Kozlowski: Sports stars still heroes after all

A few weeks ago, it came out that another sports hero was something less than heroic. Mark… A few weeks ago, it came out that another sports hero was something less than heroic. Mark McGwire admitted to using steroids intermittently for a decade, including the year in which he broke the record for most home runs in a season. Of course, that record was later beaten by another man of unusual size, Barry Bonds.

A-roid and Bonds the Bulky. Palmiero the Puffed-Up and now, Big-Mac. With all the allegations of steroid use, the question is not who took steroids between 1990 and 2000, but who didn’t. And just when baseball was recovering from the 1994 players’ strike it turns out that much of what rekindled interest in the game was fueled by the use of needles rather than baseball bats.

Baseball can sink or swim, and it won’t matter much. The only reason cheating in baseball is at all relevant is the parental worry about what kinds of role models the small fries in the sandlot have to look up to. Between steroids, Tiger Woods going from tiger to tomcat and bad jokes about the shooting ability of Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards, agonizing about what the kids think of sports stars would make a heap of sense right about now.

The standard response to the question, “What about the children?” is that idolizing sports stars is a stupid waste of time, and kids should be busy worshipping people that are more productive. However, as much as I would love to see heated discussions about Linus Pauling rookie cards, there is a certain logic to having kids follow sports stars, and it is something parents should not necessarily discourage.

Sports stars make for easy admiration. Their feats, like turning a 95 mph fastball into a 400-foot home run in about half-a-second, seem superhuman.

These feats are easily understandable, concrete and duplicable. They are especially understandable to boys brought up, not only playing sports, but taught to be competitive while playing them. Having the technique of Heifetz or the sonority of Chaliapin or the whimsy of Twain are not accomplishments as visceral or obvious as the ability to crush a ball with a bat or return an interception 100 yards.

Sports develop character. Ethics such as hard work, mental toughness, fair play and sportsmanship are learned, and the results of behaving ethically are concrete and relatively immediate. If our sports stars behave in a good manner, then we have a screaming endorsement of those ethics: you can behave just like this person, and look at the success that might result.

Finally, and most importantly: we want to believe that athletes are just like us, that what separates them from us is only talent. Watch kids at play and you’ll see what I mean. They pretend to be famous sluggers, arguing over who gets to pretend to be what, almost as if it was just a name that conferred magical powers. With the addition of the name, the kid isn’t a shrimpy 8-year-old anymore. He is Mark McGwire or Jose Canseco or James Madison.

James Madison?

Well, I had to have an idol too …

As a boy I was taught by my Little League coaches that if I learned the ethics exemplified by the person I wanted to be, I would become that person. The difference between James Madison and I was ultimately just a name, a lot of hard work, sportsmanship, mental toughness and so on. This idea makes sense to young minds, before they learn about genetic predisposition and performance-enhancing substances and Calvinism. “Do your homework because Mark Teixeira did his,” logical fallacy though it is, has appeal.

In the abstract, sports stars are not bad role models: they are people who we believe are not that different from the rest of us, they do superhuman things that are easily understandable, and it is easy to believe that success has more to do with ethics than with innate talent. The fly in the “special” ointment is that athletes really are people like the rest of us. They fall into the same troubles with drugs, alcohol, sex, firearms and the temptation to cheat. The only difference is that when a random student gets drunk in South Oakland, or a random philanderer philanders, it doesn’t make every paper in the country.

So, what do we do? It would be a mistake to discourage kids from idolizing sportsfolk because they’ll do so anyway. What parents should do is talk to their children. Make it clear who is to be idolized for what, and make it clear that all people are admirable in some respects, but not in others. Strive to hit like Ty Cobb, don’t hit people like Ty Cobb.

Finally, parents should try to develop a new set of idols for their children to follow. Teach them to value a job well-done, like a good waiter or busboy. It may not be as glamorous as when a linebacker makes a big play, but at least you never have to worry about a report of the use of performance-enhancing substances at Pamela’s.

Anyone with a Linus Pauling rookie card is urged to write kozthought@gmail.com.