Professional Athletes

I know when I use the word 'despise' to demonstrate my feeling about professional sports the word 'despise' may seem harsh to some. I despise professional sports. However, I do not despise sports. One of the most positive and fun experiences I had in high school was attending a high school football game with young men I knew from attending classes with them.  I sat in the wooden bleachers with parents, and other young men and women. The sport was organic with muddy uniforms and when the players tackled one another I heard the crash of plastic against plastic. That was a special memory. These kids didn't play the sport for money or fame. They played it because they loved football. A sports experience like that I adore and cherish.

In the news this week are the stories of professional football players who abuse their wives and children. These men make salaries the majority of us will never see in our bank accounts.  These players for their ability to handle a football and run down a field are put onto a pedestal by adults and children a like.  Kids wear the jersey and the jersey number of these players.  Little children dream of being these players.  Only a few lucky and talented athletes make it to this level of professional sports but to the rest it is a pipe dream. Not everyone who dreams the dream of professional athletics can achieve that level.  I for myself do not admire the professional athlete for one, I was never very good at athletics and as a child it was the gifted football players and cheerleaders who bullied me relentlessly. Also where are women in professional sports? Women's sports are relegated to secondary spots on every athletic station in the land and with the advent of cable TV I have over one-hundred sports channels and I am lucky if a women's game is on even one of these channels. So women are not represented in the sports world if you do not count the T & A factor of the professional cheerleaders. Not every little girl wants to cheer a game because some want to play the sport and they should have that opportunity. How can women hope to ever be taken seriously in professional ball games when the players in one of the most popular sports in the United States choose to allow violent men to play without any personal cost to himself when he chooses to beat a wife or child.  The league can not decide once under fire what the appropriate response to the abuse allegations are. They want to sweep it under the rug but many of us no longer can stomach the oppressive acceptance of violence against women and children because to accept it is to seal women's fate as second class citizens.  It is the denial of person-hood to those people who are not grown men.

This kind of blatant disregard for women and children is similar to another largely male organization, the Roman Catholic Church whose cardinals could not agree on what to do about the child abuse that was institutionalized with the Church.  How many accusations of child rape ended up in the diplomatic pouch of the Vatican never to see the light of day again? I bring up this institution as well because I see a theme with women and children emerging.  It is the reminder of the historical and societal treatment of women and children as chattel and also as less then human. Even in the twenty-first century when so many strides have been made to allow women and men to have equity in the world we still are fighting for fundamental personhood for people who are not adult males.  It angers me and disappoints me.  I am delighted that the press and other groups will not let these issues of inequality rest until something is done. I am glad that women will stand up and be counted.

The point remains that we should ask more of our heroes and leaders then abuse: physical, emotional and sexual.  We should ask for heroes that do not hit their wife and child.   We have to expect more of ourselves and of the powers that be whether recreational or spiritiual.  I look forward to the NFL having to answer for their treatment of players who have been accused and found guilty of abuse against their domestic partners and children.