Which of today’s athletes are worth admiring?

Five decades ago, impressionable American boys were encouraged both openly and covertly to emulate the nation’s greatest athletes. But looking back, it seems they were duped into idolizing caricatures rather than actual human beings.

Arthur Ashe was born in 1943 and grew up in a single-parent household; his mother died when he was 6 years old and his brother Johnnie was an infant. While Ashe initially gained renown as an athlete who overcame poverty and prejudice, the impact he made on America and the world was far greater than that of a mere world-class athlete, albeit one who won three Grand Slam tennis titles. The prowess he first exhibited on the segregated courts of his hometown in Richmond, Va. earned him a college scholarship; he also served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era.

Though hardly radical or extroverted, Ashe actively advocated for civil rights, both in his home country and overseas. He visited South Africa during the period when that nation was making the difficult transition from apartheid to racial integration. He was voluntarily arrested for taking part in a protest outside the South African embassy in Washington in 1985, and again was taken into custody in 1992 near the White House for participating in a peaceful demonstration on behalf of Haitian immigrants. A loyal husband and doting father to his daughter, Camera, Ashe also became a tireless advocate for AIDS education, and somehow found time to write a three-volume book chronicling the history of African-American athletes, a project that took him nearly six years to complete.

Ashe was a freshman at UCLA in 1963 when athletes like Mickey Mantle, Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain and Bobby Hull were being lionized for their sports-related achievements by a reverential press corps that did its utmost to create and then maintain squeaky-clean images for America’s athletic elite. Who knew if such gods gambled, tippled, philandered, or physically abused multiple spouses? News-papermen in those quaint times were as interested in sanitizing the auras surrounding America’s popular athletes as today’s media seems concerned with sullying them.

There were no electronic devices capable of spewing out sports-related information 24 hours per day, seven days a week during the JFK administration, nor were there ubiquitous TV and radio talking heads sharing their shrill opinions with a worldwide audience consisting primarily of credulous, gullible individuals permanently addicted to athletics by a multi-billion-dollar-per-year professional sports industry for which no amount of profit is ever enough.

Arthur Ashe’s autobiography, “Days of Grace,” reads like he spoke: Thoughtfully, logically and eloquently. What makes this particular memoir even more remarkable is that it was being written by someone who knew his earthly time was running out; a blood transfusion he had gotten during heart surgery performed nearly a decade earlier was tainted with HIV. Ashe had developed full-blown AIDS by the time he began putting his autobiography together in June of 1992. He died 20 years ago this week.

Today, only the most willfully naive amongst us idolize professional athletes. Recently, an internationally renowned cyclist who had previously denied all allegations of impropriety with a strident combination of anger, self-righteousness and litigiousness confessed to having cheated to win seven Tours de France. No one was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame because of the sport’s ongoing drug issues. A top college football star was humiliated because the “girlfriend” with whom he maintained an intense, long-distance relationship turned out to be imaginary. A disgruntled professional golfer publicly and indignantly expressed his unhappiness over having to pay a higher rate of taxes on his estimated annual earnings of $48 million. Later that week, one of his friends, a serial adulterer who generated an estimated $80 million last year through endorsements and licensing fees, won a tournament that earned him another $1.1 million.

A parade of egotistical, semi-literate behemoths spent the week leading up to the Super Bowl reminding us of their greatness while simultaneously denying their use of any banned substances, including the one that Major League Baseball’s highest-paid player, a pathological prevaricator and confessed drug cheat, stands accused of utilizing. A 25-year-old snowmobiler suffered fatal injuries while competing in a made-for-TV “athletic competition” that was invented for the sole purpose of generating programming and even more profits for a 24-hour sports cable network. And all of that occurred during just the first month of the current calendar year! Phew!

Arthur Ashe’s contributions to the planet that had nothing to do with sports far exceeded his impressive athletic achievements.

It’s worth considering which of today’s wealthy, entitled athletic elite will ultimately impact society in his or her lifetime like Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Pat Tillman, Billie Jean King, Muhammad Ali and Jesse Owens did in theirs. More tellingly, which, if any, of them are truly interested in doing so?

— Andy Young is a high school English teacher in York County. He never got to meet any of his childhood sports idols personally, which, in retrospect, he is not unhappy about.