Sporting an Opinion

By Bob Rehak

Someone once said, “Only comment on topics you know something about, or you’ll look like a goof.” I think it was my mother.

I can’t really comment about life, because I’m not old enough. I can’t comment on love, because it came too easily and I haven’t found its limits yet. I can’t comment on anything medical because I’d probably end up putting someone in the hospital. I have no opinion about fashion, because I own shirts that are older than my mortgage, which makes it really hard to figure out the date of old photographs. (I’ll be looking at a picture from 10 years ago and realize that I’m wearing the same shirt!) I could comment about the weather, but I’d never get it right. I could say something about education, but at this point my kids are smarter than I ever will be (but don’t tell them that).

So that pretty much leaves only one topic: sports. I like to play, coach and watch sports. Experience is a great teacher, but at my age I’ve been ditching a lot of classes (basically since the 80s). Coaching keeps me involved peripherally, but most of my current education comes in 8 minute clips on the 10 o’clock news. Occasionally I’ll sit down for a 30 minute lesson from ESPN, but that’s rare. (Although any time I travel out of town for business, my first order of business is to lock in ESPN in my hotel room and keep it running all day, the way stockbrokers keep the ticker going till the final bell).

There have been some interesting sports stories recently, ranging from inspirational to mystifying to disgusting:

--Last month Manny Ramirez hit his 500^th home run, a feat that only 24 players have accomplished in Major League history. Manny is a great player. But he’s also infuriating (and fun) to watch. Dozens of times in his career Manny has been called lazy and egotistical for posing at home plate to watch home runs and warning track flies, for not hustling out ground balls, for turning doubles into singles, and for being selfish. After the 2003 season, the Boston Red Sox even tried to get rid of Manny by putting him on waivers, but the other 29 teams in the league took a pass on him and his baggage. He must be hard to root for at times for the Red Sox Nation.

On the other hand…….

On May 14^th of this year in Baltimore, with a man on first, Manny ran to the wall to catch a deep fly ball, caught it, hit the wall, high-fived a fan in a Boston jersey in the stands, and turned and threw the ball back to the infield to double the runner off first. Manny’s petulant, selfish play at times makes me cringe. His pure enjoyment of the game makes me wish I could have high fived him.

--Big Brown, the second coming of Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Affirmed and Mr. Ed, was a lock to win the Triple Crown last week. His trainer, Rick Dutrow Jr., told us so. He said a win at the Belmont Stakes was “a foregone conclusion” and that Big Brown would win “by daylight, easily.” Big Brown finished dead last. His trainer is blaming the jockey; the jockey is blaming the horse, and the horse has no idea that he finished last. I always have found it curious when people hold racehorses in such high regard as “athletes.” Yes, Big Brown is a beautiful animal, but does he really consider himself an athlete? When champion horses die, there’s this moment of silence feeling that resonates throughout the sports world. When Barbaro finally succumbed to his injury and had to be put down, it was sports page front page news. These are animals, people. If you didn’t own the horse, invest in him or take care of him, he really shouldn’t mean that much to you. He had no clue he was an “athlete.” All he knew was that every once in a while he wore pretty silk colors and ran with other horses around a circle. Most of those horses weren’t his friends, so he had no vested interest in the outcome. Big Brown isn’t depressed today because he came in last at Belmont. He thought of it as a nice day out of the barn. Trust me, his pride was not hurt with that last place finish. Stop deifying animals and giving them human characteristics when they run fast just because a man keeps whipping him to do so.

--Cedric Benson is an athlete, though he certainly has no horse sense. The Chicago Bears cut the running back from the team the other day due to his inability to behave himself off the field. He was arrested in early May for boating while intoxicated, then again last Saturday on a drunken driving charge. Professional athletes can do really stupid things, and the rest of us just shake our heads. We can’t understand how someone can have the talent to play sports and get millions of dollars for it and just throw away that lottery ticket from God. Of course, the more talented an athlete is, the more we’re willing to tolerate his bad behavior. When a Michael Jordan gets caught cheating on his wife or gambling heavily, we wear our Big Brown blinders and pretend it doesn’t matter, as long as the wins keep coming.

I’m always taken aback when athletes tell us fans that we wouldn’t understand the pressures of being a pro athlete; that we have no idea how hard it is to live under the social responsibility microscope. That’s true, we wouldn’t know anything about playing sports professionally. But the pros have no idea how hard it is to be a fan. Once an athlete signs that first contract, he’s no longer an average fan. And chances are he was told how great he was all his life, so he was a star player since high school. He’s in a different social circle than the fans, and he can never come back. It’s like a supermodel saying she knows what it’s like to be average-looking. Cedric Benson was a bust with the Bears because of what he did on the field to begin with. His drunk driving record just tipped the scales of public opinion, of the average fan, way over the “acceptable” line. He’ll never understand why we fans don’t cheer for him anymore, and we’ll never understand why he let us down.