I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It by Charles Barkley & Michael Wilbon

Author:Charles Barkley & Michael Wilbon [Barkley, Charles & Wilbon, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Basketball, Memoirs, Biographies, cookie429, Ethnic & National, Nonfiction, Extratorrents, Kat, African-American & Black, Professional, Sports & Outdoors
ISBN: 037550883X
Amazon: B000FC1IQS
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-10-02T00:00:00+00:00

“I Am Not a

Role Model”

Nike didn’t come to me with the idea to do a commercial about role models—I went to Nike with that idea. I talked to my friend the Nike executive Howard White about it, called him after thinking about it for a while, and said, “Howard, people have this role model thing completely screwed up. Is a role model just a celebrity that parents turn their kids over to? Damn, can’t we do better than that? Is the best we can do for kids pointing them to celebrities they have no real chance of ever knowing?” I just thought we as a society need to do better in that area. So I asked, and Nike said, cool. And I thought it turned out great.

Remember, the main theme was “I am not a role model.”

And for that, I got ripped. I’d been criticized before, of course, for having my own take on social issues. But the first time I got hit really hard was for taking that stance. There were some columnists who defended me, but mostly I got killed. I’m okay with it, though, because nobody in all this time has been able to convince me that it’s wrong to tell kids to listen to their parents and not a basketball player they’ve never met. How crazy is it to get slammed for saying, “Listen to your parents, listen to your teachers, listen to the responsible adults in your neighborhood or people who have done something with their lives.” I know it’s hard to get an entire message across in less than a minute. But I still believe the message was clear enough that I thought kids need to be able to look up to folks right there around them who can teach them hard work and right from wrong.

Celebrities can’t teach ’em that from television. People are crazy. Or maybe they’re just lazy, they don’t want to do the hard work, and it’s easier to just turn their kids over to somebody ’cause he’s famous. How stupid is that? How can you make somebody your role model when you don’t know the person? All they’ve got most of the time is a perception of somebody off in the distance that might be totally distorted . . . or it could be the person is just misunderstood. One thing I hate is that all the general public knows about an athlete or a celebrity is what they know from the media, which is often inaccurate or incomplete. I know cases where a guy is labeled a bad guy and he’s really a good guy, maybe worthy of being a role model for kids he’s close to. And I know of way too many instances where the guy comes off as a good guy in the media and he’s not a good guy at all. And that’s a huge problem. Either way, how could that person be a legitimate role model for a kid? Because he’s famous? Because

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