A Sharp Dressed Man

ZZ Top may have wrote it, but how many times have we heard that the clothes make the man. Noemie Emery wrote this in the Weekly Standard, making political points against the President as she concludes:

He’s your ideal, and if he fails, it means that the things that you value—the smoothness, the snark, the verbal facility, the elevation of talk as against thought and action, the veneer of worldliness; the right schools, the right clothes, the right frame of reference; the nuance; the sophistication—that these things are, in the real world, not all that important.

And then, of course, neither are you.

Political vitriol aside, how often do we find the same in athletics? And see the ever-so-hard crash of the once triumphant Adonis we build. I've been part of that process -- insider and outsider -- and sensed the impact. Emery's last line is telling, something so obvious that I'd never seen it before. It is why fans get so crushed when they have invested so much in a person or team. Many times, we want to see ourselves in them, and we forget, they are playing the games for them -- not us -- at the end of the day.