Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick announced that he would plead guilty to federal dog fighting charges Monday and in the process made some dubious history. Vick will most certainly become the highest profile athlete in the history of American team sports to be incarcerated in his athletic prime. However, Vick may have accomplished a feat even more significant…and sad. In the wake of a horrendous summer for sports that featured dog fighting, blood doping, steroids more prominently than the games themselves, the Vick case may have finally convinced us that athletes have no business being considered role models. If this case does bring about the death of the sports role model, it would be a tragedy for us all.
At the dawn of professional athletics in America, professional athletes considered being a role model part of their job description. In 1909, Pittsburgh Pirate shortstop Honus Wagner ordered a tobacco company to stop selling baseball cards bearing his likeness because he did not want to promote tobacco products to children. In the 1950s, Willie Mays famously played stickball with kids on the streets of New York. In the 1960s, many athletes felt compelled to use their celebrity to advance political causes, including Muhammad Ali, who forfeited more than three years of his athletic prime for his refusal support the Vietnam War by enlisting in United States Army when drafted. There was a time when it simply did not occur to a professional athlete that he had no responsibility to public for his behavior. My, how times have changed.
Today’s athlete has no desire to serve as a role model, appearing to feel more responsible to his mirror than society at large. The godfather of the anti-role model attitude currently entrenched in the minds of professional athletes was former National Basketball Association superstar Charles Barkley. Barkley famously announced “I am not a role model” in a Nike ad and then appeared to adopt the phrase as a life philosophy for the balance of his career. As an active player, Barkley was as truculent as he was charming, sometimes addressing the media with copious profanity and seemingly also willing to physically confront fans when accosted. Barkley has never been linked to criminal activity, but he has forcefully abdicated the responsibility that the prior generation of athletes felt was part of its obligation, to provide a positive example for those that watch them.
Article comments
1 - Alec
The idea that athletes are role models is a tired fantasy that deserves to be retired. Many of the greatest athletes of the past are considered role models only because fawning sports reporters refused to report on these people accurately.
Ty Cobb was one of the most despicable men who ever lived, but his baseball accomplishments cannot be denied. Babe Ruth was a complicated man, and usually tried to be considerate of fans, but he was also a heavy drinker and womanizer. More recently, former Dodger great Steve Garvey was considered to be squeaky clean and a potential candidate for public office. When he divorced his wife, many people tried to paint his wife as vindictive and unstable, and even though she later had her share of problems, the simplistic notion of Garvey as a role model fell apart when he started being mocked for getting two of his mistresses pregnant around the same time in the 1980s.
RE: Don't we have a right to expect athletes to be part of the solution, not to be part of the problem?
The short answer is, NO. You have an obligation to live your own life as well and as ethically as you can. You don't have any constitutional, human, natural or moral right to demand that an athlete or anyone else make sure that you are never disappointed in them.
2 - Jake
Sadly, I think that one of the main points that we are missing is the culture that many of these athletes are raised in.
Within the black culture, there is a sense of individualism that creates a separation from following in another's footsteps or leading the way for someone else. The lack of "real-life" role models, ie. fathers, has to be one of the main causes of the continued and growing criminal actions taking place with our black athletes.
White athletes are not saints, but if you look at the track record of the past 5 years, you'd see that nothing compares to such things as: killing dogs, murder, robbery, brandishing of a weapon, shootings, etc. For the most part, white athletes are the ones using steroids and trying to figure out how to compete with the growing population of superior black athletes.
The young black man is proving to be too much of a liability, especially in the NFL and NBA; where young athletes can turn pro a year after playing college sports. If you look at the MLB, the use of the farm system quickly weeds out many athletes that do not deserve to be at the highest level.
Is this always the case? No. In a perfect world, there would be no poor role-models like Mike Vick. Sadly, a truly gifted athlete has once again fallen to the world that they were raised in and couldn't escape. It's the cultures that these athletes are raised in that determines what they will be. Sadly, many of them will never change.
Regardless of their efforts, teams can only do so much to these guys. Their rap-star ways of living will continue unless they are taught by coaches and surrounding teammates how to be a man, a role-model, and a respectable human being. Without this, we will continue to have tarnished athletes wasting away in front of us on the television; not during a game, but during a court trial.
3 - B.Smith
Get the facts straight in your article; Dany Heatley was not intoxicated.
4 - Alec
RE: Within the black culture, there is a sense of individualism that creates a separation from following in another's footsteps or leading the way for someone else.
This is largely nonsense. Black society is not monolithic, and there is nothing so tiresome as reading another instance of the uninformed notion that all black people think and act a certain way. As an aside, since individualism is one of the most celebrated notions within the United States as a whole, it is doubly strange for anyone to prattle on about individualism and black culture.
RE: The lack of "real-life" role models, ie. fathers, has to be one of the main causes of the continued and growing criminal actions taking place with our black athletes.
Oddly enough, even though Michael Vick is estranged from his father, he nonetheless has one, and had a relationship with him. And obviously, fathers are not the only role models. Or do you think that mothers are either invisible or ineffectual? Seems to me that a more proximate problem is the outrageous media contracts that feed college and professional athletics, which encourage owners, coaches, managers and college officials to ignore bad behavior until it gets totally out of hand because they don't want to upset the cash flow.
RE: White athletes are not saints, but if you look at the track record of the past 5 years, you'd see that nothing compares to such things as: killing dogs, murder, robbery, brandishing of a weapon, shootings, etc. For the most part, white athletes are the ones using steroids and trying to figure out how to compete with the growing population of superior black athletes.
More nonsense. How do you explain the doping that rocks the world of professional bicycle races, where blacks are practically non-existent? Blacks are becoming increasingly under-represented in baseball, so it is absurd to suggest that white athletes are taking steroids to compete against blacks. And, did Barry Bonds, who is black, take steroids because he couldn't compete against himself? Sammy Sosa, a Latin black, is suspected of taking steroids. What racial group was he trying to compensate for?
When you take your hand out of the sand and look at international athletics, you see cheating, doping, and all manner of bad behavior throughout the sports world.
It's also interesting to note that when white athletes like Matt Leinart or Tom Brady knock up their girl friends, the myopic fanboys who call sports talk radio prattle about how these guys are going to pay child support and accept their responsibilities (even though Leinart spends more time chasing after Paris Hilton and other celebrity babes than in hanging out with his son). On the other hand, when black athletes have children out of wedlock, these same blowhards are quick to jump on the dysfunctional black culture bandwagon.
By the way, shouldn't we talk about the white cultural dysfunction that gives us an unending stream of irresponsible and often arrogant misbehavior in people like Colin Farrel, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan?
5 - Howard Ross
Dude, get real. Role model? The public does not like some tight butt sports jock. They love bad boys! Tim Duncan is a good guy and he is considered a dead beat. Vick was always a thug (dude was sued for giving a babe herpes) but the endorsements continued to come. Kobie either raped or banged the young hottie in Colorado but he has recovered, his jersey is selling well, and the endorsements have returned. I repeat, the public loves bad boys not role models.
6 - Stinky Johnson
It really depends on whose eyes are evaluating. Mike Vick's recent comments alikening whites to vicious dogs have earned him props from the Ghetto Black Male Felon Bragging Rights community.
It's really only the monkey blacks mimicking whites disdain for him.
nothing could be more charachteristic of whyte Americans than the klan mentality calling for his legal lynching.