Athletic Entitlement: Why Can't Troubled Sports Stars Learn?

It amazes me the extent to which athletes—or daughters of millionaire hotel moguls, actors, etc.—think the world owes them a free ride.  They don’t have to obey the law, display decency or any semblance of morality, or be accountable for their actions.  (And a word to those celebrities who complain about having no personal life: tough!  This is the price you pay for all the wealth you get from the rest of us who work for a living.)

Case in point: Adam "Pacman" Jones.  The guy is on the way to a hearing for lessening his suspension because of trouble he got into at stripclubs, and he stops in a stripclub.  He has been arrested once for almost every finger he has, but because he keeps skating and being offered another chance, why would he learn to modify his behaviour?  If Jerry Jones trades for him after signing that cancer TO (who by comparison is a choir boy), everyone in the country should revile this team for enabling bad behaviour.

Jones is certainly not alone: we have seen so many of these punks who have always been given a free ride and gang-banger wannabes in the last decade to last a lifetime.  Many of them are constantly in the news for all the wrong reasons, sometimes even transcending to the non-sports dialogue.  A couple years back we saw five Cincinnati Bengals arrested, including one who had run-ins with the law three times in less than half a year!

This does not even take into consideration all those who manage to stay out of legal trouble but who are in violation of their sport's rules.  Is there anything more embarrassing are the excuses they use?  Palmeiro tried to blame it on a vitamin B shot from a teammate, Bonds claimed he was told he was getting flax seed oil, Justin Gatlin on a masseuse with a vendetta slipping steroids to him during a rubdown, and then there are the numerous excuses given by Floyd Landis.  Nothing is ever their fault, no one can ever just own up and many people try to distract us from the result by lamenting the leaks that made it public or the process by which they are tested. 

Finally, there are the issues regarding them as teammates.  When Palmeiro blamed Tejada for testing positive he violated a principle of the clubhouse.  Even if someone else is to blame, you don’t point the finger, much less try to pull someone down who has a cleaner reputation than you do.  When you’re fighting alongside guys on a daily basis, you have to be able to trust them.  Allen Iverson and Terrell Owens think they don’t have to practice or listen to their coaches (one should be leery of anyone who likes to refer to themselves not only in the third person, but by their initials).

No one is resented more on a team in any walk of life than a person who tries to put themselves above their peers, and there is no shortage of athletes that do so on a regular basis.  It's time to stop buying their jerseys, stop tolerating their attitudes, and stop having them on our payrolls.