I was over at my sister's a few weeks ago and there was golf on the television. My nephew Jack, who is six years old, looked up at me and said, "I love Tiger Woods." I didn't know what to say. I wanted to steer him away from looking up to someone like Tiger, but I couldn't explain to him why. I just told him, "I like Phil Mickelson."
Now I see all these pictures of kids crying about Lebron James leaving The Cleveland Cavaliers and they are crushed by it. As I get older, I think about when I will have kids and how I don't want them looking up to athletes. When I was younger, one of my idols was Suns guard Jason Kidd. I played point guard on my grade school basketball team and I only wanted to play like Jason Kidd. He was an unselfish point guard who played to make his teammates better. There was even this cheesy commercial with clips of Jason Kidd and that Vertical Horizon song "Everything You Want" playing in the background. It's a terrible song, but I loved that commercial because I thought it summed up how great a person Jason Kidd was. The only problem was that he wasn't a great person, he was a great athlete, but I couldn't distinguish between the two as a kid. My world came crashing down when he was arrested for hitting his wife. I was sitting on the coffee table in my living room just staring at the television and wanting to believe he couldn't have done such a thing. I lived with my mom and three older sisters and respect for women had been hammered into my mind, so hitting women was unfathomable to me. I sat there in shock, just hoping that he was innocent.
But he wasn't and sports took on a different meaning for me that day. I never idolized an athlete like that again in my life. I look at my nephew's love of Tiger Woods and realize that he is going to feel that same disappointment one day. I don't want my kids to be let down like that, but how can you let them watch sports, and keep them from idolizing the players they cheer for? I want them to experience the same joy that sports have brought me and leave out all the pain, but I don't think the two can be separated. I can only hope that future athletes start to take the idea of being a role model a little more seriously.
