I have a question for, well for anyone who can answer this for me.
What ever happened to the good guys in sports? We have always had the bad guys, from Ty Cobb to Bill Romanowski, to John Rocker. The guys who cheat, endanger, and disrespect. In the past, we had a balance. We had a good guy to a bad guy, in the "good old days" the good guys even outnumbered those bad guys.
We all know about the bad guys today. The wife beaters, the cheaters, the felons, and everything in between. They are in the news everyday.
What I want to talk about is, how in the hell did Marvin Harrison become one of the bad guys?
Marvin Harrison was lauded for the first decade of his career for all the good he was doing back in Philadelphia. Cheered as an example of sportsmanship for never showing up the defense, as he and Peyton Manning built towards Hall-of-Fame statistics. Traditionalists loved him because he "acts like he's been there before". Marvin is a perfect example of two things.
1. Athletes are not, and for sake of being an athlete should not be, role models.
2. You cannot judge the character of man, or a woman, by how they act on a court, field, or diamond. If we have learned nothing else from the "Bad Guys" in sports today, let it be that there is one old idiom that still rings true.
"The true test of a man's character is what he does when no one is watching. "
We need to focus more on players like Warrick Dunn. People aspire to be what what we glorify. Let's glorify the good guys.
1 comment:
There never was a "good old days" period. There was just a period where the sportswriters wrote about sports instead of chasing the scandals and airing the dirty laundry.
Post a Comment