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There is something everyone in America should understand about coverage of sports news. While the people who cover sports are often more creative and in tune with what is actually happening than reporters who cover the serious subjects of politics, government and national defense, they are generally in tank for sports figures and, of course, sports in general. As a result, they have a hard time hitting the people they cover upside the head when it is required.
Gilbert Arenas of the Washington Wizards has been hit hard by the sports media this week, but just wait. In a few days, weeks or months, they’ll be hoping he gets to come back and play. Why? For many reasons, but one of the biggest is that he is a great player who might still be great again. The sports guys looooove sports and they want to see and write about the Michael Jordans and Tiger Woods of the world. It makes their job a lot more interesting and easier, because more people read what they have to say. They don’t have to work up so much of a sweat to write, or speak, about people in sports who are among the greatest. (More on the subject of sports writers at a later date.)
One thing is clear from this week: regardless of whether Arenas every plays basketball again (who cares besides his family, a few fans and the sports writers?), he should never be allowed to put on the uniform of a Washington Wizard again. Taking four guns into the locker room is bad enough. Taking them out and seeming to threaten a teammate? Over the top. Then calling it all a joke? Then acting like he was shooting with his thumb and finger before a game in Philadelphia? Yelling at ticket buyers? It is worse than someone caught with cocaine acting like he’s snorting on the basketball court. It represents someone who has lost touch with any sense of reality.
Even children, in farm and ranch areas where guns are common, learn early on that you don’t play with guns, ever. Thousands, if not millions, of people have been killed by “unloaded” guns or guns that discharged when someone intended just to clean them. Another rule is that you never use a gun to threaten
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DC AREA FANS REACT TO ARENAS
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someone. It is just too serious and dangerous. You never point a gun at someone unless you have a reason, and intention, to use the weapon for self protection or to save the life of someone else. The police don’t fire warning shots and neither should civilians, because it means a quick, vast escalation of danger. Did Arenas know any of this or was he just a big kid who thought that a gun was a manly toy to have around?
While on this subject, it is absurd, even obscene, that anyone gets a 111,000,000.00 dollar contract because he can put a ball through a hoop. That works out to about 150,000 dollars per game. Well, if Arenas or anyone else can generate that kind of revenue, I would suggest that basketball, and all professional sports, be turned into a source of funds for education. Give the top players big bucks, but divert half of that money, after taxes, into education programs for poor kids or college scholarships and support for kids whose parents didn’t get to go to college (one of the groups most threatened by not graduating). Anyone who makes over a million dollars a year, half would go to education funds (with perhaps some put aside for pension funds for players who, after all, have short careers). We are ruining lives, and sport in the process, with excessive compensation given to young men, and a few women, who usually have nothing else to offer the world.
The money that is floating around at the top of our economic system has a corrosive effect on the whole idea of work. Why should some guy in Youngstown, Ohio struggle along on 36,000 a year if the guy who closed the factory where he used to work makes five million? Why do we reward people who claw their way up while short changing those who make the wheels turn at the bottom? Because it is legal? Because we can get away with it?
It wouldn’t bother me one bit if Gilbert Arenas were kicked out of professional basketball for good. I think he might have enough money to live on the rest of his life, if he is more careful with it. (No more million dollar birthday night parties.) It would be a good example for everyone of the consequences of serious, dumb and dangerous mistakes. It might even save Gilbert Arenas from his own apparent destructiveness and allow him to live a more decent life. In any case, if he were kicked out, you would see a flotsam of newspaper stories about how sad it all is that a 28 year with a brilliant career is pushed out. Hogwash. It would be a lot worse if he had accidentally killed someone with his stupid playing with guns.
Doug Terry, 1.7.09
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