When I was little, I looked up to professional sports as an escape from my hectic life of multiplication tables and talking to girls. My fascination with St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Mark McGwire reaffirmed my love of baseball, as I idolized him as some sort of folk hero. Unfortunately, much as everything in childhood, McGwire turned out to be a phony.
The MLB's most inconsiderate alumnus of the century, Jose Canseco, decided to profit on the character flaws of his cohorts in his tell-all book "Juiced." In the book, Canseco recounted his fun anecdotes about using steroids by himself and with a bunch of his teammates, including McGwire. In one great swoop, Canseco was successful in destroying the image of baseball for the entire nation.
The unofficial anointing of football as our nation's pastime occurred in 2002, when Barry Bonds broke the single-season home run record McGwire had posted four years earlier.
Today, the pastime pendulum is swinging back toward baseball.
In a sport where the most easily recognized player is always jawing on and on about how he never receives the ball, there is a strong need for change. As the ultimate team game is full of "I's" and the giant metaphor for global togetherness showcases one government trying to beat the system by cheating, reform may just be only a pipe dream.
And I'm looking at you, Santonio Holmes, for that.
There's no reason for professional athletes to be throwing their talents away at this rate. Steroids easily knock off four or five years of a baseball player's career. Gunshot wounds usually end careers. Drugs and domestic abuse draw the focus away from the team's vision toward the complete idiocy of the individuals.
Yes, the fame and money might affect these athletes, but they have a responsibility to uphold. Young boys across the country idolize these men as if they're their own fathers or brothers. High school athletes with collegiate aspirations look to the professionals for how to get ahead of the competition. The men playing these sports must understand their duty to provide a good role model for boys across the country that otherwise may not have a role model.
If they can't live up to these expectations, then they should not be given the privilege of playing professional sports.
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Really? Canseco gets skewered for being inconsiderate, even though his book was a major reason Congress and MLB finally took the steroids issue seriously? You'd rather have steroids still a major part of baseball, than have Canseco have the guts, regardless of the motive, come forward? Don't blame the problem, blame something else... totally defies logic. By that way of thinking, the person who calls the cops to report a crime is worse than the murderer/rapist/drunk driver...
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Something that nobody ever seems to talk about is whether professional athletes actually break the law at a higher rate than the general public. For instance, there are nearly 1700 players in the NFL, and we hear of maybe a few dozen or so that get in trouble each year. Earlier this year, many news sources ran articles revealing the fact that more than one percent of Americans are behind bars. No group of people is going to be perfect, and I'm not so sure that players are any worse than the general American public.
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how many times is the Collegiate times going to write an editorial on this same tired subject. I swear I've seen this opinion piece at least once a year since I've been here. We get it, athletes aren't as good a role models as they were when you were kids. They never were good role models, you were just young and naive.
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Plaxico's case is an interesting one that's being over-generalized here. Turns out that the guy actually had a permit to carry a gun in another state, but NY just didn't recognize it. Now, if other NFL players have been shot as you argue, can't you perhaps see a motive for carrying his gun when he goes out? Especially to a night club. Sounds like a calculated risk that he took to protect himself, and that it came back and bit him. I'm definitely not defending him, but it just seems that no one is considering WHY he broke the law; most other violators are malicious, whereas he was not.
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