Kids Playing Sports! Everyone Look!

I read a lot like I drive: I’ll start at a nice, safe pace, paying attention to little details and retaining all the information being thrown at me*. Then, about ten minutes in, I’ll start going faster and faster, my brain will stop sucking up the info, my eyes will glaze over, and before you know it, there I am flying off the Ben Franklin Bridge with three missing wheels and at least four dead pedestrians in the backseat after flying through my windshield. (I’m a dangerous reader)

*-I also used to speed read before an exam in college much like I speed to work now when I’m late: I crank some Queens of the Stone Age, drink about 15 Dr. Peppers, blaze ahead with no regard for human life… and before you know it, there I am flying off the Ben Franklin Bridge with three missing wheels and at least four dead pedestrians in the backseat after flying through my windshield.

Point is, my reading patterns are sporadic; it can take me five minutes to bang out “Fountainhead” or five weeks to get through the foreword of “Everybody Poops.” (I’m assuming it has a foreword – otherwise, I feel really dumb about how my college thesis went)

So while I haven’t forgotten about this (we’ll get back to that sooner than you think), I’ve also been catching up on a backlog of magazines I’ve received over the last few months. You know, the intelligent stuff. This includes ESPN The Magazine, which I’ve been receiving intentionally or otherwise for about six years. For the most part, ESPN the Mag specializes in theme issues nowadays. The Money Issue. The Athletes Take Over Issue. The Check Out These Nekkid Pix Issue.

This past month, we got to the “Kids in Sports” issue.  Adorning its cover is Dylan Moses, a 6’1”, 215-pound running back from Baton Rouge, La. who’s been sitting on scholarship offers from LSU and seven other schools for a little over a year. He starts his day at 4:30 AM with 400 pushups, 800 sit-ups, 10 minutes of jump rope and a mile run.

Dylan is 15. He received his first offer in 8^th grade.

In 8^th grade, my biggest decision was whether to spend my Saturday afternoons playing basketball or video games, and I was pretty bad at picking between that. By my senior year of high school, I was barely able to pick what college I wanted to attend with my family asking me about it daily, let alone dozens of journalists and several rabid fan bases.

The article cites a handful of other examples of barely-teens being asked to make decisions most high school seniors dread – where to go to college, who to trust their career training with – because they happen to run like gazelles and throw footballs across different area codes.

This has not-so-secretly been happening for years. ESPN has made signing day, the day most top high school recruits choose which college campus they’ll be gracing their presence with, a nationally televised event. T.J. McConnell, former point guard for my alma mater Duquesne, signed with the Dukes two full years before graduating high school. He’s now at the University of Arizona, transferring after his sophomore year.

This really started with LeBron James, though. There were plenty of high school basketball players who chose to forgo college and enter the NBA Draft before the league began to require players be one year removed from high school before declaring. Some, like Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, became superstars, while others, like Kwame Brown and Darius Miles…didn’t.

But none of them received the attention LeBron did. Many writers wondered if he shouldn’t be allowed to declare for the draft after his junior year of high school. James agreed, petitioning the league to allow him into the 2002 draft despite having not finished high school.

Instead, LeBron was forced to wait until the 2003 draft, when he was selected first overall by his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers. Seven years later, LeBron left the Cavs for the Miami Heat in a nationally televised event known as “The Decision,” a 75-minute ESPN program exclusively devoted to announcing where LeBron would play the next year.

It’s amazing – simply amazing, I tell you – that a player who received nonstop media attention since before he could drive, who was referred to as “The King” before he was allowed to vote, who had his first slew of shoe deals and sponsorships before he could legally take his first sip of alcohol, managed to grow into an out-of-touch egomaniac.

LeBron has dealt with near constant international attention better than most physical prodigies. This is far from a scientific study, but is it at all possible that giving extremely young athletes an unbelievable amount of media attention could be bad? Could inflate their big heads, or cause them to collapse under pressure?

The easy response is to blame the media, blame ESPN, but there’s a reason they keep producing issues like this and covering signing day – we dig it. We marvel at it, and the media supply what we want. If we ever stopped watching, they'd stop broadcasting it. (This is why I also roll my eyes whenever people bitch about some of the garbage ESPN airs, or when a league has a lockout. Stop watching or buying the product if it pisses you off so much. Hit 'em in the wallet. Arrange an actual boycott)

Maybe I’m totally off base and I’m just becoming a grumpy old man. Maybe I’m just ashamed that 15-year-old Dylan could most certainly beat the stuffing out of me in any athletic endeavor.

I’m simply wondering if it’s worth marveling at a phenom for a few minutes with the knowledge that they’ll likely never live a normal adolescence. Particularly with YouTube and Twitter and the like, it’s more likely than ever that these actual “diaper dandies” will be overexposed to the point of stunting their maturity.

Ah, who are we kidding? Let’s watch this two-year-old shoot a basketball.