The Pat Tillman (little) effect
It's not unheard of for a professional athlete to take a pay cut. A poor free agent market or a drop in performance can lead to a jock swallowing his pride and signing for fewer millions than he may have made the previous season. No athlete, though, can top the sacrifice the Pat Tillman is making.
Tillman, at 26 years old, left a three-year, $3.6 million contract on the table to enlist in the Army with his brother Kevin after the 2001 season. Tillman will make no more than $17,000 this year. He is believed to be the first NFL regular to leave the game for military service since World War II, when 1,000 players served and 23 were killed.
Now a members of the Army's elite Rangers, Tillman is somewhere in Iraq. Athletes are used to making sacrfices in order to achieve their goals, but making the "ultimate sacrifice" is not normally part of the equation. Rangers, by the very nature of their training are usually to be found in the middle of the worst combat has to offer. They take the biggest risks, and in a combat situation they are the likeliest to take casualties.
The Rangers are the Army's finest light infantry unit, whose standard weaponry are machine guns, mortars and grenade launchers. It was the Rangers who conducted a daylight raid in Somalia, an event upon which Ridley Scott based his 2001 film, "Black Hawk Down."
"They strike quickly, with great precision and lethality," said Carol Darby, the news media chief for the Army Special Operations command at North Carolina's Fort Bragg. "They break things open so other people can come in behind them."
After Tillman made his ground-breaking decision to serve his country in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, some wondered if others in the athletic arena -- in many minds, a parallel universe to the crucible of war -- would come in behind him.
Of course, as if to demonstrate the pampered, privileged, out-of-touch existence that far too many professional athletes lead, one of Tillman's former teammates is not impressed:
And while there has been an outpouring of support for the U.S. troops from athletes in all sports, no other high-profile professional athlete has followed Tillman's selfless example. In fact, former Cardinals teammate Simeon Rice, now a member of the Super Bowl champion-Tampa Bay Buccaneers, disparaged Tillman in an interview on Jim Rome's radio show last month.
Pat Tillman has been alone among today's professional athletes at the highest level, giving up his career to serve his country.
"He really wasn't that good, not really," Rice said. "He was good enough to play in Arizona, [but] that's just like the XFL."After several more promptings from Rome, Rice allowed, "I think it's very admirable, actually. You've got to give kudos to a guy like that because he did it for his own reasons. Maybe it's the Rambo movies, maybe it's Sylvester Stallone, Rocky, whatever compels him."
More likely, it was Tillman's love for America, not to mention his brother, who also enlisted. In the aftermath of the interview, Rice's remarks were seen as symptomatic of today's privileged, self-centered professional athletes who have been enabled from their earliest playing days.
I'd like to see how Simeon Rice would handle himself in a similar situation. I'm guessing his self-confident bravado would be the first thing to go by the wayside.
Every now and then, we hear about someone who stands on principle to the exclusion of all other concerns. How many of us would do the same? How many of us would do what Tillman did? When you starting talking about heroes, about those willing to make sacrifices for something other than themselves, Pat Tillman would be a very good place to start. In a time when spoiled, self-absorbed athletes are the rule rather than the exception, it's nice to know that at least one athlete recognizes what is truly important.
