Guarding Secrets
February 8, 2013
January was a bad month for some sports heroes, but it was an instructional time for those who paused to connect some dots.
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Two of Major League Baseball’s most prolific performers became eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame, but we learned in January that neither came close to earning enough votes for election to that prestigious shrine. Each has seen his star-power descend in a cloud of legal problems surrounding his suspected use of performance enhancing drugs.
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After seven Tour de France titles and seven times seven denials of using performance enhancing drugs and various blood doping techniques, Lance Armstrong “came clean.” Sort of.
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A Heisman Trophy candidate went from a broken-hearted soul mate to the victim of a cruel hoax to a contributor to the weirdest story college sports has witnessed. From duped to duplicitous.
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And all this with Penn State’s scandal still fresh in our minds.
How fatiguing it must be and, ultimately, how futile it is to try to keep secrets. That’s always been true; it’s just more obvious in a world where everyone’s access to social media renders investigative journalism too little and too late in uncovering the secrets that heroes harbor.
How any of these people ever thought they could guard their secrets beyond the grave would be beyond belief if it just didn’t keep happening so often. There must be something we’re doing wrong in the upbringing of prominent athletes (like too many politicians) that makes them think they can get away with sordid secrets . . . that they’re too big to fail.
The truth is, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. No secret is beyond discovery.
Well-Roundedness
January 5, 2018
Editor's Note: This blog originally was posted November 22, 2013, and the topic rings true today.
As high school seniors are scrambling to complete their college applications, I’ve reflected on how what is valued is changing.
I was accepted to both of the Ivy League schools to which I applied. This was at a time when evidence of being well-balanced, middle class and Midwestern were seen as strengths on an application. I don’t think I would be admitted to those institutions on the basis of those strengths today.
It appears that our so-called “elite” institutions are now looking for the outlier:
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Not participation in three different sports, each in its own season; but participation in one sport, year-around; and the more non-traditional the sport, the better.
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Not committed involvement in activities of the local school; but involvement away from school; maybe the invention of a product or electronic program or the founding of some nonprofit organization that improves the human condition of people in other places.
When we list all the factors that entice high school students to specialize in a single sport, we need to include that society today has made “well-roundedness” less worthy of praise than being “one-of-a-kind,” and that’s diminishing the value of being a team member unless one is the star on that team.
It is highly doubtful that either high schools or colleges are strengthened by these trends. More importantly, it is equally doubtful that single-focus childhood is the strongest way for young people to become good neighbors and community citizens.
What I continue to encourage for most students is that they sample the broad buffet of opportunities that a full-service school offers. To participate in both athletic and non-athletic activities. In both individual and team sports. To be a starter in one sport and a substitute in another. To participate in solo and ensemble. To be onstage and backstage. To taste winning and losing, and both in ample proportion.