Recently Sportscenter ran a report on the work of the Make a Wish Foundation.
Sportcenter’s report followed a segment on Ryan Braun’s recent ‘revelation’ that he’s been using banned substances. Braun, a hero to many in this city of Milwaukee and beyond, stood before the cameras less than a year ago and blasted the world for accusing him of using banned substances. While we wait for the soon-to-be-ex-Yankee A-Rod to admit to his substance abuse, I started thinking about the old question of athletes as heroes.
The Sportscenter segment on Make a Wish showed a handful of top athletes from Football to NASCAR interacting with kids and providing them a glance into the public life of a pro athlete. In the segment you get to see athletes behaving like heroes to these young people and being the kind of people so many of us expect public figures and athletes to be. In an era where so much media attention is levied towards showing exactly how and when pubic figures screw up, it is nice to realize that heroism still exists.
I realize that being a professional athlete doesn’t automatically qualify you as a hero to everyone. A person’s background and their ability to overcome incredible odds or simply do the right thing in the face of pressure not to is what most likely defines individuals as heroes. For better or worse, we are most often treated to that hero’s journey in the form of a professional athlete. It is usually the young black or Hispanic player who grew up with a slew of brothers and sisters in a single or even no parent household located somewhere near the epicenter of ‘the hood’.
Rags to riches is what so many of us strive to emulate. To believe the media and the crime statistics, More of us go the ‘Avon Barksdale’ route than the Mike Vick route. Like Vick, once the hot glare of the spotlight strikes these newly formed stars, all of the desires and learned behaviors of yesteryear are expected to burn away. Vick grew up in a culture of dog fighting. Right or wrong it was what his parents did, his relatives did, his neighbors, the local cops, and everyone else who served as an agent of socialization in his life. The legality of the thing didn’t matter, even after his rise to fame. We implore athletes to remember where they came from, well he did remember where he came from and we vilified him for it. Jay-Z once rapped about expectations, quipping, “If you grew up with holes in your zapatos you’d be celebrating the minute you was having dough.” This is an overlooked truth about rags to riches. Those not raised with wealth have no idea how to manage wealth, so there is a learning process involved and there is also a learning process involved in managing public behaviors. The superstars that persist without becoming known as bad boys are the ones who quickly learn how to manage those behaviors. Still, it doesn’t mean the others have no heart.
For better or worse, our collective culture treats professional athletes as heroes. When we in the media tend to dwell on the stars that make athletes look bad, the players who truly give back and provide for their communities get overlooked.