With all of the more serious examples of bad behaviour by professional athletes showing up in the news these days, this one hardly seems worth mentioning: an NBA 'star' who's admitted to padding his Halo 3 stats by setting up fake games with a friend and taking turns throwing games to one another (think of Boneman and me, driving each other's Resistance: Fall of Man ranks up, by one of us standing in a game so that the other could collect points killing us).
It's hardly worth mentioning except in what it says about the fool's character. He apparently thinks his statistics in a video game are important enough to spend time artificially boosting them, but then - when called on it - claims that there's nothing wrong with doing it because it's not 'hurting' anyone. That kind of rationalization makes you wonder how hard it would be to get him to tank in an NBA game - perhaps one in which he's bet against his own team - since after all, who would that really hurt? Or how often he cheats on his girlfriend or wife, because what she doesn't know won't hurt her? Or how much undeclared income he makes off his star status, as it certainly couldn't harm anyone if he got paid in cash and didn't report it? Rationalization is always so handy whenever someone wants to convince themselves that they're not doing anything wrong, when in fact they know that they actually are.
Not that we were ever likely to mistake many in the current crop of pro athletes for role models, anyway. But this seems like a ridiculously pathetic example of just how lacking in integrity some of them really are.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment