Talking the Talk
From the Cheap Seats
by Chris Hahn
Not long ago, the adage of sports was to let your performance to the talking. Athletes weren’t trying to one-up each other in the media, in addition to on the field. But with so many outlets to get sports, times have changed.
There are so many all-sports channels, websites, and radio stations that they have been forced to dig deeper to be unique. You can get sports scores and stats from anywhere, but the battle has become who can get the scoop by interviewing the eighth man of the bench for the second-to-last place team in a development basketball league and getting his opinion on politics. So not only has it caused networks to dig into athletes’ personal lives (something for which we should all have a strong disdain), but every athlete gets a platform. But what the barrage of athlete-speak should teach us is that we shouldn’t put our sports heroes on a pedestal for anything except their athletic performance.
Some of the opinions are sickening, while some are just ignorant. While I don’t believe athletes always have evil intentions with the quotes that find their way to the public, not many people would conceive of ever saying some of these absurd things.
When the country went to war in Iraq, a Washington Wizards player claimed the team’s battle to get into the NBA playoffs was essentially ‘the same thing.’ Several golfers on the PGA tour have come out against Annika playing in the Colonial. Vijay Singh said he would withdraw from the tournament if he was paired with her on the weekend…yet the only way that would have happened was that she would have had the about the same score as him after two rounds, demonstrating she deserved to be there anyway!. Jason Kidd was irate after a columnist jokingly, yet inappropriately, made comments regarding violence against his wife. The columnist got a month suspension, as opposed to the week Kidd got when he actually DID hit his wife. When asked about the equity of the punishments, Kidd seemed irked at the implication there was a double standard for athletes. Mercifully, I don’t have room to go on about the athletes who are extremely nonchalant after running into legal problems for running into police cars, having weapons, drunk-driving, and more.
Several years ago Charles Barkley started a controversy with a commercial stating he was “not your child’s role model.” His argument was that parents need to raise their children themselves and be role models to their sons and daughters. Athletes should realize that due to their celebrity and the rewards that come with it, they will always be under more scrutiny that the average person. Yet we shouldn’t expect athletes to be demi-gods who always share the mainstream opinion and never rock the boat. They may not like being chastised for some of their opinions…but if they aren’t then they’ll become too large of a role model. And that’s something they’ve taught us not to allow.