Where have all the cowboys gone?

After the recent installment of the NBA Finals in which the star was a man that never went to college and lets all face it, has gained quite a bit of popularity not through his athletic ability so much as his legal troubles. Kobe Bryant is not a team athlete. He is a great athlete nonetheless. I wanna know what happened to the respectability of professional athletes. When did they make the cross over from role models to drugged out hooligans with no regard for the law?

We live in an age where they are getting shot up in drivebys and turning up dead in roach motels and murdering men for ratting on them. Then we have people like Pacman Jones who are just trash and break any possible law or code of conduct they can. Jamaal Lewis is off dealing cocaine from a prison cell while we are all out having to pay by the C note to see him play. Charles Barkley made a good point when he spoke of how children should be looking up to teachers and policemen and not him. That's legit. I do not think anybody should look up to Charles Barkley at all, but the issue with this is would you still see it the same when you were taking a massive pay cut because those children did not look up to you? Its obvious that without those kids there is no way possible that they make the money that they do.

Now I also wanna approach the fact that I blame professional athletes for a lot of gang activity. Many of them come from hard neighborhoods. I recognize that that is a major strain upon a person. I will cite such individuals as Troy Vincent to prove that a bad neighborhood is no excuse for inappropriate behavior. I believe that the problem all starts back at dribbling. Dribbling took basketball from a team of 5 players going up against another team to a scorer with 4 defensemen going up against the same. The flash of the bling became the precedent. They were looked up to by all of these inner city children. Well then those scorers decided they were above the rest of the world because they were the most valued player. There was no pressure to act respectable. They just stuck with what they knew, being thugs. All those kids looking up to them set that as their standard.

There are exceptions to these behaviors. Deion Sanders came into the NFL and the MLB as a thug and grew into a great role model. He is no doubt flashy but he is definitely a well spoken stand up citizen. There are several more such as Peyton Manning or Tony Gonzalez.

The standard used to be that those punks would be ran off and the stand up players would be kept. These sports teams have decided it is more important to win games than stay true to their morals.