THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505140188
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BOB MOLINARO
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines
On Mother's Day, thoughts turn to an appropriate gift Bobby Cox might have given his wife.
Perhaps a catcher's mask.
Or a month's worth of free lessons at a Chuck Norris studio.
As happens from time to time - more like almost every day, come to think of it - SportsWorld is suffering another small nervous breakdown.
A major league baseball manager (Cox) and two football coaches (Gary Moeller and Dennis Erickson) are being held up as examples of sports figures who fell from their pedestals.
These are big stories, all right. But are they really important stories?
Every day, middle-aged men everywhere are involved in incidents of drunkenness and battery, and nobody much cares. But when those involved are well-known sports figures, it becomes a national crisis.
Why should this be the case? Because coaches, along with celebrity athletes, are expected to be more virtuous and noble than the rest of us. In other words, they are expected to be role models.
The role model is a sports conceit we would be better off without. Charles Barkley once told us in a sneaker commercial that he was no role model. It was a good message, but nobody wanted to believe him.
What's the use? As long as we continue to give athletes and big-shot coaches an exaggerated sense of importance and relevance, we just won't get it.
But today is Mother's Day. On Mother's Day, the jock-as-role-model doctrine should be suspended out of respect for the people who really make a difference in a child's life.
Unless your mother happens to be Nancy Lopez or Chris Evert, jock role models couldn't look more pale or puny next to the real thing.
If only we could find a way to get Mom's picture on one of those sports collector cards that are so popular today. Then we could flip it over and see that she leads the league in several categories, not the least of which is sacrifices.
And Mom doesn't ask as much of us as athletic role models do. Just a phone call now and then. A card on her birthday.
Mothers don't charge for autographs. They don't go on strike. They don't come barging into the family room selling overpriced sneakers. And they look better in a pair of earrings than Andre Agassi.
Although you'd never know it to hear the disciples of jockocracy, the influence of a Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal or Dan Marino is almost irrelevant to a child compared with the impact of a mother soldiering on.
The term role model is a powerful cliche. In sports, when somebody says ``role model,'' you think of a small child sitting at the foot of his bed, gazing dreamily at a poster of a large, imposing athlete.
But people immersed in sports are so accustomed to imagining this tender scene that few ever stop to consider what it amounts to.
For sure, kids model their jump shots, hair cuts and sometimes even the way they walk after athletes they see on TV. But most of the time, that's as far as it goes.
It's been argued that all sorts of inappropriate behavior can be attributed to the influence of dysfunctional athletes on our youth. Fortunately, then, for both kids and parents, athletes are not serious role models at all, but temporary style models with no lasting impact.
Do superstars sometimes inspire our youth? Certainly. Shaq and Jordan, for example, inspire kids to spend money they don't have on products they don't need.
If athletes are role models, it is in the most superficial of ways. Moms, on the other hand, are life models.
Today, don't let anybody insult our mothers, or our intelligence, by confusing the two. by CNB