Pro Sports Players - A Ponderism

I’m a lifelong fan of baseball – but in the past few years have also developed a passing (excuse the pun) interest in football. 

Last week, I was toggling back and forth between a baseball and football game and found myself wondering about the behavior of players of both games that I think worthy of sharing:

• At what point in the evolution of football players did they lose the capacity to hold their own drinking bottles while on the sidelines?
• At what point in the evolution of baseball players did they lose their grace about taking a “curtain call” after an amazing play – in my youth this used to encompass the following three components: stepping back onto the field from the dugout, looking up at the fans in the stands to fully acknowledge them, and then fully tipping their cap before returning to the dugout… now they either barely poke their head out and half remove their cap as though their head might fall off if the cap wanders too far from it, or they refuse to acknowledge the fans’ call for additional accolades, at all – gee, silly us that we think that highly of what they just did…!
• Then there’s Michael Vick (yeah, I was watching Sun night FB, the Eagles vs the Falcons), the dog-killing turned dog-loving-after-getting-caught QB of the Eagles – all due respect to Tony Dungee who declared Vick fully reformed and worthy of his second chance making scillions as a pro football star, and as much as I want to believe Mr. Vick has truly found remorse, I just can’t help but wonder how depraved someone must be to have done what he did in the first place – to be capable of killing dogs with your bare hands because they lost the illegal dog fight is a deep moral flaw that I’m not convinced can be so quickly reversed.  The same goes for so many of his fellow pro sports players who engage in far from acceptable behavior yet keep their jobs… and in some cases, like Vick, become even more famous as a result.
• Then there’s us…the fans, who expect so little of our sports pros… part of that raising the bar on better behavior I’ve been talking about recently.
  

Hey, just wondering….