Monsters in Sport

"It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you're associating with black people." This is a quote from Donald Sterling, the ex-owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, after his girlfriend posted a picture of Magic Johnson and her on Instagram at a Clippers game. He went on to rant about how he doesn't care if she talks with him or even has sex with him, but says just not to post pictures with him or not to bring him to his games. This was not the only instance where Sterling was caught being racist. He reportedly said blacks smell because they don't clean and said Mexicans smoke and drink while sitting around all day. These are only the cases caught on tape or heard by somebody. Donald Sterling is a monster. That's how I look at him and I know many more people do the same. He was an owner of a basketball team dominated by African American players that were trying to win his franchise a championship. He betrayed them all. This is just one case of a redundant amount of ways figures in sport have done something so obscene that people would call them a monster for doing so. It's different in sports thought because a sports figure may be a leader or a hero to many fans and the fans may deny them doing any wrongdoing. Some examples of sport figures doing monstrous things include Tiger Woods cheating on his wife multiple times for years, Kobe Bryant (and many more athletes especially recently) raping a woman, all the domestic abuse by NFL players in particular the past few years, the whole Penn State incident, Aaron Hernandez (ex-tight end for New England Patriots) shooting and killing at least one or two people and many more examples that I'm not going to include because the list would take me a couple of days to finish. Some of the examples I included may seem more monstrous than the others, but to some degree they all have traits of a monster. One monster, the werewolf, in particular can relate to some of these athletes very well. In "A Lycanthropy Reader" by Charlotte Otten, many werewolves are discussed. It was told that werewolves couldn't help themselves from women and would rape them uncontrollably and would also murder them and other people. Kobe Bryant and more recently Derrick Rose and Patrick Kane have been accused of rape. This puts these athletes at the same level as a werewolf. They might not have killed the women they raped, but those girls will almost guarantee to be effected by it for the rest of their lives. They are mentally traumatized. Everyone has heard the saying that money corrupts or money creates people to do the unthinkable things they do. I tend to agree with the saying as athletes, owners and coaches are getting paid an absurd amount of money. However, in thinking about it more, I don't believe it's just the money that does this. Many athletes at the college level have been convicted of rape, domestic abuse, stealing, or even killing other people as well. College athletes don't get paid at all, besides if you count being able to go to school as getting paid. Sport figures are looked at as leaders and hero's by so many people. This has to put an extraordinary amount of stress and pressure on them to perform well day after day and this pressure has to get to them at some point, causing them to have a breakdown and possibly even be delusional. I'm not saying this gives athletes a right to do anything monstrous that they do, but maybe we, as the fans, should try not to put so much pressure on them to perform. This most likely does cause some of the things sport figures do, but money has to have a huge role. Money can cause a load of other things as well such as power and it can even have an impact on the relationships these sport figures get into. I think a contribution of all of these things can turn any sport figure into some sort of monster.