Hard on the heels of the disturbing details of Michael Vick’s hobby came the predictable media outcry about the loss of another role model for young boys. Flashback to O.J. Simpson. The holding up of professional athletes for emulation is a moral affliction American culture seems unlikely to cast off. How many examples do we need? For every Lou Gehrig, there seem scores of cheaters like Sammy Sosa, social degenerates like Dennis Rodman, gamblers like Pete Rose, serial fornicators like Wilt Chamberlain, and adulterers like Kobe Bryant. I leave out the drug addicts, prostitute patrons, and all around insufferable egos.
Yet it is little wonder American boys revere athletes. From too young an age, they are driven by their misguided parents to participate in organized sports. Literally driven. No longer sufficient is the pick-up baseball or football game in the vacant lot at the end of the block. Budding superstars, and even those with no more agility than a roach on its back, are minivanned to cities far afield to compete with total strangers. Overnights in hotels are common. What becomes of a child who is the object of so much time, energy, attention, and expense (the fees to join these traveling teams can exceed $1000.00)? Americans are cultivating in their children a gravely disordered understanding of the proper place of sports within human experience.
It’s not only the Lord’s Day that is given over to half-a-day of televised football, it’s Monday and Thursday evenings as well. And one need not have lived in Texas to admit that football is the central reality of American high-school life. Catholic schools are among the most enthusiastic about football, as dreams of one-day taking the gridiron with the Fighting Irish fire the imaginations of linemen more likely to have memorized the playbook than the catechism. The heroes of high-school hallways are not the presidents of the Latin club (assuming Latin is still taught), but the steroid-fueled freaks of the Friday-night lights.
The thrills of victory are not the only ones associated with the sporting life that open wide adolescent adrenal glands. Can we be surprised when the Michael Irvins of the world are busted in hotel rooms with cocaine and topless “models,” when the atmosphere of a high-school football game is so sexually charged: cheerleaders gyrating like the Pussycat Dolls, girls sporting jeans cut to expose their thongs when they sit in the bleachers, post-game parties where the scoring continues? The Viagra and Victoria’s Secret commercials that are staples of NFL Sunday and the annual porn issue of Sports Illustrated reinforce the libido-driven culture of modern American sports, pastimes once rightly seen by parents and priests as healthy outlets of male teenage energy.
Can we hope to restore an ordered attitude about sports in American culture? I am not hopeful. Nonetheless, rising gasoline prices may dampen parental enthusiasm for weekend road trips to watch ten-year-old boys chase a soccer ball. Rising costs of education may reign in athletic scholarships and football programs that lose money. (Although my alma mater, Rice University, a school of fewer than 3000 undergraduates, decided not long ago to keep its Division 1A program in spite of the millions it costs the school.) And not long from now another MVP will be exposed as having more deviant habits than setting dogs on fire. Who knows what good may come of it?
Christopher Check is the executive vice president of The Rockford Institute, publisher of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org