Jocks or Jerks?

This just in…professional athletes have lost their grip on reality. Every day there is a story of an athlete refusing to play because he is being treated poorly by the organization that is paying him multi-millions of dollars every year. Every day there is news about some basketball player who is being charged with assault or a football player slapped with a paternity suit, or a baseball player charged with reckless driving and a DUI. I suppose the rules have simply never applied to them because as long as they create winning teams someone is always around to bail them out. In High School it’s the parents and coaches who look the other way because he’s a star athlete. In college, it’s some booster who throws money at problems to make them go away and acts as a cleaner to make sure the team has a shot at a National Championship or next year’s star recruit. In the Pro’s, the fans are to blame. We’ll excuse anything as long as you catch 100 balls, average 20 & 10, or bat .300 with 100 RBI’s. We either just don’t care or we care so much we are willing to accept any form of empty apology so we don’t have the guilt associated with cheering for you. Back it up with actions no longer means start doing the right thing. Instead it means go out on the field and show me why I can feel okay about turning the other cheek next time you beat your girlfriend or get involved in a shooting at a strip club or charge into the stands to face off with an aggressive fan or crash your $150,000 sports car into a telephone pole after a night of drinking.


I will no longer be an enabler. I will no longer accept mediocre morals and suspect actions in order to get a left-handed power hitter in the middle of my lineup. I will no longer be okay with the acquisition of a spoiled brat thug just because he happens to be the shooting forward my team needs to make a run in the playoffs. And I will no longer support a team that signs ex-cons because he runs a 4.4 40 with the size of a linebacker and the agility of a running back. It’s just not okay anymore. Prove to me you are a decent human being when your dollars, fame, celebrity, and fans are stripped away and then I’ll start giving you my support.

So listen up athletes. Since the normal rules don’t apply to you, I’ve created a new set of them just for you.

1) If you happen to find yourself in a strip club at 3 am, get up and leave. Check that, if you happen to find yourself in a strip club at any time of the day, get up and leave.

2) If the team you play for is willing to shell out $50 million over 5 years, count your blessings, show up for work on time every day, and give 110% nightly to your team. 99.9% of the working world won’t make $50 million in their lifetime.

3) Guns don’t kill people, they kill careers.

4) You make millions of dollars per year. You don’t need to hit a girl that isn’t acting how you want her to. Just go find a new one that will. It’s really not that hard.

5) Check the scoreboard before you decide to do a victory dance after making an 8 yard catch or a tackle 20 yards down the field. The roar from the stands is actually fans laughing at you for celebrating a routine play when your team is losing by 25 points.

6) Condoms work for pro athletes too. Travis Henry, this is for you. You have 11 children, from 10 different women, in 4 different states. Your annual child support payments are estimated at $170,000 and you are currently in jail on drug trafficking charges. $10 for a box of condoms sounds pretty good right now, huh?

7) Contracts are little pieces of paper that tell you what you can and can’t do and how much money you will get paid for how well you obey those rules. So when your contract forbids you from riding a motorcycle, don’t break your leg crashing your Harley, or worse yet, your moped. When your contract prohibits you from snow skiing, don’t post pictures of you with Jessica Simpson on the slopes of Jackson Hole. And if you have an 11 pm curfew, don’t send out a Tweet at 12:45 am from a bar in Manhattan.

8) When you get asked whether you ever did performance enhancing drugs, just say yes. It doesn’t take a forensic scientist to see the enormous size of your head and the tripling of your homerun output might somehow be connected.

9) Give me 110% every game. It’s really not that much to ask. I don’t want to hear about the grind of the season because most of you have game days only 80 or so times per year. And baseball players, stop taking the last 2 weeks off because your team won’t make the playoffs. I just don’t understand why it is okay to stop playing just because your team is out of the race. We count on you to show up and we count on you to play. We pay money to see you in person and we expect your best, not to mention we need your stats to win our Fantasy Championships.

10) The only thing that matters is whether your team wins. I find it interesting that many players only care about their stats early in their careers but are more than happy to play a back-up role for a championship contending team late in their careers. Quick test, who’s the greatest quarterback of all time? My guess is Dan Marino is fairly far down your list, yet his career stats are among the best of all time. John Stockton and Karl Malone will be forgotten in 10 years because regardless of how great they were, they never won a ring. So when you say you are willing to do anything to help the team, remember that when your team asks you to do something you don’t want to do.

Ps. Stephen Jackson, you are a punk and you’ve always been a punk. You caught lightening in a bottle 3 years ago and happened to be part of a team that made a magical run through the first round of the playoffs. But I still remember you came to the team an NBA embarrassment associated with shootings and fighting with fans in Detroit. So next time you want to bitch about being treated poorly, you might want to remember you make $8+ million per year, start and play 40+ minutes a game, and were at one point the captain of the team. And by the way, Baron Davis, not you, was the reason that team 3 years ago made us all believe.