You're a professional athlete, act like one.

The world of professional sports is going down the toilet...
In the last two years, the professional sports world, both at home and abroad has become the target of tons of negative media coverage. Most of this negativity is well deserved, as the term "professional athlete" loses all meaning entirely.
We'll start with overseas. Soccer, or futbol, depending on your nationality, is the most popular sport in the world. Certainly it is no where near the top of the American sports world, but nonetheless should be considered a premier sport. Last year one of the richest soccer clubs in all the world, Italy's Juventus was implicated in a gambling scandal involving betting on and possibly fixing games involving their own club. Many of its players and staff members were fined heavily and the club was relegated from the country's top league, the Serie A, to the Serie B. To Americans this may not seem like a big deal, but its almost like sending the entire New York Yankees franchise down to AAA baseball.
At home, Major League Baseball has been dealing with the use of steroids by its players for the last several years. Recently, the league has started naming players involved in buying these illegal drugs and is investigating them. Not only does this drag a player's name through the mud, but it also affects their club and the game of baseball. Whether a player is guilty or not anymore doesn't seem to matter, people assume everyone in baseball who can hit a home run is "juiced." Barry Bonds finally cleared the all time home run mark, and thank goodness for that. Now we can stop talking about how people don't want him to break the record because he's a black man. (It was a black man's record!) Others think he's on steroids and should have an asterisk next to his name, or be stripped of his homeruns. Whether I agree with the ladder idea or not, in this country aren't we innocent until proven guilty?
Don't even get me started on basketball and all the on court brawls and confrontations with fans over the last two seasons. Now you can't trust anyone in the NBA anymore. With one official already pleading guilty to illegal gambling, possibly fixing games, and showing loose connections in the form of debts to members of the mafia, where does it all end? Last I heard he was trying to enter a plea agreement in which he said he would name something like 20 other NBA refs who were also involved in gambling. Who do you trust? Every time I see a bad call this year that affects the outcome of a game I'm going to wonder if that referee really just blew it or did he have his own agenda? That really ruins the integrity of a game.
And of course, we end up at the big moneymaker of the group, The NFL. These days the NFL is a multi billion dollar industry. There's really no other sport that is played in such a confined area on a professional level, but has so much popularity. Football is where my heart lies. My family owned Cowboys' season tickets for nearly 30 years, and I grew up on the 50 yard line at Texas Stadium. Some of my earliest, and definitely my fondest memories are of watching the Cowboys with my dad. The 90s were a great decade to be a fan, with 3 Super Bowls in 4 years you couldn't beat the excitement. Now that I'm older and wiser, and still a huge fan, I start to see the darker side of things. Every time I turn on the TV another player is going to jail. PacMan Jones is implicated in a murder, 8 or 9 Cincinnati Bengals' are arrested in a year for various offenses, Tank Johnson convicted on felony gun charges, Michael Vick (the league's highest paid player and top jersey seller) is indicted for kingpinning a massive dog fighting ring. There have been 6 or 7 players arrested in the last year at the University of Texas alone with the latest just last week. This shows that when we give these high profile athletes a second chance, you've always got another shot waiting for you. Now these kids are starting to get in trouble, thinking that they're the next Tank Johnson, who was just signed by the Cowboys to a two year contract even though he is serving an 8 game suspension due to his legal troubles and won't be available to play until the middle of November.
AND NOW THE PATRIOTS ARE CHEATERS? How many Super Bowls did they cheat in? They've won three by a field goal or less, could they have gained a competitive advantage with that little extra video tape? While not entirely likely that it helped them during the course of the game they were taping it IS possible to gain a competitive edge from something like that. Whether it seems harmless or not it was specifically against the rules, and was recently a point of interest from Commissioner Roger Goodell. We'll probably never know how much edge it gained them, but it just goes to show that even the shiniest example of sports glory has kinks in the armor.

The bottom line here, is YOU ARE A PROFESSIONAL ATHLETE...act like one.

You are a role model...no...a hero to many people, and you need to conduct yourself accordingly. You've been given the grace, talent, and athletic ability to get into not only an elite group of people, but an elite tax-bracket, and people are going to be watching you. You not only hurt yourself but you hurt the credibility of your team and your league. Most importantly you drive the fans away. The dedicated ones like myself will always be around, clinging to what was once pure about the game, but if this trend continues, and the common fan doesn't buy tickets and jerseys anymore, there's no more big money for big time athletes.