I am a loyal Steelers fan, even though my overall knowledge of sports is limited. With the revelation of Ben Roethlisberger's escapades, all sorts of sordid thoughts are now running through my head and will be every time the play-by-play describes one of Ben's passes. I am disgusted (like the Rooneys.) This was not some get drunk, do something stupid incident that escalated beyond a fairly innocent intent. This was a 27-year-old man and his buddies shoveling drinks down the throats of 20-year-old girls to get them drunk so they'd do sexual favors for them. The incident in Las Vegas was, apparently, just a Pass Go card to him since there were no consequences. I will not be able to appreciate his athletic abilities anymore. My granddaughter has his shirt and learned to say Big Ben among the first ten names she knew. As she outgrows # 7 we will try to steer her adoration to another player--Troy Palomalu sound good to us, and in hockey, there is no finer player than Sidney Crosby. Maybe this is all the beginning of a turning point for our society when it is no longer OK to abuse women. Poor Plaxico Buress--he was just playing around with a gun, didn't hurt anyone, and ends up in jail. In his little speech, Roethlisberger talked about being a role model--he can forget about ever being a 'role model.' I don't really care about Tiger Woods--he had sex with consenting adults. It is his private business. And wasn't it high justice that when Mickelson won, his wife was able to be there--sort of showed how fakey Tiger's personal life is. Sports and sex are the 2 dominant themes in American society, and if we can have the 'elegant' practitioners of both be our new heroes, maybe there's hope for us. There was always praise for the likes of Cal Ripken and Nolan Ryan, but even in the good old days we held in high esteem some pretty raunchy sports characters--rather like the pass given to JFK.

I think that the elevation of school sports led to the elevation of professional players as 'heroes.' Young students have school pride from sports teams, not from academics or fine arts. Schools have perpetuated the myth that one can get ahead, get scholarships by being a good athlete. The vast majority of these kids never even get an adequate high school education, let alone college. What about Arne Duncan's idea of keeping schools out of March madness who have graduation rates below a certain level? That will not happen because too many people's livelihoods depend on college sports, and the biggest money in the country (both on and off the books) is not made by Wall Street, but by professional sports. Esteem goes to schools with famous athletes as graduates. Nearly forty years later, I can still tell you that my now defunct high school was the alma mater of Johnny Unitas. All high school teams should be intramural or schools mixed teams--no rivalries--that can be left to community teams like Little League. Schools should concentrate on health and academics. If all the effort and money that is plowed into high school sports was more evenly distributed, schools would be way better off. How many man-hours in school districts are devoted to scheduling, busing, ordering gear, coaching, etc. If we put that much effort into curriculum and teacher in-service we'd have fabulous results. We make a lot of noise about wanting to improve our schools, but we want to do it without ruining the Friday Night Lights which for all their romanticism in popular culture do not benefit the majority of students in a school; not physically, not socially, and certainly not academically. I thought it quite telling that my children's high school, while unable to find a few minutes each day to announce academic awards, always found time to have 15 minute pep rallies each week. Our children are really quite bright--they get the messages we send. We haven't chosen to send the right messages. While soft drink companies made our children fat, we made exclusive contracts with them to pay for electronic scoreboards (not for tutors or computers.) How much of the budget of a new high school is devoted to the "stadium." How many students, as participants in a sport will use the stadium during its life? How many students will use the media center, the library, the laboratories in a school? If an alien came to earth and investigated schools, they would surely determine that schools are built to give athletes a place to gather between contests, and to give 'teachers' a place to talk--but that's another blog.