By: Grace Baranowski <[email protected]>

A football star lost a bit of his luster on Aug. 24 when Michael Vick indicated that he’d plead guilty to “Conspiracy to Travel in Interstate Commerce in Aid of Unlawful Activities and to Sponsor a Dog in an Animal Fighting Venture” in the U.S. District Court of Richmond, Va., according to SportsIllustrated.com. He could get as much as five years of prison and a fine of $250,000, among other penalties. Vick said that he bought pit bulls and the property used to train and fight them, but that he didn’t profit from the business or bet on the fights. About 53 dogs were cited in the case.

Obviously, this is making such a big splash in the media whirlpool because Vick’s a well-known athlete. A celebrity, one might say. Now, first of all, let it be known that I do not in any way condone Vick’s actions. They were reprehensible, nightmarish, even. However, this is only one instance of well-known athletes breaking the law. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone that yet another “hero” has toppled from his pedestal. 2005 brought about the infamous Indiana Pacers brawl. The steroid investigations in Major League Baseball rocked the idea of the “great American game” to the core. And just last year, The Washington Post cited at least 35 NFL players who were arrested in a variety of charges.

What these instances tell us is that there are always lenses, whether they’re from cameras or microscopes, literal or figurative, and that these lenses have mirrors­–whether the athletes want this or not. It’s a mirror that society holds up to these players because we invest our unspoken aspirations in every touchdown or 3-pointer they score. They’re our heroes, the people we wish we could be. So when one slips up, it’s seen as a betrayal of our trust. When who we once considered a football god rushing his pigskin up a field becomes a man with a hidden and dark side that we’d rather ignore, society immediately withdraws and condemns.

But instead of automatically pointing the finger, perhaps we should take a step back to examine the situation. Maybe in a weird way we’re at fault, not for Vick’s actions, but for putting him in the limelight where we’d actually care about those actions. Countless crimes are commited by normal citizens, so why should we expect more out of a professional football player? We should remember that we’re the ones who pushed the cameras into their lives, and that those lives are flawed. Perhaps the media is a little to blame for the repercussions of this latest episode. It seems the media can play a two-faced role. First, it can serve to build up celebrities and athletes into community-serving, role-model demigods. However, just like a shark spotting the first sign of spilled blood, the media rushes to magnify missteps of the stars. And we lap it up. We fall for it, hook, line and sinker. One doesn’t have to look far from the sports arena to prove this. Need I mention Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan?

On the one hand, athletes, and all other celebrities, for that matter, should remember that they’re in the spotlight, whether they like it or not. It may not be fair, but they have to know that each action has its consequences doubled automatically. Any child watching a sports game could automatically or naively tell you that he wants to become just like his favorite player, so it isn’t a stretch that later on in life he might try to copy some of his idol’s actions. There are good-spirited professional athletes, to be sure, that kids can follow. For example, Peyton Manning or Tiger Woods, have done so much for their communities and society as a whole. Manning has his PeyBack Foundation, and Woods has created his self-named Tiger Woods Foundation, dedicated to helping children discover their initiave and potential; however, we cannot let such good examples overly inflate our expectations for the whole lot.

On the other hand, the risk is too dangerous to our idea of values to let the scandal-crazed media elect our heroes. Instead of depending on the latest sports superstar, we should look in our own lives and experiences and pick heroes a bit more personally. What are athletic “heroes,” anyway, other than charismatic, muscled ball players? They don’t inherently have the personal values system that merits “hero” status. They have the media and a few charity organizations blowing support their way with coverage and funding. All we as a public know about the sports stars are the manicured images the publicists feed us. Some, I’m sure, do display selfless behavior in the face of their astronomical paycheck, but we have no way of knowing if our favorite star truly merits our devotion. And then when something like the Vicks case happens, our trust is shattered. That broken trust is an effect entirely too traumatic to repeat over and over again. So in order to protect ourselves and our sense of morals, we can’t choose to follow blindly someone whose only real job is to play well. We cannot expect that the people we pay to play sports for us will play hero for us, too.

But professional athletes should be aware of the public’s tendancy to idolize sports stars and thus be aware of the added responsibility they shoulder. At the same time, we as spectators can’t expect angelic behavior from all players. Just like average citizens, some will be tempted to commit a wrongdoing. We also can’t center our moral core on a high-scoring ball player. Their salary does not cover donning a Superman cape or performing miracles. We are just paying them for thrilling wins on the field.