Good at sport doesn’t mean good at life

Can a leopard change its spots? Or, more to the point, if you dress a leopard in a unicorn onesie, is it still a leopard? Is it now safe to send your child into a cage with said unicorn onesiewearing leopard? The answers, obviously, are yes and no.the leopard in this case is a bad person who plays professional sport. The onesie is public relations and media training. At some point, the facade will be broken, the leopard will show itself in its proper form and we will all be appalled by its actions as it devours the helpless child.

Morale of the story, don’t stick your kid in a cage with a onesie-wearing leopard. Really, what I’m saying is, don’t hold professional sportspeople up as role models for your kids.

Your kid might aspire to be an All Black, to do as they do on the field, but they are not aspiring to have all of the personal issues which some of them have. What you see on TV is not a proper illustration of how that person is in real life. Most of them are genuinely nice, but plenty of terrible people have played for the All Blacks throughout the years. Others simply have problems which they do their best to hide from everyone, coaches and management included.

Not all rugby players are good people. Just as not all brain surgeons are good people. Not all pilots are good people. Not all cleaners are good people. Not all supermarket shelf-fillers are good people. Not all journalists are good people – this one I know for sure.

But most of the people in these lines of work – or any line of work – are.

But, you say, rugby players make their living in the public eye, so they have to at least appear to be good people. Why? I’m going to bring former NBA superstar Charles Barkley in at this point as I’m already tired of explaining this.

‘‘I am not a role model. I am not paid to be a role model. I am paid to wreak havoc on a basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball, doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.’’

Admittedly, that was from a Nike ad. But the message was clear: don’t let sportspeople show your kids the way. Do it yourself.

Barkley’s sentiment is even more pertinent to rugby. On the one hand, we ask our All Blacks to show aggression on defence, maintain high levels of intensity and stress for 80 minutes, show a bit of mongrel at the breakdown. But the mongrel, intensity and aggression stops straight after you leave the field.

Don’t drink. Don’t shag random people. Don’t get into fights. Release your inner demons on the field, but control them off it.

Most can manage that level of stress. Others can’t. But we expect all to be perfect.

Better people make better All Blacks. That sounds aspirational to me. It’s not ‘the best people make the best All Blacks’. If that were true, we would have very few people to hold up as true greats of the game.