What I’d like is to hold athlete-entertainers to account as role models so long as they’re on the job. Should Tiger Woods back his golf cart into a lake during a celebrity skins tournament, by all means let’s investigate the story, lament the fall of another athlete who “seemed different than the others,” and recalibrate our opinion of the sportsman. The same goes for folks who dope in private to enhance their public performances. Realty demands that Mark McGwire is a fallen hero; his sins bear directly on his supposed heroics.
But goings on inside a gated community that involve the private life of an athlete and his wife? I no more want to know the details than I want to know how often Tiger masturbates, another bit of gossip that would do good traffic on the Internet.
Except in the most extreme circumstances, athletes shouldn’t be treated as public figures when they are off the court, the field, or the course. It diminishes what they add to society, irrationally elevating their private lives in ways that do a disservice to them and to us.
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