Fantasy, Glory and Everything In Between

Oscar Pistorius, where people know him best - on the track. (AFP/Getty Images photo)

I think it’s time for a new Fantasy League.

Just take any famous sports figure, preferably one who is held up as a pantheon of virtue, and give them 100 points. Then come up with a point system that little by little chips at that century mark and see who gets to zero first.

Maybe just 10 points off for driving drunk. Screaming obscenities at an official … meh, just a few points here or there. Peformance-enhancing drugs? That’s worth some points, too. Sex offenses pile up the points even faster, beating up a spouse or significant other would certainly be a high-ticket offense. Perhaps a commissioner would have to set the bar as to what a murder would rate.

Because, really, how we look at athletes and celebrities is nothing more than a fantasy. If the last year or so hasn’t proved that to people, nothing ever will.

This week’s arrest of sprinter Oscar Pistorius on charges that he murdered his girlfriend is just one more smack across the head to remind people that watching someone do something glorious on TV doesn’t automatically turn them into a perfect person.

We like the fantasy. We like it when Pistorius and his blades challenge the notion of speed and what someone minus two legs can do. We really like it when a guy like Lance Armstrong can overcome cancer, get back on a bike and climb a mountain. We love the idea of a Joe Paterno, a kindly father figure who we can look to for old-school guidance in our new-fangled world.

But if people we know and love can shock and disappoint us on a regular basis, why shouldn’t a total stranger? Because, when it comes down to it, they are strangers. Only in the fantasy are they people we know.

There’s often been a disconnect among the things athletic heroes do, that somehow they don’t add up. The problem is, just like for you and me, they do add up. They add up to someone being wholly human.

There’s also been a disconnect in people’s perceptions, particularly about athletes. They are the gladiators of our day and we ascribe to them so much of what we want to be while forgetting they are also made out of the things we all are. To think Pistorius wouldn’t shoot his girlfriend because he rose up against so much adversity, or that Armstrong wouldn’t cheat because he overcame cancer is as logical as saying someone is more likely to shoplift because they have blue eyes.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, for the same reasons as anybody else. Silly reasons, actually, that point out that we just don’t know a dang thing.

In 1994, I was covering the NCAA women’s basketball championship game that North Carolina won on a buzzer-beater. There was pandemonium in the locker room after; these women were, deservedly, over the moon with happiness. They screamed, they danced. They jumped on a bench and danced some more. The bench broke, sending players flying and a few sports writers, too.

I don’t remember exactly how I ended up on the locker room floor, with my leg a little cut up by the splinters from the busted bench. The players got up and continued to celebrate, but one turned around, offered a hand to help me get up and asked me if I was OK.

It was the Tar Heels’ speedy little freshman point guard who had opted for a basketball scholarship even though the track world was waiting with baited breath for what she could accomplish there. She was cute as a bug and had the Tar Heel logo painted on her face like she was a kid at a carnival. Her name: Marion Jones.

Stripped gold medals and a prison sentence later, that’s how I still remember Marion Jones. It’s why when her name first surfaced in connection with performance-enhancing drugs, I was genuinely upset. Surely, it was the fault of her good-for-nothing husbands, I originally believed. She was so sweet to help me up off the floor, was the thought, she wouldn’t cheat.

Of course, that’s as logical as your mother telling you when you were a kid that if you continued to make that face, your face would stay that way.

My face of disappointment didn’t stay that way. Sad to say it’s been replaced by a face of skepticism, that even a jaw-dropping charge like the one against Oscar Pistorius inspires not much more than a shrug from me. It's too bad. There are a lot of good people out there and some of them are athletes.

I want to believe, I really do.  I also wish there was a Santa Claus and that I owned an Invisibility Cloak.  But the hero worship for me, these days, is a fantasy that is out of my league.

Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones' illustrious track career ended with tears outside a federal courthouse and a prison sentence. (AP photo)