Amazing Rolle takes focus off bad guys in sports
Posted: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:15 PM
As soon as I heard the story about Myron Rolle passing up the NFL for one year to pursue a Rhodes Scholarship, I swear I could hear a background chorus: “Why can’t more athletes be like Myron?”
You may just as well ask: "Why can’t everyone be like him?" In either case, the answer is simple: If everybody were like Rolle, he wouldn’t be special. He’d be just like everybody else and therefore as ordinary as grass on a prairie. Guys like him have to be rare. Otherwise, we wouldn’t appreciate him.
And let’s do just that. Let’s celebrate Myron Rolle, who graduated in pre-med at Florida State in 2½ years while playing football at the highest possible level. He had a choice of going into the NFL draft this year or to Oxford University. He made the only decision one would expect of such an extraordinary person. He passed up the money for a year and picked Oxford.
What I appreciate most about Rolle is that he’s jerked our focus off the bad guys in sports.
Let’s face it. We’re obsessed by bad behavior. We lap it up in the tabloids, talk about it with our friends and take perverse delight in concluding that sports are populated by criminals, philanderers, cheaters, drunks, druggies, sex addicts and bad tippers.
They’re rich. They’re spoiled. They have a sense of entitlement. They think they’re above the law. They’re disgusting, evil, semi-literate, self-absorbed, rotten, disgusting human beings.
Well, it’s now obvious that at least one person isn’t any of those things. And if you pull your head out of the gutter for a moment, you’d realize that the irretrievably depraved among our athletic heroes are about as rare as Rolle on the other end of the spectrum.
And if you’d take another moment, you should accept that most athletes are like most of any group. They’re average folks – decent, hard-working, reasonably polite. You don’t read about those people very often because they’re so common. You wouldn’t expect the local newspaper to run a front-page story on your neighbor down the street who goes to work every day, loves his wife and kids, belongs to a club or two, and never gets arrested. You don’t read those stories about athletes, either.
“News” is by definition that which is new or different or out of the ordinary. In sports, that’s the people who get in fights, shoot themselves in the leg, have kennels of fighting dogs – you know who they are. They’re the ones we read about not because they’re the rule in sports, but because they’re the exceptions.
Most people I’ve met in locker rooms are good people. They may have a slightly bigger ego than most of us – but they have a right to that. But on the whole, you wouldn’t mind having any of them as a neighbor.
We should all know that intuitively, but we keep saying that all athletes are rotten when the truth is that only a few of them meet that description. Even some of those we love to revile – think Terrell Owens here – have never gotten into trouble with the law and haven’t done anything that would label them as bad guys in the real world.
I wouldn’t have spent 25 years covering sports if I didn’t like the people I was writing about. I’d have to be even crazier than some people think I am – and that’s lock-him-up-in-a-padded-room crazy – to have spent so many years hanging around disgusting people. You wouldn’t watch sports if the athletes were all as bad as you say they are. You can’t get enjoyment out of watching people you hate. If you do, you’re the crazy one, not me.
Rolle is the best of the best. He’s a great football player, a better scholar, and from all reports a terrific human being who doesn’t push his beliefs or agendas on anyone. His long-term goal is to open a medical clinic in the Bahamas. I’ve no doubt he’ll do that.
Appreciate this rare human being who comes along so rarely. He’s the best of the good guys, but he’s hardly the only good guy in sports. My experience is the good guys vastly outnumber the really bad ones. They’re common – and anonymous. Just don’t let them be forgotten.
