche said God is dead, sports are regarded with a devout sense of religiosity. And the existing framework of sports mythology requires that sports figures be demi-gods. I understand advertising exacerbates the problem, with how exploitive companies like Nike brand athletes as transcendent figures, above the felonious, filth and fodder of the common man.
Yet money and power are invitations to a party where Alotta Fagina is the guest of honor. And the attendees’ list reads like the Sunday obituary: Rick Pitino, Tiki Barber, Reggie Miller, former ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips, Charles Barkley, Woods and Roethlisberger.
Self-righteously we wag our fingers from the bully pulpit. But put in the same situation, would the outcome be any different? Maybe our issue doesn’t rest with athletes’ misgivings. Perhaps the problem is with capitalism itself.
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Companies commoditized ideals and sold athletes as the embodiment of these ideals, and we bought it right up. Semantically, Woods represented the exemplary athlete — regal, faithful, loyal and fiercely competitive. So, the Tiger in-the-Woods sex scandal is social suicide for the masses, an uncomfortable realization for us that Woods is as flawed as the average person.
What, then, does that say about our understanding of the system?
It says that we mask our ignorance as innocence.
