In case you haven’t heard, Tim Tebow played on Saturday night against LSU. With a concussion.
In other news, Brett Favre still loves football after all these years, as he showed last Monday night against his former team, the Green Bay Packers.
Before you turn away from this column in disgust, allow me to explain myself. If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard some variation of these storylines repeatedly for the last two weeks or so. You’d have to be on another planet not to. The sports media covered the Tim Tebow “will he, or will he not play” story as if it were a national crisis, and the Brett Favre story was so overdone that by the time the game started I never wanted to hear the words “Brett Favre” and “Green Bay Packers” in the same sentence ever again.
All of this stems from a bigger picture: that the media is obsessed with figures like Tebow and Favre. Announcers can barely make it five minutes through a Florida game without raving about how great a kid Tebow is and how he does things that no one else in college football would ever do.
This was particularly true during last year’s national championship game. Thom Brennaman and Charles Davis spent 90 percent of the broadcast drooling over all of Tebow’s accomplishments and praising him for little things like helping opposing players to their feet (which, of course, no one had EVER seen before). It was painful to listen to and pretty much ruined the game for me.
The Monday Night Football crew was likewise smitten with Favre last week, and ABC could not get enough of Kobe Bryant last June during the NBA finals. I heard that Kobe Bryant was an “assassin” so many times that by the end, I wanted to assassinate myself.
To be fair, all three of these athletes are great at what they do, and a lot of what is said about them is true to some extent. In the end though, they are simply people who play a game that we enjoy watching — nothing more, nothing less. They should be treated as such by the media, not as gods who can do no wrong.
In reality, there are so many other people that the media could romanticize who actually deserve it. What if, instead of focusing on a privileged college kid coming back to play football with a concussion, the media spent some more time talking about a mentally exhausted Marine going back to Iraq for his fourth tour of duty? What if, instead of raving about a 40-year-old quarterback still playing for the love of the game, we gave some credit to a 70-year-old woman who still volunteers at a soup kitchen every week?
I don’t know any of these people, but I’d sure like to. I would rather listen to an entire day of coverage about the world’s real heroes than another five minutes about Brett Favre. As sports fans, we tend to get too wrapped up in our own little bubbles and obsess over people who really aren’t that special, aside from their obvious athletic gifts.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone else. I could have easily decided not to buy into the hype and skip last Monday’s Vikings-Packers game, but I didn’t. I didn’t have to listen to dozens of reports about Tim Tebow’s health status in the days before Saturday’s Florida-LSU game, but I did. The mute button was calling my name as announcers continued to praise Kobe Bryant last spring, but it remained untouched.
Sports fans eat these stories up, and the media knows it. Still, enough is enough. It is ridiculous that these athletes garner so much attention for playing a game while the world’s true superstars remain drastically overlooked.
I should add here that Tim Tebow actually does do a lot of great charity work outside of football and deserves to be commended for that. Still, many people do a lot more than Tebow does for the community and don’t get half as much attention as he does.
Here’s my proposal: For one day, we drop all of the Favre/Tebow/insert over-hyped-player-here talk and focus on people who make real sacrifices to make the world a better place.
Charles Barkley once said that he didn’t think athletes should be role models. It was a controversial statement, and he took a lot of flak for it. Though I do think athletes have a responsibility as role models to some extent, Sir Charles has a point. There are plenty of people who provide better examples of how to act than athletes. Someone just needs to tell that to the media.
[email protected]