Carmen Cruz 2018-5055

Should athletes be held to high moral standards?

Whether by choice or not, people in certain professions are held to a higher standard than others.
Doctors and surgeons are held to a higher standard than a house painter, lawyers and politicians
face greater scrutiny than landscapers and professional athletes are put under the microscope
more than teachers. It should also make people wonder if it's appropriate that professional
athletes are held to a higher standard than people in other careers.

As any other person who has found fame in this world, they have a moral obligation to live a
clean life and to serve as a role model to others.

There is 153 professional sports teams in America and over 1,000 college institutions participate
in sports. Which really is a lot of people that should be held to a higher standard because athletes
typically are people who won the genetic lottery. Their prize was the ability to hit a baseball,
shoot a basketball, or throw a football better than anyone else. For this, an athlete at the highest
level of his or her field will receive a great financial reward. However, money can't buy you
morals, intelligence, self-awareness or anything that would make a professional athlete better at
handling the rigors of being a role model than a civil engineer or a body man.

On a professional level, they are exposed to the media practically 24/7, which means every
wrong move they make will likely be exposed and are also responsible for promoting different
products. Millions of kids look up to professional athletes so when their role models do
something wrong and get off easy, and at the end of the day, it hurts the athletes reputation as
much as it hinders his fan’s decision making.

What is lost in the equation is that these people are human beings, not super men or women.
Athletes are just as flawed as any person in society and the sooner we realize that the better. Still,
when an athlete agrees to a professional contract, they are agreeing to put themselves in the
public eye. They are also, to a greater degree than most of society, dependent on the public for
their revenue. Without the public, there are no endorsement deals or million dollar contracts. An
example of how society affects your work field can be when Kobe Bryant lost various
endorsement deals since he was brought up on sexual assault charges.
Athletes need to live their lives above board or accept the consequences when they don't.
However, at the end athletes should definitely be held to higher standards because everything out
of line they might do will hurt their reputation, their school or team’s reputation, and make all
the people around them think they have no morals or rules to follow just because they play a
sport. Athletes are some of the most watched people in the world and even the most popular
around school. When an athlete understands their role, they should already know they’re going to
have to act different.