Another Hard Lesson on Perils of Worship

Mock trials, tribulations and how best to explain it to the kids ....

Earl Warren said: “I always turn to the sports pages first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”

Update: The former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice, who died in 1974, obviously hasn’t picked up a sports page lately and, to be certain, his 20-word quotation is not engraved on a plaque anywhere in my house.

The judge would be shocked to know the press pendulum has swung so dramatically that a parent like me, with three Laker-loving boys, would come to a place where hiding the sports page was in the family’s best interest.

Yet, that’s the place I’ve come to.

When the Kobe Bryant news broke over the Fourth of July weekend, my first instinct was to deny and obfuscate.

Arrested but not charged, right?

I all but granted the kids around-the-clock video-game privileges and made sure dad, the information minister, got the morning paper first to sanitize the sports section, suddenly rated PG-13.

This duck-and-cover game went on for days.

Low points?

There was the time I leaped across the couch and snatched the television remote to prevent one son from watching a show that might thoroughly crush and demoralize him, you know, ESPN’s “SportsCenter.”

At a restaurant, I purposely jacked up the volume of my voice to drown out a conversation a couple at the next table were having about the Bryant situation.

Hero worship has always been risky business, dating back to, “Say it ain’t so, Joe,” yet we continue to invest capital in sports stars and live with the consequences.

You would think that a sportswriter would know better than to let his kids get famously attached to famous athletes knowing what the sportswriter knows; that Johnny Sports Star has a public and a private face and that the two should almost never be confused.

I have covered plenty of guys who acted like Salvation Army volunteers when the television cameras flashed on but would just as soon run you over in the parking lot.

You think you know these stars, but usually you only know what they and their agents want you to know.

And although Bryant may be proven innocent of the sexual assault charge, he already has disappointed and betrayed many with his admission of adultery -- not a commandment easily explained to a fifth-grader.

I am not alone here.

Hero worship is as old as the spitball. The relationship can be luck-of-the-draw forged; a product of happenstance, geography, time and place, and serendipity.

Very smart people get swept away.

Sportscaster Bob Costas grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle and did not let go of the reins even after knowing that the Mick’s life fell far short of choirboy.

Costas, who still keeps Mantle’s baseball card in his wallet, spoke eloquently at the icon’s funeral.

“In the last year, Mickey Mantle, always so hard on himself, finally came to accept and appreciate the distinction between a role model and a hero,” Costas eulogized. “The first he was often not, the second he will always be.”

These attachments can be irrational, complicated, wonderful, painful and difficult to untangle.

We were reminded of that again this weekend with the mock trial of Pete Rose on ESPN, which stood oddly juxtaposed against the Bryant case.

Rose was represented in this cable production by attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the man who won a murder acquittal for another fallen idol, football star O.J. Simpson.

Cochran argued that Rose, whatever his transgressions against baseball, deserved to be eligible for baseball’s Hall of Fame. “Enough is enough,” Cochran argued.

A mock jury of Rose peers agreed.

Stars have no idea how lucky they are to have fans like us.

Admirers of Rose and Simpson and Magic Johnson and Mantle all have had to face disturbing truths about their heroes, yet there is a point of no return with idolatry.

As a kid, you hitch your star to their star and it’s sort of like a marriage, for better or worse.

Count yourself fortunate if your hero makes it through unscathed.

Maybe I thought my kids would get as lucky as I did with my childhood hero, Nolan Ryan, who came to my unexpected attention in 1972 when he was traded from the New York Mets to my hometown California Angels.

To my relief, and to my knowledge, Ryan never has been asked to pose sideways for a police photographer.

I remember shaking before and during a 1985 interview I had with Ryan at Dodger Stadium, terrified he would wreck the image I had carried of him since I was 12.

He did not disappoint. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t wake up time to time from a nightmare in which my guy leads the evening news: Ryan, wearing high heels and dress, robs liquor store.

Maybe that was my mistake with Bryant. Maybe I too easily handed him and his clean-cut persona over to my kids, happy that they didn’t gravitate toward Dennis Rodman or Mike Tyson.

You can’t play games forever, though, so Friday night, I called my boys into the living room and told them the truth: that Bryant had been charged with a bad crime against a woman but that didn’t mean he was guilty.

I told them that it was OK to have sports heroes but that they needed to understand that heroes bleed, make mistakes and, in some cases, go to jail.

The conversation was long overdue, but you know how that goes.

The message, I suppose, as always, in the end, is “choose your sports heroes carefully.”

Even then, you never know.