Sports and crime shouldn't mix

When did the sports pages morph into the crime beat?
Consider a single week’s sports news. Alabama football players accused of beating up and robbing folks on campus. Larry Bird’s son accused of trying to run-over his ex. And now a star Olympian with an inspiring story accused of murdering his girlfriend.
Add to that the drumbeat of stories about performance enhancing drugs, shoot-outs at nightclubs in the wee small hours, and the now all-too-routine report of one athlete or another beating up a woman.
It’s all too familiar and too depressing.
And it threatens to overshadow the accomplishments of others less inclined to thuggish behavior.
Some of this, in an odd way, is our fault as fans.
When we go overboard, when we over-praise, and when we endow our best athletes with a sense of entitlement — almost with a sense of royalty — it shouldn’t surprise us that they behave like spoiled brats.
If we applaud their every move, if we lavish enormous salaries on professionals who play a game, we end up with overpaid jerks whose last bit of humility may have disappeared in high school.
So what’s the solution?
We still love to watch the great ones perform on the field or on the court. We take vicarious pleasure when a young person we’ve known personally finds athletic success.
But somehow, we’ve got to inject a fresh dose of humility now and then, we have to restore a sense of perspective, and we have to let sports “royalty” know they have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. When they don’t, they’re just fodder for the police blotter. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]