I can’t believe kids these days.
A recent Sports Illustrated article featured 18-year-old Brandon Hancock, who finished high school in December to enroll early at USC. Hancock weighs 242 pounds, has a body fat percentage of about 5, and runs the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds. His bench press is the fourth best on the USC football team and he is treated like a deity around his alma mater, Clovis West High.
He is a football machine when most high school seniors think only about the next movie to watch and when they have to go work at the local burger joint.
As a 22-year-old student, one of the many to live their sporting dreams vicariously through others, I am stunned by the number of professional athletes younger than I am.
Eighteen-year-old Ty Tryon, and Kobe Bryant and Rafael Furcal — who are both 22 (although there has been controversy surrounding Furcal’s actual age) — make the average college student look like a failure.
Whatever happened to being well-rounded?
When I was growing up alongside thousands of other New England-area children, we all played baseball, football, hockey, basketball and soccer — making sure to play whiffleball, skip rocks and climb trees. How many trees has Bryant climbed in his life?
We threw snowballs. We jumped off cliffs. We got dirty. I would be shocked to hear that Tryon, an Orlando native who became a pro golfer at 17, has ever really gotten dirty.
Tryon, who was born June 2, 1984, has yet to miss a cut on the PGA Tour, has acted in commercials with golf legend Arnold Palmer, received congratulatory messages from President Bush and has his own official Web site at www.tytryon.com.
What did you do by the time you were 18? (That question is posed to everyone except the one 18-year-old student who will graduate from the University next week).
Kids are too specialized. Tryon’s father had his son swinging a club when he was six months old. Hancock’s teammates at USC have dubbed him “Super Swole,” because his overly inflated arms and the hours spent in the gym can’t allow him much time for other pursuits.
As much as I like to see new talent come into professional leagues, my heart will always lie with the old veterans. I’ll listen to and appreciate stories about Tryon, Furcal, Bryant, Tiger Woods, Darius Miles and now Hancock. But my favorites are guys like Carlos Baerga, who has been in professional baseball for 17 years; NBA legend John Stockton and Fred Couples, who joined the PGA Tour three years before Tyron was born. They grew up in a time when they weren’t force-fed only one sport.
In parting, a word to the young guns:
Kobe, you may be able to throw down some two-handed dunk on my head, and Ty, you may be able to shoot more than a dozen shots better than me on the golf course, but watch out, guys — I climb trees and throw snowballs with the best of them.
E-mail sports reporter Chris Cabot
at [email protected].