Character Issues

I'm not sure why the sports world is consistently surprised when those players with questions marks for character reasons go ahead and do something stupid. Some, like Michael Vick, hold it together or hide it longer and better than others, but, at the end of the day, those character issues always creep up.

LeBron James didn't go to college. People never questioned his talent but they did question both his maturity and the group he hung around with. He still hangs around with the same people, he made one of his friends from the old days into his closest adviser, and he has made a ton of poor decisions as an adult just like when he was a fresh-faced kid with all the talent in the world. His lack of education crops up frequently whenever speaking about ... any subject at all, including basketball. Many other straight-from-high-school sports kids managed to continue to read and educate themselves enough to speak intelligently on subjects, why didn't LeBron?

There are a wealth of bad character individuals in the NFL. People who have made poor decisions in their past tend to continue making those poor decisions unless shocked out of them by some traumatic event. It is for these reasons that I am not surprised when I hear about gun possession charges, assault, rape allegations, and arrests. What is true in other walks of life seem to be equally true in sports: if you're an idiot going in, you're going to be an idiot once there. If you hang with bad influence friends, you're going to have bad influences helping you to make decisions.

Add into this mix of stupidity and a bad entourage the effects of wealth, performance enhancing drugs, entitlement, and celebrity and I am, frankly, surprised we don't hear about more arrests and issues with players. Look at Mike Tyson; he was a high school prodigy when it came to fighting. There were rumors of him being aggressive toward women even back then. He came from a bad background where he had to fight to stay alive; no wonder he was such a mean, nasty fighter in the ring and had social issues outside of it. But that's what we were paying for. You don't get to be the top heavyweight fighter in the world by being nice. Yet, when his bad temper, wife beating ways were "discovered," we turned on him. When he spiraled out of control, we feigned shock. Why? He was a thug on the streets that got a ton of wealth and celebrity, which lead to entitlement, and his bad posse of "friends" fed off of him and helped him make increasingly bad decisions until he hit rock-bottom. He has, to all appearances, managed to crawl out of that death-spiral and turn things around, but that's rare. And look at how long it took him.

Most people don't change who they are without significant incentive. If people are thugs and felons in high school or college, then they will be thugs and felons in pro sports. If people have a "bad" group of friends/hangers on while they are young, they won't give them up when they get a ton of money and celebrity, and the bad decisions and peer pressure will continue in their pro career. It should only be shocking if we let it be -- if teams are truly, honestly about character, these people wouldn't be hired in the first place regardless of talent. But they are, because, in the end, it is all about ratings, talent, and wins, not about character.