新編大學(xué)英語(yǔ)第三冊(cè)u(píng)nit7 Text B: Athletes Should Not Be Role Models

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UNIT 7 AFTER-CLASS READING 1; New College English (II)

Athletes Should Not Be Role Models

1 These days there are so many stories about the criminal activities of athletes that sports pages are beginning to look like police reports. What's going on? American sports fans ask over their morning toast and coffee, What's happening to our heroes?

2 It's not difficult to understand our desire for athletes to be heroes. On the surface, at least, athletes display a vital and indomitable spirit; they are gloriously alive inside their bodies. And sports do allow us to witness acts that can legitimately be described as courageous, thrilling, beautiful, even noble. In an increasingly complicated and disorderly world, sports are still an arena in which we can regularly witness a certain kind of greatness.

3 Yet there's something of a paradox here, for the very qualities a society tends to seek in its heroes selflessness, social consciousness, and the like are precisely the opposite of those needed to transform a talented but otherwise unremarkable neighborhood kid into a Michael Jordan. To become a star athlete, you have to have an extremely competitive outlook and you have to be totally focused on the development of your own physical skills. These qualities may well make a great athlete, but they don't necessarily make a great person. On top of this, our society reinforces these traits by the system it has created to produce athletes a system characterized by limited responsibility and enormous privilege.

4 The athletes themselves suffer the costs of this system. Trained to measure themselves perpetually against the achievements of those around them, many young athletes develop a sense of what sociologist Walter Schafer has termed "conditional self-worth". They learn very quickly that they will be accepted by the important figures in their lives parents, coaches and peers as long as they are perceived as "winners". Unfortunately they become conceited and behave as if their athletic success will last forever.

5 Young athletes learn that success, rather than hard and honest play, is what brings rewards. And for those successful enough to rise to the level of big-time college sports, the "reward" is often an artificially controlled social environment, one that shields them from many of the responsibilities other students face. Coaches whose own jobs, of course, depend on maintaining winning programs protect their athletes to ensure that nothing threatens their eligibility to compete. If an athlete gets into trouble with the law, for instance, a coach will very likely intervene hiring an attorney, perhaps even managing to have the case quietly dismissed. In some schools, athletes don't even choose their own classes or buy their own books; the athletic department does all this for them. It's not unheard-of for athletic department staff to wake up athletes in the morning and to take them to class.

6 Given this situation, it's not too surprising that many young American athletes lack a fully developed understanding of right and wrong. Professor Sharon Stoll of the University of Idaho has tested more than 10,000 student athletes from all over the country, ranging from junior high to college age; she reports that in the area of moral reasoning, athletes invariably score lower than non-athletes and that they grow worse the longer they participate in athletics.

7 Overprotected by universities, flattered by local communities, given star status by the public, rewarded with seven or eight-figure salaries, successful athletes, inevitably develop the feeling that they are privileged beings as indeed they are. The danger arises when they think that because they are privileged they can have anything they want.

8 Mike Tyson, of course, is the most obvious example of this phenomenon. Having been taught as a young man that he was special his trainer, Cus D'Amato, had one set of rules for Tyson and another, more demanding, set for all his other boxers and having lived his entire adult life surrounded by a team of admiring "slaves", Tyson eventually came to believe, like a medieval king, that all he saw rightfully belonged to him. Blessed with money and fame enough to last a lifetime, he spent his time outside the ring acquiring and discarding the objects of his desire: houses, automobiles, jewelry, clothes, and women. As a result of the publicity surrounding his rape trial, countless women have related stories of Tyson asking them for sexual favors and then, upon being refused, saying with surprise, "Don't you know who I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world." Needless to say, not all athletes are Mike Tyson; there are plenty of athletes who recognize that they have been granted some extraordinary gifts in this life and want to give something back to the community.

9 Some remarkable individuals will always rise above the deforming athletic system we've created. After retiring from football, Alan Page of the Minnesota Vikings became a successful lawyer and established the Page Education Foundation, which helps minority and disadvantaged kids around the country pay for college. Frustrated by the old-boy network by which Minnesota judges were always appointed, Page challenged the system in court and was eventually elected judge in the Supreme Court. He thus became the first black ever elected to a statewide office in Minnesota. Thankfully, there will always be some legitimate heroes (or, to use the more contemporary term, role models) to be found among professional athletes.

10 Still, it's probably misguided for society to look to athletes for its heroes any more than we look among the ranks of, say, actors or lawyers or pipefitters. The social role played by athletes is indeed important (imagine a society without sports; I wouldn't want to live in it), but it's fundamentally different from that of heroes.