A lot of my friends, who know I am a big Tiger Woods fan, gave me a lot of grief about Tiger being arrested for being under the influence. One must remember that under the influence does not necessarily mean alcohol – it can be drugs or prescription drugs in the form of medicine. I try to remind them that most sport stars generally tend to have quite a few problems largely because they often come from underprivileged backgrounds and then suddenly have huge amounts of money hoisted onto them and have not necessarily always being brought up the right way. I am not talking about Tiger Woods at all in this instance, but whatever sport you are looking at – whether it is rugby, cricket, etc – there have always been scandals, people who have taken bribes, people who have alcohol problems or abused women, etc.
In fact, it seems that when one looks at that category as a business, in other words, to say some people do sport as a business, they seem to have a far higher percentage of bad behaviour amongst their stars than in the ordinary business world.

I think most people are flawed in some way or other – we are not perfect. To think that people, simply because they can hit a ball beautifully with a gold club, or curve a soccer ball with their feet, now suddenly have class, manners and know how to behave is a mistake. At the moment, for example in golf, the number one player in the world has previously been suspended for using cocaine and allegedly for involvement with other players’ wives. Soccer players seem to avoid that most of the time, because in many cases it is just run of the mill news to hear of some exposé of yet another soccer star with prostitutes or having affairs and those of us who follow cricket in South Africa will never forget the cases involving Hansie Cronje and the bribes, etc.

I guess, by the same token, when I listen to pop music, I don’t consider pop stars poets. Some of them have catchy lyrics, sometimes written by themselves and sometimes not, but the vast majority of them don’t write poetry and should not be confused with poets and the vast majority of sport stars should not be confused with role models.

If you are talking about role models, we are talking about people like Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Margaret Thatcher and in my mother’s case, Mother
Theresa, although there have been a lot of revelations about her in recent years. I
guess the point I am making is that one should not confuse one’s admiration for the
way somebody either sings or plays sport and to allow you to then, because they do
something like that so well, think that that person is a role model and is classy and
sensible in every way. In some cases they might be, in other cases, just like
everybody else, they are flawed human beings and when they are held up to more
media exposure than the rest of us, then it all comes crumbling down.