I don't want this to come off as a Lance Armstrong column or a Manti Te'o column. I will admit, I probably would not be writing it if they had not been in the news last month, and I've thought to myself on multiple occasions, "No one wants to hear my take on this mess, especially not three weeks after the fact."
But I would like to use the events of the first month of 2013 Armstrong's admission to Oprah Winfrey that he cheated his way to seven Tour de France titles and the revelation that Te'o's late girlfriend never actually existed to talk more broadly about how we perceive professional athletes this year.
In my youth, professional athletes were either good guys or bad guys. Good guys were the players that played for my teams and the star athletes of the day. Bad guys were people the media told me not to like, such as Barry Bonds, and guys on the teams I rooted against basically, anyone who played for Manchester United. Unfortunately, sports are a lot more complicated than that.
Baltimore Ravens fans see Ray Lewis as a good guy, a reformed Christian who also happens to be one of the greatest middle linebackers of all time. But there are a lot of people out there who believe he is just the opposite: a guy who literally got away with murder and a thug on the field. Lewis' role in a pair of 2000 killings remains questionable, though murder charges against him were dismissed. Someone like Lewis doesn't fit nicely into either the "good" or "bad" categories. Same goes for Armstrong remember the millions he raised for cancer? and Te'o.
Now, at 22, I realize that I cannot take the same fawning approach to fandom that I did in my teens. I cannot put athletes on a pedestal, regardless of how many Super Bowls they have won, and I cannot break them down into "good" or "bad." All I know about these athletes is what they choose to reveal to the public. If that is all I am going off of, I am not really in a position to render judgment about them.
We are often quick to lionize an athlete like Tiger Woods and hold him up as the paragon of virtue, even though the average person barely knows him. And while the fallout is often ugly when the athlete in question does not turn out to be who we thought he was, it does not mean that we will stop building legends like Woods.
We love heroes. I would even go so far as to argue that we need heroes, and sports are a very convenient way of creating them. But the fall of athletes like Woods, Armstrong or Pete Rose forces us to confront some very important questions.
Should we promote athletes as heroes even if our knowledge of their character is incomplete? Or, should we look at them merely as very successful humans akin to the way we look at a real-estate billionaire but stop short of granting them hero status because we don't want to give them a chance to let us down? There's no right answer here.
This might sound like a loss of innocence the realization that you cannot count on anyone in sports but I would prefer to think of it as Dartmouth teaching me a life lesson. There are a lot of very good athletes at this school, but I do not think of them as athletes. I think of them as people. When I see an athlete in a frat basement, I'm not thinking, "How many yards did he rush for today?" My thoughts are usually more along the lines of, "Who is that cute girl he's playing pong with?"
I have crossed paths with several elite athletes at Dartmouth, including NCAA champions and Olympians, but because I look at them as human beings first, I have formed an opinion on them based on how they have acted toward me, rather than their athletic accomplishments. So, moving forward, I am going to try to think of professional athletes in a similar way. That does not mean that I will not respect what they have accomplished on the field, but I will no longer use the neat "good" and "bad" labels when assessing them as a person. If I meet Tom Brady, I will probably still melt into a puddle but, with few exceptions, I will try, hard as it may be, to remember that he is a human being first, athlete second, and that he is as capable of flaws as any of us are.
