Since this is a post about sports, basketball in particular, I am happy to throw out a few statistics (no, there are no batting averages in basketball!).
There are 30 NBA teams, such as the San Antonio Spurs, Denver Nuggets or the Charlotte Hornets. Each team has only 12 men on their active roster and they 
can carry at least one or more inactive players. NBA players may be easy to spot in a crowd, but they are hard to find. In fact, in your particular state, there are only one or two active NBA players per 1 million people!
I went online and found writer Andrew Powell-Morse’s “The Unofficial 2013 NBA Player Census.” He showed that 38 percent of NBA players range in age from 22 to 25. The average pay range for these players in 2013 was between $3.7 million and $5.5 million.
As that old song goes: Nice work if you can get it…”
So of the less than 400 men who can claim to be active NBA players, all are millionaires and all are pretty darn lucky. The mountain each man climbs is very steep and the chances of being the next LeBron James or P.J. Hairston are infinitesimally small. Who was that second name you ask?
P.J. Hairston, NBA Rookie
In his defense, I will say that P.J. Hairston, rookie for the Charlotte Hornets is only 21 years old. He is 6-foot-6 and weighs in at 230 pounds.
To make the story short, Hairston found himself in an idiotic basketball pick-up game at the YMCA in Durham against a bunch of teenagers. The story goes that Hairston was angry because his pick-up team was being beaten by another pick-up team. Hairston got so mad, he got into a fight with a 17 year old high school kid who is 6-foot-5 and weighs maybe 190 pounds. He punched the kid in the head and neck now he is being charged with assault.
I will skip the brief apology that Hairston issued as a member of the Charlotte Hornets and I will skip the requisite quote that Hairston put out on Twitter that told his fans to not believe everything they hear. Want to know why? Because I don’t care.
I care about P.J. Hairston as a person, but I truly don’t need his apologies or his Twitter-fed bravado. I don’t even care that he was playing with high school kids instead of with other pro’s at a training facility.
He embarrassed the Charlotte Hornets team, his coaches, all of the people who struggled to help him climb that mountain, the fans at North Carolina where he had been their leading scorer and most of all, he embarrassed himself.
What happened to P.J. Hairston is what happens to many rookies. He thought he was above consequences. He forgot he was no longer in high school or college. He thought he could carry the same attitudes into the professional ranks that served him when he was younger – he can’t.
Why Peer Lectures Won’t Work
Every year, rookies and veterans alike get treated to “ethics seminars” by men and women who were once in the professional ranks – and who screwed up themselves. They stand up there and give their little talks and everyone goes away happy. Or it’s someone from the league office who has learned every life lesson from a human resources lecture that was re-purposed by someone in the league office.
The scenario doesn’t work. Each year, a certain percentage of P.J. Hairston’s will make huge ethical blunders because when their peers or league officials stood up on the stage, they zoned out.
Let me put it another way: if my car is broken and you come along and say, “Hey, my car was once broken too,” it still doesn’t get my car running.
What neither peers nor league trainers can offer is perspective. A 21 year old NBA or NFL or MLB player doesn’t necessarily relate to a 30 year-old ex-player. In fact, and I know this, the designated league lecturer or the ex-player, can only offer, “Don’t do this or you’ll suffer consequences.”
I, unfortunately, once paid a huge price for my mistakes when I thought I was above the consequences. Since those days I have devoted my life to helping others in a real-way and often without fancy bells, whistles and human resources jargon.
Maybe I have a one-foot vertical leap. If I took 100 shots at a basket maybe two would find their way to the rim, and I don’t know a “pick and roll” from an egg-roll. However, I know what it’s like to lose everything; I know what the inside of a jail cell looks like; I know what happens when a person falls off the mountain; P.J. Hairston doesn’t. That’s why I am so passionate about sports ethics.
He needs a mentor, not a rubber stamp.
You hit the watermelon on the head every time! Gallagher