Forced Perspective

Feel free to try this at home or at your place of work: Go into a room with three or four other adults and make the following observation - "Lance Armstrong sure is one heck of an athlete." Then start the clock. See how long it takes before someone points out that Lance Armstrong left his wife and is hanging around with that Sheryl Crow.
Six time winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, founding director of the Livestrong Foundation inspiring and empowering people living with cancer, and philanderer. Having put together one of the most impressive teams and one of sports greatest strings of victories, one must certainly be captivated by Lothario Armstrong's romantic escapades. What a letch.
I shouldn't be surprised. Around the time that John Elway was finally reaching the top of his particular Everest, winning back to back Super Bowls after setting countless other NFL records on his way, he had the bad taste to end his marriage. Oh, how the mighty are fallen. Those Lombardi trophies are looking just a little skanky all of a sudden.
That fifty percent divorce rate will knock just about anybody out of the saddle - even our heroes, it seems. I remember having a nasty twinge when I heard about Lance divorcing - and John - and then I remembered that great pontificator Charles Barkley, who once suggested that he (and perhaps all athletes) shouldn't be role models. This is how he described the new shoes that Nike wanted him to endorse: "These are my new shoes. They're good shoes. They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me. They'll only make you have shoes like me. That's it."
I guess that's kind of how I feel about the personal lives of athletes and other celebrities. Watching them and cheering them on in the field of their endeavor isn't condoning their accomplishments as husbands, wives, or fathers. We can still sit slack-jawed at the super-human feats that these very human individuals achieve. Well, except that pinhead Tom Cruise...