Being a grandparent to six grandchildren, my concern for many of our most publicized events is much different than 50 years ago when their fathers were being raised. Having only a minimum of contact with their families due to distance, it is difficult to speculate on how high-profile events affect them and their perspective of life.
One of them, a grandson, just turned 13 and in a brief note to him in his birthday card, I mentioned that the “teen years” greatly affect our character development. Other words which came to mind as I sought the appropriate phrase included honesty, integrity, responsibility and moral values to name a few. With a younger brother, he is automatically a role model for the younger sibling.
As I contemplated his role-model responsibility, some of the recent publicity concerning cyclist Lance Armstrong came to mind. The winner of seven consecutive Tour deFrance races from 1999 to 2005, he was an international celebrity. Cycling is not just an individual event, but really a team effort, but one person is the leader and receives the majority of the recognition when they are successful. Even though there were claims of illegal drug use during his career, the recent highly-touted interview when he finally acknowledged he had used drugs, and successfully lied to cover it up, came as a major disappointment.
He suddenly plunged from history’s greatest cyclist to cycling’s most successful cheater and liar. He now stands as an individual willing to do anything to win, including lying to his own children. That is not a role model I would recommend to my grandchildren.
As the story of Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s “girlfriend” unfolds, we can see evidence of fame and fortune affecting one of football’s most respected awards (the Heisman Trophy) and one of America’s great universities (Notre Dame).
Whether Manti Te’o was a victim or a participant, we do not know, and we may be subjected to ongoing speculation while never finding the complete story.
However, as a young man, of Samoan descent and a native of Hawaii, he certainly was a role model for many - including my 13-year-old grandson who also plays football. The question of the relationship with the fictitious girlfriend probably had no effect on his football performance, but certainly tarnished his reputation and very well could have affected his play in the National Championship game against Alabama since the truth was coming out then.
We need more positive role models like Stan Musial, the St. Louis Cardinal baseball star who I remember best as a true gentleman, a positive role model as I was growing up, and an extremely talented athlete. One of my very early memories of Stan Musial was an article (I believe it was in Reader’s Digest) where a father wrote about meeting Stan on the beach in Florida. The kids on the beach were playing catch with this unknown person when the writer (the father of one of the boys) walked up. Recognizing that one of the boys knew the man who just arrived, Stan Musial tossed the ball to the father and said, “Here, you can do this better than I can,” and left. Only after he had left the area did the boys acknowledge it had been Stan Musial. The article was titled “The Most Unforgettable Person I Ever Met.”
True role models are hard to find. It takes more than one great game or even seven years of successful cycling. A desire to risk the loss of fame and fortune, if need be, to achieve an unblemished life is undoubtedly the first step.
With the news media looking for flaws in the life of today’s celebrities, true role models may be a thing of the past. We can have “heroes” as long as athletes hit ninth-inning home runs to win a World Series, or someone scores the game-winning touchdown in a Super Bowl, but the moment is quickly lost in tomorrow’s headline of another spectacular finish.
And, we can’t look to our political leaders who are so caught-up in the Washington game playing that we still don’t know the truth about Benghazi or even the fine details of Obamacare.
George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are still role models to me, as are Generals MacArthur and Eisenhower. Lucky for me and for them, history has not destroyed their image and there was no e-mail to tell the details of questioned events and no one had a chance to reveal personal information on Facebook, only to regret it later.
Life was less complex when my kids were small and I used Bart Starr as a role model and an example of an athlete with character and Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry as leaders to whom they could look.
It seems like respectable politicians have been hard to find, but maybe that is just the world they have chosen to work in and the circumstances draw them down. The current commercial exposing former Senator Hagel’s connections intended to derail his appointment as Secretary of Defense makes it obvious we can’t have much respect for those who go to Washington and allow the temptations to affect their judgments.
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Editor’s note: Leo Lynch is an award-winning columnist. He is a native of Benton County has deep roots in northwest Arkansas. He is a retired industrial engineer and former Justice of the Peace. He can be contacted at [email protected]
Opinion, Pages 4 on 02/06/2013