Our heroes?

Something has been bothering me the last couple of days. In fact it has kind of made me a little bit sick to my stomach. No, its not the Garnett trade to Boston which further dents the chances my lowly Bucks have of making an NBA final. Whats that?...you say they had no chance even before that trade? Hmmm...probably right.

No, whats making me a little sick is something thats becoming somewhat of a phenomenon in the sports world. The trendy thing it seems is for an athlete to be tragically killed and for a sudden rush of sympathy to pour in from all over the world. People write glowing reports about how great a guy the deceased was. How he care for his teammates, family and gosh darnit even the fans. How he will be truly missed and on and on it goes. The sports star is put on a pedestal for us to look up to even in death. Sports Illustrated writes a little obituary that immortalizes the player. The tv sports networks show a little tribute montage and then do that thing where they put up the picture of the player, play the sad music and slowly fade the screen to black. I guess this is all fine and until recently I would sit there and feel a certain amount of sadness for the sports worlds loss. But something has changed.

If you have been following sports lately, you know that the examples are endless. The new catching point however seems to be that once the tributes and life end credits have rolled on these sports stars...we then find out the ugly truth. When St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Josh Hancock died in a late night car crash in April, he got the posthumous treatment associated with a professional athlete. All the tributes, the SI story and the memorial patch worn on his teammates jerseys. It wasn't until a while later that it was revealed that at the time of the accident Hancock was highly intoxicated (twice the Missouri state limit), not wearing a seatbelt, talking on his cell phone, and later a smoking pipe and marijuana were found in his truck. And he crashed into a parked tow truck on the side of the highway! Oops. But no, its not oops. Its stupidity plain and simple. He killed himself but could have killed others. Further compounding this situation was the fact that his family then had the nerve to sue the bar he had just left, the tow truck driver parked on the side of the road, the towing company, and the driver who had needed towing assistance. What?! Those cases were tossed out but it makes me wonder if athletes don't have to worry about trifling things such as accountability. Its sickening.

The Hancock case is not the only one of its kind in the past 3 months. We were duped into feeling sad again this past month when former pitcher Rod Beck passed away. And the tributes rolled in. And then some time passed and we find that Beck had a whackload of cocaine in his house the day he died. That likely contributed to his death. Doh! I won't even start on the WWE wrestler Chris Benoit's story. I think you all know how that one goes.

I'm just saying that it sucks to feel sympathy at someones death only to find that maybe they did not live the most noble of lives or die the most poignant of deaths. Maybe its just me, but in a sports world that has to grit its teeth and endure the Barry Bonds' and Tour de Frances' of this world it might be nice to hear a genuine story of a pro athlete with no dark underside. Wouldn't that be nice? So I guess when your sports hero dies the new fad might be to hold your sympathy until a month or two later just to make sure it was okay to miss them. Now thats really sad. God forbid that word comes out next week that late NFL coach Bill Walsh spent his final months pushing drugs or pimping. I guess I'll just shake my head...but unfortunately not in surprise.