[djmcmath]

+1 Insightful to PoP. I would happily classify baseball and football the same way (except different). Back in the day, there were athletes that you could look up to and respect -- they were involved in their communities, and they weren't criminals who used their money and celebrity status to get off the hook for doing things that would land those of us in the "unwashed masses" in the Big House for the rest of our lives.

Of course, there's a deeper cause to the effect of the decline in sports characters over the years: we, as consumers, continue to provide funding to these people. We watch games on TV, we buy tickets to their games, we buy sports paraphenalia to "support the team." All of that is, in effect, voting with our dollars to say that it's more important to have players with skill than to have players with character.

IMHO, guys like Kobe won't go away until consumers start caring en masse about the decline of so-called professional sports.