Given all the publicity given to baseball’s steroids scandals and football’s spoiled young thugs, one could be forgiven for wondering if the term “professional athlete” isn’t synonymous with “spoiled, self-absorbed jackass”. That’s overly simplistic, of course, because there are a lot of decent human beings out there who also happen to be professional athletes. Unfortunately, those aren’t the stories you hear these days. Yeah, someone doing copious amounts of charity work away from the prying eyes of a camera lens just isn’t something that’s going to stand out in today’s hypercompetitive media marketplace.
Sometimes, though, doing the right thing, or at least a very good and thoughtful thing, can be all the reward a person needs. Brady Quinn didn’t have to make the very personal and heartfelt gesture that he did. He simply did it because he wanted to make a difference for a family that was suffering a devastating loss…and is there ever a wrong way to do the right? What sells copy? How about an athlete crashing his Range Rover while masturbating to a porn DVD playing on his dashboard (the late Eddie Griffin) or an athlete involved in late-night gunplay at a strip club (too many to even know where to begin)? Yeah, that’s the ticket….
It’s refreshing to discover that no, not all professional athletes are self-absorbed, immature, misogynistic thugs. It’s just too bad that the ones who do good things don’t get nearly the press that those who (&^% up do, because there are a lot more Brady Quinns than we’re made aware of.
