David Quinn: Family man Rooney the pitch-perfect role model
Friday March 05 2010
There was a time when I had Wayne Rooney marked down as a wretch and a thug. No more. Rooney, unlike a lot of his peers, has cottoned on to the fact that when you are a high-profile footballer you are also a role model, and you need to act like one.
Rooney was reacting the other day to the various scandals embroiling the England team, and particularly John Terry.
Rooney said: "It's difficult as a footballer because you know people look up to you. You are a role model whether you like it or not. You need to try and be aware of that, try and do your best on the pitch, and try to do things well for kids to see."
He added: "I got into a few things that I shouldn't have and I tried to change that. I am settled at home now. It's all good. I am enjoying my life with my family. I spend a lot of time at home with them, and that has obviously benefited me."
What Wayne Rooney was talking about was character, and implicitly about the virtues (good habits) that make character, virtues like prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.
Somewhere along the line we abandoned these, deciding they were repressive, uptight, bourgeois and passe. We decided that 'let it all hang out' is a much better philosophy.
The result has been entirely and depressingly predictable. If you give up notions of virtue and good character, you get exactly the type of person who has specialised in bringing English football into disrepute, stretching from the merely odious, like John Terry, to actual criminals who have been up on physical and sexual assault charges.
Footballers don't come from nowhere. They reflect society. If there's more crime than there was 40 years ago, and more infidelity, footballers will reflect those changed social norms.
But here's the rub, precisely because famous footballers are also role models, when they behave badly they will be imitated, and therefore overall standards of behaviour will decline even more.
Part of the reason for this decline is the ridiculous pretence on the part of liberals that so long as sexual misbehaviour remains inside the law it is a purely private matter of concern to no one but the people immediately involved.
This is the reasoning that had some commentators saying we should ignore what John Terry did to his wife and friend, that it's their business, not ours, and that it should have had no implications for his captaincy of the England side.
But England manager Fabio Capello, an old-fashioned type if ever there was one, had a different view. He believes character matters, and that actions should have consequences. Terry had behaved incredibly badly, in his view. He had disrupted the England team, distracted from its preparations and a price had to be paid. He therefore stripped him of the England captaincy.
But Capello didn't arrive at his decision simply because of the effect of Terry's behaviour on his team. He also did it because of his belief that "children look to these players as an example for life".
And there you have it, the ultimate repudiation of the fanciful liberal notion that serious sexual misconduct is no business of society. It is our business, because what we see we copy, and what famous, high-profile people do, we copy even more. If they behave badly, more of us will behave badly, and in turn more of us will become victims of bad behaviour.
Fabio Capello and Wayne Rooney are simply calling for a return to common sense, and not to some kind of neo-puritanism.
Capello is saying that bad behaviour should have consequences, and both he and Rooney are saying that famous footballers should behave well so that others will also behave well. What could be more obvious?
Alex Ferguson, another old-fashioned type, is full of praise for Wayne Rooney, both as a footballer and a man. Rooney's behaviour both on and off pitch is light years away from where it used to be. He has very plainly and obviously been working on his character.
In fact, Ferguson regards Rooney as a throw-back to the sort of players he knew when he was younger, back when character mattered a lot more than it does today, back when it was still in fashion.
Dare we think that Wayne Rooney is the harbinger of a return to old-fashioned virtues? I doubt it, but it would be exceedingly nice to think so.
PS: It's probably 10 years since I first wrote a column warning about grade inflation. Thanks to a new report, the establishment has at last admitted it is a reality. But why should we be surprised? We had a property bubble, it therefore makes perfect sense that we had a grade inflation bubble as well. In both cases we fell victim to delusions of our own making and in both cases we condemned those who said they were delusions.
Why, the teachers' unions are still insisting grade inflation is a myth.
- David Quinn
Irish Independent
