The Right Kind Of Role Model

Pick up any magazine at a grocery store checkout and chances are there will be at least one story about a celebrity behaving badly.

If Don Imus isn't insulting the Rutgers basketball team, then Duane "Dog" Chapman, from A&E's Bounty Hunter is haranguing his son for dating a black woman.

Sports figures aren't much better. They abuse animals, drive while drunk and get arrested on drug and gun charges.

In a world when celebrities are usually the last people I want my kids to look to as role models, I was thrilled to read this article about a hometown hero, Raven's kicker Matt Stover.

Married to his highschool sweetheart and father to three, Stover's life off the field is as normal as yours or mine. He cooks with his kids, takes them to Bob Evans to eat and attends church. According to Stover, success comes with accountability.

The full article is worth the read, but here's my favorite part:

"Too many people measure a man's success by his performance on the ballfield, in his billfold and in the bedroom," he says. "On the ballfield it's all about your athletic ability. If I can be one of the cool kids, the studs, the jocks, then I am a man. With the billfold, it becomes if I get financial success, I am a man. Finally, in the bedroom, if many women find me desirable, I am a man."

"These three things do not make you a man," he insists. "I am nothing everlasting, nothing eternal, if I am of those three things."

"A real man accepts responsibility, leads courageously, rejects passivity and expects great rewards," he told his audience.

"You can be 30 years old and still be a boy," he says, "because you have never taken responsibility for your life and your actions."

Finally. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Maryland Family Magazine, for highlighting a sports figure I can point out to my kids as someone to emulate.