Athletes used to just play model roles

At what point, exactly, in our sports history as a nation did athletes come to be expected to be “role models?”

It couldn’t have been during the 1920s and ‘30s, when Babe Ruth was king. Everyone loved Ruth, but did every mom and dad wish for their little tyke to grow up to be just like him? Kids themselves adored the Babe and few of them, I’ll venture to guess, were scarred for life if they happened to hear that he loved women and beer and cigars. If they aspired to emulate him, it was in the hitting of home runs, not in the carousing that was, to them, incidental to his large appeal.

In the ‘40s there was Ted Williams, the paragon of hitting and the very picture of un-congeniality. Red Sox fans might have called Teddy Ballgame a bum when he struck out with two on, but they didn’t fret overlong that, when he threw his bat in disgust afterwards, he was providing a poor example for the kiddies.

Williams’ rival, Joe Dimaggio, of course, was the exception. Every boy in America wanted to play centerfield for the Yankees, and also marry Marilyn Monroe. Dimaggio may have been the first big star whose private life impinged on the consciousness of kids.

In the ‘fifties, when I was a kid, we had Mickey Mantle as an icon. I admired Mantle – growing up in Pittsburgh, my favorite was Roberto Clemente – and I tried switch-hitting in Little League in imitation of The Mick. When he hit .400 with three homers in the 1960 Series against the Pirates I couldn’t help but be in awe, and the next year, when he, not Maris, looked like he would break Ruth’s record of 60 home runs, I was even more spellbound. Almost everyone knew that Mantle was a drunk, but every man Jack dreamed of his son becoming the next Mickey Mantle.

So what gives, these days? Why do we demand that athletes not only tear the cover off a baseball or dunk a basketball or otherwise do something we could only dream of doing, while also being model – “role model,” that is – citizens?

Maybe it’s just that – that because athletes have skills that are so far beyond us, we expect them to have other superior qualities, as well. In the old days, we might have idolized a few extraordinary players whose abilities we recognized as transcendent, but as for the other, run-of-the-mill athletes, we thought we could one day be in their shoes. Now, in this the Age of Information, we know that something like hitting a baseball thrown by a Major League pitcher is unthinkable – we appreciate the incredibly specialized skill involved. We appreciate it, but we resent it – resent the outlandish salaries being handed out for something as trivial, after all, as hitting a baseball.

As far as we’re concerned, the athlete owes us something more.