by Mark Schwartz

Created on: June 29, 2009   Last Updated: July 04, 2009

Sports figures are no more qualified to be role models than ordinary people. There are examples of sports figures who are terrible role models, just as there are examples of ordinary citizens who are terrible role models. Likewise, there are good role models in both groups. As a society, we often lavish both praise and criticism on professional athletes, but for the most part they are not specially equipped to handle this extra attention, and while some can handle and even embrace it, others cannot. Anything extra we are expecting from sports figures is just that our expectation.

In order to say that sports figures are failing as role models, we need to define success as a role model. What are we expecting? Perfect people who our children can look up to and emulate? Someone worthy of imitation? Someone we can feel good about? Someone who will reinforce to our children the lessons we teach them at home? The answers to these questions vary, but generally speaking we as a society know that people who are famous receive extra attention from us, and we invest our time and money in watching these famous people and appreciating the gifts that make them interesting to us. We want to know then, that our time and money are well spent. This also means different things to different people, but for a lot of us it means that we can feel good about the connection we imagine we have with these people. In sports, we often say that's my team or that's my player as if we share a common bond with the teams and athletes we support. To have them fail us makes us feel cheated, like we are aligning ourselves with a lie.

As children growing up, a lot of us would emulate our favorite players in the way we played the games. Take baseball for example: if our baseball heroes were gritty and scrappy, we wanted to play that way, too; if they hustled all the time, we wanted to hustle; if they were big and strong, we wanted to work out to make ourselves big and strong; and even if they wore their hat a certain way, we wanted to wear our hat the same way. These on-field emulations often spilled out to their off-the-field antics as well. But when our athletes did things we couldn't or wouldn't do (or that our parents were telling us were wrong), we often felt bad that our emulation of them had to stop there. When we saw them play, we wanted to be them, but when they stopped playing and we saw who they really were, a lot of times we stopped wanting to be them as much. If we couldn't or didn't want to be them, we didn't want them as our role models. In that sense, we felt like they failed us.

The failure of sports figures as role models is purely the result of us wanting them to be everything we wanted to be. This is often unrealistic, and it should come as no surprise that many of them couldn't or wouldn't live up to that.

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