Avoiding The Club (And Possible Violence) For Professional Athletes Is Sensible, But So What?

Club violence with professional athletes either involved or on the periphery has become a media trope as common as celebrity divorce. Personally, impassioned commentary about what a responsible athlete should or should not do has become equally passe. In the end, those attitudes do more to reflect the speakers' personal prejudices than some objective standard which they offer as 'the more sensible path.'

And it's not that they're wrong; not going to the club in order to avoid potentially charged situations is more sensible. But professional athletes are men and women who get where they are by honing elite physical talent with the kind of drive and discipline any sensible person admires. Most people blow off steam by hanging out with friends, maybe they go out with friends.

The issue most sensible (and voluble, on this subject) spectators don't have to deal with, is what do you do when you make it? When loose cash goes from fifty bucks for dinner and a movie to a stack of hundreds you'll never miss? How do you spend a grand in a gas station?

You go somewhere where the level of entertainment is relevant to what you have to burn. A rich athlete traveling between the largest markets in the United States can count on a few things in every city he goes to:

• Basketball
• Gourmet Food
• Video Games
• The Club

Sure, they could be going to bookstores, to school online, studying a foreign language etc. but they probably aren't. From experience, once you've cleaned out a bookstore in your area of interest it's just full of things you've already read, online school is time-intensive as breaking rocks and studying a foreign language is something you talk about (ironically) more often than you do. Some guys no doubt do these things, but just like regular income guys, there are always more than enough that prefer their entertainment with as little legwork as possible.

In the end and despite my intentions, this commentary is likely just as passe as the perception of 'clubgoing = not sensible = these guys should stop going'. Athletes will go because it's one of the few ubiquitous places where pretty much any appetite can be satisfied depending on your mood when you have the bills to back your play. There's an element of danger, but that's going to be present in any environment where there's the slightest whiff of 'social status' and 'sexually-charged'. Life happens everywhere, and while you can argue it's more sensible for them to avoid a potentially dangerous situation, why would any young person listen? The club isn't exactly a dark alley, where youth and money congregate stuff happens and that's exactly why they're going.