Look to athletes for talent, not courage

Dan Rather closed the CBS Evening News for a brief period in 1986 with a bizarre one-word epigram: "courage."\nPeople had no idea what he meant. Some people thought he was condescending. Others thought he was crazy.\nI thought back to that when I was watching the Arete Awards for Courage in Sports on CBS this past weekend. The Arete Awards aired right after the Colts' most recent debacle. What a contrast they probably provided to those who did not change the channel.\nIn case you missed it, the Colts got booed while losing at home to Tennessee Sunday. The Colts are in first place, yet it struck me as typical the fans would react that way. Generally speaking, the sports columnists, sports radio shows and sports fans have been leaning this way for awhile now, especially in pro sports and even when things had been going relatively well.\nAthletes don't lack talent. They lack heart. They lack guts, and of course, they lack whatever you feel is a clever, non-vulgar euphemism for the male genitalia. My favorite is "acorns in the midsection." In other words, it's a courage thing.\nWhat is odd is that sports are about frivolity and fun. The ritualistic ceremony that is a bunch of guys sitting around a TV set watching a game, fight, race or match is all about finding something diversionary.\nSo why do we hold athletes to a standard of courage? In sports, the word gets thrown out there all too casually.\nThis brings us to the Arete Awards. After watching this show, I will be extremely careful the next time I describe an athlete as courageous. The show profiled Mallory Code, the 18-year-old golfer battling the terribly cruel double whammy of cystic fibrosis and diabetes, but has emerged as one of our top junior golfers. Part of San Jose State football player Neil Parry's leg was amputated after a severe compound fracture suffered on-field, yet he has returned to play. Snowboarder Chris Klug won an Olympic bronze medal less than two years after a liver transplant.\nContrary to what you might think, these athletes don't prove the point that today's supposedly coddled, whiny athletes aren't courageous. What it proves is that you have to be careful before determining standards for courageousness.\nYou or I may never have had a chance to display our courageousness, but I don't think you would wish cystic fibrosis, diabetes, a severed limb or liver transplant surgery on yourself or anybody else either. Plus, how many athletes or potential athletes has cystic fibrosis or some other fatal disease struck down before we ever had the chance to hear from them? \nAnother Arete Awards winner was Pat Tillman, a safety for the Arizona Cardinals who quit football and a $1.2 million salary and instead enlisted with the Army Rangers for $18,000 per year. According to those who know him, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 affected Tillman greatly. \nTillman's story adds a whole new layer to argument. Is it courageous to fight for one's country if he is contributing to further worldwide carnage? Is it courageous when we allow ourselves to conform to our government's wishes? Or is patriotism the highest calling for a courageous person? Is giving away salary enough to define courage?\nMarcus Mann, a forward from Mississippi Valley State, quit a potential NBA career in 1996 to work at a youth correctional facility for 13- to 20-year-olds. Compared to Tillman, this story received no publicity. Mann's work might be more thankless than Tillman's. After all, soldiers get ticker tape parades, and prison counselors often get a lot of heartache.\nThe biggest problem in sports today is that we expect too much from athletes. I would hope that we only demand that athletes entertain. While athletes may be role models even if they do not want to be, we should not expect them to be courageous beyond standards we would put on ourselves. That is not to say that sports are the coward's way out either. To devote oneself purely and completely to a sport in order to compete at the professional level is courageous enough. For the record, taking a paternity test on "The Maury Povich Show" is not courageous.\nIf your favorite team loses, though, it's not gutlessness. They stink.