I’ve never been a big NFL fan (for the most part, the games are played on the wrong day). When I was a kid, Steve Young played for the 49ers, and since he had previously played for BYU, I was nominally a 49ers fan. Steve Young, though, seems to have been a pretty decent guy and was (and is) a guy worthy of emulation by young boys tossing footballs around backyards and parks across America (if anyone still does that since that level of freedom requires unscheduled time and so-called free-range kids, both a rarity and both not really the subject of these couple paragraphs). On the other side of Steve Young, there was the NBA’s Charles Barkley selling products by telling the world, “I am not a role model.” Even as a young kid, I knew that was an out-and-out lie. Whether professional athletes want to be or not, they are role models. That is unfortunate, considering the standard behavior of most of them.
Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL (ISBN: 0-446-60747-9) by Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger delves into the subject of the behavior of professional athletes (and, in a way, college and high school athletes since the authors not that professional athletes who get a pass on bad behavior have been getting similar passes for years). The book relies heavily on statistics, which everyone knows are open to manipulation, but the authors go into detail about their methodology. The bulk of the book is anecdotes regarding various players and their criminal undertakings, ranging from gambling (probably the least harmful thing discussed) to robbery, burglary, and assault, and then on up to murder. It’s tough reading in some places as this raw, and real people are involved. The authors’ position is that players, team management, NFL management, and fans are at fault, but the bulk of the fault lies with team and league management, since they are the ones that push for light punishments, involve their lawyers in an effort to get players off the hook, and stick up for guys who spend their days off skirting the law in myriad ways. They do proffer some solutions, most of which center around harsh penalties for all encounters with the law, not just convictions and not just for what people normally think of as “serious crimes.”
While the book is over ten years old, it seems things haven’t changed much. Athletes still get away with murder, sometimes literally, while average people get the book thrown at them. As long as big money is involved, things are unlikely to change unless the ultimate source of that money, the fans, become too disgusted with the behavior of their idols, and stop going to games, turning on TVs, and buying merchandise. I tend to agree with the authors in their assessment that the statistics for professional athletes (while this book was about football players, the authors subsequently wrote a book about basketball players) skew high for athletes, meaning the percentage of the population that is criminal is higher among athletes than among the rest of us, and I agree with them that the punishments need to be much more severe from the teams and the leagues, as well as the criminal justice system. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon, and behavior that is rightfully condemned in all other areas of life will continue to be quietly and quickly dismissed when the one doing it can effectively move balls across goal lines.
Pros and Cons: The Criminals Who Play in the NFL (ISBN: 0-446-60747-9) by Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger delves into the subject of the behavior of professional athletes (and, in a way, college and high school athletes since the authors not that professional athletes who get a pass on bad behavior have been getting similar passes for years). The book relies heavily on statistics, which everyone knows are open to manipulation, but the authors go into detail about their methodology. The bulk of the book is anecdotes regarding various players and their criminal undertakings, ranging from gambling (probably the least harmful thing discussed) to robbery, burglary, and assault, and then on up to murder. It’s tough reading in some places as this raw, and real people are involved. The authors’ position is that players, team management, NFL management, and fans are at fault, but the bulk of the fault lies with team and league management, since they are the ones that push for light punishments, involve their lawyers in an effort to get players off the hook, and stick up for guys who spend their days off skirting the law in myriad ways. They do proffer some solutions, most of which center around harsh penalties for all encounters with the law, not just convictions and not just for what people normally think of as “serious crimes.”While the book is over ten years old, it seems things haven’t changed much. Athletes still get away with murder, sometimes literally, while average people get the book thrown at them. As long as big money is involved, things are unlikely to change unless the ultimate source of that money, the fans, become too disgusted with the behavior of their idols, and stop going to games, turning on TVs, and buying merchandise. I tend to agree with the authors in their assessment that the statistics for professional athletes (while this book was about football players, the authors subsequently wrote a book about basketball players) skew high for athletes, meaning the percentage of the population that is criminal is higher among athletes than among the rest of us, and I agree with them that the punishments need to be much more severe from the teams and the leagues, as well as the criminal justice system. Personally, I don’t see that happening any time soon, and behavior that is rightfully condemned in all other areas of life will continue to be quietly and quickly dismissed when the one doing it can effectively move balls across goal lines.
 | This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess. |
No comments:
Post a Comment