Tipping point: Idea that sports stars can be role models is unrealistic

The idea that sports stars should be role models is a childish conceit possessed solely by adults. No child is silly enough to think because someone is good at kicking a ball or running fast they should also be pillars of humanism. Only adults can manage to be that wilfully dumb.

Yet again it is the shuddersome figure of Ched Evans which highlights how an awful lot of otherwise bright people need to grow up about this ludicrous idea of a sports career coming with a presumption of moral probity.

It doesn’t. Talent is indiscriminate. That man can be base should be no more an eye-opener than a vulture being ravenous: Sartre said that, as major a talent as is imaginable and also a gold-medal self-serving shit.

That is an uncomfortable duality we seem able to accommodate quite easily when it suits us. In politics or business it can even be perceived as a virtue. Yet in the comparative triviality of sport it’s supposedly different, a clue perhaps to the cynicism behind the pose.

Children do admire sporting figures, but hardly to the hagiographic extent that the adult world treats them. Cut away at the coverage of why Oldham ultimately refused to sign up a convicted rapist and you are left with sponsors threatening to withdraw the money-hose, sponsors concerned about a blow to their profits, sponsors under pressure from hysterical adults purporting to believe that being a footballer is too privileged a position for the normal rules of law to apply.

Digging around in bins

Thus football is presumed to include an ethical element that is key to raising the next generation – football! Only adults could believe that. Only politicos on the make could say it with a straight face. And only media trying to justify digging around in bins, both literal and digital, could present it as some duty to relay.

Of course, it muddies things that so many sporting figures are happily complicit in pimping sanitised PR-coated versions of themselves in return for remunerative profile.

This deepens the cynicism involved in a vacuous puff industry reliant on sanctimonious filler that allows ‘personalities’ tee themselves up as ‘examples’. That such moves make them blatant hostages to fortune can provoke charitable thoughts only towards those ultimately too stupid to be on the make.

It takes a monumental level of greedy self-regard to think that booting a ball, swinging a club or steering a jalopy entitles one to assume such a role for the world.

However, those possessed of sufficient self-awareness to recognise the pitfalls can still find themselves press-ganged into playing ball in this role-model charade, supposedly because so much of modern sport revolves around hero-worship, an argument sold on the backs of kids but which usually is much more relevant to grizzled adults and their own hero-worship.

Tiger Woods’ cringe-inducing sponsor-pacifying performance after his ex-wife took a club to his car remains a nadir of role-model cynicism, when a world supposedly shocked at the idea of a rich and famous man availing of opportunities for easy sex was treated to the spectacle of Woods pleading for corporate forgiveness when he should have been at home pleading contrition.

But examples are so plentiful of sponsored semblance being undermined by grubby human reality that only those really desperately wanting to believe sporting prowess is equatable to character can continue to be outraged: them or those mouthing off for the sake of making noise.

Fearful anonymity

There are deeply relevant issues involved in the wretched Evans’ case. Sentencing for serious crime is an obvious one. Is it right that a convicted rapist should be out of jail in a couple of years?

How can the victim of Evans’s rape be forced to live in fearful anonymity because of disgusting online abuse with the authorities seemingly powerless to do anything about it?

But such questions have been buried underneath a torrent of bombastic hysteria about whether or not Evans should be allowed go back to the job he has spent his life training for because it might be interpreted by impressionable youth as a sign that rape is okay. This power is being invested in a footballer, by adults clearly unaware of the condescension inherent in their assumption. In fact this investment in a footballer’s supposed influence is so juvenile that only petulant adults unable to cope with not getting their way could come up with it.

The real point here revolves around a culture so self-serving it conspires in heaping ridiculous levels of adulation and significance on successful sporting achievement and yet appears unable to cope with the idea that those who perform one specific discipline brilliantly might not be so brilliant when the final whistle has blown.

And the outcome in the Evans case is that centuries of jurisprudence, the reflection of how we view ourselves, is apparently worth parking to the side for a second-rate footballer unable to live up to the supposed role which a digital mob, opportunist hacks and deeply cynical politicians believe he should fill.

To which all that can be said really is – for God’s sake, GROW UP.