Basketball player Sebastian Telfair is a national celebrity.
His skills in shooting and ball handling have been broadcast live on ESPN2. He’s appeared on the cover of Slam magazine and been featured alongside models in lingerie in Dime magazine. He gets fan mail from across the country. and Adidas provides him with free shoes and clothes.
None of this sounds particularly unusual. After all, many sports heroes are national celebrities. What makes Telfair’s fame unusual is his age. He’s 18 and plays hoops for Lincoln High School in Brooklyn.
A year from now (at this writing), Telfair may be playing for a pro-team in the National Basketball Association. If so, he would be following in the oversized footsteps of LeBron James, this year’s high-school-to-the-pros star; Kevin Garnett, who made the jump in 1995; and others.
High School ‘Professionals’
Telfair isn’t the only teen poised on the brink of sports superstardom. O.J. Mayo, who plays for North College Hill High School in Cincinnati; Darius Washington from Edgewater High in Orlando; and Atlanta’s Dwight Howard, who is expected to be the first pick in the next NBA draft, all are considering entering professional basketball as soon as they graduate from high school.
High school principals, sports journalists and NBA Commissioner David Stern are all debating the advantages and disadvantages of the so-called “professionalization” of high school sports; but the real question is whether there’s anything anyone can do to slow it down.
“It used to be the next Michael Jordan; now it’s the next LeBron James,” Commissioner Stern told The New York Times recently, “Now it’s down to 14-year-olds and ninth graders being focused on by the sports magazines. Elementary school, here we come. It’s not the proudest moment in sports overall.”
Fighting for Their Youth
Stern has tried to implement a minimum age requirement of 20 for incoming NBA players, but he ran into opposition from the players’ union. Likewise, team owners and broadcasting executives favor younger stars in part because they generate media coverage, fan excitement and money.
Those favoring minimum age requirements for players are also fighting a losing battle with parents. According to one basketball insider, some parents are trying to breed basketball stars.
“I see a lot of high school kids getting personal trainers. I’ve got seventh grade parents calling me, asking if I can help get their kid on a traveling team. One parent whose son is in the third grade wants me to come watch his son play now. He says he wants him to start playing with seventh graders to get him ready.”
Some parents begin molding their children to be sports prodigies in infancy, holding them back in kindergarten in the hopes of giving them an advantage in later grades.
Harvey Araton, a sports columnist with The Times, chastised adults in gyms and broadcasting booths who put their own dreams and desires ahead of the best interests of young people. “It’s the wave across America, from college athletic departments to the suburban soccer club,” wrote Araton in a Dec. 13 column. “It’s the execution of adult agendas loosely disguised as the promotion of the young. In the case of the national TV game, it’s the hunt for basketball’s next Joe Multimillionaire, in synergistic partnership with the corporations, the coaches and assorted climbers. In the process, another level of the education system is left wide open to the distortion of its purposes.”
Araton and others also note that high school baseball and hockey players often graduate to the pros without major objections. So what’s the problem with basketball? Some journalists suggest it’s young African-American men who are most attracted to the NBA while baseball and hockey attract greater numbers of white kids. It’s impossible to say whether protests over young hoops players susch as Sebastian Telfair represent the worst of racism or the best concern for the future of young blacks, who already are underrepresented in American colleges and universities.
Entertainment
Sports isn’t the only field in which teens dream of fame and celebrity. A recent Entertainment Weekly cover story featured the four young heartthrob stars of TV’s new surprise hit series, “The O.C.,” starring Adam Brody (age 23), Rachel Bilson (22), Mischa Barton (17) and Benjamin McKenzie (a relative old-timer at 25). These and others in “The 25 Breakout Stars of 2003” from TV (“Joan of Arcadia”‘s 20-year-old Amber Tamblyn) and the big screen (18-year old Keira Knightley of Pirates of the Caribbean and 17-year-old Shia LaBeouf of Holes, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Dumb and Dumberer) feed the entertainment media’s incessant need for fresh faces.
Will these young stars go on to enjoy lengthy performance careers; or will they quickly burn out, only to be seen on network reality shows alongside Erik Estrada, Gary Coleman and Dennis Rodman? Only time will tell.
Meanwhile, magazines such as Teen Vogue and Teen People and cable TV shows such as “Real Access: Hot 24 in 2004” provide teens with a never-ending stream of hot, young celebrities upon whom they can affix their many hopes, ambitions and frustrations.
The Price of Fame
There’s nothing inherently wrong with being a child celebrity. Shirley Temple handled fame pretty well for a tot, and she even went on to serve America as an ambassador. Still, there is a dark side to the youthful commitment to fame at any price; andght now,the poster child of that dark side is singer Michael Jackson.
By the time you read this, the verdict may be in on Jackson’s child molestation trial. In December, explaining himself to Ed Bradley of the TV news magazine “60 Minutes,” Jackson defended his practice of sleeping with children and the entire fantasy world of his Neverland Ranch complex by saying such things are his compensation for never having had a childhood himself. After all, Jackson’s own childhood was too full of singing, recording, performing and traveling to allow him to develop any normal relationships with other boys or girls.
At least Jackson has real talent, as do many of the high school basketball players who have their hopes set on a career in the NBA; but along with all the truly talented teens are the vast majority of normal kids who don’t really excel at anything but still desire celebrity. Such normal kids are about as talented as Paris Hilton, star of “The Simple Life” and an illegally distributed Internet sex tape, except they’re neither filthy rich nor particularly sexy. Instead, these normal kids resemble Scooby, the sad and endearing character from Todd Solondz’s riveting but disturbing 2002 film Storytelling. In the film, a documentary filmmaker investigating the crisis of contemporary youth interviews Scooby, an inarticulate and anti-social high school student. Scooby puts down his joint long enough to explain his only goal in life: “I want to be famous.”
Decades ago, cultural critic Daniel J. Boorstin defined a celebrity as a person who is well known for his well-knownness. Today, many people yearn to be such a celebrity, and often their parents and the larger culture blindly applaud their desires.
