Louisville National Championship: Should We Really Celebrate Rick Pitino?
This post was contributed to FanSided.com by Gregory Esposito. For more of his original content, visit Oddservation.com.
Call it the “year of the comeback.”
Or maybe we should just call it the year of the false American idol. I’m not talking about the William Hung variety either.
In a matter of four months the collective we as sports fans have vaunted names like Ray Lewis and Tiger Woods into the stratosphere once again. In the process we completely ignored their checkered pasts — accused of being involved in a murder for the previous and philandering to a level that would make Don Draper blush for the latter — in favor of praising them for their current successes.
Lewis rode off into the sunset with a Super Bowl championship and a two-week media love fest that was sappier than a maple tree. At the same time Tiger regained his stroke, the No. 1 world ranking and his klout — both on and off social media — with advertisers and fans alike.
Don’t let anyone fool you. America’s pastime isn’t baseball or even football. No, redemption is America’s favorite pastime and both of these cases were just a few of the latest examples of it.
Woods and NIKE knew it. That’s why they released an ad proclaiming “winning takes care of everything” when he reclaimed the top spot in golf. Monday night proved their theory right once again.
With the Louisville Cardinals victory in the national title game over Michigan, the headlines and the spotlight have now shifted to Rick Pitino. The same Rick Pitino who just four years earlier was caught in a sex scandal involving an Italian restaurant, a pregnancy, extortion and more.
He’s another comeback story everyone is infatuated with the way a teenage boy is infatuated with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. In the same week Pitino became the first coach in NCAA basketball history to win national titles with two different schools, he was also told he’ll be inducted into Basketball Hall of Fame and his son was named head coach at Minnesota. It all makes for a great sound bite, a touching television package or a unique headline. It’s the stuff some television producers salivate over like a dog waiting for a treat. They are the stories that win Emmys and spark debate.
The question is, should these stories evoke these emotions?
Should we really be celebrating these flawed human beings because of their success on the playing surface? Is it right to forgive and forget? Does praising them show the flaws in us as sports fans as much as it hides the flaws in their characters?
The answer is a complex one. Celebrating athletic achievement is what being a sports fan is all about. As we do it though, we need to remember that one shining moment doesn’t outweigh everything else an athlete or a coach does in and out of their sport. If we let it, we’re ignoring reality in favor of a fun comeback story.
Winning takes care of a lot, but it can never change the past.