Florida State isn’t the football powerhouse it used to be, but the story of its star safety Myron Rolle is an inspiration. Yesterday, the 3.75 CGP pre-med major, who graduated in just two and a half years, earned a Rhodes Scholarship.
Rolle arrived at Florida State as one of the nation’s top recruits. I am jealous that UCLA, which has a tradition of producing All-Americans at that position, did not land him. Rolle, who moonlights doing cancer research while aspiring to be a neurosurgeon, is a role model in every sense of the term.
However, I think his defensive coordinator should be fired and banned from coaching for his comment last year criticizing him for letting school interfere with his football. What a jackass!
While Florida State has recently dismissed several key players from the team for poor academic performance and suspended others for participating in a lunchroom brawl, Rolle is tutoring kids from the Seminole tribe reservation and studying to be a doctor, a profession this world need more people to pursue.
In America, we probably give athletes more respect and admiration than they deserve. We also like to gobble up any news of celebrities messing up and embarrassing themselves in their mug shots or on You-Tube.
Of course there are a lot of athletes we can admire and teach our kids to look up to, and my short list of admired athletes just got a little longer. (My favorites? John Wooden, Jackie Robinson, Bill Bradley, Jim Plunkett. My least admired are Al Davis, OJ Simpson, Barry Bonds).
Anyway, congratulations to Myron Rolle and Florida State. Here is a link to an uplifting article about Rolle, whose parents deserve some credit, too.